initial commit of ebook 1696HEADmain

12 files changed, 32871 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/1696-0.txt b/1696-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6d82924
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1696-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5412 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Club of Queer Trades
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Posting Date: November 17, 2008 [EBook #1696]
+Release Date: April, 1999
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES
+
+by G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
+
+Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something
+to do with the designing of the things called flats in England
+and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of
+economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors
+and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets
+anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that
+the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be
+thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the
+passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives.
+The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the
+Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel,
+and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the
+twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers'
+Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk Street,
+and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries
+would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice
+hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.
+
+The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be,
+is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which
+the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate
+must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be
+an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given
+in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or
+variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would
+not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's
+furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their
+trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock
+Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech
+to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby
+Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the
+trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its
+inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose
+to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive
+a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when
+one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know
+whether to laugh or cry.
+
+The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing;
+to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking
+at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should
+feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should
+have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity,
+not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many
+societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have
+accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my
+audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps,
+I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged.
+I will recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that
+superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain
+the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been
+so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the
+Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten
+Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations,
+at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as
+I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come
+across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of
+the metropolis call me facetiously 'The King of Clubs'. They also call
+me 'The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I
+have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the
+better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club
+of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious
+thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered
+by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely
+stirred out of his attic.
+
+Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
+unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
+would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
+like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
+might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt
+the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
+sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs
+of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in
+odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords,
+armour--the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these
+quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern--a powerful, legal
+face. And no one but I knew who he was.
+
+Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene
+that occurred in ------, when one of the most acute and forcible of the
+English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that
+occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all.
+For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something
+curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the
+law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as
+a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the
+people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very
+outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said
+to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: “I sentence you to
+three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given
+conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside.” He
+accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal
+crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of
+justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately
+encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in
+which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come
+forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet.
+After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited,
+the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with
+quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: “Get a
+new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul.” All this, of
+course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy
+and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court.
+It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers,
+against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought.
+The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but
+at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great
+judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of
+lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken
+very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering
+at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a
+stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows:
+
+“O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
+tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.”
+
+He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.
+
+I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that
+gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he
+was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the
+great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck
+his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even
+unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily,
+when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a
+huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.
+
+“Sorry to bother you, Basil,” he gasped. “I took a liberty--made an
+appointment here with a man--a client--in five minutes--I beg your
+pardon, sir,” and he gave me a bow of apology.
+
+Basil smiled at me. “You didn't know,” he said, “that I had a practical
+brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is
+to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at
+everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist,
+an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a--what are you now, Rupert?”
+
+“I am and have been for some time,” said Rupert, with some dignity, “a
+private detective, and there's my client.”
+
+A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being
+given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked
+swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and
+said, “Good evening, gentlemen,” with a stress on the last syllable that
+somehow marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social.
+He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black
+moustache, which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by
+his sad sea-blue eyes.
+
+Basil immediately said to me, “Let us come into the next room, Gully,”
+ and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
+
+“Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.”
+
+The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major
+Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten
+altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
+remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a
+quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I
+do not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.
+
+Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he
+was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who
+recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and
+tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his
+habits he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup.
+One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion--the
+cultivation of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his
+blue eyes glittered like a child's at a new toy, the eyes that had
+remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round Roberts
+at Candahar.
+
+“Well, Major,” said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
+himself into a chair, “what is the matter with you?”
+
+“Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover,” said the Major, with
+righteous indignation.
+
+We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
+shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
+
+“I beg your pardon.”
+
+“Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me.
+Something. Preposterous.”
+
+We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
+sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's
+fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the
+reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major
+Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes
+of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert
+and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the
+most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in
+black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.
+
+Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
+enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay,
+it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's
+house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The
+thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in
+the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad
+water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his
+little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in
+heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and
+had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was
+one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand
+rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
+life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would
+not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that
+within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught
+in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or
+dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.
+
+One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
+faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
+from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
+along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden
+walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured
+appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a
+theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of
+us, it was not altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse
+gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of
+a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with
+fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before
+him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were
+splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite
+pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and
+then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors
+and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of
+anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent, praised some,
+disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth
+and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The
+man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to
+the Major.
+
+“I'll tell you what, sir,” he said. “If you're interested in them
+things, you just get on to that wall.”
+
+“On the wall!” cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
+quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.
+
+“Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,”
+ hissed the tempter. “I'll help you up, sir.”
+
+How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of
+the Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with
+an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical
+assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The
+second after, the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel
+inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments
+were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old
+soldier had ever felt in all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes
+fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the
+lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for
+once it was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for
+the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the
+sentence:
+
+DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
+
+A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown
+looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the barrow had
+suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its incredible
+inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown
+did not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military
+exploits, he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person,
+but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again,
+might have thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke,
+but Brown could not easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint
+learning that the garden arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one;
+he thought it extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money
+like water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to
+offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and
+waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with six legs.
+
+At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and
+the watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the
+gravel path.
+
+“Who on earth are you?” he gasped, trembling violently.
+
+“I am Major Brown,” said that individual, who was always cool in the
+hour of action.
+
+The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
+stammered wildly, “Come down--come down here!”
+
+“At your service,” said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass
+beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.
+
+The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run
+towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide
+led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed
+house, until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man
+turned with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.
+
+“For heaven's sake,” he said, “don't mention jackals.”
+
+Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran
+downstairs with a clatter.
+
+The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and
+peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in
+the world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to
+see that the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking
+out.
+
+“Madam,” he said, bowing simply, “I am Major Brown.”
+
+“Sit down,” said the lady; but she did not turn her head.
+
+She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour
+of Bedford Park. “You have come, I suppose,” she said mournfully, “to
+tax me about the hateful title-deeds.”
+
+“I have come, madam,” he said, “to know what is the matter. To know why
+my name is written across your garden. Not amicably either.”
+
+He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe
+the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene,
+the frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was
+still, and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he
+studied cried to heaven for his blood.
+
+“You know I must not turn round,” said the lady; “every afternoon till
+the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.”
+
+Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to
+accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.
+
+“It is almost six,” he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper
+clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth
+the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and
+yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet
+tantalising, the face of an elf.
+
+“That makes the third year I have waited,” she cried. “This is an
+anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would
+happen once and for all.”
+
+And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From
+low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a
+voice cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:
+
+“Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?”
+
+Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door
+and looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the
+street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon
+sparks. On returning, he found the lady in green trembling.
+
+“It is the end,” she cried, with shaking lips; “it may be death for both
+of us. Whenever--”
+
+But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse
+proclamation from the dark street, again horribly articulate.
+
+“Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?”
+
+Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
+frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too
+long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational
+Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the
+drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific voice came:
+
+“Major Brown, Major Brown, where did--”
+
+Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time--in
+time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries
+appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.
+
+The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man
+thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again,
+it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. “Where's your
+coal-cellar?” he said, and stepped out into the passage.
+
+She looked at him with wild grey eyes. “You will not go down,” she
+cried, “alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?”
+
+“Is this the way?” replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three
+at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in,
+feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied,
+a pair of great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly
+belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of
+the head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a
+brutal image of destiny. But the Major's head, though upside down, was
+perfectly clear and intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure
+until he had slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the
+knees of the invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out
+one of his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a
+muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with a
+crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a
+cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had evidently now
+no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and thither to get past
+the Major to the door, but that tenacious person had him hard by the
+coat collar and hung with the other hand to a beam. At length there came
+a strain in holding back this human bull, a strain under which Brown
+expected his hand to rend and part from the arm. But something else
+rent and parted; and the dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the
+cellar, leaving the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his
+adventure and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out
+at the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole equipment
+of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards and whitewashed
+walls.
+
+“The lady was in the conspiracy, of course,” said Rupert, nodding. Major
+Brown turned brick red. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I think not.”
+
+Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
+nothing. When next he spoke he asked:
+
+“Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?”
+
+“There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,” said
+the Major carefully; “there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string,
+and this letter,” and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:
+
+Dear Mr Plover,
+
+I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re
+Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow.
+The coal-cellar, of course.
+
+Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.
+
+Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut
+in:
+
+“Is it dated from anywhere?”
+
+“No--oh, yes!” replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; “14 Tanner's
+Court, North--”
+
+Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.
+
+“Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me your
+revolver.”
+
+Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was
+some time before he answered:
+
+“I don't think you'll need it.”
+
+“Perhaps not,” said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. “One never knows.
+But going down a dark court to see criminals--”
+
+“Do you think they are criminals?” asked his brother.
+
+Rupert laughed stoutly. “Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a
+harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless
+experiment, but--”
+
+“Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?” asked Basil, in the
+same distant and monotonous voice.
+
+“My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter.”
+
+“I am looking at the letter,” said the mad judge calmly; though, as a
+matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. “I don't think it's the sort
+of letter one criminal would write to another.”
+
+“My dear boy, you are glorious,” cried Rupert, turning round, with
+laughter in his blue bright eyes. “Your methods amaze me. Why, there
+is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You
+might as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of
+thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar Square.”
+
+Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not
+otherwise move.
+
+“That's rather good,” he said; “but, of course, logic like that's not
+what is really wanted. It's a question of spiritual atmosphere. It's not
+a criminal letter.”
+
+“It is. It's a matter of fact,” cried the other in an agony of
+reasonableness.
+
+“Facts,” murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
+animals, “how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly--in fact, I'm
+off my head--but I never could believe in that man--what's his name,
+in those capital stories?--Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to
+something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in
+all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree.
+It's only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up--only the
+green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.”
+
+“But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?”
+
+“We have eternity to stretch our legs in,” replied the mystic. “It can
+be an infinity of things. I haven't seen any of them--I've only seen the
+letter. I look at that, and say it's not criminal.”
+
+“Then what's the origin of it?”
+
+“I haven't the vaguest idea.”
+
+“Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?”
+
+Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed
+collecting his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:
+
+“Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through
+silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and
+deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as
+a ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and
+saw it was a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was
+Lord Kitchener. What would you think?”
+
+He paused a moment, and went on:
+
+“You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation
+of putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would
+not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of
+ordinary personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that
+he inherited a dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been
+hypnotised at a seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if
+he refused the ordeal. With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet--but
+not with Kitchener. I should know all that, because in my public days
+I knew him quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals
+quite well. It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres.” And he
+closed his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.
+
+Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and
+pity. The former said,
+
+“Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think--until your
+spiritual mystery turns up--that a man who sends a note recommending a
+crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at
+least tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral
+tastes. Can I have that revolver?”
+
+“Certainly,” said Basil, getting up. “But I am coming with you.” And he
+flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the
+corner.
+
+“You!” said Rupert, with some surprise, “you scarcely ever leave your
+hole to look at anything on the face of the earth.”
+
+Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.
+
+“I scarcely ever,” he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance,
+“hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at
+once, without going to see it.”
+
+And he led the way out into the purple night.
+
+We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
+Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet
+Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major
+Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop
+and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike
+delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest
+among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and
+poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly
+to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.
+
+Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight
+at danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat pocket.
+
+“Shall we go in now?” he asked.
+
+“Not get police?” asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the
+street.
+
+“I am not sure,” answered Rupert, knitting his brows. “Of course, it's
+quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of us, and--”
+
+“I shouldn't get the police,” said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert
+glanced at him and stared hard.
+
+“Basil,” he cried, “you're trembling. What's the matter--are you
+afraid?”
+
+“Cold, perhaps,” said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he
+was shaking.
+
+At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.
+
+“You're laughing,” he cried. “I know that confounded, silent, shaky
+laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all
+three of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians--”
+
+“But I shouldn't call the police,” said Basil. “We four heroes are quite
+equal to a host,” and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.
+
+Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the
+rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned
+abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.
+
+“Stand close,” he said in the voice of a commander. “The scoundrel may
+be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and
+rush in.”
+
+The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for
+the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.
+
+“Now,” hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
+suddenly over his shoulder, “when I say 'Four', follow me with a rush.
+If I say 'Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say
+'Stop', stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If
+they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your
+sword-stick ready. Now--one, two, three, four!”
+
+With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the
+room like an invasion, only to stop dead.
+
+The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared,
+at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful
+glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and
+drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed
+moustache, and the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked
+up as we came to a standstill.
+
+“Did you knock?” he asked pleasantly. “I am sorry if I did not hear.
+What can I do for you?”
+
+There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
+himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.
+
+The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.
+
+“Is your name P. G. Northover?” he asked.
+
+“That is my name,” replied the other, smiling.
+
+“I think,” said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his
+face, “that this letter was written by you.” And with a loud clap he
+struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man
+called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely
+nodded.
+
+“Well, sir,” said the Major, breathing hard, “what about that?”
+
+“What about it, precisely,” said the man with the moustache.
+
+“I am Major Brown,” said that gentleman sternly.
+
+Northover bowed. “Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?”
+
+“Say!” cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; “why, I want this
+confounded thing settled. I want--”
+
+“Certainly, sir,” said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of
+the eyebrows. “Will you take a chair for a moment.” And he pressed
+an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room
+beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but
+stood chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.
+
+The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy, young
+man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.
+
+“Mr Hopson,” said Northover, “this is Major Brown. Will you please
+finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.
+
+“You will excuse me, gentlemen,” said the egregious Northover, with his
+radiant smile, “if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have
+some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday
+tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we? Ha! ha!”
+
+The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence
+ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G. Northover; a
+raging silence on the part of everybody else.
+
+At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled
+with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the
+handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity,
+placed a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.
+
+The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few
+moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him.
+He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered
+something, muttering--“Careless.” Then he read it again with the same
+impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown,
+whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.
+
+“I think you will find that all right, Major,” he said briefly.
+
+The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear
+later, but he found it like this:
+
+  Major Brown to P. G. Northover.                                    £ s. d.
+   January 1, to account rendered                                    5  6 0
+   May 9, to potting and embedding of 200 pansies                    2  0 0
+   To cost of trolley with flowers                                   0 15 0
+   To hiring of man with trolley                                     0  5 0
+   To hire of house and garden for one day                           1  0 0
+   To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3  0 0
+   To salary of Miss Jameson                                         1  0 0
+   To salary of Mr Plover                                            1  0 0
+                                                                 ----------
+                                                             Total L14  6 0
+  A Remittance will oblige.
+
+“What,” said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly
+rising out of his head, “What in heaven's name is this?”
+
+“What is it?” repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement.
+“It's your account, of course.”
+
+“My account!” The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. “My
+account! And what have I got to do with it?”
+
+“Well,” said Northover, laughing outright, “naturally I prefer you to
+pay it.”
+
+The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words
+came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into
+the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's head.
+
+The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on
+the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the
+united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the
+empty floor.
+
+“Let me go, you scamps,” he shouted. “Let me--”
+
+“Stand still,” cried Rupert authoritatively. “Major Brown's action is
+excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted--”
+
+“A customer has a perfect right,” said Northover hotly, “to question an
+alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture.”
+
+“What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?”
+ shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain
+or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and
+exasperating mystery. “Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent
+tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me--”
+
+“Mad,” said Northover, gazing blankly round; “all of them mad. I didn't
+know they travelled in quartettes.”
+
+“Enough of this prevarication,” said Rupert; “your crimes are
+discovered. A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though
+only a private detective myself, I will take the responsibility of
+telling you that anything you say--”
+
+“Mad,” repeated Northover, with a weary air.
+
+And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the
+strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.
+
+“Major Brown,” he said, “may I ask you a question?”
+
+The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.
+
+“You?” he cried; “certainly, Mr Grant.”
+
+“Can you tell me,” said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow,
+as he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, “can you tell
+me what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?”
+
+The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and
+futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:
+
+“Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something--a name with a
+hyphen--Gurney-Brown; that was it.”
+
+“And when did the house change hands?” said Basil, looking up sharply.
+His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.
+
+“I came in last month,” said the Major.
+
+And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great
+office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.
+
+“Oh! it's too perfect--it's too exquisite,” he gasped, beating the arms
+with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing
+voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like
+weathercocks in a whirlwind.
+
+“Confound it, Basil,” said Rupert, stamping. “If you don't want me to go
+mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means.”
+
+Northover rose.
+
+“Permit me, sir, to explain,” he said. “And, first of all, permit me to
+apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable
+blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you
+will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and
+dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand
+the loss.” And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the
+waste-paper basket and bowed.
+
+Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. “But I don't even
+begin to understand,” he cried. “What bill? what blunder? what loss?”
+
+Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and
+with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration,
+there were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,
+especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn
+intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.
+
+“Do you know where you are, Major?” he said.
+
+“God knows I don't,” said the warrior, with fervour.
+
+“You are standing,” replied Northover, “in the office of the Adventure
+and Romance Agency, Limited.”
+
+“And what's that?” blankly inquired Brown.
+
+The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his
+dark eyes on the other's face.
+
+“Major,” said he, “did you ever, as you walked along the empty street
+upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to
+happen--something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something
+pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life;
+something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its
+anchorage, and driving free.' Did you ever feel that?”
+
+“Certainly not,” said the Major shortly.
+
+“Then I must explain with more elaboration,” said Mr Northover, with a
+sigh. “The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great
+modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear
+of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us
+and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for
+a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and
+Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes
+to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his
+front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot
+against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he
+receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately
+in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first
+written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at
+present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed
+by our Mr Grigsby), I consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is
+almost a pity you did not see the end of it. I need scarcely explain
+further the monstrous mistake. Your predecessor in your present house,
+Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks,
+ignoring alike the dignity of the hyphen and the glory of military rank,
+positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the same
+person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle of another man's
+story.”
+
+“How on earth does the thing work?” asked Rupert Grant, with bright and
+fascinated eyes.
+
+“We believe that we are doing a noble work,” said Northover warmly. “It
+has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that
+is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all
+artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into
+fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of
+battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a
+book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We
+give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the
+necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen,
+of running down long streets from pursuers--all healthy and pleasant
+exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin
+Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the
+splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we
+can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and
+dream.”
+
+Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery
+had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased
+speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.
+
+Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good
+humour.
+
+“Of course; awfully dense, sir,” he said. “No doubt at all, the scheme
+excellent. But I don't think--” He paused a moment, and looked dreamily
+out of the window. “I don't think you will find me in it. Somehow, when
+one's seen--seen the thing itself, you know--blood and men screaming,
+one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible,
+you know, 'There remaineth a rest'.”
+
+Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:
+
+“Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire,
+at any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown's view of the
+matter--”
+
+“I should be obliged for your card, sir,” said the Major, in his abrupt
+but courteous voice. “Pay for chair.”
+
+The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.
+
+It ran, “P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency, 14
+Tanner's Court, Fleet Street.”
+
+“What on earth is 'C.Q.T.'?” asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major's
+shoulder.
+
+“Don't you know?” returned Northover. “Haven't you ever heard of the
+Club of Queer Trades?”
+
+“There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't heard
+of,” said the little Major reflectively. “What's this one?”
+
+“The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people
+who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one of
+the earliest members.”
+
+“You deserve to be,” said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a
+smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.
+
+When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer
+smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. “A fine chap,
+that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance
+of being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all
+people getting into the nets of one of Grigsby's tales,” and he laughed
+out aloud in the silence.
+
+Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An
+owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and
+somewhat absurd inquiry.
+
+“What! back again, Major?” cried Northover in surprise. “What can I do
+for you?”
+
+The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.
+
+“It's horribly absurd,” he said. “Something must have got started in
+me that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate
+desire to know the end of it all.”
+
+“The end of it all?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Major. “'Jackals', and the title-deeds, and 'Death to
+Major Brown'.”
+
+The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.
+
+“I am terribly sorry, Major,” said he, “but what you ask is impossible.
+I don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules
+of the agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an
+outsider; I am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help.
+I do hope you understand--”
+
+“There is no one,” said Brown, “who understands discipline better than I
+do. Thank you very much. Good night.”
+
+And the little man withdrew for the last time.
+
+He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
+garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance
+Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in
+her languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly
+that she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades
+provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who
+went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a
+murderer.
+
+The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa,
+and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged--except,
+perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine
+unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of
+abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by
+the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the
+title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so
+many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that he will realize
+the rest of those purple adventures in a better world.
+
+
+
+Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
+
+Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
+perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
+tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top
+of a flying hill is a fairy tale.
+
+The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave
+us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
+infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor
+parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented
+by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow
+streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a
+narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you
+do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was
+civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed
+its morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going
+through a criminal slum, “I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals.” But
+here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums.
+Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway
+engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united by their
+common contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were
+the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here,
+above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines
+and hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But though one
+never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing
+we knew we should not see--anything really great, central, of the
+first class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion
+indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and
+crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums
+which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real
+possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the
+great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.
+
+“But you must always remember also,” said Grant to me, in his heavy
+abstracted way, when I had urged this view, “that the very vileness of
+the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory
+of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live
+in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate
+civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of
+people here are good people. And being good is an adventure far more
+violent and daring than sailing round the world. Besides--”
+
+“Go on,” I said.
+
+No answer came.
+
+“Go on,” I said, looking up.
+
+The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he
+was paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of the tram.
+
+“What is the matter?” I asked, peering over also.
+
+“It is very odd,” said Grant at last, grimly, “that I should have been
+caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these
+people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England.”
+
+“Where?” I asked, leaning over further, “where?”
+
+“Oh, I was right enough,” he went on, in that strange continuous and
+sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, “I was
+right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes;
+they are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two;
+they may beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the
+same; they are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings
+and haloes--at any rate compared to that man.”
+
+“Which man?” I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which
+Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.
+
+He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly
+passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to
+attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious
+consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black
+top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the
+decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something
+as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was
+curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of
+grey and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather
+Oriental; he had two black tufts of moustache.
+
+“What has he done?” I asked.
+
+“I am not sure of the details,” said Grant, “but his besetting sin is
+a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has
+adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan.”
+
+“What plan?” I asked. “If you know all about him, why don't you tell me
+why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?”
+
+Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.
+
+“I think you've made a mistake in my meaning,” he said. “I don't know
+his name. I never saw him before in my life.”
+
+“Never saw him before!” I cried, with a kind of anger; “then what in
+heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in
+England?”
+
+“I meant what I said,” said Basil Grant calmly. “The moment I saw
+that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid
+innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were
+being themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in
+these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest
+sense, trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be
+evil.”
+
+“But if you never saw him before--” I began.
+
+“In God's name, look at his face,” cried out Basil in a voice that
+startled the driver. “Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal
+pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he
+was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so
+grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at
+his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat.”
+
+I stirred uncomfortably.
+
+“But, after all,” I said, “this is very fanciful--perfectly absurd. Look
+at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you--”
+
+“Oh, the mere facts,” he cried out in a kind of despair. “The mere
+facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in superstitions, so
+clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do
+you not trust an immediate impression?”
+
+“Well, an immediate impression may be,” I said, “a little less practical
+than facts.”
+
+“Bosh,” he said. “On what else is the whole world run but immediate
+impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of
+this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual
+impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you
+measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook?
+Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may
+save your business--you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely
+upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which
+I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that
+man walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some
+kind.”
+
+“You always put things well,” I said, “but, of course, such things
+cannot immediately be put to the test.”
+
+Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
+
+“Let us get off and follow him,” he said. “I bet you five pounds it will
+turn out as I say.”
+
+And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.
+
+The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked
+along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him.
+Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down
+an ill-lit alley. We swung silently after him.
+
+“This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take,” I said.
+
+“A man of what kind?” asked my friend.
+
+“Well,” I said, “a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I
+thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part
+of the world at all.”
+
+“Ah, yes,” said Basil, and said no more.
+
+We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like
+the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the
+glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The
+intervals between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the
+whole city. Our pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between
+the lamp-posts; but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined
+horse; I stopped also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of
+the solid darkness in front of us was the darkness of his body.
+
+At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a
+yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on
+a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas
+cut the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the
+interview was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could
+be. Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card
+and said:
+
+“At once. Take a cab.”
+
+A heavy, deep voice from inside said:
+
+“Right you are.”
+
+And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the
+striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just
+helping us. It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it
+like midnight.
+
+“This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,” I
+repeated.
+
+“I don't know,” said Basil humbly. “It leads to Berkeley Square.”
+
+As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and
+tried to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I
+wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right.
+We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London--more
+dreary, one must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.
+
+“This is very extraordinary!” said Basil Grant, as we turned into
+Berkeley Square.
+
+“What is extraordinary?” I asked. “I thought you said it was quite
+natural.”
+
+“I do not wonder,” answered Basil, “at his walking through nasty
+streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do
+wonder at his going to the house of a very good man.”
+
+“What very good man?” I asked with exasperation.
+
+“The operation of time is a singular one,” he said with his
+imperturbable irrelevancy. “It is not a true statement of the case to
+say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man.
+I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But
+fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and
+a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps
+of old Beaumont's house.”
+
+“Who is old Beaumont?” I asked irritably.
+
+“A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood--don't you know his
+name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more
+work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't know what;
+anyhow, he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight
+disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that
+real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress
+and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If
+you went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree
+with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a
+cheap alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it
+seems a matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the
+stars or the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession
+of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is
+romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on
+their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands
+for fear of tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons
+are generally fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself,
+good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter there.”
+
+“My good fellow,” I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, “the
+truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language,
+you have the 'slight disadvantage' of being off your head. You see a
+total stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories
+about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an
+honest man's door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil,
+and come home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet
+with the distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner.”
+
+Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.
+
+“I thought,” he said, “that I had outlived vanity.”
+
+“What do you want now?” I cried.
+
+“I want,” he cried out, “what a girl wants when she wears her new frock;
+I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a
+monitor--I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right
+about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say
+it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend
+Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know.”
+
+“Do you really mean--?” I began.
+
+“I will apologize,” he said calmly, “for our not being dressed for a
+call,” and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark
+stone steps and rang at the bell.
+
+A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving
+my friend's name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to
+respect. We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly
+but that our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out
+quickly to meet us.
+
+“My dear fellow,” he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again,
+“I have not seen you for years. Have you been--er--” he said, rather
+wildly, “have you been in the country?”
+
+“Not for all that time,” answered Basil, smiling. “I have long given
+up my official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a
+deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment.”
+
+“An inopportune moment,” cried the ardent gentleman. “You come at the
+most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?”
+
+“I do not,” answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of
+laughter came from the inner room.
+
+“Basil,” said Lord Beaumont solemnly, “I have Wimpole here.”
+
+“And who is Wimpole?”
+
+“Basil,” cried the other, “you must have been in the country. You must
+have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is
+Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?”
+
+“As to who Shakespeare was,” answered my friend placidly, “my views go
+no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was
+Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is--” and his speech also was
+cloven with a roar of laughter from within.
+
+“Wimpole!” cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. “Haven't you heard
+of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation,
+I do not say into an art--for that, perhaps, it always was but into a
+great art, like the statuary of Michael Angelo--an art of masterpieces.
+His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot dead. They
+are final; they are--”
+
+Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the
+very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of
+the inner house into the hall where we were standing.
+
+“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.
+
+“I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it,” exploded the large old
+gentleman. “I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer
+like that. I won't be made a guy. I won't--”
+
+“Come, come,” said Beaumont feverishly. “Let me introduce you. This is
+Mr Justice Grant--that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of
+Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh.”
+
+“Who has not?” asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing
+him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger,
+but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his
+face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart
+though corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a
+magnificent courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show
+an unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity;
+so much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.
+
+“I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,” he said gruffly, “to fail
+in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in
+your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but
+that flashy half-caste jackanapes--”
+
+At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre
+air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly
+enjoying the intellectual banquet within.
+
+“I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond,” said
+Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, “even if you only remember him as a
+schoolboy.”
+
+“Perfectly,” said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and
+respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter
+Cholmondeliegh, he said:
+
+“I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going
+yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you.”
+
+The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
+struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of
+obeisance and a vague utterance of, “If Lady Beaumont... a lady, of
+course,” he followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely
+been deposited there half a minute before another peal of laughter told
+that he had (in all probability) been scored off again.
+
+“Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh,” said Beaumont, as he
+helped us off with our coats. “He has not the modern mind.”
+
+“What is the modern mind?” asked Grant.
+
+“Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive--and faces the facts
+of life seriously.” At this moment another roar of laughter came from
+within.
+
+“I only ask,” said Basil, “because of the last two friends of yours who
+had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
+thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way, if I remember
+right.”
+
+“Do you know,” said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
+entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, “I can never
+quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and
+sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?”
+
+“No,” said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
+drawing-room.
+
+This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
+slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon.
+Two people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the
+house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and
+with the intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal
+amusement and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who
+looked at him with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw
+him out of the window.
+
+He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything
+from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair
+suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a
+man--the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking
+in North London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.
+
+“What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole,” said Muriel Beaumont eagerly,
+“is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite
+philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm
+sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came.”
+
+“I agree with Miss Beaumont,” said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
+indignation. “If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it
+difficult to keep my countenance.”
+
+“Difficult to keep your countenance,” cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
+alarm; “oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum.”
+
+Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
+readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:
+
+“Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?”
+
+“I never talk tomfooleries,” said the other, “without first knowing my
+audience.”
+
+Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on
+the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding
+the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very
+particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house
+rapturously listening to Wimpole.
+
+“May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?” asked Grant. “It is
+about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us.”
+
+I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this
+strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of side room
+out of the hall.
+
+“Drummond,” said Basil sharply, “there are a great many good people, and
+a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind
+of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people
+are wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has
+also some common sense. What do you make of Wimpole?”
+
+Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face
+became suddenly as red as his moustache.
+
+“I am not a fair judge of him,” he said.
+
+“Why not?” asked Grant.
+
+“Because I hate him like hell,” said the other, after a long pause and
+violently.
+
+Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss
+Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating. Grant said
+quietly:
+
+“But before--before you came to hate him, what did you really think of
+him?”
+
+“I am in a terrible difficulty,” said the young man, and his voice told
+us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. “If I spoke about him
+as I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to
+be able to say that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But
+again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him, that is my private affair. But
+I also disapprove of him--really I do believe I disapprove of him quite
+apart from my private feelings. When first he came, I admit he was much
+quieter, but I did not like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then
+that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this
+fellow, with his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the
+way he does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be
+bad to fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap
+savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if
+you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate
+the man because a certain person admires him. But I believe that apart
+from that I should hate the man because old Sir Walter hates him.”
+
+This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the
+young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless
+worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct
+realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I
+was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could
+not help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however
+nobly disguised from himself.
+
+In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was
+perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.
+
+“In the name of God, let's get away.”
+
+I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected
+me. I only know that for some reason or other he so affected me that I
+was, within a few minutes, in the street outside.
+
+“This,” he said, “is a beastly but amusing affair.”
+
+“What is?” I asked, baldly enough.
+
+“This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have
+just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very night, at
+which Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very
+extraordinary about that. The extraordinary thing is that we are not
+going.”
+
+“Well, really,” I said, “it is already six o'clock and I doubt if we
+could get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the fact that
+we are not going.”
+
+“Don't you?” said Grant. “I'll bet you'll see something extraordinary in
+what we're doing instead.”
+
+I looked at him blankly.
+
+“Doing instead?” I asked. “What are we doing instead?”
+
+“Why,” said he, “we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house
+on a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is
+only to show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this
+cigar, wait until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole
+have left this house?”
+
+“Certainly,” I said. “But I do not know which is likely to leave first.
+Have you any notion?”
+
+“No,” he said. “Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again,
+Mr Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is a thing to
+be flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some
+time to analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will both have to leave
+within reasonable time, for they will both have to get dressed and come
+back to dinner here tonight.”
+
+As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house
+drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened that we
+really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh came
+out at the same moment.
+
+They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt;
+then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of them, made Sir
+Walter smile and say: “The night is foggy. Pray take my cab.”
+
+Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with
+both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had hissed in
+my ear:
+
+“Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog--run.”
+
+We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
+streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but we
+are running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at
+the fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away
+rejoicing, having just come in contact with the more generous among the
+rich. Then the two men talked together as men do talk together after
+giving and receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to
+forgiveness or a duel--at least so it seemed as we watched it from ten
+yards off. Then the two men shook hands heartily, and one went down one
+fork of the road and one down another.
+
+Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.
+
+“Run after that scoundrel,” he cried; “let us catch him now.”
+
+We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.
+
+“Stop!” I shouted wildly to Grant. “That's the wrong turning.”
+
+He ran on.
+
+“Idiot!” I howled. “Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has slipped
+us. He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong... Are you deaf?
+You're wrong!”
+
+“I don't think I am,” he panted, and ran on.
+
+“But I saw him!” I cried. “Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It's
+the old man... What are you doing? What are we to do?”
+
+“Keep running,” said Grant.
+
+Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet,
+whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was
+utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.
+
+“Charlie,” said Basil hoarsely, “can you believe in my common sense for
+four minutes?”
+
+“Of course,” I said, panting.
+
+“Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at
+once when I say 'Now'. Now!”
+
+We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
+gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we got
+him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and
+full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him;
+when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil's
+arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street side and
+waited. As I say, I had no notion why.
+
+“I am sorry to incommode you,” said Basil calmly out of the darkness;
+“but I have made an appointment here.”
+
+“An appointment!” I said blankly.
+
+“Yes,” he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged
+on the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. “I
+have made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow.
+An old friend. Jasper Drummond his name is--you may have met him
+this afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the
+Beaumonts' dinner is over.”
+
+For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness.
+By the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my mind that
+the same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the bench of
+a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine
+no other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old
+country gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of
+wood.
+
+After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the
+court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white face of
+Jasper Drummond.
+
+“Mr Grant,” he said blankly, “the thing is incredible. You were right;
+but what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where dukes and
+duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him,
+that extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn't say a funny
+thing. He didn't say anything at all. What does it mean?”
+
+Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.
+
+“That is what it means,” he said.
+
+Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the place,
+jumped back, as from a mouse.
+
+“What?” he said weakly, “... what?”
+
+Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's
+breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered state,
+seemed to make some effort to retain.
+
+It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
+Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As far as
+he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or
+at least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism.
+The greater part of the document had been torn and obliterated in the
+struggle, but the termination remained. It ran as follows:
+
+C. Says... Keep countenance.
+
+W. Keep... British Museum.
+
+C. Know whom talk... absurdities.
+
+W. Never talk absurdities without...
+
+“What is it?” cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of final
+fury.
+
+“What is it?” replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid
+chant. “What is it? It is a great new profession. A great new trade. A
+trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy.”
+
+“A new profession!” said the young man with the red moustache vaguely;
+“a new trade!”
+
+“A new trade,” repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, “a new
+profession! What a pity it is immoral.”
+
+“But what the deuce is it?” cried Drummond and I in a breath of
+blasphemy.
+
+“It is,” said Grant calmly, “the great new trade of the Organizer of
+Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I
+have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character.
+He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really
+at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and
+his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He is a swindler, and a swindler of
+a perfectly delightful and novel kind. He hires himself out at
+dinner-parties to lead up to other people's repartees. According to a
+preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says
+the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client says the
+clever things arranged for him. In short, he allows himself to be scored
+off for a guinea a night.”
+
+“And this fellow Wimpole--” began Drummond with indignation.
+
+“This fellow Wimpole,” said Basil Grant, smiling, “will not be an
+intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and
+silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the
+floor.”
+
+“That fellow,” cried Drummond furiously, “that fellow ought to be in
+gaol.”
+
+“Not at all,” said Basil indulgently; “he ought to be in the Club of
+Queer Trades.”
+
+
+
+Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
+
+The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been
+reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than
+the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The
+bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the
+tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts
+of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and
+eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar
+studs. The stud with which I was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as
+I made the above reflections, was one which I was trying to introduce
+into my shirt collar when a loud knock came at the door.
+
+My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me.
+He and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in
+the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head
+to come my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a
+small and confidential affair at the table of a good but unconventional
+political lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a
+third guest, a Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was
+an authority on chimpanzees. As Basil was an old friend of the hostess
+and I had never seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he
+(with his usual social sagacity) might have decided to take me along in
+order to break the ice. The theory, like all my theories, was complete;
+but as a fact it was not Basil.
+
+I was handed a visiting card inscribed: “Rev. Ellis Shorter”, and
+underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry
+could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, “Asking the
+favour of a few moments' conversation on a most urgent matter.”
+
+I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of
+God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on
+my dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at
+my entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He
+flapped a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic
+black gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration,
+that he flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed,
+white-haired, white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy
+type. He said:
+
+“I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come--I
+can only say--I can only say in my defence, that I come--upon an
+important matter. Pray forgive me.”
+
+I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.
+
+“What I have to say,” he said brokenly, “is so dreadful--it is so
+dreadful--I have lived a quiet life.”
+
+I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in
+time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's honest air
+of bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger
+and more tragic than my own.
+
+I said gently: “Pray go on.”
+
+Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old,
+noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.
+
+“I'm so sorry,” he said meekly; “I wouldn't have come--but for--your
+friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.”
+
+“Major Brown!” I said, with some interest.
+
+“Yes,” said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid
+shawl about. “He told me you helped him in a great difficulty--and my
+difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death.”
+
+I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. “Will it take long, Mr
+Shorter?” I asked. “I have to go out to dinner almost at once.”
+
+He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his
+moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.
+
+“I have no right, Mr Swinburne--I have no right at all,” he said. “If
+you have to go out to dinner, you have of course--a perfect right--of
+course a perfect right. But when you come back--a man will be dead.”
+
+And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.
+
+The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and
+drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and
+a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this
+dear, doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.
+
+“Will you have a cigar?” I said.
+
+“No, thank you,” he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not
+smoking cigars was a social disgrace.
+
+“A glass of wine?” I said.
+
+“No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now,” he repeated with that
+hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often
+try to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all
+night drinking rum-punch. “Not just now, thank you.”
+
+“Nothing else I can get for you?” I said, feeling genuinely sorry for
+the well-mannered old donkey. “A cup of tea?”
+
+I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he
+drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:
+
+“I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these
+excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex”--he threw this in with
+an indescribable airiness of vanity--“I have never known such things
+happen.”
+
+“What things happen?” I asked.
+
+He straightened himself with sudden dignity.
+
+“As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex,” he said, “I have never been forcibly
+dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the
+character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It
+may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before.”
+
+“I have never heard of it,” I said, “as among the duties of a clergyman.
+But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
+follow you correctly. Dressed up--as what?”
+
+“As an old woman,” said the vicar solemnly, “as an old woman.”
+
+I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make
+an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic,
+and I said respectfully:
+
+“May I ask how it occurred?”
+
+“I will begin at the beginning,” said Mr Shorter, “and I will tell my
+story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past
+eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and
+pay certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the
+treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded
+some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the
+matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a
+very earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author
+of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled
+(unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine.”
+
+He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that
+can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation.
+He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the
+detective stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be
+kept back.
+
+“I then proceeded,” he went on, with the same maddening
+conscientiousness of manner, “to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course;
+Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having
+consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I
+cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ
+pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss
+Brett. The Dorcas meetings are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife
+being unwell, Miss Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in
+church work, had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society
+is entirely under my wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss
+Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members of it.
+I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.
+
+“When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
+Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of
+course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in
+these matters of full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and
+repeat the actual details of a conversation, particularly a conversation
+which (though inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good
+work) was one which did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the
+time and was in fact--er--mostly about socks. I can, however, remember
+distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with
+a woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she
+was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather was very
+changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted,
+I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with
+white hair. The only other figure in the group that caught my attention
+was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners,
+silver hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic
+member of the party; and her views on the subject of pinafores, though
+expressed with a natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong
+and advanced. Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply
+in black) it could not be denied that the others looked in some way what
+you men of the world would call dowdy.
+
+“After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did so
+I heard something which--I cannot describe it--something which seemed
+to--but I really cannot describe it.”
+
+“What did you hear?” I asked, with some impatience.
+
+“I heard,” said the vicar solemnly, “I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with
+the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl),
+the following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the
+spot, and as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them
+down on a piece of paper. I believe I have it here.” He fumbled in
+his breast-pocket, bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and
+programmes of village concerts. “I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James,
+the following words: 'Now's your time, Bill.'”
+
+He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely
+and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about his
+facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.
+
+“This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand
+it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should
+address another maiden lady as 'Bill'. My experience, as I have said,
+may be incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in
+exclusively spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But
+it seemed to me odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not
+misunderstand the phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to
+maintain at the time that the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', were by
+no means pronounced with that upper-class intonation which, as I have
+already said, had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation.
+In fact, the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', would have been, I fancy,
+unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.
+
+“I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
+surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
+hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against
+the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still
+knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was
+only an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended
+departure.
+
+“I said genially, 'I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
+really be going. I have--er--' I stopped here, for the words she
+had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely
+business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I
+think, natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have
+not the least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render
+them phonetically. But she said,” and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly
+at his papers, “she said: 'Chuck it, fat 'ead,' and she added something
+that sounded like 'It's a kop', or (possibly) 'a kopt'. And then the
+last cord, either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped
+suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the
+mantelpiece, said: 'Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up
+before you start jawin'. You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days
+with this way of doin' things, har lar theater.'
+
+“My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
+fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
+society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
+dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but
+now, alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their
+strange female freemasonry. I remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was
+just, in my absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse
+about Diana's nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from
+behind. The moment it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.
+
+“Miss Brett--or what I had called Miss Brett--was standing in front of
+me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
+Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an
+attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a
+shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her
+cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wo--no, that is I saw
+that instead of being a woman she--he, I mean--that is, it was a man.”
+
+Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to
+arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed
+with a higher fever of nervousness:
+
+“As for Miss Mowbray, she--he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her
+arm--that is she had his arm--round her neck--my neck I mean--and I
+could not cry out. Miss Brett--that is, Mr Brett, at least Mr something
+who was not Miss Brett--had the revolver pointed at me. The other two
+ladies--or er--gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag in the background.
+It was all clear at last: they were criminals dressed up as women, to
+kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex. But why? Was it to
+be Nonconformists?
+
+“The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ''Urry up,
+'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get off.'
+
+“'Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett--I mean the man with the
+revolver--'why should we show 'im the game?'
+
+“'If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at the
+door, whom they called Bill. 'A man wot knows wot 'e's doin' is worth
+ten wot don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'
+
+“'Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it
+had been Miss Mowbray's). 'Bring out the picture, 'Arry.'
+
+“The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other
+two women--I mean men--were turning over baggage, and asked them for
+something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room
+and held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that
+display, all the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.
+
+“It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands
+of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise;
+but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was
+an extremely good one, worked up with all the accessories of the
+conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and
+was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious
+that it was no snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this
+photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a
+photograph. It was a photograph that I had never had taken.
+
+“I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good
+deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the
+details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,
+my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never
+posed so for any photographer.
+
+“'Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver, with
+ill-timed facetiousness. 'Parson, prepare to meet your God.' And with
+this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that
+part of the picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair
+of white whiskers and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait
+of an old lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand
+against the woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin
+is like another. It had required only the whiskers and the collar to
+make it me in every hair.
+
+“'Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he shot
+the glass back again. 'Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin' to the
+lady. Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin' to us,
+as bein' the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel
+Hawker, the man who's come to live in these parts, don't you?'
+
+“I nodded.
+
+“'Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, 'that's 'is
+mother. 'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he flung his
+fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who
+was exactly like me.
+
+“'Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke out
+Bill from the door. 'Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain't goin' to do
+you no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as
+for the old woman's clothes--why, you'll look lovely in 'em.'
+
+“'You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man behind
+me. 'Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this man Hawker
+tonight. Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne when 'e sees
+us. Maybe on the other 'and--'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be dead when we goes
+away. Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now as you know, 'e shuts
+'isself up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why
+and we does. The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother.
+Well, it's a confounded funny coincidence,' he said, accenting the
+penultimate, 'it's a very unusual piece of good luck, but you're 'is
+mother.'
+
+“'When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his head in
+a ruminant manner, 'when I first saw it I said--old Shorter. Those were
+my exact words--old Shorter.'
+
+“'What do you mean, you wild creatures?' I gasped. 'What am I to do?'
+
+“'That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver,
+good-humouredly; 'you've got to put on those clothes,' and he pointed to
+a poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.
+
+“I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I
+had no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a loaded
+pistol. In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an
+old woman--as somebody else's mother, if you please--and was dragged out
+of the house to take part in a crime.
+
+“It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were
+closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out towards
+the lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that
+ever straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every
+external, we were six very respectable old ladies of small means, in
+black dresses and refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really
+five criminals and a clergyman.
+
+“I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as
+I walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To cry out, so long
+as we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for
+the ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the
+other hand, to attempt to stop strangers and explain the situation was
+impossible, because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long
+before I had persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a
+story, my companions would certainly have got off themselves, and in all
+probability would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had
+the misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an
+inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this, that the
+Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.
+
+“I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and
+keeping pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like
+step, until at length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing under
+it. I had made up my mind. Until we reached them we were all equally
+demure and silent and swift. When we reached them I suddenly flung
+myself against the railings and roared out: 'Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!
+Rule Britannia! Get your 'air cut. Hoop-la! Boo!' It was a condition of
+no little novelty for a man in my position.
+
+“The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled,
+drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' he began
+gruffly.
+
+“'Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear
+hoarsely. 'Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear the words
+and see the neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.
+
+“I yelled, and yelled--I was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains
+that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our village concerts; I
+rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.
+
+“'If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the policeman, 'I
+shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly she is right enough.'
+
+“I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of
+thing; but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I had
+ever heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.
+
+“'When we get you past,' whispered Bill, 'you'll howl louder; you'll
+howl louder when we're burning your feet off.'
+
+“I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares
+that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting
+and horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their
+poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils.
+I cannot think there is anything so heart-breaking in hell.
+
+“For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions
+and the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome the
+policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one
+can describe anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched
+suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest, calling out (if I
+remember correctly), 'Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was at that moment
+that I remembered most dearly that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in
+Essex.
+
+“My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back of
+the neck.
+
+“'You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect
+imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.
+
+“'Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor friend. We
+will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but she is quite a
+lady--only eccentric.'
+
+“'She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.
+
+“'Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.
+
+“'Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed character
+of Miss James, 'she wants looking after.' 'She does,' said the
+policeman, 'but I'll look after her.'
+
+“'That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. 'She wants her friends. She
+wants a particular medicine we've got.'
+
+“'Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, 'no other medicine any
+good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'
+
+“'I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal shame,
+the Vicar of Chuntsey.
+
+“'Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, 'I don't like the
+eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er 'ead in
+my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the looks of you.
+I've seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong 'uns. Who are you?'
+
+“'We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable
+dignity. 'Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office
+who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If
+you choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend,
+no doubt you are legally entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have
+any legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'
+
+“The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment.
+Under cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned for an instant
+on me faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the
+darkness. When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions
+on to them, I had seen the telegraphic look flash from face to face
+saying that only retreat was possible now.
+
+“By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute
+reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not quit the
+role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the
+real case, the officer would merely have thought that I was slightly
+recovered and would have put me in charge of my friends. Now, however,
+if I liked I might safely undeceive him.
+
+“But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
+doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of
+the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but
+such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many
+improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be
+drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!
+
+“I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
+quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that
+I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly
+and easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four
+turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure.
+At the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the
+street like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
+dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was
+gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and
+blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried
+them in clean earth.”
+
+The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair.
+Both the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on,
+impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind
+these things he was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed
+courage and a sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told
+his story with many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very
+convincing realism.
+
+“And now--” I began.
+
+“And now,” said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like
+servile energy, “and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man
+Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said
+was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for
+reasons that you perceive. Among other things, they wouldn't believe me.
+What is to be done?”
+
+I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.
+
+“My friend Basil Grant,” I said, “is the best man we can go to. He and I
+were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
+back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?”
+
+“Not at all,” he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd
+plaid shawl.
+
+A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's
+flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden
+staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and
+scrappy interior, the white gleam of Basil's shirt-front and the lustre
+of his fur coat flung on the wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He
+was drinking a glass of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come
+back from the dinner-party.
+
+He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter
+with the genuine simplicity and respect which he never failed to exhibit
+in dealing with any human being. When it was over he said simply:
+
+“Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?”
+
+I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy
+collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening,
+that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at
+Mr Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, “No.”
+
+Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer
+or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the
+old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more
+and more from his head.
+
+“You are quite sure, Mr Shorter,” he repeated, “that you don't know
+Captain Fraser?”
+
+“Quite,” answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him
+returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his
+tone when he first entered my presence.
+
+Basil sprang smartly to his feet.
+
+“Then our course is clear,” he said. “You have not even begun your
+investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go
+together to see Captain Fraser.”
+
+“When?” asked the clergyman, stammering.
+
+“Now,” said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.
+
+The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.
+
+“I really do not think that it is necessary,” he said.
+
+Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again,
+and put his hands in his pockets.
+
+“Oh,” he said, with emphasis. “Oh--you don't think it necessary; then,”
+ and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation, “then, Mr
+Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you without your
+whiskers.”
+
+And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my
+life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact
+with an intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that
+splendour and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived
+perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose
+their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of
+friends with heart disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a
+hansom cab, looking at a sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now.
+At the very moment of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a
+fellow creature, Basil Grant had gone mad.
+
+“Your whiskers,” he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. “Give me your
+whiskers. And your bald head.”
+
+The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.
+
+“Sit down, Basil,” I implored, “you're a little excited. Finish your
+wine.”
+
+“Whiskers,” he answered sternly, “whiskers.”
+
+And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for
+the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was
+the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime and a
+pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables
+were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery
+scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed
+after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.
+
+And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last
+half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of
+Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed
+him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have
+expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting
+would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old
+vicar looked like a sort of farcical fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not
+seem to be so much astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of
+something like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil.
+In fact, the unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.
+
+At length Shorter was cornered.
+
+“Come, come, Mr Grant,” he panted, “you can't do anything to me. It's
+quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm. It's only a
+social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant.”
+
+“I don't blame you, my man,” said Basil coolly. “But I want your
+whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?”
+
+“No, no,” said Mr Shorter, laughing, “we provide them ourselves. They
+don't belong to Captain Fraser.”
+
+“What the deuce does all this mean?” I almost screamed. “Are you all
+in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald head belong to
+Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to
+do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him,
+Basil.”
+
+“No,” said Grant, “I didn't.”
+
+“Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?” I asked, staring. “Why
+not?”
+
+“Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was
+detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”
+
+“In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point
+when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.
+
+Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
+Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
+night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner,
+and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white
+whiskers and a plaid shawl.
+
+“Sit down, gentlemen,” cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. “Sit
+down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm
+in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have
+saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have
+liked that, eh?”
+
+The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
+duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly
+pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
+
+“Basil,” I said, “if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?”
+
+He laughed again.
+
+“Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades.
+These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking)
+are Professional Detainers.”
+
+“And what on earth's that?” I asked.
+
+“It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne,” began he who had once been
+the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
+indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no
+longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of
+a young city man. “It is really nothing very important. We are paid by
+our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people
+whom they want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser--” and
+with that he hesitated and smiled.
+
+Basil smiled also. He intervened.
+
+“The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted
+us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa,
+and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is--er--what is I
+believe described as 'the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours
+with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our
+houses so as to let him have the field to himself.”
+
+“And of course,” said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, “as I
+had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady,
+I had to come with something rather hot and strong--rather urgent. It
+wouldn't have done to be tame.”
+
+“Oh,” I said, “I acquit you of tameness.”
+
+“Thank you, sir,” said the man respectfully, “always very grateful for
+any recommendation, sir.”
+
+The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close
+red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil's
+admirable Burgundy.
+
+“It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy
+from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often knocked up against
+us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you
+with hunting stories, when you're burning to be introduced to somebody,
+he's from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours,
+just when you wanted to go to the Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The
+Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.”
+
+“There is one thing I don't understand,” I said. “Why you are both
+vicars.”
+
+A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in
+Essex.
+
+“That may have been a mistake, sir,” he said. “But it was not our fault.
+It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the
+highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain
+you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who
+impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain.
+We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to
+satisfy the firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars.
+Before that we had two years as colonels, the next in our scale.
+Colonels are four guineas.”
+
+
+
+Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
+
+Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst
+like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose from many
+separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who wore
+light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he
+was lean and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.
+
+He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a
+degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of
+the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There
+are inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial
+civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that
+restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant
+officer in the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in
+his time, to judge from his conversation, from partridges to elephants,
+but his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that “the moon” had been
+not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is
+a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.
+
+He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which
+consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed
+spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a
+green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big
+game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These
+always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in
+quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight
+of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.
+
+I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old
+regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim
+and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was
+quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its
+blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety.
+To find a middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank
+of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the
+more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the
+mysterious gentleman no good.
+
+Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man
+admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good
+man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells;
+they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange
+smoke from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which
+discredit a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If
+Keith's tales were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at
+any rate, every opportunity of being a scamp.
+
+He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his
+brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was
+invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was
+a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and
+cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat
+extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it
+was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this boyish
+incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am bound to say
+that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at Basil's
+opposing him, however banteringly.
+
+I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I
+could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.
+
+“You don't seriously mean, Basil,” I said, “that you think that that
+fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad
+Mullah and--”
+
+“He has one fault,” said Basil thoughtfully, “or virtue, as you may
+happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style;
+he is too veracious.”
+
+“Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,” said Rupert contemptuously,
+“be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all
+his life in one ancestral manor.”
+
+“No, he's extremely fond of change of scene,” replied Basil
+dispassionately, “and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his
+chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is
+that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
+frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort
+of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they
+are too absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if
+he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.”
+
+“So far from paradox,” said his brother, with something rather like a
+sneer, “you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe
+that truth is stranger than fiction?”
+
+“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” said Basil placidly.
+“For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is
+congenial to it.”
+
+“Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
+anything I ever heard of,” said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. “Do
+you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?”
+
+“I believe Keith's words,” answered the other. “He is an honest man.”
+
+“I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,” said Rupert
+cynically.
+
+“I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely
+in himself,” I said mildly; “his mode of life--”
+
+Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and
+Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his
+head.
+
+“I say, Grant,” he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the
+door, “I've got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me
+a hundred pounds? There's a good chap.”
+
+Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was
+sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked
+up a quill-pen.
+
+“Shall I cross it?” he asked, opening a cheque-book.
+
+“Really,” began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, “since
+Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before
+his family, I--”
+
+“Here you are, Ugly,” said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction
+of the quite nonchalant officer. “Are you in a hurry?”
+
+“Yes,” replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. “As a matter of fact I
+want it now. I want to see my--er--business man.”
+
+Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on
+the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, “Receiver of stolen goods,
+perhaps.” What he did say was:
+
+“A business man? That's rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith.”
+
+Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like
+ill-temper:
+
+“He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see him.”
+
+“Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?” said Rupert Grant
+grimly. “Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to go
+with you?”
+
+Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a
+little; his brow blackened sharply.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he said. “What did you say?”
+
+Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony,
+and he answered:
+
+“I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along
+with you to this house-agent's.”
+
+The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.
+
+“Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my bedroom. Look
+under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!” And with a furious
+energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of the room.
+
+Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
+excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
+transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the
+disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation
+was certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable
+unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil
+and I tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other
+that we had both noticed this.
+
+Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
+unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
+Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets
+grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser
+with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the
+figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a
+gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or
+fifth lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a
+halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a
+sort of sulky desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all
+indescribably dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for
+a penny toyshop, ran the inscription: “P. Montmorency, House-Agent.”
+
+“This is the office of which I spoke,” said Keith, in a cutting voice.
+“Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about
+my welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
+business adviser?”
+
+Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
+would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.
+
+“If you will excuse me,” he said, clenching his hands behind his back,
+“I think I should feel myself justified in--”
+
+“Oh! Come along in,” exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture
+of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at
+his heels.
+
+P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind
+a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey
+hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
+combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black
+frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical
+angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as
+anything could look, short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch
+Highlander.
+
+We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
+gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he
+was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon
+something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was
+a ferret.
+
+The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and
+steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised for
+hours together in his bedroom. He said:
+
+“Mr Montmorency, I think?”
+
+The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment,
+picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive into his trousers
+pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:
+
+“Sir.”
+
+“You are a house-agent, are you not?” asked Rupert.
+
+To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes
+wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present that
+he knew.
+
+“A house-agent,” cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were
+“burglar”.
+
+“Yes... oh, yes,” said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish
+smile. “I am a house-agent... oh, yes.”
+
+“Well, I think,” said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, “that
+Lieutenant Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his request.”
+
+Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.
+
+“I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter.
+“It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your suggestions er--about
+the br--”
+
+“Right,” cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness
+of a gunshot. “We needn't bother about all that. If you've done what I
+told you, all right.”
+
+And he turned sharply towards the door.
+
+Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
+stammering a moment he said: “Excuse me... Mr Keith... there was another
+matter... about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried to get all the
+heating apparatus possible under the circumstances ... but in winter...
+at that elevation...”
+
+“Can't expect much, eh?” said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same
+sudden skill. “No, of course not. That's all right, Montmorency. There
+can't be any more difficulties,” and he put his hand on the handle of
+the door.
+
+“I think,” said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, “that Mr
+Montmorency has something further to say to you, lieutenant.”
+
+“Only,” said the house-agent, in desperation, “what about the birds?”
+
+“I beg your pardon,” said Rupert, in a general blank.
+
+“What about the birds?” said the house-agent doggedly.
+
+Basil, who had remained throughout the proceedings in a state of
+Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a state of
+Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.
+
+“Before you go, Lieutenant Keith,” he said. “Come now. Really, what
+about the birds?”
+
+“I'll take care of them,” said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long
+back turned to us; “they shan't suffer.”
+
+“Thank you, sir, thank you,” cried the incomprehensible house-agent,
+with an air of ecstasy. “You'll excuse my concern, sir. You know I'm
+wild on wild animals. I'm as wild as any of them on that. Thank you,
+sir. But there's another thing...”
+
+The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an
+indescribable laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh, the
+purport of which was direct and essential, and yet which one cannot
+exactly express. As near as it said anything, verbally speaking, it
+said: “Well, if you must spoil it, you must. But you don't know what
+you're spoiling.”
+
+“There is another thing,” continued Mr Montmorency weakly. “Of course,
+if you don't want to be visited you'll paint the house green, but--”
+
+“Green!” shouted Keith. “Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won't have
+a house of another colour. Green!” and before we could realize anything
+the door had banged between us and the street.
+
+Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he
+spoke before the echoes of the door died away.
+
+“Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited,” he said.
+“What is the matter with him? Is he unwell?”
+
+“Oh, I should think not,” said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. “The
+negotiations have been somewhat difficult--the house is rather--”
+
+“Green,” said Rupert calmly. “That appears to be a very important point.
+It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin
+my companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for
+houses by their colour? Do clients write to a house-agent asking for a
+pink house or a blue house? Or, to take another instance, for a green
+house?”
+
+“Only,” said Montmorency, trembling, “only to be inconspicuous.”
+
+Rupert had his ruthless smile. “Can you tell me any place on earth in
+which a green house would be inconspicuous?”
+
+The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing
+out a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the counter, he said:
+
+“No; I can't.”
+
+“You can't suggest an explanation?”
+
+“No,” said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to
+suggest a sudden situation, “I can't. And may I, as a busy man, be
+excused if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in
+connection with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to
+get for you, sir?”
+
+He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
+staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
+answered:
+
+“I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has unduly
+delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my apparent
+impertinence.”
+
+“Not at all, sir,” said the house-agent, taking a South American spider
+idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the slope of his
+desk. “Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again.”
+
+Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious
+to face Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was
+deserted.
+
+“What do you say now?” cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said
+nothing now.
+
+We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself
+dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey
+street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely
+meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three.
+
+In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly
+to thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then
+into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a
+knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a
+crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that there is madness in the
+heart and core of the mob. It soon became evident that something really
+important had happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our
+way to the front, with the cunning which is known only to cockneys, and
+once there we soon learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been
+a brawl concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead
+on the stones of the street. Of the other four, all interesting matters
+were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous fact.
+One of the four survivors of the brutal and perhaps fatal scuffle was
+the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn to ribbons, his eyes
+blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other thing, however, pointed at him
+in a worse manner. A short sword, or very long knife, had been drawn out
+of his elegant walking-stick, and lay in front of him upon the stones.
+It did not, however, appear to be bloody.
+
+The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
+omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with
+his incontrollable and intolerable secret.
+
+“That is the man, constable,” he shouted, pointing at the battered
+lieutenant. “He is a suspicious character. He did the murder.”
+
+“There's been no murder done, sir,” said the policeman, with his
+automatic civility. “The poor man's only hurt. I shall only be able to
+take the names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good
+eye kept on them.”
+
+“Have a good eye kept on that one,” said Rupert, pale to the lips, and
+pointing to the ragged Keith.
+
+“All right, sir,” said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round
+of the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had completed
+his task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately
+connected with the examination had gone away. He still found, however,
+one eager-faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It
+was Rupert Grant.
+
+“Constable,” he said, “I have a very particular reason for asking you
+a question. Would you mind telling me whether that military fellow who
+dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address or not?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said the policeman, after a reflective pause; “yes, he gave
+me his address.”
+
+“My name is Rupert Grant,” said that individual, with some pomp. “I
+have assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder whether you
+would tell me, as a special favour, what address?”
+
+The constable looked at him.
+
+“Yes,” he said slowly, “if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton
+Common, near Purley, Surrey.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as
+fast as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to himself.
+
+Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to
+breakfast; he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always the
+attitude of the indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when
+Basil and I came down we found him ready and restless.
+
+“Well,” he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the
+meal. “What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?”
+
+“What do I think of him?” inquired Basil slowly. “I don't think anything
+of him.”
+
+“I'm glad to hear it,” said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy
+that was somewhat exultant. “I thought you'd come round to my view, but
+I own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man
+is a translucent liar and knave.”
+
+“I think,” said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, “that I did
+not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of him I meant
+grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that
+he did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of
+him, since you think him a knave. I should say he was glaringly good
+myself.”
+
+“I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake,” said Rupert,
+breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. “What the deuce is the
+sense of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our common
+agreement, dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who
+doesn't conceal his acquaintance with all the blackest and bloodiest
+scenes on earth. We take the trouble to follow him to one of his
+appointments, and if ever two human beings were plotting together and
+lying to every one else, he and that impossible house-agent were doing
+it. We followed him home, and the very same night he is in the thick
+of a fatal, or nearly fatal, brawl, in which he is the only man armed.
+Really, if this is being glaringly good, I must confess that the glare
+does not dazzle me.”
+
+Basil was quite unmoved. “I admit his moral goodness is of a certain
+kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of change and
+experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are
+mere coincidence or special pleading. It's true he didn't want to talk
+about his house business in front of us. No man would. It's true that he
+carries a sword-stick. Any man might. It's true he drew it in the shock
+of a street fight. Any man would. But there's nothing really dubious in
+all this. There's nothing to confirm--”
+
+As he spoke a knock came at the door.
+
+“If you please, sir,” said the landlady, with an alarmed air, “there's a
+policeman wants to see you.”
+
+“Show him in,” said Basil, amid the blank silence.
+
+The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost as
+soon as he appeared there.
+
+“I think one of you gentlemen,” he said, curtly but respectfully, “was
+present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew my attention
+very strongly to a particular man.”
+
+Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
+constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.
+
+“A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn
+in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith.”
+
+“This is amusing,” said Basil, laughing. “I was in the very act of
+clearing that poor officer's character of rather fanciful aspersions.
+What about him?”
+
+“Well, sir,” said the constable, “I took all the men's addresses and had
+them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more than that. All the
+other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address.
+The place doesn't exist.”
+
+The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping
+both his thighs.
+
+“Well, by all that's good,” he cried. “This is a sign from heaven.”
+
+“It's certainly very extraordinary,” said Basil quietly, with knitted
+brows. “It's odd the fellow should have given a false address,
+considering he was perfectly innocent in the--”
+
+“Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer,” cried Rupert, in a sort of
+rapture, “I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You think every one
+as good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful
+acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean
+streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false
+address. That's what we call glaring goodness.”
+
+“It's certainly very extraordinary,” repeated Basil. And he strolled
+moodily about the room. Then he said: “You are quite sure, constable,
+that there's no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have
+really gone to it and found it was a fraud?”
+
+“It was very simple, sir,” said the policeman, chuckling. “The place
+he named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were
+down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no
+such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is
+so near London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to
+say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right
+enough. He was a clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost
+England that people know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that
+there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But
+as a fact, there isn't.”
+
+Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and
+darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered almost for
+the first time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather
+wondered at the almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his
+original prejudice in favour of the wildly questionable lieutenant. At
+length he said:
+
+“You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in
+the district--by the way, what was the address?”
+
+The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but
+before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the window in a
+perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with
+the sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.
+
+“Why, I can tell you that, Basil,” he said graciously as he idly plucked
+leaves from a plant in the window. “I took the precaution to get this
+man's address from the constable last night.”
+
+“And what was it?” asked his brother gruffly.
+
+“The constable will correct me if I am wrong,” said Rupert, looking
+sweetly at the ceiling. “It was: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley,
+Surrey.”
+
+“Right, sir,” said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers.
+
+There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few
+seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair so suddenly
+that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his
+lips had flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic
+laughter struck and shook the ceiling--laughter that shook the laughter,
+laughter redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not stop.
+
+Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with
+laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this time ill
+almost with terror.
+
+“Excuse me,” said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet.
+“I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also
+unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down
+to that place. The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to
+know. It's quite out of proportion to the comparatively small distance.”
+
+“Get down to that place?” I repeated blankly. “Get down to what place?”
+
+“I have forgotten its name,” said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in
+his pockets as he rose. “Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a
+timetable?”
+
+“You don't seriously mean,” cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort
+of confusion of emotions. “You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton
+Common, do you? You can't mean that!”
+
+“Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?” asked Basil, smiling.
+
+“Why should you?” said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of
+the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
+
+“To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,” said Basil Grant. “I
+thought you wanted to find him?”
+
+Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently
+on the floor. “And in order to find him,” he said, “you suggest the
+admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth
+where we know he can't be.”
+
+The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting
+laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on
+with a reiterated gesture:
+
+“He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of
+St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be
+in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store
+cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only
+one where he has just been systematically looked for and where we know
+that he is not to be found--and that, if I understand you rightly, is
+where you want us to go.”
+
+“Exactly,” said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; “I thought
+you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly
+here till I come back.”
+
+It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if
+they really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I
+cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished
+decisively with his great-coat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with
+a considerable flurry of rationality.
+
+“My dear chap,” he cried, “do you really mean that you see any good in
+going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten
+tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place
+that came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying
+reference in a scrape?”
+
+“Yes,” said Basil, taking out his watch, “and, what's worse, we've lost
+the train.”
+
+He paused a moment and then added: “As a matter of fact, I think we may
+just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and
+I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich
+Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn't be in. But
+if we get down by the 5.15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we
+shall just catch him.”
+
+“Catch him!” cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. “I wish we
+could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?”
+
+“I keep forgetting the name of the common,” said Basil, as he buttoned
+up his coat. “The Elms--what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That's
+where we shall find him.”
+
+“But there is no such place,” groaned Rupert; but he followed his
+brother downstairs.
+
+We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our
+sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and
+do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the
+fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was
+that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared
+the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from
+our breakfast table and said: “I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten
+Tails,” we should have followed him to the end of the world.
+
+I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this
+occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the
+strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense
+twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the
+London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if
+ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the
+human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or
+Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops
+into that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It
+seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by
+God--such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.
+
+There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself.
+But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our
+expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional
+wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more
+useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin
+to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which
+has led men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed
+men under the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew
+was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to
+look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.
+
+Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the
+gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell
+of the windy common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly
+Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the
+dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable
+success.
+
+“Well,” he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
+slapping them together, “here we are at last.”
+
+The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked
+above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign
+of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of
+that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
+innkeeper standing at an open door.
+
+“How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilization. That notion
+that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till
+you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and
+the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red
+star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red
+river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I
+have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in
+enormous quantities.”
+
+Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
+wind died in the dreary trees.
+
+“You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own
+house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth,
+and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good
+fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I said originally.”
+
+“What do you mean?” I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort
+of sanity. “What is his greatest virtue?”
+
+“His greatest virtue,” replied Basil, “is that he always tells the
+literal truth.”
+
+“Well, really,” cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger,
+and slapping himself like a cabman, “he doesn't seem to have been very
+literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I
+ask, have you brought us out to this infernal place?”
+
+“He was too truthful, I confess,” said Basil, leaning against the tree;
+“too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in
+a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time
+we went in. We shall be late for dinner.”
+
+Rupert whispered to me with a white face:
+
+“Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
+house?”
+
+“I suppose so,” I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be
+a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as
+strange as the wind:
+
+“Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?”
+
+“Why, up here,” cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above
+our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
+
+“Come up, all of you,” he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of
+a schoolboy. “Come up. You'll be late for dinner.”
+
+The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a
+yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them.
+Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of
+footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I
+supposed, have been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.
+
+Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of
+the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly
+mystical in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant's
+staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious
+voice above called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after
+him.
+
+Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
+suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the
+whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw
+three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible
+suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how,
+half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer
+and all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all
+probability, laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty
+to laugh at us about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when
+I thought what his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that
+moment, I nearly let go of the tree and fell.
+
+“Swinburne,” said Rupert suddenly, from above, “what are we doing? Let's
+get down again,” and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he too
+felt the shock of wakening to reality.
+
+“We can't leave poor Basil,” I said. “Can't you call to him or get hold
+of him by the leg?”
+
+“He's too far ahead,” answered Rupert; “he's nearly at the top of the
+beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks' nests, I
+suppose.”
+
+We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The
+mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind.
+Then I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far
+from the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe.
+I saw that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a
+little in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines
+taper towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me
+feel lost in space, like a falling star.
+
+“Can nothing be done to stop Basil?” I called out.
+
+“No,” answered my fellow climber. “He's too far up. He must get to the
+top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again.
+Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself.”
+
+“Perhaps he's talking to us,” I said.
+
+“No,” said Rupert, “he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to talk
+to himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight; it's a known
+sign of the brain going.”
+
+“Yes,” I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was sounding
+above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous tones in which
+he had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now
+and then, up there among the leaves and stars.
+
+After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said,
+“My God!” with a violent voice.
+
+“What's the matter--are you hurt?” I cried, alarmed.
+
+“No. Listen to Basil,” said the other in a very strange voice. “He's not
+talking to himself.”
+
+“Then he is talking to us,” I cried.
+
+“No,” said Rupert simply, “he's talking to somebody else.”
+
+Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a
+sudden burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear the
+conversational voice above. I could hear two voices.
+
+Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as before:
+“Come up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith.”
+
+And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard in our
+chambers more than once. It called out:
+
+“Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.”
+
+Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in the
+branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face and fierce
+moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly
+Southern air that belonged to him.
+
+Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily
+into the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned,
+tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table,
+and a circular seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was
+Basil, who, in the instant after alighting there, had fallen into an
+attitude of marmoreal ease as if he had been there from boyhood; he was
+smoking a cigar with a slow pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond
+Keith, who looked happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with
+his granite guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with
+the wild whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the
+green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The
+sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle
+in the corner. In the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne.
+Glasses were already set for us.
+
+The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot
+of a light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild
+sea.
+
+Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then
+Basil spoke.
+
+“You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further
+question about the cold veracity of our injured host.”
+
+“I don't quite grasp it all,” said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden
+glare. “Lieutenant Keith said his address was--”
+
+“It's really quite right, sir,” said Keith, with an open smile. “The
+bobby asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully, that I lived
+in the elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr
+Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses
+of this kind. He has a special line in arboreal villas. It's being kept
+rather quiet at present, because the people who want these houses don't
+want them to get too common. But it's just the sort of thing a fellow
+like myself, racketing about in all sorts of queer corners of London,
+naturally knocks up against.”
+
+“Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?” asked Rupert eagerly,
+recovering his ease with the romance of reality.
+
+Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and
+nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.
+
+“W-well, yes, sir,” he said. “The fact was--er--my people wanted me very
+much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared myself for
+anything but natural history and botany and things like that. My poor
+parents have been dead some years now, but--naturally I like to respect
+their wishes. And I thought somehow that an arboreal villa agency was
+a sort of--of compromise between being a botanist and being a
+house-agent.”
+
+Rupert could not help laughing. “Do you have much custom?” he asked.
+
+“N-not much,” replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith, who
+was (I am convinced) his only client. “But what there is--very select.”
+
+“My dear friends,” said Basil, puffing his cigar, “always remember two
+facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about any one
+who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing
+about any one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the
+most likely. The second is to remember that very plain literal fact
+always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house
+in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The
+Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic
+about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you
+would have believed it.”
+
+“Drink your wine, gentlemen,” said Keith, laughing, “for this confounded
+wind will upset it.”
+
+We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
+mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
+tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.
+
+
+
+Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
+
+Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was
+the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and
+talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for
+that person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he
+were always on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of
+these chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his
+life. A few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became
+his lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of
+them as if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen
+from a goods train or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would
+be, let us say, a veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey;
+another, a mild prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another,
+a young captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains
+in the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable
+certainty precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major
+Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his
+acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right
+hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of
+masculine hysterics, the compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor
+and the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a cab
+together and then dined with each other twice a week until they died. I
+myself was another. I had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the
+balcony of the National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about
+the weather. Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and
+God; for men always talk about the most important things to total
+strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself;
+the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts
+of the wisdom of a moustache.
+
+One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was
+Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
+interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest,
+if not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language.
+He was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a
+bearded man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face
+of an unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He
+went to and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless
+tea-shops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He
+was never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by
+the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his
+little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There
+he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister
+demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical
+students, but one would not have called it exhilarating. His only hours
+of exhilaration occurred when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the
+house, late at night, a tornado of conversation.
+
+Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
+these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly
+in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember
+vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with
+them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange
+calamity fell upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of
+his particular class and type (the class that is at once academic and
+middle-class), a Radical of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was
+a Radical himself, but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon
+type of Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical
+party. Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called “Zulu
+Interests and the New Makango Frontier”, in which a precise scientific
+report of his study of the customs of the people of T'Chaka was
+reinforced by a severe protest against certain interferences with these
+customs both by the British and the Germans. He was sitting with the
+magazine in front of him, the lamplight shining on his spectacles, a
+wrinkle in his forehead, not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant
+strode up and down the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high
+spirits and his heavy tread.
+
+“It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd,” he was
+saying, “it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for
+all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way
+of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but
+for all that you don't understand them as well as I do, who don't know
+an assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more
+Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always
+championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are
+sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you
+are not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the
+glass. Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum.
+Look at this umbrella.” And he held up that sad but still respectable
+article. “Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge you
+have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of doubt
+that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to
+you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin--thus--”
+
+And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head,
+so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase
+rocking.
+
+Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to
+the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.
+
+“Your mental processes,” he said, “always go a little too fast. And they
+are stated without method. There is no kind of inconsistency”--and
+no words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the
+word--“between valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their
+stage in the evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial
+and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this
+concession which I have just described to you and the view that the
+evolutionary stage in question is, nevertheless, so far as we can form
+any estimate of values in the variety of cosmic processes, definable in
+some degree as an inferior evolutionary stage.”
+
+Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone
+like two pallid moons.
+
+Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.
+
+“True,” he said, “there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear.
+But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I am very far
+from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage,
+whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything
+stupid or ignorant about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils
+in the dark. It seems to me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man
+be thought a sort of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of
+existence itself? Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the
+idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?”
+
+Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paper-knife
+and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.
+
+“Beyond all question,” he said, “it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude
+to the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that our
+civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I
+apprehend you), is or may be a retrogression from states identical with
+or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover, I shall be inclined
+to concede that such a proposition is of the nature, in some degree at
+least, of a primary proposition, and cannot adequately be argued, in the
+same sense, I mean, that the primary proposition of pessimism, or the
+primary proposition of the non-existence of matter, cannot adequately
+be argued. But I do not conceive you to be under the impression that you
+have demonstrated anything more concerning this proposition than that it
+is tenable, which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement
+that it is not a contradiction in terms.”
+
+Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.
+
+“You don't understand,” he said, “but, on the other hand, as a
+compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that
+disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I began it
+when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was
+that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense that you are a
+scientist, I know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For
+instance, your theory of the origin of language, something about its
+having come from the formulated secret language of some individual
+creature, though you knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its
+favour, still does not convince me, because I have a feeling that that
+is not the way that things happen. If you ask me why I think so I can
+only answer that I am a Zulu; and if you ask me (as you most certainly
+will) what is my definition of a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one
+who has climbed a Sussex apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost
+in an English lane.”
+
+“Your process of thought--” began the immovable Chadd, but his speech
+was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which always in such
+families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm
+and said:
+
+“James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again.”
+
+The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in
+such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but
+practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out
+of the room.
+
+“I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,” said Basil
+Grant, “but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the
+men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it
+not, that Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper of Asiatic
+manuscripts?”
+
+The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a
+great deal of pathos also. “I believe it's true,” she said. “If it is,
+it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great
+deal, but great relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a
+lot of things. James' health has never been good, and while we are as
+poor as we are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his
+own dreadful grinding notions and discoveries, which he loves more than
+man, woman, or child. I have often been afraid that unless something of
+this kind occurred we should really have to be careful of his brain. But
+I believe it is practically settled.”
+
+“I am delighted,” began Basil, but with a worried face, “but these
+red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't advise
+you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I've
+known men, and good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be
+disappointed. Of course, if it is true--”
+
+“If it is true,” said the woman fiercely, “it means that people who have
+never lived may make an attempt at living.”
+
+Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed
+look in his eyes.
+
+“Is it true?” asked Basil, with burning eyes.
+
+“Not a bit true,” answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment. “Your
+argument was in three points fallacious.”
+
+“What do you mean?” demanded Grant.
+
+“Well,” said the professor slowly, “in saying that you could possess a
+knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from--”
+
+“Oh! confound Zulu life,” cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. “I
+mean, have you got the post?”
+
+“You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts,” he said,
+opening his eye with childlike wonder. “Oh, yes, I got that. But the
+real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me
+since I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose
+a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it
+is absolutely impeded by the facts.”
+
+“I am crushed,” said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's
+sister retired to her room, possibly to laugh, possibly not.
+
+It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely
+long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may
+be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with
+Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal,
+a time, in point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal
+we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular,
+seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by
+his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there
+had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern
+carelessness in being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he
+opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and
+drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but
+something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure
+had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack
+guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been
+for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was
+scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his
+seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and
+came round to me in two strides.
+
+“What do you make of that?” he said, and flattened out the wire in front
+of me.
+
+It ran: “Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous. Chadd.”
+
+“What does the woman mean?” I said after a pause, irritably. “Those
+women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he
+was born.”
+
+“You are mistaken,” said Grant composedly. “It is true that all sensible
+women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that,
+all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don't put
+it in telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or
+God all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at
+that. If Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman
+in a post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly
+certain that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and
+she can think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly.”
+
+“It will force us of course,” I said, smiling.
+
+“Oh, yes,” he replied; “there is a cab-rank near.”
+
+Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge,
+through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road.
+Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.
+
+“I think you will take my word for it, my friend,” he said; “this is
+one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever
+happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization.”
+
+“I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't quite
+see it,” I said. “Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a
+dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of
+the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so
+very extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul
+like a spider's web should not find his strength equal to a confounding
+change of fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James
+Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?”
+
+“It would not be extraordinary in the least,” answered Basil, with
+placidity. “It would not be extraordinary in the least,” he repeated,
+“if the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary
+circumstance to which I referred.”
+
+“What,” I asked, stamping my foot, “was the extraordinary thing?”
+
+“The extraordinary thing,” said Basil, ringing the bell, “is that he has
+not gone mad from excitement.”
+
+The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway
+as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be
+blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general
+sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three
+black-clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the
+catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.
+
+“Sit down, won't you?” said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat
+rigid with pain. “I think you had better be told first what has
+happened.”
+
+Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she
+continued, in an even and mechanical voice:
+
+“I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This
+morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both
+somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out
+of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however,
+without it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said,
+'Were you looking for anything I could get?' He did not answer, but
+this constantly happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my
+question, and still he did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up
+in his studies that nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him
+aware of one's presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really
+do not know how to describe the sensation which I then had. It seems
+simply silly, but at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting
+one's brain. The fact is, James was standing on one leg.”
+
+Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.
+
+“Standing on one leg?” I repeated.
+
+“Yes,” replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
+suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. “He was
+standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the
+toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only
+answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as
+if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking
+quite gravely at the fireplace.
+
+“'James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened.
+James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the
+other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a
+teetotum the other way. 'Are you mad?' I cried. 'Why don't you answer
+me?' He had come to a standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he
+always does, with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When
+I had spoken he remained a second or two motionless, and then his only
+reply was to lift his left foot slowly from the floor and describe
+circles with it in the air. I rushed to the door and shouted for
+Christina. I will not dwell on the dreadful hours that followed. All
+three of us talked to him, implored him to speak to us with appeals that
+might have brought back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop
+and dance and kick with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs
+belonged to some one else or were possessed by devils. He has never
+spoken to us from that time to this.”
+
+“Where is he now?” I said, getting up in some agitation. “We ought not
+to leave him alone.”
+
+“Doctor Colman is with him,” said Miss Chadd calmly. “They are in the
+garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he can
+scarcely go into the street.”
+
+Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden.
+It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a
+little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this
+shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something
+natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and
+verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a
+small, sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I
+presume Dr Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with
+a nervous twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend,
+listening with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong
+sunlight gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the
+night before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious
+decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have been
+the identical figure of last night. That one thing was that while the
+face listened reposefully the legs were industriously dancing like the
+legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of
+the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and incredibility to
+the prodigy--the prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a
+harlequin. For miracles should always happen in broad daylight. The
+night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.
+
+The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat
+drearily to the window.
+
+“You know, Adelaide,” she said, “that Mr Bingham from the Museum is
+coming again at three.”
+
+“I know,” said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. “I suppose we shall have to tell
+him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to
+us.”
+
+Grant suddenly turned round. “What do you mean?” he said. “What will you
+have to tell Mr Bingham?”
+
+“You know what I shall have to tell him,” said the professor's sister,
+almost fiercely. “I don't know that we need give it its wretched name.
+Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to
+go on like that?” And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the
+garden, the shining, listening face and the unresting feet.
+
+Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. “When did you
+say the British Museum man was coming?” he said.
+
+“Three o'clock,” said Miss Chadd briefly.
+
+“Then I have an hour before me,” said Grant, and without another word
+threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk
+straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden
+path drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood
+a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his
+trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the
+broad brim of his hat.
+
+Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a
+loud familiar voice, “Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our
+inferiors?”
+
+The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to
+speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a
+friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.
+
+“Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?” Basil continued, still in
+the same loud and lucid tone.
+
+Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg,
+his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather
+sharply. “Shall we go inside, professor?” he said. “Now you have shown
+me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go
+in,” and he tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the
+same time whispering to Grant: “I must ask you not to trouble him with
+questions. Most risky. He must be soothed.”
+
+Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:
+
+“Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will
+endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if
+you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour.
+I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very
+little to him, and that little shall be as soothing as--as syrup.”
+
+The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.
+
+“It is rather dangerous for him,” he said, “to be long in the strong sun
+without his hat. With his bald head, too.”
+
+“That is soon settled,” said Basil composedly, and took off his own big
+hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did
+not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.
+
+The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for
+some seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and then saying,
+shortly, “All right,” strutted away into the house, where the three
+Misses Chadd were all looking out from the parlour window on to the
+garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without
+moving, and they saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness
+itself.
+
+Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding
+in making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he had done
+this slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large pencil
+out of another.
+
+He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from
+him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again.
+Thus they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of
+turf, the one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a
+problem, the other leaping and playing like a child.
+
+After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put
+the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and
+walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of
+him.
+
+Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild
+morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil
+in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and
+then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his
+sister had described as being the first of all his antics. And the
+moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out
+rigid before him, confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The
+professor dropped his bent leg, and swinging his weight on to it kicked
+out the other behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like
+a saltire cross, and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into
+the air. Then before any of the spectators could say a word or even
+entertain a thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort
+of jig or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two
+madmen instead of one.
+
+They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that
+they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the
+garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor
+Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed
+about to turn a cart-wheel, when they were frozen in their follies by
+the steely voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, “Mr Bingham of the British
+Museum.”
+
+Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly
+effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable
+manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was
+of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some
+credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a
+considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But
+neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
+grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves
+about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.
+
+The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant
+stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny
+black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them
+to the other.
+
+“Dr Colman,” said Basil, turning to him, “will you entertain Professor
+Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham,
+might I have the pleasure of a few moments' private conversation? My
+name is Grant.”
+
+Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful
+but a trifle bewildered.
+
+“Miss Chadd will excuse me,” continued Basil easily, “if I know my way
+about the house.” And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the
+back door into the parlour.
+
+“Mr Bingham,” said Basil, setting a chair for him, “I imagine that Miss
+Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence.”
+
+“She has, Mr Grant,” said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort
+of compassionate nervousness. “I am more pained than I can say by this
+dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should
+have happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend
+a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of
+course--really, I don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of
+course, retain--I sincerely trust he will--his extraordinarily valuable
+intellect. But I am afraid--I am really afraid--that it would not do to
+have the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts--er--dancing about.”
+
+“I have a suggestion to make,” said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his
+chair, drawing it up to the table.
+
+“I am delighted, of course,” said the gentleman from the British Museum,
+coughing and drawing up his chair also.
+
+The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
+Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:
+
+“My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
+could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
+character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
+through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd £800 a year until he
+stops dancing.”
+
+“Eight hundred a year!” said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted
+his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and he raised them
+with a mild blue stare. “I think I have not quite understood you. Did I
+understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his
+present state, in the Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a
+year?”
+
+Grant shook his head resolutely.
+
+“No,” he said firmly. “No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
+anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought
+to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely
+say that until he stops dancing you ought to pay him £800 Surely you
+have some general fund for the endowment of research.”
+
+Mr Bingham looked bewildered.
+
+“I really don't know,” he said, blinking his eyes, “what you are talking
+about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a
+year for life?”
+
+“Not at all,” cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. “I never said for
+life. Not at all.”
+
+“What for, then?” asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly
+to tear his hair. “How long is this endowment to run? Not till his
+death? Till the Judgement day?”
+
+“No,” said Basil, beaming, “but just what I said. Till he has stopped
+dancing.” And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his
+pockets.
+
+Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and
+kept them there.
+
+“Come, Mr Grant,” he said. “Do I seriously understand you to suggest
+that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary
+simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he
+should be paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he
+is flinging his boots about in the back yard?”
+
+“Precisely,” said Grant composedly.
+
+“That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
+but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?”
+
+“One must stop somewhere,” said Grant. “Of course.”
+
+Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.
+
+“There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant,” he said coldly.
+“What you are trying to explain to me may be a joke--a slightly
+unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your
+pardon for the former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite
+irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of
+Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure
+to speak of it. But it is clear there is a limit to everything. And if
+the Archangel Gabriel went mad it would sever his connection, I am sorry
+to say, with the British Museum Library.”
+
+He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in
+dramatic warning, arrested him.
+
+“Stop!” said Basil sternly. “Stop while there is yet time. Do you want
+to take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help in the
+glory of Europe--in the glory of science? Do you want to carry your head
+in the air when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in
+a great discovery? Do you want--”
+
+Bingham cut in sharply:
+
+“And if I do want this, Mr Grant--”
+
+“Then,” said Basil lightly, “your task is easy. Get Chadd £800 a year
+till he stops dancing.”
+
+With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently
+to the door, but in passing out of it found it blocked. Dr Colman was
+coming in.
+
+“Forgive me, gentlemen,” he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, “the
+fact is, Mr Grant, I--er--have made a most disturbing discovery about Mr
+Chadd.”
+
+Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.
+
+“I was afraid so,” he said. “Drink, I imagine.”
+
+“Drink!” echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. “Oh, no,
+it's not drink.”
+
+Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and
+vague. “Homicidal mania--” he began.
+
+“No, no,” said the medical man impatiently.
+
+“Thinks he's made of glass,” said Bingham feverishly, “or says he's
+God--or--”
+
+“No,” said Dr Colman sharply; “the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of
+a different character. The awful thing about him is--”
+
+“Oh, go on, sir,” cried Bingham, in agony.
+
+“The awful thing about him is,” repeated Colman, with deliberation,
+“that he isn't mad.”
+
+“Not mad!”
+
+“There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy,” said the doctor
+shortly; “he hasn't got any of them.”
+
+“But why does he dance?” cried the despairing Bingham. “Why doesn't he
+answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?”
+
+“The devil knows,” said Dr Colman coolly. “I'm paid to judge of
+lunatics, but not of fools. The man's not mad.”
+
+“What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?” said Mr Bingham.
+“Can none get into any kind of communication with him?”
+
+Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:
+
+“I shall be very happy,” he said, “to give him any message you like to
+send.”
+
+Both men stared at him.
+
+“Give him a message?” they cried simultaneously. “How will you give him
+a message?”
+
+Basil smiled in his slow way.
+
+“If you really want to know how I shall give him your message,” he
+began, but Bingham cried:
+
+“Of course, of course,” with a sort of frenzy.
+
+“Well,” said Basil, “like this.” And he suddenly sprang a foot into the
+air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on one leg.
+
+His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact
+that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.
+
+“You drive me to it,” he said. “You drive me to betray my friend. And I
+will, for his own sake, betray him.”
+
+The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as
+of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure. “Anything painful, of
+course--” he began.
+
+Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck
+them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.
+
+“Idiots!” he cried. “Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James
+Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to your miserable
+library, with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never
+seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck
+casually behind his spectacles and above his seedy old collar, the face
+of a man who might have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher's
+stone? It is all my fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly
+faith. I argued against him on the score of his famous theory about
+language--the theory that language was complete in certain individuals
+and was picked up by others simply by watching them. I also chaffed him
+about not understanding things in rough and ready practice. What has
+this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has worked out a system
+of language of his own (it would take too long to explain); he has made
+up, I say, a language of his own. And he has sworn that till people
+understand it, till he can speak to us in this language, he will not
+speak in any other. And he shall not. I have understood, by taking
+careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others. This shall not be
+blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall have £800 a year
+from somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an
+infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution.”
+
+Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.
+
+“I thank you, Mr Grant,” he said. “I hope I shall be able to answer for
+the source of the £800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my
+cab?”
+
+“No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham,” said Grant heartily. “I think I
+will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden.”
+
+The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
+friendly. They were still dancing when I left.
+
+
+
+Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
+
+The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of
+interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he
+was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of
+London. His brother Basil said of him: “His reasoning is particularly
+cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes
+in abruptly and leads him right.” Whether this was true of Rupert as a
+whole, or no, it was certainly curiously supported by one story about
+him which I think worth telling.
+
+We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
+was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight
+in summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
+darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth
+were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of
+the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them,
+Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out
+of the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to
+prove to me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective
+theories. He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain,
+seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a
+falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy
+milkman who walked in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which
+afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten
+what were the main outlines of the milkman's crime. I think it had
+something to do with the fact that he had only one small can of milk to
+carry, and that of that he had left the lid loose and walked so quickly
+that he spilled milk on the pavement. This showed that he was not
+thinking of his small burden, and this again showed that he anticipated
+some other than lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this (taken
+in conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed something else
+that I have entirely forgotten. I am afraid that I derided this detailed
+revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that Rupert Grant, who,
+though the best of fellows, had a good deal of the sensitiveness of the
+artistic temperament, slightly resented my derision. He endeavoured to
+take a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity which he associated with
+his profession, but the cigar, I think, was nearly bitten through.
+
+“My dear fellow,” he said acidly, “I'll bet you half a crown that
+wherever that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out something
+curious.”
+
+“My resources are equal to that risk,” I said, laughing. “Done.”
+
+We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of
+the mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some
+ado to keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of
+milk, silver in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it,
+he disappeared down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really
+believed that the milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept
+him as having vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took
+no hold on my mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared
+himself into the area.
+
+I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post in the
+lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps without his
+can and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more
+elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet
+laughing; a not uncommon contradiction in him, denoting excitement.
+
+“My friend,” he said, rubbing his hands, “so much for all your
+scepticism. So much for your philistine ignorance of the possibilities
+of a romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your
+prosaic good nature will have to express itself.”
+
+“What?” I said incredulously, “do you mean to say that you really did
+find anything the matter with the poor milkman?”
+
+His face fell.
+
+“Oh, the milkman,” he said, with a miserable affectation at having
+misunderstood me. “No, I--I--didn't exactly bring anything home to the
+milkman himself, I--”
+
+“What did the milkman say and do?” I said, with inexorable sternness.
+
+“Well, to tell the truth,” said Rupert, shifting restlessly from
+one foot to another, “the milkman himself, as far as merely physical
+appearances went, just said, 'Milk, Miss,' and handed in the can. That
+is not to say, of course, that he did not make some secret sign or
+some--”
+
+I broke into a violent laugh. “You idiot,” I said, “why don't you own
+yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made a secret
+sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did nothing
+worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?”
+
+His face grew grave.
+
+“Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that
+the milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that I was wrong
+about him.”
+
+“Then come along with you,” I said, with a certain amicable anger, “and
+remember that you owe me half a crown.”
+
+“As to that, I differ from you,” said Rupert coolly. “The milkman's
+remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman may have been.
+But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I
+think, as follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came
+to a real stop I should find out something curious.”
+
+“Well?” I said.
+
+“Well,” he answered, “I jolly well have. You just come with me,” and
+before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked through
+the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost
+before I made any decision.
+
+When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally,
+as the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a closed door,
+shuttered windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous
+well in which I found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me
+there, and who stood there with dancing eyes. I was just about to turn
+back when Rupert caught me by the elbow.
+
+“Just listen to that,” he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right
+hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters of the
+basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined
+my head for a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an
+unmistakable human voice.
+
+“Have you been talking to somebody inside?” I asked suddenly, turning to
+Rupert.
+
+“No, I haven't,” he replied, with a grim smile, “but I should very much
+like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?”
+
+“No, of course not,” I replied.
+
+“Then I recommend you to listen,” said Rupert sharply.
+
+In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a
+moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which there
+was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which
+took the form of the words: “When shall I get out? When shall I get out?
+Will they ever let me out?” or words to that effect.
+
+“Do you know anything about this?” I said, turning upon Rupert very
+abruptly.
+
+“Perhaps you think I am the criminal,” he said sardonically, “instead
+of being in some small sense the detective. I came into this area two or
+three minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something funny
+going on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a
+woman) was moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do
+not know anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my
+disinherited daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when
+I hear a human being wailing that she can't get out, and talking to
+herself like a mad woman and beating on the shutters with her fists,
+as she was doing two or three minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning,
+that is all.”
+
+“My dear fellow,” I said, “I apologize; this is no time for arguing.
+What is to be done?”
+
+Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.
+
+“First of all,” he said, “house-breaking.” And he forced the blade into
+the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap
+and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely
+unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead
+and opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization
+which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our
+breath. Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window
+itself seemed suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed
+against the glass within, and with increased distinctness, with the
+increase of the opening came the words:
+
+“When shall I get out?”
+
+“What can all this be?” I said.
+
+Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing the
+ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in it, smaller
+and more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he
+had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and
+querulous and clear, making the same demand for liberty.
+
+“Can't you get out, madam?” I said, drawing near the hole in some
+perturbation.
+
+“Get out? Of course I can't,” moaned the unknown female bitterly. “They
+won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them I'd call the
+police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me
+as long as they liked only--”
+
+I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick,
+incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held my arm hard,
+held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to
+stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment,
+and in the act swung slightly round, so that I was facing the supporting
+wall of the front door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness
+like that of Rupert, for a figure almost as motionless as the pillars of
+the portico, but unmistakably human, had put his head out from between
+the doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted
+lamps of the street was just behind his head, throwing it into abrupt
+darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of his face
+beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring at us. I must say I
+thought Rupert's calmness magnificent. He rang the area bell quite idly,
+and went on talking to me with the easy end of a conversation which had
+never had any beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did
+not stir. I almost thought it was really a statue. In another moment
+the grey area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was opened
+suddenly and a small and decorous housemaid stood in it.
+
+“Pray excuse me,” said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make
+somehow or other at once affable and underbred, “but we thought perhaps
+that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don't expect--”
+
+“Not here,” said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of
+the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces.
+
+“Very sad, very sad--the indifference of these people,” said the
+philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As we did
+so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.
+
+“Well, what do you make of that?” asked Rupert, slapping his gloves
+together when we got into the street.
+
+I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such
+conditions I had but one thought.
+
+“Don't you think,” I said a trifle timidly, “that we had better tell
+your brother?”
+
+“Oh, if you like,” said Rupert, in a lordly way. “He is quite near, as
+I promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall we take a cab?
+Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him.”
+
+Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted
+look. After a little looking about we discovered Basil Grant with his
+great head and his great white hat blocking the ticket-office window. I
+thought at first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an
+astonishingly long time about it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing
+religion with the booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head
+through the hole in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was
+some time before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental
+fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some of the
+official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get
+him to understand that we had made an astounding discovery. When he
+did listen, he listened attentively, walking between us up and down
+the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a rather feverish duet of the
+great house in South Kensington, of the equivocal milkman, of the lady
+imprisoned in the basement, and the man staring from the porch. At
+length he said:
+
+“If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
+careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice on
+the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would
+look worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman
+who looked at you looked thoroughly, and will wear, so to speak,
+your portraits next to his heart. If you want to find out if there
+is anything in this without a police raid I fancy you had better wait
+outside. I'll go in and see them.”
+
+His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the
+house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor of
+twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it was.
+
+“Do you think it's safe, Basil,” said his brother, pausing, a little
+pale, under the lamp, “to go into that place alone? Of course we
+shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do
+something--something sudden--or odd. I can't feel it's safe.”
+
+“I know of nothing that is safe,” said Basil composedly, “except,
+possibly--death,” and he went up the steps and rang at the bell. When
+the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of
+gaslight in the gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying
+our friend inside, we could not repress a shudder. It had been like
+the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A
+freshening night breeze began to blow up the street, and we turned up
+the collars of our coats. At the end of twenty minutes, in which we
+had scarcely moved or spoken, we were as cold as icebergs, but more, I
+think, from apprehension than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an
+abrupt movement towards the house.
+
+“I can't stand this,” he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into
+the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the black house
+front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming
+out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you
+could have heard every syllable across the street. Another voice, or,
+possibly, two voices, were laughing and talking back at him from within.
+
+“No, no, no,” Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility.
+“That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of all. It's the
+soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When
+you see a cosmic force you don't like, trick it, my boy. But I must
+really be off.”
+
+“Come and pitch into us again,” came the laughing voice from out of the
+house. “We still have some bones unbroken.”
+
+“Thanks very much, I will--good night,” shouted Grant, who had by this
+time reached the street.
+
+“Good night,” came the friendly call in reply, before the door closed.
+
+“Basil,” said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, “what are we to do?”
+
+The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.
+
+“What is to be done, Basil?” I repeated in uncontrollable excitement.
+
+“I'm not sure,” said Basil doubtfully. “What do you say to getting some
+dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get
+those fellows to come, but they couldn't.”
+
+We stared blankly.
+
+“Go to the Court Theatre?” repeated Rupert. “What would be the good of
+that?”
+
+“Good? What do you mean?” answered Basil, staring also. “Have you turned
+Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of course.”
+
+“But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!” cried
+Rupert. “What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I go
+for the police?”
+
+Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.
+
+“Oh, that,” he said. “I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some
+mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm sorry
+those fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of these green
+omnibuses? There is a restaurant in Sloane Square.”
+
+“I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us,” I said irritably.
+“How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a mere private
+affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be
+private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's drawing-room, would
+you think it bad taste to talk about it just as if it was a confounded
+dado or an infernal etching?”
+
+Basil laughed heartily.
+
+“That's very forcible,” he said. “As a matter of fact, though, I know
+it's all right in this case. And there comes the green omnibus.”
+
+“How do you know it's all right in this ease?” persisted his brother
+angrily.
+
+“My dear chap, the thing's obvious,” answered Basil, holding a return
+ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket.
+“Those two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They're not
+the kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a
+paper before the omnibus comes.”
+
+“Oh, curse the paper!” cried Rupert, in a fury. “Do you mean to tell
+me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch
+darkness in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with
+the keepers of it and thought them rather good men?”
+
+“Good men do commit crimes sometimes,” said Basil, taking the ticket
+out of his mouth. “But this kind of good man doesn't commit that kind of
+crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?”
+
+The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the
+dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an
+instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it
+and been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.
+
+“Basil,” I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, “I simply won't
+leave this street and this house.”
+
+“Nor will I,” said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers.
+“There's some black work going on there. If I left it I should never
+sleep again.”
+
+Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.
+
+“Of course if you feel like that,” he said, “we'll investigate further.
+You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two young Oxford
+fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this
+pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution and all that.”
+
+“I think,” said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, “that we shall
+enlighten you further about their ethics.”
+
+“And may I ask,” said Basil gloomily, “what it is that you propose to
+do?”
+
+“I propose, first of all,” said Rupert, “to get into this house;
+secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to
+knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house.”
+
+Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an
+instant with one of his sudden laughs.
+
+“Poor little boys,” he said. “But it almost serves them right for
+holding such silly views, after all,” and he quaked again with amusement
+“there's something confoundedly Darwinian about it.”
+
+“I suppose you mean to help us?” said Rupert.
+
+“Oh, yes, I'll be in it,” answered Basil, “if it's only to prevent your
+doing the poor chaps any harm.”
+
+He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking
+indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door
+opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.
+
+“So sorry to haunt you like this,” he said. “I met two friends outside
+who very much want to know you. May I bring them in?”
+
+“Delighted, of course,” said a young voice, the unmistakable voice
+of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the
+decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was
+a short, but shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a
+square, snub-nosed face. He wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some
+incredible college purple.
+
+“This way,” he said; “mind the steps by the staircase. This house is
+more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish
+exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really.”
+
+“That,” said Rupert, with a savage smile, “I can quite believe.”
+
+We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young
+inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines
+and books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who
+stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly,
+with dead brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket. He was that
+particular type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and
+clumsy, and yet who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.
+
+“Any more arguments?” he said, when introductions had been effected. “I
+must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science
+such as we. I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet.”
+
+“Bosh,” answered Grant. “I never said a word against eminent men of
+science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes
+itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new
+religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall
+of man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't
+understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they
+think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion,
+they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The
+Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that,
+instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk
+unscientifically about science.”
+
+“That is all very well,” said the big young man, whose name appeared
+to be Burrows. “Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or
+the violin, can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the
+rudiments may be of public use. Greenwood here,” indicating the little
+man in the blazer, “doesn't know one note of music from another. Still,
+he knows something. He knows enough to take off his hat when they play
+'God Save the King'. He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play
+'Oh, Dem Golden Slippers'. Just in the same way science--”
+
+Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
+uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.
+Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his
+throat, and bent the giant backwards.
+
+“Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne,” he called out, and before I
+knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple
+blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but
+I was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of
+his feet from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and
+then we fell with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.
+
+My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's
+voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the
+beginning.
+
+“... wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and
+I need not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old friends
+against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying
+you up in this antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can
+reasonably be while...”
+
+I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
+garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty hands.
+Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows;
+how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by
+Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave went over his whole frame. An
+instant after his head plunged forward like a bull's, and Rupert Grant
+was slung head over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in
+front of him. Simultaneously the bull's head butted Basil in the chest,
+bringing him also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a
+Berserker roar, leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the
+room, smashing the waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang
+furiously to his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it
+now.
+
+Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
+through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and
+before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments,
+could even lift his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room.
+Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were now outnumbered.
+Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me
+back into the corner upon the wreck of the paper basket. The other two
+flew at Basil, and pinned him against the wall. Rupert lifted himself on
+his elbow, but he was still dazed.
+
+In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil
+come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.
+
+“Now this,” he said, “is what I call enjoying oneself.”
+
+I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase,
+from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To my astonishment
+his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child
+heated by a favourite game.
+
+I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of
+me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to him. He turned
+quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The
+latter's head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship,
+as his enemies pressed him down. He flung up one hand just as I thought
+him falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I
+afterwards discovered, of St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood
+bounded across the room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous
+tome bodily out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the
+air, so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over
+like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness broke, and
+he sank, his enemies closing over him.
+
+Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he
+could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each
+other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert
+certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor
+was a sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense
+waste-paper basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the
+knees in them, as in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg
+stuck right through a sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it
+ludicrously, like some fantastic trouser frill.
+
+Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
+might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of
+Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in
+it as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad
+back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil,
+somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows' huge fists and those of the
+footman were battering Basil's sunken head like an anvil, but nothing
+could get the giant's ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his
+own head was forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right
+leg of his captor was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and
+fro with a purple face. Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the
+ceiling shook together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to
+fill the floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows
+like battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he
+sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and another
+in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he knew clearly
+that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom
+Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between them they secured him
+easily. The man who had hold of me let go and turned to his rescue, but
+I leaped up like a spring released, and, to my infinite satisfaction,
+knocked the fellow down. The other footman, bleeding at the mouth
+and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the room. My late captor,
+without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the battle was won.
+Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the
+pinioned Mr Burrows.
+
+To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
+perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.
+
+“And now, gentlemen,” he said, “since you have got your own way, perhaps
+you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?”
+
+“This,” said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive,
+“this is what we call the survival of the fittest.”
+
+Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
+phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the
+end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a
+handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he
+sang out quite coolly:
+
+“Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
+antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.”
+
+“All right,” said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured
+way in an armchair. “Don't hurry for us,” he said, glancing round at the
+litter of the room, “we have all the illustrated papers.”
+
+Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even
+more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed
+through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice
+continuing conversationally:
+
+“And now, Mr Burrows,” he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
+“there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument.
+I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the
+floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there
+than the man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however,
+can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were
+saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that
+the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public.”
+
+“Precisely,” said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. “I hold
+that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science
+can be...”
+
+And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I
+noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
+Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings
+with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all
+philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank
+deeper and deeper into the under-world of that mysterious house, which,
+perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was,
+owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human
+secret locked below.
+
+The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
+that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry,
+the servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with
+indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty
+apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a
+bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted
+room.
+
+Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
+abyss:
+
+“Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you
+captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to
+deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are
+free.”
+
+For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
+silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
+easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
+heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
+drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.
+
+“Has anybody got a match?” said Rupert grimly. “I fancy we have come
+pretty near the end of this business.”
+
+I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare,
+yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of
+it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped,
+leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical--an
+iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the
+gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of
+the captive.
+
+At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room
+sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling
+silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair
+of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare
+of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
+background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
+place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
+wood about an hour before.
+
+“Madam,” said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, “permit me
+to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your
+complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and
+we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue.”
+
+The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for
+a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she
+said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
+
+“Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had
+rescued me?”
+
+“Yes, madam,” said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. “We have very
+satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled
+affairs with them very satisfactorily.”
+
+The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
+
+“What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?” she cried.
+
+“We persuaded them, my dear madam,” said Rupert, laughing, “by knocking
+them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?”
+
+To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat
+by the window.
+
+“Do I understand,” she said, with the air of a person about to begin
+knitting, “that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?”
+
+“We have,” said Rupert proudly; “we have resisted their oppression and
+conquered it.”
+
+“Oh, thanks,” answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
+
+A considerable pause followed.
+
+“The road is quite clear for you, madam,” said Rupert pleasantly.
+
+The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us
+for an instant.
+
+“But what about Greenwood and Burrows?” she said. “What did I understand
+you to say had become of them?”
+
+“They are lying on the floor upstairs,” said Rupert, chuckling. “Tied
+hand and foot.”
+
+“Well, that settles it,” said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang
+into her seat again, “I must stop where I am.”
+
+Rupert looked bewildered.
+
+“Stop where you are?” he said. “Why should you stop any longer where you
+are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?”
+
+“The question rather is,” said the old lady, with composure, “what power
+can force me to go anywhere else?”
+
+We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.
+
+At last I said, “Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you
+here?”
+
+“I suppose you don't intend to tie me up,” she said, “and carry me off?
+I certainly shall not go otherwise.”
+
+“But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, “we
+heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”
+
+“Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive
+grimly. “I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to
+myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”
+
+“Some sense of honour?” repeated Rupert, and the last light of
+intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with
+rolling eyes.
+
+He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once
+more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. “Can we do nothing for
+you, madam?” I said forlornly.
+
+“Why,” said the lady, “if you are particularly anxious to do me a little
+favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.”
+
+Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his
+vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the
+sitting-room and scene of battle.
+
+“Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,” Mr Burrows was saying,
+lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; “but we must consider
+the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality...”
+
+“Basil,” cried Rupert, gasping, “she won't come out.”
+
+“Who won't come out?” asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted
+in an argument.
+
+“The lady downstairs,” replied Rupert. “The lady who was locked up. She
+won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these
+fellows loose.”
+
+“And a jolly sensible suggestion,” cried Basil, and with a bound he was
+on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds
+with hands and teeth.
+
+“A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood.”
+
+In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the
+purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as
+particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other
+hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.
+
+“Well,” said Basil, in his cheeriest way, “I think we must be getting
+away. We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to
+stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we've made ourselves at
+home. Good night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert.”
+
+“Basil,” said Rupert desperately, “for God's sake come and see what you
+can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the discomfort out of my
+mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these
+gentlemen won't mind perhaps...”
+
+“No, no,” cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. “No,
+no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make a tour of
+the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you.”
+
+This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others
+which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil
+Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to
+have gone mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the
+end of the day and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the
+sky after rain, and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned
+upon me. But this day's work was destined to end in confusion worse
+confounded. Before we left that house, ten minutes afterwards, one
+half-witted touch was added which rolled all our minds in cloud. If
+Rupert's head had suddenly fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun
+to sprout out of Greenwood's shoulders, we could scarcely have been more
+suddenly stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We had to go
+to bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it and
+let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As will be seen, it
+was not until months afterwards that by another accident and in another
+way it was explained. For the present I only state what happened.
+
+When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading,
+the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison
+again closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as
+pitch. The old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she
+seemed to have a weird preference for sitting in the dark.
+
+Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady
+turned her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong
+gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up
+and swept a sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked
+quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this
+subservience had been offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in
+this subservience, and desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they
+received it. To my surprise they did not seem to have seen it at all:
+Burrows was paring his nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the
+back of the group and had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing
+fact became apparent. It was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the
+group, the golden gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His
+face wore an expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of
+a very grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It
+was he who had acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was he, beyond
+any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been directed.
+
+“So I hear,” he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, “I hear,
+madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without
+success.”
+
+“No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you,” answered the lady
+with a high colour. “But you have not found me guilty of treachery.”
+
+“I willingly attest it, madam,” replied Basil, in the same level tones,
+“and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of
+loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large
+discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of
+these gentlemen. But you know that you can safely leave it at mine.”
+
+The captive made another reverence. “I have never complained of
+your injustice,” she said. “I need scarcely say what I think of your
+generosity.”
+
+And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room,
+Basil holding the door open for her.
+
+He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. “This will be a
+relief to you,” he said.
+
+“Yes, it will,” replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like
+a sphinx.
+
+We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as
+if we had fallen into it from some high tower.
+
+“Basil,” said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, “I always thought you
+were my brother. But are you a man? I mean--are you only a man?”
+
+“At present,” replied Basil, “my mere humanity is proved by one of the
+most unmistakable symbols--hunger. We are too late for the theatre in
+Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes
+the green omnibus!” and he had leaped on it before we could speak.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my
+room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having
+jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the
+latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less
+a thing than the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and
+headquarters of the source of all our joys and sorrows--the Club of
+Queer Trades. I should expand this story for ever if I explained how
+ultimately we ran this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a
+hundred interesting things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of
+a cabman, the fighting of roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the
+finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the
+finding of the subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer
+Trades.
+
+I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger
+one than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and
+seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and
+hospitable dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces
+that I knew. There was Mr Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated
+between the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
+Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
+Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented
+the Dancing Language.
+
+As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their
+chairs, and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat
+gaped at us like a missing tooth.
+
+“The president's not here,” said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to
+Professor Chadd.
+
+“N-no,” said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness. “I
+can't imagine where he is.”
+
+“Good heavens,” said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, “I really feel a little
+nervous. I'll go and see.” And he ran out of the room.
+
+An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.
+
+“He's there, gentlemen--he's there all right--he's coming in now,”
+ he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the
+beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who
+was the first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought
+indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of madmen: what fantastic
+was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an
+expectation?
+
+Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled
+and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and
+in evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.
+
+How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person
+particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But
+on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses.
+Hors-d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort
+of ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was
+over. The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon
+being made of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was
+made of the moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and
+eating and drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he
+was there, the king of these capering idiots.
+
+At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the
+time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his
+feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.
+
+“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is a custom in this society that the
+president for the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast
+of sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of
+his trade. We then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It
+is my business, as the senior member, to open by stating my claim to
+membership of this club. Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my
+best in that capacity to do justice and to administer the law. But it
+gradually dawned on me that in my work, as it was, I was not touching
+even the fringe of justice. I was seated in the seat of the mighty, I
+was robed in scarlet and ermine; nevertheless, I held a small and lowly
+and futile post. I had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and
+my red and gold was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me
+taut and passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend
+to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the
+time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have
+been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of
+explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this
+grew on me, there grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous
+frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper or an oath, seemed
+more connected with life than the words I had to say. Then came the time
+when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and
+melted from public life.”
+
+Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I
+who were listening with intensity to this statement.
+
+“Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself
+privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral differences.
+Before very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly
+secret) had spread over the whole of society. People were tried before
+me not for the practical trifles for which nobody cares, such as
+committing a murder, or keeping a dog without a licence. My criminals
+were tried for the faults which really make social life impossible. They
+were tried before me for selfishness, or for an impossible vanity, or
+for scandalmongering, or for stinginess to guests or dependents. Of
+course these courts had no sort of real coercive powers. The fulfilment
+of their punishments rested entirely on the honour of the ladies and
+gentlemen involved, including the honour of the culprits. But you would
+be amazed to know how completely our orders were always obeyed. Only
+lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South Kensington
+whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means of
+breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely refused
+to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had been
+inopportune enough to rescue her.”
+
+Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for
+the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the explanation of
+the old lady's strange discontent and her still stranger content with
+her lot. She was one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court.
+She was one of the clients of his Queer Trade.
+
+We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health
+of Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of everything
+having been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the
+presence of God. We dimly heard Basil say:
+
+“Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance Agency.”
+
+And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had made
+long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it had begun, like a
+true cycle.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1696-0.txt or 1696-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/9/1696/
+
+Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/1696-0.zip b/1696-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf556c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1696-0.zip
diff --git a/1696-h.zip b/1696-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..67b868c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1696-h.zip
diff --git a/1696-h/1696-h.htm b/1696-h/1696-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..90782fe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1696-h/1696-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,6544 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Club of Queer Trades
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: November 17, 2008 [EBook #1696]
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by G. K. Chesterton
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter 1. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter 2. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter 3. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter 4. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter 5. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter 6. &nbsp;&nbsp;</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something to
+      do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America.
+      There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising space by
+      piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos
+      and complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or
+      happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find
+      the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first
+      glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing
+      attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only
+      looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency
+      or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the
+      twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream.
+      If the Thugs set up a Strangers' Assassination Company in one of the great
+      buildings in Norfolk Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to
+      answer inquiries, no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades
+      reigns in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of
+      fossils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is
+      soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the
+      absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must
+      have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an
+      entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in
+      the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or
+      variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not
+      admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's
+      furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their
+      trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock
+      Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to
+      the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith
+      affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be
+      a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus
+      the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days
+      collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in
+      them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what
+      Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or
+      cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to
+      realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at
+      the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should
+      feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have
+      come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not
+      altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies
+      as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast
+      and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I
+      collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of
+      some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the
+      doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but
+      darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the
+      Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully
+      misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of
+      Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of
+      course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations, at any rate,
+      shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said,
+      was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner
+      or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis
+      call me facetiously 'The King of Clubs'. They also call me 'The Cherub',
+      in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I have presented in my
+      declining years. I only hope the spirits in the better world have as good
+      dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one
+      very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it
+      was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a
+      star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
+      unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
+      would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
+      like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
+      might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt
+      the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
+      sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of
+      Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast
+      to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour&mdash;the
+      whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic
+      relics, appeared curiously keen and modern&mdash;a powerful, legal face.
+      And no one but I knew who he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene
+      that occurred in&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, when one of the most acute and forcible of the
+      English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that
+      occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all.
+      For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something
+      curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the
+      law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as a
+      K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the people
+      concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken
+      one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man who
+      had attempted a crime of passion: &ldquo;I sentence you to three years
+      imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given conviction, that
+      what you require is three months at the seaside.&rdquo; He accused criminals
+      from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal crimes, but of things
+      that had never been heard of in a court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack
+      of humour, and morbidity deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in
+      that celebrated diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that
+      brilliant patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to
+      give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the household
+      had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the Premier again to
+      step forward, which he did with quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a
+      sudden, grating voice: &ldquo;Get a new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog.
+      Get a new soul.&rdquo; All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was
+      premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually
+      deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent
+      and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable
+      defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the advocates
+      were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the
+      time came for the great judge to give a summing-up; and one of his
+      celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly
+      looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he
+      looked sad and lowering at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments,
+      and then burst into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as
+      follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
+      tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that
+      gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he
+      was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the
+      great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck
+      his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even
+      unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily,
+      when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a
+      huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry to bother you, Basil,&rdquo; he gasped. &ldquo;I took a liberty&mdash;made an
+      appointment here with a man&mdash;a client&mdash;in five minutes&mdash;I
+      beg your pardon, sir,&rdquo; and he gave me a bow of apology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil smiled at me. &ldquo;You didn't know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I had a practical
+      brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to
+      be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at
+      everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist,
+      an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a&mdash;what are you now,
+      Rupert?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am and have been for some time,&rdquo; said Rupert, with some dignity, &ldquo;a
+      private detective, and there's my client.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being given,
+      the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked swiftly
+      into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and said, &ldquo;Good
+      evening, gentlemen,&rdquo; with a stress on the last syllable that somehow
+      marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social. He had a
+      large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black moustache,
+      which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by his sad
+      sea-blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil immediately said to me, &ldquo;Let us come into the next room, Gully,&rdquo; and
+      was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major
+      Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten
+      altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
+      remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a
+      quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do
+      not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he was
+      anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who recovered
+      British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes of an old
+      maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was
+      precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm
+      he had, which was of the nature of a religion&mdash;the cultivation of
+      pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered
+      like a child's at a new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when
+      the troops were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Major,&rdquo; said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
+      himself into a chair, &ldquo;what is the matter with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover,&rdquo; said the Major, with
+      righteous indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
+      shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me. Something.
+      Preposterous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly sleepy
+      assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's fragmentary, but
+      excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the reader to what we
+      endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major Brown in my own words.
+      But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a
+      trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder
+      and rounder as we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the
+      world, from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in
+      his chair and talking like a telegram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
+      enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay, it
+      was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's
+      house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The
+      thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in the
+      little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad
+      water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his
+      little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in
+      heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and had,
+      perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of
+      those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather
+      than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw life like
+      a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would not have
+      believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that within a few
+      yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a whirlpool of
+      incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or dreamed of in the
+      horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
+      faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
+      from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
+      along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden
+      walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured
+      appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a
+      theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of
+      us, it was not altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel
+      footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a
+      religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with
+      fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him
+      a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid
+      specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite pansies
+      predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and then into
+      bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors and other
+      mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of anguish selected
+      the best roots from the less excellent, praised some, disparaged others,
+      made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth and rarity to a
+      degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The man was just
+      pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to the Major.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll tell you what, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you're interested in them things,
+      you just get on to that wall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the wall!&rdquo; cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
+      quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,&rdquo;
+       hissed the tempter. &ldquo;I'll help you up, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of the
+      Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with an easy
+      leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical assistance,
+      he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The second after,
+      the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a
+      fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up
+      by the most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in
+      all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and
+      there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast pattern of
+      pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it was not their
+      horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for the pansies were
+      arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the sentence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown
+      looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the barrow had
+      suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its incredible
+      inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown did
+      not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military exploits,
+      he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person, but by the
+      same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have
+      thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not
+      easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the garden
+      arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it
+      extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money like water for
+      a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to offer, he admitted
+      the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and waited as he would have
+      done in the presence of a man with six legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and the
+      watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the gravel
+      path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who on earth are you?&rdquo; he gasped, trembling violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Major Brown,&rdquo; said that individual, who was always cool in the hour
+      of action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
+      stammered wildly, &ldquo;Come down&mdash;come down here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At your service,&rdquo; said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass
+      beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run
+      towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide led
+      him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed house,
+      until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man turned
+      with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For heaven's sake,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;don't mention jackals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran
+      downstairs with a clatter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and
+      peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in the
+      world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to see that
+      the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; he said, bowing simply, &ldquo;I am Major Brown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said the lady; but she did not turn her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour
+      of Bedford Park. &ldquo;You have come, I suppose,&rdquo; she said mournfully, &ldquo;to tax
+      me about the hateful title-deeds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come, madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to know what is the matter. To know why my
+      name is written across your garden. Not amicably either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe
+      the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene, the
+      frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was still,
+      and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he studied
+      cried to heaven for his blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I must not turn round,&rdquo; said the lady; &ldquo;every afternoon till the
+      stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to
+      accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is almost six,&rdquo; he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper
+      clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the
+      lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most
+      attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising,
+      the face of an elf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That makes the third year I have waited,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;This is an
+      anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would
+      happen once and for all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From low
+      down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a voice
+      cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door and
+      looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the street,
+      where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon sparks. On
+      returning, he found the lady in green trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the end,&rdquo; she cried, with shaking lips; &ldquo;it may be death for both
+      of us. Whenever&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse proclamation
+      from the dark street, again horribly articulate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
+      frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too long
+      and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational Major was a
+      little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the drawing-room.
+      Scarcely had he done so than the terrific voice came:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown, Major Brown, where did&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time&mdash;in
+      time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries
+      appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man thrust
+      through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again, it had
+      vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. &ldquo;Where's your coal-cellar?&rdquo;
+       he said, and stepped out into the passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him with wild grey eyes. &ldquo;You will not go down,&rdquo; she cried,
+      &ldquo;alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this the way?&rdquo; replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three
+      at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in,
+      feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied, a
+      pair of great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly
+      belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of the
+      head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a brutal
+      image of destiny. But the Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly
+      clear and intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure until he had
+      slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of the
+      invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one of his long,
+      bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a muscle pulled it off
+      the ground and laid the huge living man, with a crash, along the floor. He
+      strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a cat. They rolled over and
+      over. Big as the man was, he had evidently now no desire but to escape; he
+      made sprawls hither and thither to get past the Major to the door, but
+      that tenacious person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the
+      other hand to a beam. At length there came a strain in holding back this
+      human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to rend and part
+      from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and the dim fat figure
+      of the giant vanished out of the cellar, leaving the torn coat in the
+      Major's hand; the only fruit of his adventure and the only clue to the
+      mystery. For when he went up and out at the front door, the lady, the rich
+      hangings, and the whole equipment of the house had disappeared. It had
+      only bare boards and whitewashed walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lady was in the conspiracy, of course,&rdquo; said Rupert, nodding. Major
+      Brown turned brick red. &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
+      nothing. When next he spoke he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,&rdquo; said the
+      Major carefully; &ldquo;there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string, and
+      this letter,&rdquo; and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Mr Plover,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re
+      Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow.
+      The coal-cellar, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut in:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it dated from anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;oh, yes!&rdquo; replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; &ldquo;14 Tanner's
+      Court, North&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me your
+      revolver.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was some
+      time before he answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think you'll need it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps not,&rdquo; said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. &ldquo;One never knows.
+      But going down a dark court to see criminals&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think they are criminals?&rdquo; asked his brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert laughed stoutly. &ldquo;Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a
+      harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless
+      experiment, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?&rdquo; asked Basil, in the same
+      distant and monotonous voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am looking at the letter,&rdquo; said the mad judge calmly; though, as a
+      matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. &ldquo;I don't think it's the sort
+      of letter one criminal would write to another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear boy, you are glorious,&rdquo; cried Rupert, turning round, with
+      laughter in his blue bright eyes. &ldquo;Your methods amaze me. Why, there is
+      the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You might
+      as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of thing that
+      was likely to be set up in Trafalgar Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not
+      otherwise move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's rather good,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but, of course, logic like that's not what
+      is really wanted. It's a question of spiritual atmosphere. It's not a
+      criminal letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is. It's a matter of fact,&rdquo; cried the other in an agony of
+      reasonableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Facts,&rdquo; murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
+      animals, &ldquo;how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly&mdash;in fact, I'm
+      off my head&mdash;but I never could believe in that man&mdash;what's his
+      name, in those capital stories?&mdash;Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points
+      to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in
+      all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree.
+      It's only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up&mdash;only the
+      green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have eternity to stretch our legs in,&rdquo; replied the mystic. &ldquo;It can be
+      an infinity of things. I haven't seen any of them&mdash;I've only seen the
+      letter. I look at that, and say it's not criminal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what's the origin of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't the vaguest idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed collecting
+      his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through
+      silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and
+      deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as a
+      ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and saw
+      it was a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was Lord
+      Kitchener. What would you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused a moment, and went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation of
+      putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would not
+      think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of ordinary
+      personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that he inherited a
+      dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a
+      seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if he refused the
+      ordeal. With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet&mdash;but not with
+      Kitchener. I should know all that, because in my public days I knew him
+      quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals quite well.
+      It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres.&rdquo; And he closed his
+      eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and
+      pity. The former said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think&mdash;until your
+      spiritual mystery turns up&mdash;that a man who sends a note recommending
+      a crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at least
+      tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral tastes.
+      Can I have that revolver?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Basil, getting up. &ldquo;But I am coming with you.&rdquo; And he
+      flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the
+      corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You!&rdquo; said Rupert, with some surprise, &ldquo;you scarcely ever leave your hole
+      to look at anything on the face of the earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I scarcely ever,&rdquo; he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance,
+      &ldquo;hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at
+      once, without going to see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he led the way out into the purple night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
+      Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet
+      Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major
+      Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop and
+      flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike
+      delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest
+      among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and
+      poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly
+      to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight at
+      danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we go in now?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not get police?&rdquo; asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the
+      street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not sure,&rdquo; answered Rupert, knitting his brows. &ldquo;Of course, it's
+      quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of us, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shouldn't get the police,&rdquo; said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert glanced
+      at him and stared hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;you're trembling. What's the matter&mdash;are you
+      afraid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cold, perhaps,&rdquo; said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he
+      was shaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're laughing,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I know that confounded, silent, shaky laugh
+      of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all three
+      of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I shouldn't call the police,&rdquo; said Basil. &ldquo;We four heroes are quite
+      equal to a host,&rdquo; and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the rest
+      of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned abruptly,
+      the revolver glittering in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand close,&rdquo; he said in the voice of a commander. &ldquo;The scoundrel may be
+      attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and rush
+      in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the
+      old judge and his convulsion of merriment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
+      suddenly over his shoulder, &ldquo;when I say 'Four', follow me with a rush. If
+      I say 'Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say 'Stop',
+      stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If they attack us I
+      shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your sword-stick ready. Now&mdash;one,
+      two, three, four!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the room
+      like an invasion, only to stop dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared, at
+      the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful glance, we
+      saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and drawers of
+      bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed moustache, and
+      the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked up as we came to
+      a standstill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you knock?&rdquo; he asked pleasantly. &ldquo;I am sorry if I did not hear. What
+      can I do for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
+      himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is your name P. G. Northover?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is my name,&rdquo; replied the other, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his
+      face, &ldquo;that this letter was written by you.&rdquo; And with a loud clap he
+      struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man called
+      Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; said the Major, breathing hard, &ldquo;what about that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about it, precisely,&rdquo; said the man with the moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Major Brown,&rdquo; said that gentleman sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Northover bowed. &ldquo;Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say!&rdquo; cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; &ldquo;why, I want this
+      confounded thing settled. I want&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly, sir,&rdquo; said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of
+      the eyebrows. &ldquo;Will you take a chair for a moment.&rdquo; And he pressed an
+      electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room beyond.
+      The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but stood
+      chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy, young
+      man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Hopson,&rdquo; said Northover, &ldquo;this is Major Brown. Will you please finish
+      that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will excuse me, gentlemen,&rdquo; said the egregious Northover, with his
+      radiant smile, &ldquo;if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have
+      some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday
+      tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we? Ha! ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence ensued;
+      a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G. Northover; a raging
+      silence on the part of everybody else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled
+      with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the
+      handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity, placed
+      a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few
+      moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him. He took
+      up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered something,
+      muttering&mdash;&ldquo;Careless.&rdquo; Then he read it again with the same
+      impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown,
+      whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you will find that all right, Major,&rdquo; he said briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear
+      later, but he found it like this:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Major Brown to P. G. Northover.                                    £ s. d.
+   January 1, to account rendered                                    5  6 0
+   May 9, to potting and embedding of 200 pansies                    2  0 0
+   To cost of trolley with flowers                                   0 15 0
+   To hiring of man with trolley                                     0  5 0
+   To hire of house and garden for one day                           1  0 0
+   To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3  0 0
+   To salary of Miss Jameson                                         1  0 0
+   To salary of Mr Plover                                            1  0 0
+                                                                 &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+                                                             Total £14  6 0
+  A Remittance will oblige.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What,&rdquo; said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly
+      rising out of his head, &ldquo;What in heaven's name is this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement.
+      &ldquo;It's your account, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My account!&rdquo; The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. &ldquo;My
+      account! And what have I got to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Northover, laughing outright, &ldquo;naturally I prefer you to pay
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words
+      came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into
+      the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on
+      the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the
+      united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the
+      empty floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me go, you scamps,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Let me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand still,&rdquo; cried Rupert authoritatively. &ldquo;Major Brown's action is
+      excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A customer has a perfect right,&rdquo; said Northover hotly, &ldquo;to question an
+      alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?&rdquo;
+       shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain or
+      danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and
+      exasperating mystery. &ldquo;Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent
+      tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mad,&rdquo; said Northover, gazing blankly round; &ldquo;all of them mad. I didn't
+      know they travelled in quartettes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enough of this prevarication,&rdquo; said Rupert; &ldquo;your crimes are discovered.
+      A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though only a private
+      detective myself, I will take the responsibility of telling you that
+      anything you say&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mad,&rdquo; repeated Northover, with a weary air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the
+      strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;may I ask you a question?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You?&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;certainly, Mr Grant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you tell me,&rdquo; said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow, as
+      he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, &ldquo;can you tell me
+      what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and futile
+      irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something&mdash;a name with a hyphen&mdash;Gurney-Brown;
+      that was it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when did the house change hands?&rdquo; said Basil, looking up sharply. His
+      strange eyes were burning brilliantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came in last month,&rdquo; said the Major.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great
+      office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! it's too perfect&mdash;it's too exquisite,&rdquo; he gasped, beating the
+      arms with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing
+      voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like
+      weathercocks in a whirlwind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound it, Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert, stamping. &ldquo;If you don't want me to go
+      mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Northover rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Permit me, sir, to explain,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And, first of all, permit me to
+      apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable
+      blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you
+      will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and
+      dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand the
+      loss.&rdquo; And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the
+      waste-paper basket and bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. &ldquo;But I don't even
+      begin to understand,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;What bill? what blunder? what loss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and
+      with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration, there
+      were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,
+      especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn
+      intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know where you are, Major?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows I don't,&rdquo; said the warrior, with fervour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are standing,&rdquo; replied Northover, &ldquo;in the office of the Adventure and
+      Romance Agency, Limited.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what's that?&rdquo; blankly inquired Brown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark
+      eyes on the other's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon
+      some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen&mdash;something,
+      in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread;
+      something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved;
+      something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving
+      free.' Did you ever feel that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not,&rdquo; said the Major shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I must explain with more elaboration,&rdquo; said Mr Northover, with a
+      sigh. &ldquo;The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great
+      modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear
+      of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us
+      and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for a
+      varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance
+      Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround
+      him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door,
+      an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his
+      life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a
+      mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of
+      incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of
+      the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in
+      the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I
+      consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did not
+      see the end of it. I need scarcely explain further the monstrous mistake.
+      Your predecessor in your present house, Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber
+      to our agency, and our foolish clerks, ignoring alike the dignity of the
+      hyphen and the glory of military rank, positively imagined that Major
+      Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the same person. Thus you were suddenly
+      hurled into the middle of another man's story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How on earth does the thing work?&rdquo; asked Rupert Grant, with bright and
+      fascinated eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We believe that we are doing a noble work,&rdquo; said Northover warmly. &ldquo;It
+      has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is
+      more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic
+      existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he
+      reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a
+      book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to
+      slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but
+      we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall
+      to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from
+      pursuers&mdash;all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse
+      of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one
+      great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his
+      childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes,
+      and at the same instant dance and dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery
+      had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased
+      speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good
+      humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course; awfully dense, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No doubt at all, the scheme
+      excellent. But I don't think&mdash;&rdquo; He paused a moment, and looked
+      dreamily out of the window. &ldquo;I don't think you will find me in it.
+      Somehow, when one's seen&mdash;seen the thing itself, you know&mdash;blood
+      and men screaming, one feels about having a little house and a little
+      hobby; in the Bible, you know, 'There remaineth a rest'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire, at
+      any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown's view of the matter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should be obliged for your card, sir,&rdquo; said the Major, in his abrupt
+      but courteous voice. &ldquo;Pay for chair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It ran, &ldquo;P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency, 14
+      Tanner's Court, Fleet Street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth is 'C.Q.T.'?&rdquo; asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major's
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you know?&rdquo; returned Northover. &ldquo;Haven't you ever heard of the Club
+      of Queer Trades?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't heard of,&rdquo;
+       said the little Major reflectively. &ldquo;What's this one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people
+      who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one of
+      the earliest members.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You deserve to be,&rdquo; said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a
+      smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer
+      smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. &ldquo;A fine chap, that
+      Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance of being
+      a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all people
+      getting into the nets of one of Grigsby's tales,&rdquo; and he laughed out aloud
+      in the silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An
+      owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and
+      somewhat absurd inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! back again, Major?&rdquo; cried Northover in surprise. &ldquo;What can I do for
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's horribly absurd,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Something must have got started in me
+      that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate
+      desire to know the end of it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The end of it all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Major. &ldquo;'Jackals', and the title-deeds, and 'Death to
+      Major Brown'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am terribly sorry, Major,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;but what you ask is impossible. I
+      don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules of the
+      agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an outsider; I
+      am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you
+      understand&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no one,&rdquo; said Brown, &ldquo;who understands discipline better than I
+      do. Thank you very much. Good night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the little man withdrew for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
+      garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance
+      Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in her
+      languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly that she
+      had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades provided for
+      them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who went down into a
+      coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a murderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa, and
+      the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged&mdash;except,
+      perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine unselfishness
+      as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his
+      wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue
+      eyes, that he is wondering what were the title-deeds, and why he was not
+      allowed to mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is
+      religious, and believes that he will realize the rest of those purple
+      adventures in a better world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect
+      place for talking on earth&mdash;the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar.
+      To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying
+      hill is a fairy tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us
+      a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
+      infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor
+      parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented
+      by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow
+      streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a
+      narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do
+      not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was
+      civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its
+      morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going through
+      a criminal slum, &ldquo;I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals.&rdquo; But here
+      there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums. Here
+      there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway engineers and
+      philanthropists&mdash;two dingy classes of men united by their common
+      contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were the
+      churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here, above
+      all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines and
+      hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But though one never
+      knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing we knew
+      we should not see&mdash;anything really great, central, of the first
+      class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable
+      our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked entries,
+      to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the
+      Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that
+      at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may
+      strike down the street like a thunderbolt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must always remember also,&rdquo; said Grant to me, in his heavy
+      abstracted way, when I had urged this view, &ldquo;that the very vileness of the
+      life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the
+      human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something
+      worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization. But
+      yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good
+      people. And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than
+      sailing round the world. Besides&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No answer came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; I said, looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he was
+      paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of the tram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; I asked, peering over also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very odd,&rdquo; said Grant at last, grimly, &ldquo;that I should have been
+      caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these
+      people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo; I asked, leaning over further, &ldquo;where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I was right enough,&rdquo; he went on, in that strange continuous and
+      sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, &ldquo;I was
+      right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes; they
+      are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two; they may
+      beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the same; they
+      are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings and haloes&mdash;at
+      any rate compared to that man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which man?&rdquo; I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which
+      Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly
+      passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to
+      attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious
+      consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black
+      top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the
+      decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something
+      as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was
+      curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey
+      and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental;
+      he had two black tufts of moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has he done?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not sure of the details,&rdquo; said Grant, &ldquo;but his besetting sin is a
+      desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has adopted
+      some imposture or other to effect his plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What plan?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;If you know all about him, why don't you tell me
+      why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you've made a mistake in my meaning,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don't know his
+      name. I never saw him before in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never saw him before!&rdquo; I cried, with a kind of anger; &ldquo;then what in
+      heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in
+      England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I meant what I said,&rdquo; said Basil Grant calmly. &ldquo;The moment I saw that
+      man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid innocence.
+      I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being
+      themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in these
+      slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest sense,
+      trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be evil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you never saw him before&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In God's name, look at his face,&rdquo; cried out Basil in a voice that
+      startled the driver. &ldquo;Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal pride
+      which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one
+      of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to
+      insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at his hair. In
+      the name of God and the stars, look at his hat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stirred uncomfortably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, after all,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;this is very fanciful&mdash;perfectly absurd.
+      Look at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the mere facts,&rdquo; he cried out in a kind of despair. &ldquo;The mere facts!
+      Do you really admit&mdash;are you still so sunk in superstitions, so
+      clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you
+      not trust an immediate impression?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, an immediate impression may be,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a little less practical
+      than facts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosh,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;On what else is the whole world run but immediate
+      impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this
+      world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual
+      impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you
+      measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook?
+      Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may save
+      your business&mdash;you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely
+      upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which I
+      pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man
+      walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You always put things well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but, of course, such things cannot
+      immediately be put to the test.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us get off and follow him,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I bet you five pounds it will
+      turn out as I say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked
+      along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him. Then
+      he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down an
+      ill-lit alley. We swung silently after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man of what kind?&rdquo; asked my friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I
+      thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part
+      of the world at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes,&rdquo; said Basil, and said no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like
+      the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the glare of
+      intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The intervals
+      between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the whole city. Our
+      pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts;
+      but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped
+      also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness
+      in front of us was the darkness of his body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a
+      yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on a
+      very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas cut
+      the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the interview
+      was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could be. Our
+      exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At once. Take a cab.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A heavy, deep voice from inside said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the
+      striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just
+      helping us. It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it
+      like midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,&rdquo; I
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Basil humbly. &ldquo;It leads to Berkeley Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and tried
+      to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I wondered and
+      doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right. We were coming
+      to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London&mdash;more dreary, one
+      must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very extraordinary!&rdquo; said Basil Grant, as we turned into Berkeley
+      Square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is extraordinary?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;I thought you said it was quite
+      natural.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wonder,&rdquo; answered Basil, &ldquo;at his walking through nasty streets;
+      I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do wonder at his
+      going to the house of a very good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What very good man?&rdquo; I asked with exasperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The operation of time is a singular one,&rdquo; he said with his imperturbable
+      irrelevancy. &ldquo;It is not a true statement of the case to say that I have
+      forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man. I remember it all
+      vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But fifteen years ago I
+      knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long
+      sight better than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's
+      house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is old Beaumont?&rdquo; I asked irritably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood&mdash;don't you know
+      his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more
+      work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't know what; anyhow,
+      he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight
+      disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that real
+      disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and
+      novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you
+      went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you,
+      so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap
+      alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a
+      matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or
+      the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession of literary
+      and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is romantic; men
+      who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on their feet only
+      to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands for fear of
+      tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons are generally
+      fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself, good men. I am
+      really surprised to see a criminal enter there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My good fellow,&rdquo; I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, &ldquo;the
+      truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language,
+      you have the 'slight disadvantage' of being off your head. You see a total
+      stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about
+      his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an honest
+      man's door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come
+      home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet with the
+      distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I had outlived vanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want now?&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he cried out, &ldquo;what a girl wants when she wears her new frock; I
+      want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a monitor&mdash;I
+      want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right about that
+      man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say it cannot be
+      tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend Beaumont. He is
+      a delightful man to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you really mean&mdash;?&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will apologize,&rdquo; he said calmly, &ldquo;for our not being dressed for a
+      call,&rdquo; and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark
+      stone steps and rang at the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving my
+      friend's name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to respect.
+      We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly but that
+      our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again, &ldquo;I have
+      not seen you for years. Have you been&mdash;er&mdash;&rdquo; he said, rather
+      wildly, &ldquo;have you been in the country?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for all that time,&rdquo; answered Basil, smiling. &ldquo;I have long given up my
+      official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a deliberate
+      retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An inopportune moment,&rdquo; cried the ardent gentleman. &ldquo;You come at the most
+      opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not,&rdquo; answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of
+      laughter came from the inner room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Lord Beaumont solemnly, &ldquo;I have Wimpole here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who is Wimpole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; cried the other, &ldquo;you must have been in the country. You must
+      have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is
+      Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to who Shakespeare was,&rdquo; answered my friend placidly, &ldquo;my views go no
+      further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was Mary
+      Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is&mdash;&rdquo; and his speech also was
+      cloven with a roar of laughter from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wimpole!&rdquo; cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. &ldquo;Haven't you heard
+      of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation, I do
+      not say into an art&mdash;for that, perhaps, it always was but into a
+      great art, like the statuary of Michael Angelo&mdash;an art of
+      masterpieces. His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot
+      dead. They are final; they are&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the
+      very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of the
+      inner house into the hall where we were standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, my dear chap,&rdquo; began Lord Beaumont hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it,&rdquo; exploded the large old
+      gentleman. &ldquo;I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like
+      that. I won't be made a guy. I won't&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come,&rdquo; said Beaumont feverishly. &ldquo;Let me introduce you. This is Mr
+      Justice Grant&mdash;that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of
+      Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who has not?&rdquo; asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing
+      him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger, but
+      even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his face
+      and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart though
+      corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent
+      courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show an
+      unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so
+      much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,&rdquo; he said gruffly, &ldquo;to fail
+      in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in
+      your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but
+      that flashy half-caste jackanapes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre air
+      came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly enjoying
+      the intellectual banquet within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Beaumont, turning to Grant, &ldquo;even if you only remember him as a
+      schoolboy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfectly,&rdquo; said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and
+      respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter
+      Cholmondeliegh, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going
+      yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
+      struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of obeisance
+      and a vague utterance of, &ldquo;If Lady Beaumont... a lady, of course,&rdquo; he
+      followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely been deposited
+      there half a minute before another peal of laughter told that he had (in
+      all probability) been scored off again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh,&rdquo; said Beaumont, as he
+      helped us off with our coats. &ldquo;He has not the modern mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the modern mind?&rdquo; asked Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive&mdash;and faces the facts
+      of life seriously.&rdquo; At this moment another roar of laughter came from
+      within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only ask,&rdquo; said Basil, &ldquo;because of the last two friends of yours who
+      had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
+      thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon&mdash;this way, if I
+      remember right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish entertainment,
+      as he trotted after us towards the interior, &ldquo;I can never quite make out
+      which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so
+      reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
+      drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
+      slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon. Two
+      people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the house,
+      Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and with the
+      intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal amusement
+      and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at him
+      with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the
+      window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from
+      the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair
+      suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man&mdash;the
+      unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North
+      London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole,&rdquo; said Muriel Beaumont eagerly, &ldquo;is
+      how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite
+      philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm
+      sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree with Miss Beaumont,&rdquo; said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
+      indignation. &ldquo;If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it
+      difficult to keep my countenance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Difficult to keep your countenance,&rdquo; cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
+      alarm; &ldquo;oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
+      readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never talk tomfooleries,&rdquo; said the other, &ldquo;without first knowing my
+      audience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on
+      the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding the
+      whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very
+      particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house
+      rapturously listening to Wimpole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?&rdquo; asked Grant. &ldquo;It is about
+      business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this
+      strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of side room
+      out of the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drummond,&rdquo; said Basil sharply, &ldquo;there are a great many good people, and a
+      great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of
+      coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are
+      wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has also
+      some common sense. What do you make of Wimpole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face
+      became suddenly as red as his moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a fair judge of him,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; asked Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I hate him like hell,&rdquo; said the other, after a long pause and
+      violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss
+      Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating. Grant said
+      quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But before&mdash;before you came to hate him, what did you really think
+      of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in a terrible difficulty,&rdquo; said the young man, and his voice told
+      us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. &ldquo;If I spoke about him as
+      I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to be
+      able to say that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But
+      again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him, that is my private affair. But I
+      also disapprove of him&mdash;really I do believe I disapprove of him quite
+      apart from my private feelings. When first he came, I admit he was much
+      quieter, but I did not like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then
+      that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this
+      fellow, with his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the way
+      he does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be bad to
+      fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap savagely,
+      unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if you want it,
+      the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate the man because
+      a certain person admires him. But I believe that apart from that I should
+      hate the man because old Sir Walter hates him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the
+      young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless
+      worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct
+      realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I
+      was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could not
+      help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however nobly
+      disguised from himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was
+      perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the name of God, let's get away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected me.
+      I only know that for some reason or other he so affected me that I was,
+      within a few minutes, in the street outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is a beastly but amusing affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is?&rdquo; I asked, baldly enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have
+      just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very night, at which
+      Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very
+      extraordinary about that. The extraordinary thing is that we are not
+      going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it is already six o'clock and I doubt if we could
+      get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the fact that we are
+      not going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you?&rdquo; said Grant. &ldquo;I'll bet you'll see something extraordinary in
+      what we're doing instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at him blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doing instead?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;What are we doing instead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house on
+      a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is only to
+      show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this cigar, wait
+      until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole have left this
+      house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But I do not know which is likely to leave first.
+      Have you any notion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again, Mr
+      Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is a thing to be
+      flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some time to
+      analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will both have to leave within
+      reasonable time, for they will both have to get dressed and come back to
+      dinner here tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house
+      drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened that we
+      really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh came out
+      at the same moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt;
+      then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of them, made Sir
+      Walter smile and say: &ldquo;The night is foggy. Pray take my cab.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with
+      both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had hissed in my
+      ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog&mdash;run.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
+      streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but we are
+      running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at the
+      fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away
+      rejoicing, having just come in contact with the more generous among the
+      rich. Then the two men talked together as men do talk together after
+      giving and receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to
+      forgiveness or a duel&mdash;at least so it seemed as we watched it from
+      ten yards off. Then the two men shook hands heartily, and one went down
+      one fork of the road and one down another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run after that scoundrel,&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;let us catch him now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; I shouted wildly to Grant. &ldquo;That's the wrong turning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He ran on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idiot!&rdquo; I howled. &ldquo;Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has slipped us.
+      He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong... Are you deaf? You're
+      wrong!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think I am,&rdquo; he panted, and ran on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I saw him!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It's the
+      old man... What are you doing? What are we to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep running,&rdquo; said Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet,
+      whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was
+      utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charlie,&rdquo; said Basil hoarsely, &ldquo;can you believe in my common sense for
+      four minutes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I said, panting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at once
+      when I say 'Now'. Now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
+      gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we got him
+      tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and
+      full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him;
+      when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil's
+      arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street side and
+      waited. As I say, I had no notion why.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry to incommode you,&rdquo; said Basil calmly out of the darkness; &ldquo;but
+      I have made an appointment here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An appointment!&rdquo; I said blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged on
+      the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. &ldquo;I have
+      made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow. An old
+      friend. Jasper Drummond his name is&mdash;you may have met him this
+      afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the
+      Beaumonts' dinner is over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness. By
+      the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my mind that the
+      same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the bench of a
+      British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine no
+      other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old country
+      gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the
+      court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white face of
+      Jasper Drummond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said blankly, &ldquo;the thing is incredible. You were right; but
+      what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where dukes and
+      duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him, that
+      extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn't say a funny thing.
+      He didn't say anything at all. What does it mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what it means,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the place,
+      jumped back, as from a mouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; he said weakly, &ldquo;... what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's
+      breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered state,
+      seemed to make some effort to retain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
+      Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As far as he
+      could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or at
+      least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism. The
+      greater part of the document had been torn and obliterated in the
+      struggle, but the termination remained. It ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      C. Says... Keep countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      W. Keep... British Museum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      C. Know whom talk... absurdities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      W. Never talk absurdities without...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of final
+      fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid
+      chant. &ldquo;What is it? It is a great new profession. A great new trade. A
+      trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A new profession!&rdquo; said the young man with the red moustache vaguely; &ldquo;a
+      new trade!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A new trade,&rdquo; repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, &ldquo;a new
+      profession! What a pity it is immoral.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what the deuce is it?&rdquo; cried Drummond and I in a breath of blasphemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said Grant calmly, &ldquo;the great new trade of the Organizer of
+      Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I
+      have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character.
+      He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really at
+      all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and his name is
+      not Cholmondeliegh. He is a swindler, and a swindler of a perfectly
+      delightful and novel kind. He hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead
+      up to other people's repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which
+      you may find on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has
+      arranged for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for
+      him. In short, he allows himself to be scored off for a guinea a night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this fellow Wimpole&mdash;&rdquo; began Drummond with indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This fellow Wimpole,&rdquo; said Basil Grant, smiling, &ldquo;will not be an
+      intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and
+      silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the
+      floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That fellow,&rdquo; cried Drummond furiously, &ldquo;that fellow ought to be in
+      gaol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Basil indulgently; &ldquo;he ought to be in the Club of Queer
+      Trades.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been
+      reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the
+      large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones
+      of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no
+      longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell
+      over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small
+      things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I
+      was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections,
+      was one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when a loud
+      knock came at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me. He
+      and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in the act
+      of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head to come
+      my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a small and
+      confidential affair at the table of a good but unconventional political
+      lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a third guest, a
+      Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was an authority on
+      chimpanzees. As Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never
+      seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual social
+      sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break the ice.
+      The theory, like all my theories, was complete; but as a fact it was not
+      Basil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was handed a visiting card inscribed: &ldquo;Rev. Ellis Shorter&rdquo;, and
+      underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry could
+      not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, &ldquo;Asking the favour of
+      a few moments' conversation on a most urgent matter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of God
+      has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on my
+      dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at my
+      entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He flapped
+      a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black
+      gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he
+      flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired,
+      white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come&mdash;I
+      can only say&mdash;I can only say in my defence, that I come&mdash;upon an
+      important matter. Pray forgive me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I have to say,&rdquo; he said brokenly, &ldquo;is so dreadful&mdash;it is so
+      dreadful&mdash;I have lived a quiet life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in
+      time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's honest air of
+      bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger and
+      more tragic than my own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said gently: &ldquo;Pray go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old, noticed
+      my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so sorry,&rdquo; he said meekly; &ldquo;I wouldn't have come&mdash;but for&mdash;your
+      friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown!&rdquo; I said, with some interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid shawl
+      about. &ldquo;He told me you helped him in a great difficulty&mdash;and my
+      difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. &ldquo;Will it take long, Mr Shorter?&rdquo;
+       I asked. &ldquo;I have to go out to dinner almost at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his
+      moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no right, Mr Swinburne&mdash;I have no right at all,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If
+      you have to go out to dinner, you have of course&mdash;a perfect right&mdash;of
+      course a perfect right. But when you come back&mdash;a man will be dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and
+      drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and a
+      captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this dear,
+      doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you have a cigar?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you,&rdquo; he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not
+      smoking cigars was a social disgrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A glass of wine?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now,&rdquo; he repeated with that
+      hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often try
+      to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all night
+      drinking rum-punch. &ldquo;Not just now, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing else I can get for you?&rdquo; I said, feeling genuinely sorry for the
+      well-mannered old donkey. &ldquo;A cup of tea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he
+      drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these excitements.
+      As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex&rdquo;&mdash;he threw this in with an
+      indescribable airiness of vanity&mdash;&ldquo;I have never known such things
+      happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What things happen?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened himself with sudden dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have never been forcibly
+      dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the
+      character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It may
+      be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never heard of it,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;as among the duties of a clergyman.
+      But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
+      follow you correctly. Dressed up&mdash;as what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As an old woman,&rdquo; said the vicar solemnly, &ldquo;as an old woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make an
+      old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic, and
+      I said respectfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I ask how it occurred?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will begin at the beginning,&rdquo; said Mr Shorter, &ldquo;and I will tell my
+      story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past eleven
+      this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and pay
+      certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the
+      treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded
+      some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the matter
+      of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very
+      earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of
+      several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled (unless
+      my memory misleads me) Eglantine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that
+      can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation. He had,
+      I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the detective
+      stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be kept back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I then proceeded,&rdquo; he went on, with the same maddening conscientiousness
+      of manner, &ldquo;to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course; Mr Robert Carr) who
+      is temporarily assisting our organist, and having consulted with him (on
+      the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I cannot as yet say whether
+      justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ pipes), I finally dropped in
+      upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings are
+      usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss Brett, a
+      newcomer in our village, but very active in church work, had very kindly
+      consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is entirely under my wife's
+      management as a rule, and except for Miss Brett, who, as I say, is very
+      active, I scarcely know any members of it. I had, however, promised to
+      drop in on them, and I did so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss Brett,
+      but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of course, for any
+      person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in these matters of
+      full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and repeat the actual
+      details of a conversation, particularly a conversation which (though
+      inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one
+      which did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was in
+      fact&mdash;er&mdash;mostly about socks. I can, however, remember
+      distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a
+      woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she was
+      introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather was very
+      changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted, I
+      cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with
+      white hair. The only other figure in the group that caught my attention
+      was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners, silver
+      hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic member of the
+      party; and her views on the subject of pinafores, though expressed with a
+      natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong and advanced.
+      Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply in black) it
+      could not be denied that the others looked in some way what you men of the
+      world would call dowdy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did so I
+      heard something which&mdash;I cannot describe it&mdash;something which
+      seemed to&mdash;but I really cannot describe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you hear?&rdquo; I asked, with some impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard,&rdquo; said the vicar solemnly, &ldquo;I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with
+      the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl), the
+      following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the spot, and
+      as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them down on a
+      piece of paper. I believe I have it here.&rdquo; He fumbled in his
+      breast-pocket, bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and
+      programmes of village concerts. &ldquo;I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James,
+      the following words: 'Now's your time, Bill.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely
+      and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about his
+      facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand it.
+      It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should address
+      another maiden lady as 'Bill'. My experience, as I have said, may be
+      incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in exclusively
+      spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But it seemed to me
+      odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand the
+      phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time that
+      the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', were by no means pronounced with that
+      upper-class intonation which, as I have already said, had up to now
+      characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation. In fact, the words, 'Now's your
+      time, Bill', would have been, I fancy, unsuitable if pronounced with that
+      upper-class intonation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
+      surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
+      hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against
+      the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still
+      knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was only
+      an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said genially, 'I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
+      really be going. I have&mdash;er&mdash;' I stopped here, for the words she
+      had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely
+      business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I think,
+      natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have not the
+      least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render them
+      phonetically. But she said,&rdquo; and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly at his
+      papers, &ldquo;she said: 'Chuck it, fat 'ead,' and she added something that
+      sounded like 'It's a kop', or (possibly) 'a kopt'. And then the last cord,
+      either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My
+      esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said:
+      'Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up before you start jawin'.
+      You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days with this way of doin'
+      things, har lar theater.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
+      fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
+      society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
+      dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but now,
+      alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange
+      female freemasonry. I remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was just, in my
+      absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana's
+      nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The moment
+      it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Brett&mdash;or what I had called Miss Brett&mdash;was standing in
+      front of me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
+      Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an
+      attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a
+      shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her
+      cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wo&mdash;no, that is I saw
+      that instead of being a woman she&mdash;he, I mean&mdash;that is, it was a
+      man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to
+      arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed
+      with a higher fever of nervousness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As for Miss Mowbray, she&mdash;he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her
+      arm&mdash;that is she had his arm&mdash;round her neck&mdash;my neck I
+      mean&mdash;and I could not cry out. Miss Brett&mdash;that is, Mr Brett, at
+      least Mr something who was not Miss Brett&mdash;had the revolver pointed
+      at me. The other two ladies&mdash;or er&mdash;gentlemen, were rummaging in
+      some bag in the background. It was all clear at last: they were criminals
+      dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in
+      Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ''Urry up,
+      'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get off.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett&mdash;I mean the man with the revolver&mdash;'why
+      should we show 'im the game?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at the door,
+      whom they called Bill. 'A man wot knows wot 'e's doin' is worth ten wot
+      don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it
+      had been Miss Mowbray's). 'Bring out the picture, 'Arry.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other two
+      women&mdash;I mean men&mdash;were turning over baggage, and asked them for
+      something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room and
+      held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that display,
+      all the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands
+      of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise; but no
+      more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely
+      good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional
+      photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and was relieved
+      against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no
+      snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth
+      was that I had never sat for such a photograph. It was a photograph that I
+      had never had taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good
+      deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the
+      details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,
+      my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never
+      posed so for any photographer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver, with
+      ill-timed facetiousness. 'Parson, prepare to meet your God.' And with this
+      he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that part of
+      the picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair of white
+      whiskers and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait of an old
+      lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand against the
+      woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin is like
+      another. It had required only the whiskers and the collar to make it me in
+      every hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he shot the
+      glass back again. 'Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin' to the lady.
+      Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin' to us, as bein'
+      the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the
+      man who's come to live in these parts, don't you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, 'that's 'is mother.
+      'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he flung his fingers in a
+      general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who was exactly
+      like me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke out
+      Bill from the door. 'Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain't goin' to do you
+      no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as for
+      the old woman's clothes&mdash;why, you'll look lovely in 'em.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man behind
+      me. 'Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this man Hawker tonight.
+      Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne when 'e sees us. Maybe
+      on the other 'and&mdash;'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be dead when we goes away.
+      Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now as you know, 'e shuts 'isself up
+      and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why and we does.
+      The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded
+      funny coincidence,' he said, accenting the penultimate, 'it's a very
+      unusual piece of good luck, but you're 'is mother.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his head in a
+      ruminant manner, 'when I first saw it I said&mdash;old Shorter. Those were
+      my exact words&mdash;old Shorter.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'What do you mean, you wild creatures?' I gasped. 'What am I to do?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver,
+      good-humouredly; 'you've got to put on those clothes,' and he pointed to a
+      poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I had
+      no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a loaded pistol.
+      In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an old woman&mdash;as
+      somebody else's mother, if you please&mdash;and was dragged out of the
+      house to take part in a crime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were
+      closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out towards the
+      lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that ever
+      straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every
+      external, we were six very respectable old ladies of small means, in black
+      dresses and refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really five
+      criminals and a clergyman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as I
+      walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To cry out, so long as
+      we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for the
+      ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the other
+      hand, to attempt to stop strangers and explain the situation was
+      impossible, because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long
+      before I had persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a story,
+      my companions would certainly have got off themselves, and in all
+      probability would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had the
+      misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an
+      inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this, that the
+      Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and keeping
+      pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like step, until at
+      length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing under it. I had made up
+      my mind. Until we reached them we were all equally demure and silent and
+      swift. When we reached them I suddenly flung myself against the railings
+      and roared out: 'Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Rule Britannia! Get your 'air
+      cut. Hoop-la! Boo!' It was a condition of no little novelty for a man in
+      my position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled,
+      drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' he began gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear hoarsely.
+      'Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear the words and see the
+      neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I yelled, and yelled&mdash;I was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains
+      that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our village concerts; I
+      rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the policeman, 'I
+      shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly she is right enough.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of thing;
+      but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I had ever
+      heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'When we get you past,' whispered Bill, 'you'll howl louder; you'll howl
+      louder when we're burning your feet off.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares
+      that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting and
+      horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their
+      poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I
+      cannot think there is anything so heart-breaking in hell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions and
+      the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome the policeman
+      and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one can describe
+      anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched suddenly forward
+      and ran my head into his chest, calling out (if I remember correctly),
+      'Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was at that moment that I remembered most
+      dearly that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back of the
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect
+      imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor friend. We
+      will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but she is quite a
+      lady&mdash;only eccentric.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed character of
+      Miss James, 'she wants looking after.' 'She does,' said the policeman,
+      'but I'll look after her.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. 'She wants her friends. She
+      wants a particular medicine we've got.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, 'no other medicine any
+      good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal shame, the
+      Vicar of Chuntsey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, 'I don't like the
+      eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er 'ead in my
+      stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the looks of you, I've
+      seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong 'uns. Who are you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable
+      dignity. 'Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office
+      who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If you
+      choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend, no
+      doubt you are legally entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have any
+      legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment. Under
+      cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned for an instant on me
+      faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the darkness.
+      When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions on to them,
+      I had seen the telegraphic look flash from face to face saying that only
+      retreat was possible now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute
+      reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not quit the
+      role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the
+      real case, the officer would merely have thought that I was slightly
+      recovered and would have put me in charge of my friends. Now, however, if
+      I liked I might safely undeceive him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
+      doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of the
+      Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but such
+      necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many
+      improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be drunk.
+      Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
+      quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that I
+      was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly and
+      easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four
+      turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure. At
+      the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the
+      street like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
+      dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was
+      gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and
+      blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried
+      them in clean earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair. Both
+      the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on, impressed
+      me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind these things he
+      was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed courage and a
+      sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told his story with
+      many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing
+      realism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like servile
+      energy, &ldquo;and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man Hawker. I
+      cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said was real. But
+      surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for reasons that you
+      perceive. Among other things, they wouldn't believe me. What is to be
+      done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend Basil Grant,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is the best man we can go to. He and I
+      were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
+      back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd
+      plaid shawl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's
+      flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden
+      staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and scrappy
+      interior, the white gleam of Basil's shirt-front and the lustre of his fur
+      coat flung on the wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He was drinking
+      a glass of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come back from the
+      dinner-party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter with
+      the genuine simplicity and respect which he never failed to exhibit in
+      dealing with any human being. When it was over he said simply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy
+      collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening,
+      that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at Mr
+      Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer or
+      his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the old
+      clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more and
+      more from his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite sure, Mr Shorter,&rdquo; he repeated, &ldquo;that you don't know
+      Captain Fraser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him
+      returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his
+      tone when he first entered my presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil sprang smartly to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then our course is clear,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You have not even begun your
+      investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go
+      together to see Captain Fraser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When?&rdquo; asked the clergyman, stammering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really do not think that it is necessary,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again, and
+      put his hands in his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; he said, with emphasis. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;you don't think it necessary;
+      then,&rdquo; and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation,
+      &ldquo;then, Mr Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you
+      without your whiskers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my
+      life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact with
+      an intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that splendour
+      and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived perpetually near
+      the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason. And
+      I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart
+      disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a
+      sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very moment of
+      delivering a judgement for the salvation of a fellow creature, Basil Grant
+      had gone mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your whiskers,&rdquo; he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. &ldquo;Give me your
+      whiskers. And your bald head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, Basil,&rdquo; I implored, &ldquo;you're a little excited. Finish your
+      wine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whiskers,&rdquo; he answered sternly, &ldquo;whiskers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for the
+      door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was the quiet
+      room was turned into something between a pantomime and a pandemonium by
+      those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables were vaulted with a
+      noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery scattered in
+      smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed after the Rev.
+      Ellis Shorter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last
+      half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of
+      Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed
+      him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have
+      expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting would
+      have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old vicar
+      looked like a sort of farcical fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not seem to be
+      so much astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of something
+      like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the
+      unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length Shorter was cornered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he panted, &ldquo;you can't do anything to me. It's
+      quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm. It's only a social
+      fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't blame you, my man,&rdquo; said Basil coolly. &ldquo;But I want your whiskers.
+      And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; said Mr Shorter, laughing, &ldquo;we provide them ourselves. They
+      don't belong to Captain Fraser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the deuce does all this mean?&rdquo; I almost screamed. &ldquo;Are you all in an
+      infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald head belong to Captain
+      Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do with the
+      affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Grant, &ldquo;I didn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?&rdquo; I asked, staring. &ldquo;Why
+      not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, &ldquo;the fact is I was
+      detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your bedroom?&rdquo; I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point
+      when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
+      Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
+      night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner, and
+      by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers
+      and a plaid shawl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, gentlemen,&rdquo; cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. &ldquo;Sit down
+      all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm in it,
+      and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him
+      from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that,
+      eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
+      duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly
+      pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades. These
+      two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking) are
+      Professional Detainers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what on earth's that?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne,&rdquo; began he who had once been the
+      Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
+      indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no longer
+      its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of a young
+      city man. &ldquo;It is really nothing very important. We are paid by our clients
+      to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people whom they want
+      out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser&mdash;&rdquo; and with that
+      he hesitated and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil smiled also. He intervened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted us
+      both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa, and
+      the lady with whom we were all to have dined is&mdash;er&mdash;what is I
+      believe described as 'the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours
+      with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our
+      houses so as to let him have the field to himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And of course,&rdquo; said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, &ldquo;as I had
+      to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady, I had
+      to come with something rather hot and strong&mdash;rather urgent. It
+      wouldn't have done to be tame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I acquit you of tameness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; said the man respectfully, &ldquo;always very grateful for any
+      recommendation, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close
+      red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil's
+      admirable Burgundy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy
+      from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often knocked up against us
+      before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you with
+      hunting stories, when you're burning to be introduced to somebody, he's
+      from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours, just
+      when you wanted to go to the Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The
+      Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one thing I don't understand,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Why you are both
+      vicars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in Essex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That may have been a mistake, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But it was not our fault.
+      It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the
+      highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain you
+      gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who
+      impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain. We
+      are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to satisfy the
+      firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars. Before that we had
+      two years as colonels, the next in our scale. Colonels are four guineas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst
+      like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose from many
+      separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who wore light,
+      loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he was lean
+      and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a degree
+      so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of the
+      unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There are
+      inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial
+      civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that
+      restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant
+      officer in the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in his
+      time, to judge from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but
+      his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that &ldquo;the moon&rdquo; had been not
+      unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is a
+      fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which
+      consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed
+      spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a
+      green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big
+      game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These
+      always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in
+      quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of
+      the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental
+      sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as
+      he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey,
+      though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness,
+      and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety. To find a
+      middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant
+      is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and
+      solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman
+      no good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man
+      admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good
+      man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells;
+      they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange smoke
+      from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which discredit
+      a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If Keith's tales
+      were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at any rate, every
+      opportunity of being a scamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his brother
+      Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was invariably the
+      case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was a clever young
+      fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and cleverness, when sharply
+      combined, so often produce, a somewhat extravagant scepticism. He saw
+      doubt and guilt everywhere, and it was meat and drink to him. I had often
+      got irritated with this boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular
+      occasion I am bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I
+      was astounded at Basil's opposing him, however banteringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I could
+      not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seriously mean, Basil,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that you think that that
+      fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad
+      Mullah and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has one fault,&rdquo; said Basil thoughtfully, &ldquo;or virtue, as you may happen
+      to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style; he is too
+      veracious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,&rdquo; said Rupert contemptuously, &ldquo;be
+      a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all his life
+      in one ancestral manor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he's extremely fond of change of scene,&rdquo; replied Basil
+      dispassionately, &ldquo;and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his
+      chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is
+      that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
+      frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort of
+      things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they are too
+      absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if he were
+      sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far from paradox,&rdquo; said his brother, with something rather like a
+      sneer, &ldquo;you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe
+      that truth is stranger than fiction?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,&rdquo; said Basil placidly.
+      &ldquo;For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial
+      to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than anything
+      I ever heard of,&rdquo; said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. &ldquo;Do you, on your
+      soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe Keith's words,&rdquo; answered the other. &ldquo;He is an honest man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,&rdquo; said Rupert
+      cynically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely in
+      himself,&rdquo; I said mildly; &ldquo;his mode of life&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and Drummond
+      Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Grant,&rdquo; he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the door,
+      &ldquo;I've got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me a
+      hundred pounds? There's a good chap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was
+      sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked up
+      a quill-pen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I cross it?&rdquo; he asked, opening a cheque-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, &ldquo;since Lieutenant
+      Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before his family, I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here you are, Ugly,&rdquo; said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction of
+      the quite nonchalant officer. &ldquo;Are you in a hurry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. &ldquo;As a matter of fact I want
+      it now. I want to see my&mdash;er&mdash;business man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on the
+      tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, &ldquo;Receiver of stolen goods,
+      perhaps.&rdquo; What he did say was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A business man? That's rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like
+      ill-temper:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?&rdquo; said Rupert Grant
+      grimly. &ldquo;Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to go with
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a
+      little; his brow blackened sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What did you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony, and
+      he answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along
+      with you to this house-agent's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my bedroom. Look
+      under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!&rdquo; And with a furious energy
+      which took away our breath he banged his way out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
+      excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
+      transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the
+      disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation was
+      certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable unrest,
+      annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil and I
+      tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other that we
+      had both noticed this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
+      unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
+      Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets
+      grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser
+      with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the
+      figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a
+      gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or fifth
+      lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the
+      mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a sort of sulky
+      desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all indescribably dingy
+      in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for a penny toyshop, ran
+      the inscription: &ldquo;P. Montmorency, House-Agent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the office of which I spoke,&rdquo; said Keith, in a cutting voice.
+      &ldquo;Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about my
+      welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
+      business adviser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
+      would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you will excuse me,&rdquo; he said, clenching his hands behind his back, &ldquo;I
+      think I should feel myself justified in&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Come along in,&rdquo; exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture of
+      savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at his
+      heels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind a
+      bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey
+      hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
+      combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black frock-coat,
+      a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical angle, and looked,
+      generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as anything could look,
+      short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
+      gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he was,
+      did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon
+      something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was a
+      ferret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and steely
+      voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised for hours
+      together in his bedroom. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Montmorency, I think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment,
+      picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive into his trousers
+      pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a house-agent, are you not?&rdquo; asked Rupert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes
+      wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present that he
+      knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A house-agent,&rdquo; cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were
+      &ldquo;burglar&rdquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes... oh, yes,&rdquo; said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish
+      smile. &ldquo;I am a house-agent... oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think,&rdquo; said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, &ldquo;that Lieutenant
+      Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his request.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter.
+      &ldquo;It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your suggestions er&mdash;about
+      the br&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right,&rdquo; cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness
+      of a gunshot. &ldquo;We needn't bother about all that. If you've done what I
+      told you, all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he turned sharply towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
+      stammering a moment he said: &ldquo;Excuse me... Mr Keith... there was another
+      matter... about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried to get all the heating
+      apparatus possible under the circumstances ... but in winter... at that
+      elevation...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't expect much, eh?&rdquo; said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same
+      sudden skill. &ldquo;No, of course not. That's all right, Montmorency. There
+      can't be any more difficulties,&rdquo; and he put his hand on the handle of the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, &ldquo;that Mr Montmorency
+      has something further to say to you, lieutenant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only,&rdquo; said the house-agent, in desperation, &ldquo;what about the birds?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; said Rupert, in a general blank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about the birds?&rdquo; said the house-agent doggedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, who had remained throughout the proceedings in a state of
+      Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a state of
+      Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before you go, Lieutenant Keith,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Come now. Really, what about
+      the birds?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take care of them,&rdquo; said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long back
+      turned to us; &ldquo;they shan't suffer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, sir, thank you,&rdquo; cried the incomprehensible house-agent, with
+      an air of ecstasy. &ldquo;You'll excuse my concern, sir. You know I'm wild on
+      wild animals. I'm as wild as any of them on that. Thank you, sir. But
+      there's another thing...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an indescribable
+      laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh, the purport of which was
+      direct and essential, and yet which one cannot exactly express. As near as
+      it said anything, verbally speaking, it said: &ldquo;Well, if you must spoil it,
+      you must. But you don't know what you're spoiling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is another thing,&rdquo; continued Mr Montmorency weakly. &ldquo;Of course, if
+      you don't want to be visited you'll paint the house green, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Green!&rdquo; shouted Keith. &ldquo;Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won't have a
+      house of another colour. Green!&rdquo; and before we could realize anything the
+      door had banged between us and the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he spoke
+      before the echoes of the door died away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What
+      is the matter with him? Is he unwell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I should think not,&rdquo; said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. &ldquo;The
+      negotiations have been somewhat difficult&mdash;the house is rather&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Green,&rdquo; said Rupert calmly. &ldquo;That appears to be a very important point.
+      It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin my
+      companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for
+      houses by their colour? Do clients write to a house-agent asking for a
+      pink house or a blue house? Or, to take another instance, for a green
+      house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only,&rdquo; said Montmorency, trembling, &ldquo;only to be inconspicuous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert had his ruthless smile. &ldquo;Can you tell me any place on earth in
+      which a green house would be inconspicuous?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing out
+      a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the counter, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; I can't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't suggest an explanation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to
+      suggest a sudden situation, &ldquo;I can't. And may I, as a busy man, be excused
+      if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in
+      connection with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to get
+      for you, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
+      staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
+      answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has unduly
+      delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my apparent
+      impertinence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all, sir,&rdquo; said the house-agent, taking a South American spider
+      idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the slope of his
+      desk. &ldquo;Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious to face
+      Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was deserted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say now?&rdquo; cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said
+      nothing now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself
+      dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey
+      street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely
+      meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly to
+      thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then into
+      a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a knowledge
+      of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a crowd stirs
+      ever so slightly it means that there is madness in the heart and core of
+      the mob. It soon became evident that something really important had
+      happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front,
+      with the cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we soon
+      learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl concerned
+      with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead on the stones of the
+      street. Of the other four, all interesting matters were, as far as we were
+      concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous fact. One of the four survivors
+      of the brutal and perhaps fatal scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant
+      Keith, his clothes torn to ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his
+      knuckles. One other thing, however, pointed at him in a worse manner. A
+      short sword, or very long knife, had been drawn out of his elegant
+      walking-stick, and lay in front of him upon the stones. It did not,
+      however, appear to be bloody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
+      omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with his
+      incontrollable and intolerable secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the man, constable,&rdquo; he shouted, pointing at the battered
+      lieutenant. &ldquo;He is a suspicious character. He did the murder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's been no murder done, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, with his automatic
+      civility. &ldquo;The poor man's only hurt. I shall only be able to take the
+      names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good eye kept on
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have a good eye kept on that one,&rdquo; said Rupert, pale to the lips, and
+      pointing to the ragged Keith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round of
+      the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had completed his
+      task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately connected
+      with the examination had gone away. He still found, however, one
+      eager-faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It was
+      Rupert Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Constable,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have a very particular reason for asking you a
+      question. Would you mind telling me whether that military fellow who
+      dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, after a reflective pause; &ldquo;yes, he gave me
+      his address.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Rupert Grant,&rdquo; said that individual, with some pomp. &ldquo;I have
+      assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder whether you would
+      tell me, as a special favour, what address?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton
+      Common, near Purley, Surrey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as fast
+      as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to breakfast;
+      he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always the attitude of the
+      indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when Basil and I came
+      down we found him ready and restless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the
+      meal. &ldquo;What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do I think of him?&rdquo; inquired Basil slowly. &ldquo;I don't think anything
+      of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad to hear it,&rdquo; said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy
+      that was somewhat exultant. &ldquo;I thought you'd come round to my view, but I
+      own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man is a
+      translucent liar and knave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, &ldquo;that I did
+      not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of him I meant
+      grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that he
+      did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of him,
+      since you think him a knave. I should say he was glaringly good myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake,&rdquo; said Rupert,
+      breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. &ldquo;What the deuce is the sense
+      of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our common agreement,
+      dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who doesn't
+      conceal his acquaintance with all the blackest and bloodiest scenes on
+      earth. We take the trouble to follow him to one of his appointments, and
+      if ever two human beings were plotting together and lying to every one
+      else, he and that impossible house-agent were doing it. We followed him
+      home, and the very same night he is in the thick of a fatal, or nearly
+      fatal, brawl, in which he is the only man armed. Really, if this is being
+      glaringly good, I must confess that the glare does not dazzle me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil was quite unmoved. &ldquo;I admit his moral goodness is of a certain kind,
+      a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of change and experiment.
+      But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are mere
+      coincidence or special pleading. It's true he didn't want to talk about
+      his house business in front of us. No man would. It's true that he carries
+      a sword-stick. Any man might. It's true he drew it in the shock of a
+      street fight. Any man would. But there's nothing really dubious in all
+      this. There's nothing to confirm&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke a knock came at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you please, sir,&rdquo; said the landlady, with an alarmed air, &ldquo;there's a
+      policeman wants to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show him in,&rdquo; said Basil, amid the blank silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost as
+      soon as he appeared there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think one of you gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, curtly but respectfully, &ldquo;was
+      present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew my attention
+      very strongly to a particular man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
+      constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn
+      in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is amusing,&rdquo; said Basil, laughing. &ldquo;I was in the very act of
+      clearing that poor officer's character of rather fanciful aspersions. What
+      about him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; said the constable, &ldquo;I took all the men's addresses and had
+      them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more than that. All the
+      other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address.
+      The place doesn't exist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping
+      both his thighs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, by all that's good,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;This is a sign from heaven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's certainly very extraordinary,&rdquo; said Basil quietly, with knitted
+      brows. &ldquo;It's odd the fellow should have given a false address, considering
+      he was perfectly innocent in the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer,&rdquo; cried Rupert, in a sort of
+      rapture, &ldquo;I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You think every one as
+      good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful
+      acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean streets,
+      a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false address.
+      That's what we call glaring goodness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's certainly very extraordinary,&rdquo; repeated Basil. And he strolled
+      moodily about the room. Then he said: &ldquo;You are quite sure, constable, that
+      there's no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have really
+      gone to it and found it was a fraud?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was very simple, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, chuckling. &ldquo;The place he
+      named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were down
+      there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no such
+      house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is so near
+      London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to say nothing of
+      Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right enough. He was a
+      clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost England that people
+      know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a
+      particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there
+      isn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and
+      darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered almost for the
+      first time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather wondered
+      at the almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his original
+      prejudice in favour of the wildly questionable lieutenant. At length he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in
+      the district&mdash;by the way, what was the address?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but
+      before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the window in a
+      perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with the
+      sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I can tell you that, Basil,&rdquo; he said graciously as he idly plucked
+      leaves from a plant in the window. &ldquo;I took the precaution to get this
+      man's address from the constable last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what was it?&rdquo; asked his brother gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The constable will correct me if I am wrong,&rdquo; said Rupert, looking
+      sweetly at the ceiling. &ldquo;It was: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley,
+      Surrey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few
+      seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair so suddenly
+      that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his
+      lips had flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic
+      laughter struck and shook the ceiling&mdash;laughter that shook the
+      laughter, laughter redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not
+      stop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with
+      laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this time ill
+      almost with terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet. &ldquo;I am
+      awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also unpractical,
+      because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down to that place.
+      The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to know. It's quite out
+      of proportion to the comparatively small distance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get down to that place?&rdquo; I repeated blankly. &ldquo;Get down to what place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have forgotten its name,&rdquo; said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his
+      pockets as he rose. &ldquo;Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a
+      timetable?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seriously mean,&rdquo; cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort
+      of confusion of emotions. &ldquo;You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton
+      Common, do you? You can't mean that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?&rdquo; asked Basil, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you?&rdquo; said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the
+      plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,&rdquo; said Basil Grant. &ldquo;I
+      thought you wanted to find him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on
+      the floor. &ldquo;And in order to find him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you suggest the admirable
+      expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know
+      he can't be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting
+      laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on with
+      a reiterated gesture:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of St
+      Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be in the
+      Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store cupboard; but
+      out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only one where he has
+      just been systematically looked for and where we know that he is not to be
+      found&mdash;and that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to
+      go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; &ldquo;I thought you
+      might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly here
+      till I come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if they
+      really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I cannot
+      say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished decisively
+      with his great-coat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with a
+      considerable flurry of rationality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear chap,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;do you really mean that you see any good in
+      going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten
+      tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that
+      came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying
+      reference in a scrape?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Basil, taking out his watch, &ldquo;and, what's worse, we've lost
+      the train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused a moment and then added: &ldquo;As a matter of fact, I think we may
+      just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and I
+      think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich
+      Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn't be in. But if
+      we get down by the 5.15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we shall
+      just catch him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Catch him!&rdquo; cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. &ldquo;I wish we
+      could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I keep forgetting the name of the common,&rdquo; said Basil, as he buttoned up
+      his coat. &ldquo;The Elms&mdash;what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That's
+      where we shall find him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is no such place,&rdquo; groaned Rupert; but he followed his brother
+      downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our
+      sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and do
+      not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the
+      fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was
+      that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared the
+      thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from our
+      breakfast table and said: &ldquo;I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten
+      Tails,&rdquo; we should have followed him to the end of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this
+      occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the
+      strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense
+      twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the
+      London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if
+      ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human
+      spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland
+      hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that
+      silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It seems to be one of
+      the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God&mdash;such a place
+      was Buxton Common, near Purley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But
+      it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our
+      expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional
+      wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless
+      than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the
+      foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which has led
+      men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under
+      the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not
+      there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at
+      us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the
+      gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell of
+      the windy common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly Basil
+      stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the dusk I
+      could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
+      slapping them together, &ldquo;here we are at last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked
+      above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign of
+      man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of that
+      wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
+      innkeeper standing at an open door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How jolly it is,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;to get back to civilization. That notion
+      that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till you've
+      really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel
+      flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man
+      that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the
+      good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you,
+      will be drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
+      wind died in the dreary trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own house.
+      I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth, and again
+      in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good fellow. But his
+      greatest virtue remains what I said originally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort of
+      sanity. &ldquo;What is his greatest virtue?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His greatest virtue,&rdquo; replied Basil, &ldquo;is that he always tells the literal
+      truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger, and
+      slapping himself like a cabman, &ldquo;he doesn't seem to have been very literal
+      or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have
+      you brought us out to this infernal place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was too truthful, I confess,&rdquo; said Basil, leaning against the tree;
+      &ldquo;too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in a
+      little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time we
+      went in. We shall be late for dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert whispered to me with a white face:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
+      house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose so,&rdquo; I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a
+      cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as strange
+      as the wind:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, up here,&rdquo; cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above our
+      heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come up, all of you,&rdquo; he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a
+      schoolboy. &ldquo;Come up. You'll be late for dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a yard
+      anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them. Thus
+      occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of footholds
+      that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I supposed, have
+      been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the
+      waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly mystical
+      in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant's staircase
+      going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious voice above
+      called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
+      suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the
+      whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw
+      three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible
+      suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how,
+      half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer and
+      all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all probability,
+      laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us
+      about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when I thought what
+      his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly
+      let go of the tree and fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Swinburne,&rdquo; said Rupert suddenly, from above, &ldquo;what are we doing? Let's
+      get down again,&rdquo; and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he too
+      felt the shock of wakening to reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't leave poor Basil,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Can't you call to him or get hold of
+      him by the leg?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's too far ahead,&rdquo; answered Rupert; &ldquo;he's nearly at the top of the
+      beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks' nests, I
+      suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The
+      mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind. Then
+      I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far from
+      the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw
+      that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little
+      in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines taper
+      towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me feel lost
+      in space, like a falling star.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can nothing be done to stop Basil?&rdquo; I called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; answered my fellow climber. &ldquo;He's too far up. He must get to the
+      top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again.
+      Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps he's talking to us,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rupert, &ldquo;he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to talk to
+      himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight; it's a known sign of
+      the brain going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was sounding
+      above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous tones in which he
+      had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now and
+      then, up there among the leaves and stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said, &ldquo;My
+      God!&rdquo; with a violent voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter&mdash;are you hurt?&rdquo; I cried, alarmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Listen to Basil,&rdquo; said the other in a very strange voice. &ldquo;He's not
+      talking to himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he is talking to us,&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rupert simply, &ldquo;he's talking to somebody else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a sudden
+      burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear the conversational
+      voice above. I could hear two voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as before: &ldquo;Come
+      up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard in our
+      chambers more than once. It called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in the
+      branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face and fierce
+      moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly Southern
+      air that belonged to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily into
+      the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned, tiny
+      room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table, and a
+      circular seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was Basil,
+      who, in the instant after alighting there, had fallen into an attitude of
+      marmoreal ease as if he had been there from boyhood; he was smoking a
+      cigar with a slow pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who
+      looked happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with his granite
+      guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with the wild
+      whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the green umbrella,
+      and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The sealed jar of
+      strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle in the corner. In
+      the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne. Glasses were already
+      set for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot of a
+      light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then Basil
+      spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further
+      question about the cold veracity of our injured host.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't quite grasp it all,&rdquo; said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden
+      glare. &ldquo;Lieutenant Keith said his address was&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's really quite right, sir,&rdquo; said Keith, with an open smile. &ldquo;The bobby
+      asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully, that I lived in the
+      elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr
+      Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses of
+      this kind. He has a special line in arboreal villas. It's being kept
+      rather quiet at present, because the people who want these houses don't
+      want them to get too common. But it's just the sort of thing a fellow like
+      myself, racketing about in all sorts of queer corners of London, naturally
+      knocks up against.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?&rdquo; asked Rupert eagerly,
+      recovering his ease with the romance of reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and
+      nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;W-well, yes, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The fact was&mdash;er&mdash;my people wanted
+      me very much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared
+      myself for anything but natural history and botany and things like that.
+      My poor parents have been dead some years now, but&mdash;naturally I like
+      to respect their wishes. And I thought somehow that an arboreal villa
+      agency was a sort of&mdash;of compromise between being a botanist and
+      being a house-agent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert could not help laughing. &ldquo;Do you have much custom?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;N-not much,&rdquo; replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith, who
+      was (I am convinced) his only client. &ldquo;But what there is&mdash;very
+      select.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear friends,&rdquo; said Basil, puffing his cigar, &ldquo;always remember two
+      facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about any one who is
+      sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing about any
+      one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the most likely.
+      The second is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems
+      fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham
+      with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The Elms' over
+      it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic about that.
+      Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have
+      believed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink your wine, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Keith, laughing, &ldquo;for this confounded
+      wind will upset it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
+      mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
+      tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was the
+      reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and talk
+      not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for that
+      person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he were
+      always on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of these
+      chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his life. A
+      few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his
+      lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of them as
+      if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods
+      train or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a
+      veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a mild
+      prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a young captain in
+      the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in the Lancers;
+      another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable certainty
+      precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry,
+      and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his acquaintance over a
+      discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which
+      reduced the little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the
+      compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an
+      old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined with each
+      other twice a week until they died. I myself was another. I had met Grant
+      while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the National Liberal Club,
+      and exchanged a few words about the weather. Then we had talked for about
+      an hour about politics and God; for men always talk about the most
+      important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger
+      we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances
+      to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was
+      Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
+      interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest, if
+      not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language. He
+      was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded
+      man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an
+      unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to
+      and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-shops,
+      with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He was never seen
+      without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by the lighter wits
+      of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his little brick villa
+      in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There he lived with three
+      sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister demeanour. His life was
+      happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical students, but one would
+      not have called it exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred
+      when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a
+      tornado of conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
+      these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly in
+      the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember vividly
+      (for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with them) the
+      gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange calamity fell
+      upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class
+      and type (the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a Radical
+      of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical himself, but he
+      was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of Radical who passes
+      most of his time in abusing the Radical party. Chadd had just contributed
+      to a magazine an article called &ldquo;Zulu Interests and the New Makango
+      Frontier&rdquo;, in which a precise scientific report of his study of the
+      customs of the people of T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest
+      against certain interferences with these customs both by the British and
+      the Germans. He was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the
+      lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead, not of
+      anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and down the room,
+      shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his heavy tread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd,&rdquo; he was
+      saying, &ldquo;it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for all
+      that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way of
+      cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but for
+      all that you don't understand them as well as I do, who don't know an
+      assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more
+      Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always
+      championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are
+      sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are
+      not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass.
+      Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at
+      this umbrella.&rdquo; And he held up that sad but still respectable article.
+      &ldquo;Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge you have carried
+      that object under your arm, and I have no sort of doubt that you carried
+      it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to you to give one
+      wild yell and hurl it like a javelin&mdash;thus&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head, so that
+      it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase rocking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to
+      the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mental processes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;always go a little too fast. And they
+      are stated without method. There is no kind of inconsistency&rdquo;&mdash;and no
+      words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the word&mdash;&ldquo;between
+      valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their stage in the
+      evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial and requisite to
+      do so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this concession which I
+      have just described to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in
+      question is, nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in
+      the variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an inferior
+      evolutionary stage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone
+      like two pallid moons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear. But
+      there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I am very far from
+      being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage, whatever
+      the blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything stupid or
+      ignorant about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils in the dark.
+      It seems to me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be thought a sort
+      of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself?
+      Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are
+      not afraid of devils in the dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paper-knife
+      and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beyond all question,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude to
+      the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that our civilization
+      is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I apprehend you), is
+      or may be a retrogression from states identical with or analogous to the
+      state of the Zulus. Moreover, I shall be inclined to concede that such a
+      proposition is of the nature, in some degree at least, of a primary
+      proposition, and cannot adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean,
+      that the primary proposition of pessimism, or the primary proposition of
+      the non-existence of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do not
+      conceive you to be under the impression that you have demonstrated
+      anything more concerning this proposition than that it is tenable, which,
+      after all, amounts to little more than the statement that it is not a
+      contradiction in terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't understand,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but, on the other hand, as a
+      compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that
+      disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I began it
+      when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was
+      that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense that you are a
+      scientist, I know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For
+      instance, your theory of the origin of language, something about its
+      having come from the formulated secret language of some individual
+      creature, though you knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its
+      favour, still does not convince me, because I have a feeling that that is
+      not the way that things happen. If you ask me why I think so I can only
+      answer that I am a Zulu; and if you ask me (as you most certainly will)
+      what is my definition of a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has
+      climbed a Sussex apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost in an
+      English lane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your process of thought&mdash;&rdquo; began the immovable Chadd, but his speech
+      was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which always in such
+      families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm and
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in such men
+      the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but practical
+      life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out of the
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,&rdquo; said Basil
+      Grant, &ldquo;but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the men
+      who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it not, that
+      Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper of Asiatic manuscripts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a
+      great deal of pathos also. &ldquo;I believe it's true,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If it is, it
+      will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great deal,
+      but great relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a lot of
+      things. James' health has never been good, and while we are as poor as we
+      are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his own dreadful
+      grinding notions and discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or
+      child. I have often been afraid that unless something of this kind
+      occurred we should really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe
+      it is practically settled.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am delighted,&rdquo; began Basil, but with a worried face, &ldquo;but these
+      red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't advise
+      you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I've known
+      men, and good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be
+      disappointed. Of course, if it is true&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is true,&rdquo; said the woman fiercely, &ldquo;it means that people who have
+      never lived may make an attempt at living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed
+      look in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it true?&rdquo; asked Basil, with burning eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a bit true,&rdquo; answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment. &ldquo;Your
+      argument was in three points fallacious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; demanded Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the professor slowly, &ldquo;in saying that you could possess a
+      knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! confound Zulu life,&rdquo; cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. &ldquo;I mean,
+      have you got the post?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts,&rdquo; he said, opening
+      his eye with childlike wonder. &ldquo;Oh, yes, I got that. But the real
+      objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me since
+      I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose a Zulu
+      truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it is
+      absolutely impeded by the facts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am crushed,&rdquo; said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's
+      sister retired to her room, possibly to laugh, possibly not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely long
+      and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may be our
+      excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with Grant) got
+      down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in
+      point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a
+      very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so
+      dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and
+      I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the
+      top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in being
+      really urgent and coercive&mdash;a telegram. This he opened with the same
+      heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he
+      read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but something, I know not
+      what, made me feel that the motionless figure had been pulled together
+      suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said
+      nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been for an instant cleared
+      and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to
+      me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it,
+      kicked it away like a cur from under him and came round to me in two
+      strides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you make of that?&rdquo; he said, and flattened out the wire in front
+      of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It ran: &ldquo;Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous. Chadd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does the woman mean?&rdquo; I said after a pause, irritably. &ldquo;Those women
+      have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he was
+      born.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are mistaken,&rdquo; said Grant composedly. &ldquo;It is true that all sensible
+      women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that, all
+      women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don't put it in
+      telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or God
+      all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at that. If
+      Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman in a
+      post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain
+      that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can
+      think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will force us of course,&rdquo; I said, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he replied; &ldquo;there is a cab-rank near.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge, through
+      Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road. Only as he
+      was opening the gate he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you will take my word for it, my friend,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;this is one
+      of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever
+      happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't quite see
+      it,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a dreamy
+      somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of the
+      inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so very
+      extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul like a
+      spider's web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of
+      fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should
+      lose his wits from excitement?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would not be extraordinary in the least,&rdquo; answered Basil, with
+      placidity. &ldquo;It would not be extraordinary in the least,&rdquo; he repeated, &ldquo;if
+      the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary circumstance to
+      which I referred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What,&rdquo; I asked, stamping my foot, &ldquo;was the extraordinary thing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The extraordinary thing,&rdquo; said Basil, ringing the bell, &ldquo;is that he has
+      not gone mad from excitement.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway
+      as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be
+      blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general
+      sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three
+      black-clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the
+      catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, won't you?&rdquo; said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat
+      rigid with pain. &ldquo;I think you had better be told first what has happened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she
+      continued, in an even and mechanical voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This
+      morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both
+      somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out of
+      the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however, without
+      it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said, 'Were you
+      looking for anything I could get?' He did not answer, but this constantly
+      happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my question, and still
+      he did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that
+      nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's
+      presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really do not know how
+      to describe the sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly, but at
+      the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one's brain. The fact
+      is, James was standing on one leg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Standing on one leg?&rdquo; I repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
+      suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. &ldquo;He was
+      standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the toe
+      pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only answer was
+      to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as if pointing to
+      the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at
+      the fireplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened.
+      James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the other,
+      gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a teetotum
+      the other way. 'Are you mad?' I cried. 'Why don't you answer me?' He had
+      come to a standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he always does,
+      with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he
+      remained a second or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift
+      his left foot slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the
+      air. I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on
+      the dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to him, implored
+      him to speak to us with appeals that might have brought back the dead, but
+      he has done nothing but hop and dance and kick with a solemn silent face.
+      It looks as if his legs belonged to some one else or were possessed by
+      devils. He has never spoken to us from that time to this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he now?&rdquo; I said, getting up in some agitation. &ldquo;We ought not to
+      leave him alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Colman is with him,&rdquo; said Miss Chadd calmly. &ldquo;They are in the
+      garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he can
+      scarcely go into the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden.
+      It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a little
+      too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this shining
+      and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something natural,
+      I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and verdant but
+      painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a small,
+      sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume
+      Dr Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous
+      twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend, listening
+      with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong sunlight
+      gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the night before,
+      when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious decorum. But for
+      one thing the figure of this morning might have been the identical figure
+      of last night. That one thing was that while the face listened reposefully
+      the legs were industriously dancing like the legs of a marionette. The
+      neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable
+      sharpness and incredibility to the prodigy&mdash;the prodigy of the head
+      of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen
+      in broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore
+      commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat
+      drearily to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, Adelaide,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that Mr Bingham from the Museum is coming
+      again at three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. &ldquo;I suppose we shall have to tell
+      him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to
+      us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant suddenly turned round. &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What will you
+      have to tell Mr Bingham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what I shall have to tell him,&rdquo; said the professor's sister,
+      almost fiercely. &ldquo;I don't know that we need give it its wretched name. Do
+      you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to go on
+      like that?&rdquo; And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the garden,
+      the shining, listening face and the unresting feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. &ldquo;When did you say
+      the British Museum man was coming?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three o'clock,&rdquo; said Miss Chadd briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I have an hour before me,&rdquo; said Grant, and without another word
+      threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk
+      straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden path
+      drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood a couple
+      of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his trousers pocket,
+      but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a loud
+      familiar voice, &ldquo;Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our
+      inferiors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to
+      speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a
+      friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?&rdquo; Basil continued, still in
+      the same loud and lucid tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg, his
+      expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather
+      sharply. &ldquo;Shall we go inside, professor?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Now you have shown me
+      the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go in,&rdquo;
+       and he tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the same
+      time whispering to Grant: &ldquo;I must ask you not to trouble him with
+      questions. Most risky. He must be soothed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will endeavour
+      to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if you will
+      leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour. I want to
+      watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very little to him,
+      and that little shall be as soothing as&mdash;as syrup.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is rather dangerous for him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to be long in the strong sun
+      without his hat. With his bald head, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is soon settled,&rdquo; said Basil composedly, and took off his own big
+      hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did
+      not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for some
+      seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and then saying,
+      shortly, &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; strutted away into the house, where the three Misses
+      Chadd were all looking out from the parlour window on to the garden. They
+      looked out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without moving, and they
+      saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding in
+      making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he had done this
+      slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large pencil out of
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from
+      him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again. Thus
+      they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of turf, the
+      one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a problem, the
+      other leaping and playing like a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put
+      the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and
+      walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild morning
+      had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil in front
+      of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and then drew up
+      his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his sister had
+      described as being the first of all his antics. And the moment he had done
+      it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out rigid before him,
+      confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped
+      his bent leg, and swinging his weight on to it kicked out the other
+      behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a saltire cross,
+      and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air. Then before
+      any of the spectators could say a word or even entertain a thought about
+      the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of jig or hornpipe opposite
+      each other; and the sun shone down on two madmen instead of one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that
+      they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the garden
+      with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor Chadd was
+      in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed about to
+      turn a cart-wheel, when they were frozen in their follies by the steely
+      voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, &ldquo;Mr Bingham of the British Museum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly
+      effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable
+      manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was of
+      the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some
+      credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a
+      considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But
+      neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
+      grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves
+      about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant
+      stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny
+      black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them
+      to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr Colman,&rdquo; said Basil, turning to him, &ldquo;will you entertain Professor
+      Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham,
+      might I have the pleasure of a few moments' private conversation? My name
+      is Grant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful
+      but a trifle bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Chadd will excuse me,&rdquo; continued Basil easily, &ldquo;if I know my way
+      about the house.&rdquo; And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the back
+      door into the parlour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Bingham,&rdquo; said Basil, setting a chair for him, &ldquo;I imagine that Miss
+      Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has, Mr Grant,&rdquo; said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort of
+      compassionate nervousness. &ldquo;I am more pained than I can say by this
+      dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should have
+      happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend a position
+      which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of course&mdash;really, I
+      don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of course, retain&mdash;I
+      sincerely trust he will&mdash;his extraordinarily valuable intellect. But
+      I am afraid&mdash;I am really afraid&mdash;that it would not do to have
+      the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts&mdash;er&mdash;dancing about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a suggestion to make,&rdquo; said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his
+      chair, drawing it up to the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am delighted, of course,&rdquo; said the gentleman from the British Museum,
+      coughing and drawing up his chair also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
+      Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
+      could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
+      character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
+      through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd £800 a year until he stops
+      dancing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight hundred a year!&rdquo; said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted his
+      mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor&mdash;and he raised them with
+      a mild blue stare. &ldquo;I think I have not quite understood you. Did I
+      understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his
+      present state, in the Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a
+      year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant shook his head resolutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said firmly. &ldquo;No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
+      anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought to
+      take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely say
+      that until he stops dancing you ought to pay him £800 Surely you have some
+      general fund for the endowment of research.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham looked bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know,&rdquo; he said, blinking his eyes, &ldquo;what you are talking
+      about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a year
+      for life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. &ldquo;I never said for
+      life. Not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What for, then?&rdquo; asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly
+      to tear his hair. &ldquo;How long is this endowment to run? Not till his death?
+      Till the Judgement day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Basil, beaming, &ldquo;but just what I said. Till he has stopped
+      dancing.&rdquo; And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and kept
+      them there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do I seriously understand you to suggest that
+      the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary simply
+      on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he should be
+      paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he is flinging
+      his boots about in the back yard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Grant composedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
+      but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must stop somewhere,&rdquo; said Grant. &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said coldly. &ldquo;What
+      you are trying to explain to me may be a joke&mdash;a slightly unfeeling
+      joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your pardon for the
+      former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite irrelevant to my
+      duties. The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is
+      a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But
+      it is clear there is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel
+      went mad it would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the
+      British Museum Library.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in dramatic
+      warning, arrested him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; said Basil sternly. &ldquo;Stop while there is yet time. Do you want to
+      take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help in the glory of
+      Europe&mdash;in the glory of science? Do you want to carry your head in
+      the air when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in a
+      great discovery? Do you want&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham cut in sharply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if I do want this, Mr Grant&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said Basil lightly, &ldquo;your task is easy. Get Chadd £800 a year till
+      he stops dancing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently to
+      the door, but in passing out of it found it blocked. Dr Colman was coming
+      in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, &ldquo;the
+      fact is, Mr Grant, I&mdash;er&mdash;have made a most disturbing discovery
+      about Mr Chadd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was afraid so,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Drink, I imagine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink!&rdquo; echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. &ldquo;Oh, no,
+      it's not drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and vague.
+      &ldquo;Homicidal mania&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; said the medical man impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thinks he's made of glass,&rdquo; said Bingham feverishly, &ldquo;or says he's God&mdash;or&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Dr Colman sharply; &ldquo;the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of a
+      different character. The awful thing about him is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, go on, sir,&rdquo; cried Bingham, in agony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The awful thing about him is,&rdquo; repeated Colman, with deliberation, &ldquo;that
+      he isn't mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not mad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy,&rdquo; said the doctor
+      shortly; &ldquo;he hasn't got any of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why does he dance?&rdquo; cried the despairing Bingham. &ldquo;Why doesn't he
+      answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil knows,&rdquo; said Dr Colman coolly. &ldquo;I'm paid to judge of lunatics,
+      but not of fools. The man's not mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?&rdquo; said Mr Bingham.
+      &ldquo;Can none get into any kind of communication with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be very happy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to give him any message you like to
+      send.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Both men stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give him a message?&rdquo; they cried simultaneously. &ldquo;How will you give him a
+      message?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil smiled in his slow way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you really want to know how I shall give him your message,&rdquo; he began,
+      but Bingham cried:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; with a sort of frenzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Basil, &ldquo;like this.&rdquo; And he suddenly sprang a foot into the
+      air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on one leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact
+      that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You drive me to it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You drive me to betray my friend. And I
+      will, for his own sake, betray him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as
+      of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure. &ldquo;Anything painful, of
+      course&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck them
+      all rigid in their feeble attitudes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idiots!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James Chadd
+      going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to your miserable library,
+      with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never seen that he
+      has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck casually behind
+      his spectacles and above his seedy old collar, the face of a man who might
+      have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my
+      fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I argued against
+      him on the score of his famous theory about language&mdash;the theory that
+      language was complete in certain individuals and was picked up by others
+      simply by watching them. I also chaffed him about not understanding things
+      in rough and ready practice. What has this glorious bigot done? He has
+      answered me. He has worked out a system of language of his own (it would
+      take too long to explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own.
+      And he has sworn that till people understand it, till he can speak to us
+      in this language, he will not speak in any other. And he shall not. I have
+      understood, by taking careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others.
+      This shall not be blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall
+      have £800 a year from somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him
+      now is an infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I hope I shall be able to answer for
+      the source of the £800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my cab?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham,&rdquo; said Grant heartily. &ldquo;I think I
+      will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
+      friendly. They were still dancing when I left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of interest&mdash;first,
+      the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he was engaged, and,
+      second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of London. His brother
+      Basil said of him: &ldquo;His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and
+      invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him
+      right.&rdquo; Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was
+      certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I think worth
+      telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
+      was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight in
+      summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
+      darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth
+      were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of
+      the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them,
+      Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out of
+      the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to
+      me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective theories. He
+      would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing a
+      conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a falling fusee.
+      His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy milkman who walked
+      in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which afterwards overtook
+      us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten what were the main
+      outlines of the milkman's crime. I think it had something to do with the
+      fact that he had only one small can of milk to carry, and that of that he
+      had left the lid loose and walked so quickly that he spilled milk on the
+      pavement. This showed that he was not thinking of his small burden, and
+      this again showed that he anticipated some other than lacteal business at
+      the end of his walk, and this (taken in conjunction with something about
+      muddy boots) showed something else that I have entirely forgotten. I am
+      afraid that I derided this detailed revelation unmercifully; and I am
+      afraid that Rupert Grant, who, though the best of fellows, had a good deal
+      of the sensitiveness of the artistic temperament, slightly resented my
+      derision. He endeavoured to take a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity
+      which he associated with his profession, but the cigar, I think, was
+      nearly bitten through.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; he said acidly, &ldquo;I'll bet you half a crown that wherever
+      that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out something curious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My resources are equal to that risk,&rdquo; I said, laughing. &ldquo;Done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of the
+      mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some ado to
+      keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of milk, silver
+      in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it, he disappeared
+      down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really believed that the
+      milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him as having
+      vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took no hold on my
+      mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared himself into the
+      area.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post in the
+      lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps without his can
+      and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more
+      elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet
+      laughing; a not uncommon contradiction in him, denoting excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; he said, rubbing his hands, &ldquo;so much for all your scepticism.
+      So much for your philistine ignorance of the possibilities of a romantic
+      city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your prosaic good
+      nature will have to express itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; I said incredulously, &ldquo;do you mean to say that you really did find
+      anything the matter with the poor milkman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the milkman,&rdquo; he said, with a miserable affectation at having
+      misunderstood me. &ldquo;No, I&mdash;I&mdash;didn't exactly bring anything home
+      to the milkman himself, I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did the milkman say and do?&rdquo; I said, with inexorable sternness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, to tell the truth,&rdquo; said Rupert, shifting restlessly from one foot
+      to another, &ldquo;the milkman himself, as far as merely physical appearances
+      went, just said, 'Milk, Miss,' and handed in the can. That is not to say,
+      of course, that he did not make some secret sign or some&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I broke into a violent laugh. &ldquo;You idiot,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;why don't you own
+      yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made a secret
+      sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did nothing
+      worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face grew grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that the
+      milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that I was wrong about
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then come along with you,&rdquo; I said, with a certain amicable anger, &ldquo;and
+      remember that you owe me half a crown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to that, I differ from you,&rdquo; said Rupert coolly. &ldquo;The milkman's
+      remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman may have been. But
+      I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I think, as
+      follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came to a real
+      stop I should find out something curious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;I jolly well have. You just come with me,&rdquo; and
+      before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked through the
+      blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost before
+      I made any decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally, as
+      the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a closed door, shuttered
+      windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous well in which I
+      found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me there, and who
+      stood there with dancing eyes. I was just about to turn back when Rupert
+      caught me by the elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just listen to that,&rdquo; he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right
+      hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters of the
+      basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined
+      my head for a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an
+      unmistakable human voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been talking to somebody inside?&rdquo; I asked suddenly, turning to
+      Rupert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I haven't,&rdquo; he replied, with a grim smile, &ldquo;but I should very much
+      like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of course not,&rdquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I recommend you to listen,&rdquo; said Rupert sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a
+      moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which there was
+      a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which took
+      the form of the words: &ldquo;When shall I get out? When shall I get out? Will
+      they ever let me out?&rdquo; or words to that effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know anything about this?&rdquo; I said, turning upon Rupert very
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you think I am the criminal,&rdquo; he said sardonically, &ldquo;instead of
+      being in some small sense the detective. I came into this area two or
+      three minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something funny
+      going on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a woman)
+      was moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do not know
+      anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited
+      daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being
+      wailing that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman
+      and beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two or three
+      minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning, that is all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I apologize; this is no time for arguing. What
+      is to be done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;house-breaking.&rdquo; And he forced the blade into
+      the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap and
+      glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely
+      unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead and
+      opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization
+      which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our breath.
+      Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window itself seemed
+      suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass
+      within, and with increased distinctness, with the increase of the opening
+      came the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When shall I get out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can all this be?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing the
+      ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in it, smaller
+      and more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he had
+      done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and
+      querulous and clear, making the same demand for liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't you get out, madam?&rdquo; I said, drawing near the hole in some
+      perturbation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get out? Of course I can't,&rdquo; moaned the unknown female bitterly. &ldquo;They
+      won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them I'd call the
+      police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me
+      as long as they liked only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick,
+      incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held my arm hard,
+      held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to
+      stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment,
+      and in the act swung slightly round, so that I was facing the supporting
+      wall of the front door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness
+      like that of Rupert, for a figure almost as motionless as the pillars of
+      the portico, but unmistakably human, had put his head out from between the
+      doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted lamps of
+      the street was just behind his head, throwing it into abrupt darkness.
+      Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of his face beyond one fact,
+      that he was unquestionably staring at us. I must say I thought Rupert's
+      calmness magnificent. He rang the area bell quite idly, and went on
+      talking to me with the easy end of a conversation which had never had any
+      beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost
+      thought it was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was golden
+      with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a small and
+      decorous housemaid stood in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray excuse me,&rdquo; said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make
+      somehow or other at once affable and underbred, &ldquo;but we thought perhaps
+      that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don't expect&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not here,&rdquo; said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of the
+      menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very sad, very sad&mdash;the indifference of these people,&rdquo; said the
+      philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As we did
+      so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what do you make of that?&rdquo; asked Rupert, slapping his gloves
+      together when we got into the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such conditions
+      I had but one thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think,&rdquo; I said a trifle timidly, &ldquo;that we had better tell your
+      brother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you like,&rdquo; said Rupert, in a lordly way. &ldquo;He is quite near, as I
+      promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall we take a cab?
+      Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted look.
+      After a little looking about we discovered Basil Grant with his great head
+      and his great white hat blocking the ticket-office window. I thought at
+      first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly
+      long time about it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing religion with
+      the booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the hole in
+      his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time before he would
+      talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental fatalism in modern thought,
+      which had been well typified by some of the official's ingenious but
+      perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get him to understand that we
+      had made an astounding discovery. When he did listen, he listened
+      attentively, walking between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we
+      told him in a rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington,
+      of the equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement, and the
+      man staring from the porch. At length he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
+      careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice on the
+      same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would look
+      worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman who looked
+      at you looked thoroughly, and will wear, so to speak, your portraits next
+      to his heart. If you want to find out if there is anything in this without
+      a police raid I fancy you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the
+      house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor of
+      twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think it's safe, Basil,&rdquo; said his brother, pausing, a little pale,
+      under the lamp, &ldquo;to go into that place alone? Of course we shall be near
+      enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do something&mdash;something
+      sudden&mdash;or odd. I can't feel it's safe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know of nothing that is safe,&rdquo; said Basil composedly, &ldquo;except, possibly&mdash;death,&rdquo;
+       and he went up the steps and rang at the bell. When the massive
+      respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of gaslight in
+      the gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying our friend
+      inside, we could not repress a shudder. It had been like the heavy gaping
+      and closing of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A freshening night
+      breeze began to blow up the street, and we turned up the collars of our
+      coats. At the end of twenty minutes, in which we had scarcely moved or
+      spoken, we were as cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from apprehension
+      than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an abrupt movement towards the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't stand this,&rdquo; he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into
+      the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the black house
+      front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming
+      out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you could
+      have heard every syllable across the street. Another voice, or, possibly,
+      two voices, were laughing and talking back at him from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, no,&rdquo; Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility.
+      &ldquo;That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of all. It's the soul,
+      my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When you see a
+      cosmic force you don't like, trick it, my boy. But I must really be off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and pitch into us again,&rdquo; came the laughing voice from out of the
+      house. &ldquo;We still have some bones unbroken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks very much, I will&mdash;good night,&rdquo; shouted Grant, who had by
+      this time reached the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; came the friendly call in reply, before the door closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, &ldquo;what are we to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is to be done, Basil?&rdquo; I repeated in uncontrollable excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not sure,&rdquo; said Basil doubtfully. &ldquo;What do you say to getting some
+      dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get
+      those fellows to come, but they couldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We stared blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go to the Court Theatre?&rdquo; repeated Rupert. &ldquo;What would be the good of
+      that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good? What do you mean?&rdquo; answered Basil, staring also. &ldquo;Have you turned
+      Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!&rdquo; cried Rupert.
+      &ldquo;What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I go for the
+      police?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some mistake,
+      possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm sorry those
+      fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of these green omnibuses?
+      There is a restaurant in Sloane Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us,&rdquo; I said irritably.
+      &ldquo;How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a mere private
+      affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be
+      private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's drawing-room, would you
+      think it bad taste to talk about it just as if it was a confounded dado or
+      an infernal etching?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil laughed heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's very forcible,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;As a matter of fact, though, I know it's
+      all right in this case. And there comes the green omnibus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know it's all right in this ease?&rdquo; persisted his brother
+      angrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear chap, the thing's obvious,&rdquo; answered Basil, holding a return
+      ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. &ldquo;Those
+      two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They're not the kind.
+      Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a paper before the
+      omnibus comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, curse the paper!&rdquo; cried Rupert, in a fury. &ldquo;Do you mean to tell me,
+      Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch
+      darkness in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with
+      the keepers of it and thought them rather good men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good men do commit crimes sometimes,&rdquo; said Basil, taking the ticket out
+      of his mouth. &ldquo;But this kind of good man doesn't commit that kind of
+      crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the dim
+      wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an
+      instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it and
+      been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, &ldquo;I simply won't leave
+      this street and this house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor will I,&rdquo; said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers. &ldquo;There's
+      some black work going on there. If I left it I should never sleep again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course if you feel like that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we'll investigate further.
+      You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two young Oxford fellows.
+      Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this pseudo-Darwinian
+      business. Ethics of evolution and all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, &ldquo;that we shall enlighten
+      you further about their ethics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And may I ask,&rdquo; said Basil gloomily, &ldquo;what it is that you propose to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I propose, first of all,&rdquo; said Rupert, &ldquo;to get into this house; secondly,
+      to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to knock them
+      down, bind them, gag them, and search the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an
+      instant with one of his sudden laughs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor little boys,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But it almost serves them right for holding
+      such silly views, after all,&rdquo; and he quaked again with amusement &ldquo;there's
+      something confoundedly Darwinian about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you mean to help us?&rdquo; said Rupert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I'll be in it,&rdquo; answered Basil, &ldquo;if it's only to prevent your
+      doing the poor chaps any harm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking indifferent
+      and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door opened he
+      stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So sorry to haunt you like this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I met two friends outside who
+      very much want to know you. May I bring them in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delighted, of course,&rdquo; said a young voice, the unmistakable voice of the
+      Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the decorous
+      little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was a short,
+      but shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a square, snub-nosed
+      face. He wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some incredible college
+      purple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This way,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;mind the steps by the staircase. This house is more
+      crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish exterior.
+      There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Rupert, with a savage smile, &ldquo;I can quite believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young
+      inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines and
+      books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who stood
+      with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly, with dead
+      brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket. He was that particular
+      type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet
+      who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any more arguments?&rdquo; he said, when introductions had been effected. &ldquo;I
+      must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science
+      such as we. I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosh,&rdquo; answered Grant. &ldquo;I never said a word against eminent men of
+      science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes
+      itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new
+      religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of
+      man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't
+      understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they
+      think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they
+      have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian
+      movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of
+      talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically
+      about science.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is all very well,&rdquo; said the big young man, whose name appeared to be
+      Burrows. &ldquo;Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or the violin,
+      can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the rudiments may
+      be of public use. Greenwood here,&rdquo; indicating the little man in the
+      blazer, &ldquo;doesn't know one note of music from another. Still, he knows
+      something. He knows enough to take off his hat when they play 'God Save
+      the King'. He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play 'Oh, Dem
+      Golden Slippers'. Just in the same way science&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
+      uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.
+      Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his
+      throat, and bent the giant backwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne,&rdquo; he called out, and before I knew
+      where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple blazer.
+      He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but I was
+      heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of his feet
+      from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and then we fell
+      with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's voice
+      finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and I need
+      not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old friends against the
+      most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying you up in this
+      antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be
+      while...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
+      garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty hands.
+      Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows; how
+      strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by Rupert's
+      arm, but a convulsive heave went over his whole frame. An instant after
+      his head plunged forward like a bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung head
+      over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him.
+      Simultaneously the bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him
+      also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar,
+      leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the
+      waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously to his feet.
+      Basil did the same. But they had the best of it now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
+      through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and before
+      Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments, could even lift
+      his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room. Defeated even when
+      we were in a majority, we were now outnumbered. Greenwood and one of the
+      footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me back into the corner upon
+      the wreck of the paper basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned him
+      against the wall. Rupert lifted himself on his elbow, but he was still
+      dazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil
+      come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now this,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is what I call enjoying oneself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase,
+      from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To my astonishment
+      his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child heated
+      by a favourite game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of
+      me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to him. He turned
+      quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The
+      latter's head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship, as
+      his enemies pressed him down. He flung up one hand just as I thought him
+      falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards
+      discovered, of St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across
+      the room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome bodily out of
+      the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air, so that it
+      struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over like a rolling
+      ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness broke, and he sank, his
+      enemies closing over him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he
+      could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each
+      other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert
+      certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor was a
+      sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense waste-paper
+      basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the knees in them, as
+      in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a
+      sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some
+      fantastic trouser frill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies, might
+      be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of Mr
+      Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in it
+      as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad back
+      swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil, somehow, had
+      hold of the other. Burrows' huge fists and those of the footman were
+      battering Basil's sunken head like an anvil, but nothing could get the
+      giant's ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his own head was
+      forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor
+      was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face.
+      Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook together, as
+      the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the floor. Basil sprang
+      up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like battering-rams knocked the
+      footman into a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows, with one
+      antimacassar in his hand and another in his teeth, and bound him hand and
+      foot almost before he knew clearly that his head had struck the floor.
+      Then Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down,
+      and between them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let
+      go and turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and,
+      to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other footman,
+      bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the
+      room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the
+      battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood,
+      Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
+      perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;since you have got your own way, perhaps
+      you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive,
+      &ldquo;this is what we call the survival of the fittest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
+      phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the
+      end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a
+      handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he sang
+      out quite coolly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
+      antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way
+      in an armchair. &ldquo;Don't hurry for us,&rdquo; he said, glancing round at the
+      litter of the room, &ldquo;we have all the illustrated papers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even more
+      slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed through the
+      room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice continuing
+      conversationally:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, Mr Burrows,&rdquo; he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
+      &ldquo;there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument. I'm
+      sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor,
+      and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there than the
+      man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely
+      be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were saying, if I
+      remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments
+      of science might with advantage be made public.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. &ldquo;I hold that
+      nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can
+      be...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I noticed
+      that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy. Strange as it
+      may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a slight
+      degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all philosophy and
+      chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper
+      into the under-world of that mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to
+      us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of
+      its semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
+      that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the
+      servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with
+      indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty
+      apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a bandbox,
+      and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
+      abyss:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you captive
+      are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to deliver you.
+      We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are free.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
+      silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
+      easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
+      heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
+      drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has anybody got a match?&rdquo; said Rupert grimly. &ldquo;I fancy we have come
+      pretty near the end of this business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare, yellow-papered
+      apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window.
+      An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It
+      had, however, revealed something more practical&mdash;an iron gas bracket
+      just above my head. I struck another match and lit the gas. And we found
+      ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room sat
+      an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver
+      hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of
+      Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of
+      the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
+      background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
+      place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
+      wood about an hour before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, &ldquo;permit me to have
+      the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your complaints
+      happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have
+      therefore ventured to come to your rescue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a
+      moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said,
+      with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had
+      rescued me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, madam,&rdquo; said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. &ldquo;We have very
+      satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled
+      affairs with them very satisfactorily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We persuaded them, my dear madam,&rdquo; said Rupert, laughing, &ldquo;by knocking
+      them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat
+      by the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I understand,&rdquo; she said, with the air of a person about to begin
+      knitting, &ldquo;that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have,&rdquo; said Rupert proudly; &ldquo;we have resisted their oppression and
+      conquered it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, thanks,&rdquo; answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A considerable pause followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The road is quite clear for you, madam,&rdquo; said Rupert pleasantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us
+      for an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what about Greenwood and Burrows?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;What did I understand
+      you to say had become of them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are lying on the floor upstairs,&rdquo; said Rupert, chuckling. &ldquo;Tied hand
+      and foot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that settles it,&rdquo; said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang
+      into her seat again, &ldquo;I must stop where I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert looked bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop where you are?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Why should you stop any longer where you
+      are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The question rather is,&rdquo; said the old lady, with composure, &ldquo;what power
+      can force me to go anywhere else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last I said, &ldquo;Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you don't intend to tie me up,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and carry me off? I
+      certainly shall not go otherwise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear madam,&rdquo; cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, &ldquo;we
+      heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,&rdquo; replied the captive
+      grimly. &ldquo;I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to
+      myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some sense of honour?&rdquo; repeated Rupert, and the last light of
+      intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with
+      rolling eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once
+      more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. &ldquo;Can we do nothing for
+      you, madam?&rdquo; I said forlornly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said the lady, &ldquo;if you are particularly anxious to do me a little
+      favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague
+      violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the
+      sitting-room and scene of battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,&rdquo; Mr Burrows was saying,
+      lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; &ldquo;but we must consider the
+      matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; cried Rupert, gasping, &ldquo;she won't come out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who won't come out?&rdquo; asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in
+      an argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lady downstairs,&rdquo; replied Rupert. &ldquo;The lady who was locked up. She
+      won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these
+      fellows loose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a jolly sensible suggestion,&rdquo; cried Basil, and with a bound he was on
+      top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds with
+      hands and teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple
+      jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as particularly
+      sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other hand, was
+      heaving with herculean laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Basil, in his cheeriest way, &ldquo;I think we must be getting
+      away. We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to
+      stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we've made ourselves at
+      home. Good night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert desperately, &ldquo;for God's sake come and see what you
+      can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the discomfort out of my
+      mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these
+      gentlemen won't mind perhaps...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. &ldquo;No,
+      no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make a tour of
+      the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others
+      which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil Grant,
+      days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to have gone
+      mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the end of the day
+      and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the sky after rain,
+      and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me. But this
+      day's work was destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we
+      left that house, ten minutes afterwards, one half-witted touch was added
+      which rolled all our minds in cloud. If Rupert's head had suddenly fallen
+      off on the floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of Greenwood's
+      shoulders, we could scarcely have been more suddenly stricken. And yet of
+      this we had no explanation. We had to go to bed that night with the
+      prodigy and get up next morning with it and let it stand in our memories
+      for weeks and months. As will be seen, it was not until months afterwards
+      that by another accident and in another way it was explained. For the
+      present I only state what happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading,
+      the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison again
+      closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as pitch. The
+      old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she seemed to
+      have a weird preference for sitting in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady turned
+      her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong gaslight.
+      Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up and swept a
+      sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked quickly at Greenwood
+      and Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this subservience had been
+      offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in this subservience, and
+      desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they received it. To my
+      surprise they did not seem to have seen it at all: Burrows was paring his
+      nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the group and
+      had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing fact became apparent. It
+      was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the group, the golden gaslight
+      lighting up his strong face and figure. His face wore an expression
+      indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of a very grave smile. His
+      head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It was he who had
+      acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was he, beyond any shadow of
+      reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I hear,&rdquo; he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, &ldquo;I hear,
+      madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without
+      success.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you,&rdquo; answered the lady
+      with a high colour. &ldquo;But you have not found me guilty of treachery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I willingly attest it, madam,&rdquo; replied Basil, in the same level tones,
+      &ldquo;and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of
+      loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large
+      discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of
+      these gentlemen. But you know that you can safely leave it at mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The captive made another reverence. &ldquo;I have never complained of your
+      injustice,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I need scarcely say what I think of your
+      generosity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room,
+      Basil holding the door open for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. &ldquo;This will be a
+      relief to you,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it will,&rdquo; replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like a
+      sphinx.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as if
+      we had fallen into it from some high tower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, &ldquo;I always thought you were
+      my brother. But are you a man? I mean&mdash;are you only a man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At present,&rdquo; replied Basil, &ldquo;my mere humanity is proved by one of the
+      most unmistakable symbols&mdash;hunger. We are too late for the theatre in
+      Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes the
+      green omnibus!&rdquo; and he had leaped on it before we could speak. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my room,
+      swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having jumped
+      over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the latest and
+      wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less a thing than
+      the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and headquarters of the
+      source of all our joys and sorrows&mdash;the Club of Queer Trades. I
+      should expand this story for ever if I explained how ultimately we ran
+      this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting
+      things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of
+      roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a cellar, the
+      finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding of the subterranean
+      passage, the finding of the Club of Queer Trades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger one
+      than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and
+      seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and
+      hospitable dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces that I
+      knew. There was Mr Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated between
+      the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
+      Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
+      Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented the
+      Dancing Language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their chairs,
+      and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat gaped at us
+      like a missing tooth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The president's not here,&rdquo; said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to
+      Professor Chadd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;N-no,&rdquo; said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness.
+      &ldquo;I can't imagine where he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens,&rdquo; said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, &ldquo;I really feel a little
+      nervous. I'll go and see.&rdquo; And he ran out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's there, gentlemen&mdash;he's there all right&mdash;he's coming in
+      now,&rdquo; he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the
+      beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who was the
+      first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought indistinctly,
+      could be maddest in this world of madmen: what fantastic was it whose
+      shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an expectation?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled and
+      shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and in
+      evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person
+      particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But on
+      this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses.
+      Hors-d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort of
+      ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was over.
+      The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon being made
+      of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of the
+      moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and eating and
+      drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he was there,
+      the king of these capering idiots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the
+      time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his
+      feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is a custom in this society that the president
+      for the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast of sentiment,
+      but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of his trade. We
+      then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It is my business, as
+      the senior member, to open by stating my claim to membership of this club.
+      Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to do
+      justice and to administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in
+      my work, as it was, I was not touching even the fringe of justice. I was
+      seated in the seat of the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and ermine;
+      nevertheless, I held a small and lowly and futile post. I had to go by a
+      mean rule as much as a postman, and my red and gold was worth no more than
+      his. Daily there passed before me taut and passionate problems, the
+      stringency of which I had to pretend to relieve by silly imprisonments or
+      silly damages, while I knew all the time, by the light of my living common
+      sense, that they would have been far better relieved by a kiss or a
+      thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West
+      Highlands. Then, as this grew on me, there grew on me continuously the
+      sense of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper
+      or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had to say.
+      Then came the time when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed
+      as a madman and melted from public life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I who
+      were listening with intensity to this statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself
+      privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral differences.
+      Before very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly secret)
+      had spread over the whole of society. People were tried before me not for
+      the practical trifles for which nobody cares, such as committing a murder,
+      or keeping a dog without a licence. My criminals were tried for the faults
+      which really make social life impossible. They were tried before me for
+      selfishness, or for an impossible vanity, or for scandalmongering, or for
+      stinginess to guests or dependents. Of course these courts had no sort of
+      real coercive powers. The fulfilment of their punishments rested entirely
+      on the honour of the ladies and gentlemen involved, including the honour
+      of the culprits. But you would be amazed to know how completely our orders
+      were always obeyed. Only lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden
+      lady in South Kensington whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for
+      being the means of breaking off an engagement through backbiting,
+      absolutely refused to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons
+      had been inopportune enough to rescue her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for
+      the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the explanation of
+      the old lady's strange discontent and her still stranger content with her
+      lot. She was one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court. She was
+      one of the clients of his Queer Trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health of
+      Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of everything having
+      been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the presence
+      of God. We dimly heard Basil say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance Agency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had made
+      long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it had begun, like a
+      true cycle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1696-h.htm or 1696-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/9/1696/
+
+Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers, and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f53f390
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1696 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1696)
diff --git a/old/1696-h.htm.2019-03-21 b/old/1696-h.htm.2019-03-21
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..72741a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1696-h.htm.2019-03-21
@@ -0,0 +1,6543 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Club of Queer Trades
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: November 17, 2008 [EBook #1696]
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by G. K. Chesterton
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter 1. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter 2. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter 3. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter 4. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter 5. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter 6. &nbsp;&nbsp;</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something to
+      do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America.
+      There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising space by
+      piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos
+      and complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or
+      happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find
+      the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first
+      glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing
+      attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only
+      looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency
+      or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the
+      twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream.
+      If the Thugs set up a Strangers' Assassination Company in one of the great
+      buildings in Norfolk Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to
+      answer inquiries, no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades
+      reigns in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of
+      fossils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is
+      soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the
+      absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must
+      have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an
+      entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in
+      the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or
+      variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not
+      admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's
+      furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their
+      trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock
+      Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to
+      the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith
+      affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be
+      a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus
+      the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days
+      collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in
+      them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what
+      Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or
+      cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to
+      realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at
+      the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should
+      feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have
+      come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not
+      altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies
+      as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast
+      and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I
+      collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of
+      some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the
+      doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but
+      darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the
+      Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully
+      misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of
+      Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of
+      course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations, at any rate,
+      shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said,
+      was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner
+      or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis
+      call me facetiously 'The King of Clubs'. They also call me 'The Cherub',
+      in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I have presented in my
+      declining years. I only hope the spirits in the better world have as good
+      dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one
+      very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it
+      was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a
+      star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
+      unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
+      would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
+      like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
+      might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt
+      the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
+      sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of
+      Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast
+      to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour&mdash;the
+      whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic
+      relics, appeared curiously keen and modern&mdash;a powerful, legal face.
+      And no one but I knew who he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene
+      that occurred in&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, when one of the most acute and forcible of the
+      English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that
+      occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all.
+      For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something
+      curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the
+      law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as a
+      K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the people
+      concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken
+      one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man who
+      had attempted a crime of passion: &ldquo;I sentence you to three years
+      imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given conviction, that
+      what you require is three months at the seaside.&rdquo; He accused criminals
+      from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal crimes, but of things
+      that had never been heard of in a court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack
+      of humour, and morbidity deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in
+      that celebrated diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that
+      brilliant patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to
+      give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the household
+      had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the Premier again to
+      step forward, which he did with quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a
+      sudden, grating voice: &ldquo;Get a new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog.
+      Get a new soul.&rdquo; All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was
+      premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually
+      deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent
+      and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable
+      defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the advocates
+      were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the
+      time came for the great judge to give a summing-up; and one of his
+      celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly
+      looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he
+      looked sad and lowering at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments,
+      and then burst into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as
+      follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
+      tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that
+      gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he
+      was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the
+      great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck
+      his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even
+      unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily,
+      when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a
+      huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry to bother you, Basil,&rdquo; he gasped. &ldquo;I took a liberty&mdash;made an
+      appointment here with a man&mdash;a client&mdash;in five minutes&mdash;I
+      beg your pardon, sir,&rdquo; and he gave me a bow of apology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil smiled at me. &ldquo;You didn't know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I had a practical
+      brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to
+      be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at
+      everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist,
+      an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a&mdash;what are you now,
+      Rupert?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am and have been for some time,&rdquo; said Rupert, with some dignity, &ldquo;a
+      private detective, and there's my client.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being given,
+      the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked swiftly
+      into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and said, &ldquo;Good
+      evening, gentlemen,&rdquo; with a stress on the last syllable that somehow
+      marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social. He had a
+      large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black moustache,
+      which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by his sad
+      sea-blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil immediately said to me, &ldquo;Let us come into the next room, Gully,&rdquo; and
+      was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major
+      Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten
+      altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
+      remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a
+      quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do
+      not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he was
+      anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who recovered
+      British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes of an old
+      maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was
+      precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm
+      he had, which was of the nature of a religion&mdash;the cultivation of
+      pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered
+      like a child's at a new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when
+      the troops were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Major,&rdquo; said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
+      himself into a chair, &ldquo;what is the matter with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover,&rdquo; said the Major, with
+      righteous indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
+      shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me. Something.
+      Preposterous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly sleepy
+      assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's fragmentary, but
+      excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the reader to what we
+      endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major Brown in my own words.
+      But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a
+      trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder
+      and rounder as we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the
+      world, from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in
+      his chair and talking like a telegram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
+      enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay, it
+      was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's
+      house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The
+      thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in the
+      little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad
+      water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his
+      little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in
+      heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and had,
+      perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of
+      those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather
+      than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw life like
+      a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would not have
+      believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that within a few
+      yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a whirlpool of
+      incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or dreamed of in the
+      horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
+      faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
+      from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
+      along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden
+      walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured
+      appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a
+      theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of
+      us, it was not altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel
+      footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a
+      religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with
+      fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him
+      a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid
+      specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite pansies
+      predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and then into
+      bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors and other
+      mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of anguish selected
+      the best roots from the less excellent, praised some, disparaged others,
+      made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth and rarity to a
+      degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The man was just
+      pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to the Major.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll tell you what, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you're interested in them things,
+      you just get on to that wall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the wall!&rdquo; cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
+      quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,&rdquo;
+       hissed the tempter. &ldquo;I'll help you up, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of the
+      Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with an easy
+      leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical assistance,
+      he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The second after,
+      the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a
+      fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up
+      by the most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in
+      all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and
+      there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast pattern of
+      pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it was not their
+      horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for the pansies were
+      arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the sentence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown
+      looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the barrow had
+      suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its incredible
+      inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown did
+      not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military exploits,
+      he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person, but by the
+      same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have
+      thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not
+      easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the garden
+      arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it
+      extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money like water for
+      a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to offer, he admitted
+      the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and waited as he would have
+      done in the presence of a man with six legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and the
+      watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the gravel
+      path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who on earth are you?&rdquo; he gasped, trembling violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Major Brown,&rdquo; said that individual, who was always cool in the hour
+      of action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
+      stammered wildly, &ldquo;Come down&mdash;come down here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At your service,&rdquo; said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass
+      beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run
+      towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide led
+      him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed house,
+      until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man turned
+      with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For heaven's sake,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;don't mention jackals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran
+      downstairs with a clatter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and
+      peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in the
+      world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to see that
+      the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; he said, bowing simply, &ldquo;I am Major Brown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said the lady; but she did not turn her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour
+      of Bedford Park. &ldquo;You have come, I suppose,&rdquo; she said mournfully, &ldquo;to tax
+      me about the hateful title-deeds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come, madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to know what is the matter. To know why my
+      name is written across your garden. Not amicably either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe
+      the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene, the
+      frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was still,
+      and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he studied
+      cried to heaven for his blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I must not turn round,&rdquo; said the lady; &ldquo;every afternoon till the
+      stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to
+      accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is almost six,&rdquo; he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper
+      clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the
+      lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most
+      attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising,
+      the face of an elf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That makes the third year I have waited,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;This is an
+      anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would
+      happen once and for all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From low
+      down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a voice
+      cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door and
+      looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the street,
+      where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon sparks. On
+      returning, he found the lady in green trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the end,&rdquo; she cried, with shaking lips; &ldquo;it may be death for both
+      of us. Whenever&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse proclamation
+      from the dark street, again horribly articulate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
+      frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too long
+      and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational Major was a
+      little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the drawing-room.
+      Scarcely had he done so than the terrific voice came:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown, Major Brown, where did&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time&mdash;in
+      time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries
+      appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man thrust
+      through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again, it had
+      vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. &ldquo;Where's your coal-cellar?&rdquo;
+       he said, and stepped out into the passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him with wild grey eyes. &ldquo;You will not go down,&rdquo; she cried,
+      &ldquo;alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this the way?&rdquo; replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three
+      at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in,
+      feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied, a
+      pair of great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly
+      belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of the
+      head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a brutal
+      image of destiny. But the Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly
+      clear and intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure until he had
+      slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of the
+      invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one of his long,
+      bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a muscle pulled it off
+      the ground and laid the huge living man, with a crash, along the floor. He
+      strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a cat. They rolled over and
+      over. Big as the man was, he had evidently now no desire but to escape; he
+      made sprawls hither and thither to get past the Major to the door, but
+      that tenacious person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the
+      other hand to a beam. At length there came a strain in holding back this
+      human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to rend and part
+      from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and the dim fat figure
+      of the giant vanished out of the cellar, leaving the torn coat in the
+      Major's hand; the only fruit of his adventure and the only clue to the
+      mystery. For when he went up and out at the front door, the lady, the rich
+      hangings, and the whole equipment of the house had disappeared. It had
+      only bare boards and whitewashed walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lady was in the conspiracy, of course,&rdquo; said Rupert, nodding. Major
+      Brown turned brick red. &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I think not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
+      nothing. When next he spoke he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,&rdquo; said the
+      Major carefully; &ldquo;there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string, and
+      this letter,&rdquo; and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Mr Plover,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re
+      Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow.
+      The coal-cellar, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut in:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it dated from anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;oh, yes!&rdquo; replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; &ldquo;14 Tanner's
+      Court, North&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me your
+      revolver.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was some
+      time before he answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think you'll need it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps not,&rdquo; said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. &ldquo;One never knows.
+      But going down a dark court to see criminals&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think they are criminals?&rdquo; asked his brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert laughed stoutly. &ldquo;Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a
+      harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless
+      experiment, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?&rdquo; asked Basil, in the same
+      distant and monotonous voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am looking at the letter,&rdquo; said the mad judge calmly; though, as a
+      matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. &ldquo;I don't think it's the sort
+      of letter one criminal would write to another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear boy, you are glorious,&rdquo; cried Rupert, turning round, with
+      laughter in his blue bright eyes. &ldquo;Your methods amaze me. Why, there is
+      the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You might
+      as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of thing that
+      was likely to be set up in Trafalgar Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not
+      otherwise move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's rather good,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but, of course, logic like that's not what
+      is really wanted. It's a question of spiritual atmosphere. It's not a
+      criminal letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is. It's a matter of fact,&rdquo; cried the other in an agony of
+      reasonableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Facts,&rdquo; murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
+      animals, &ldquo;how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly&mdash;in fact, I'm
+      off my head&mdash;but I never could believe in that man&mdash;what's his
+      name, in those capital stories?&mdash;Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points
+      to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in
+      all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree.
+      It's only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up&mdash;only the
+      green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have eternity to stretch our legs in,&rdquo; replied the mystic. &ldquo;It can be
+      an infinity of things. I haven't seen any of them&mdash;I've only seen the
+      letter. I look at that, and say it's not criminal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what's the origin of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't the vaguest idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed collecting
+      his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through
+      silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and
+      deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as a
+      ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and saw
+      it was a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was Lord
+      Kitchener. What would you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused a moment, and went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation of
+      putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would not
+      think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of ordinary
+      personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that he inherited a
+      dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a
+      seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if he refused the
+      ordeal. With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet&mdash;but not with
+      Kitchener. I should know all that, because in my public days I knew him
+      quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals quite well.
+      It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres.&rdquo; And he closed his
+      eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and
+      pity. The former said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think&mdash;until your
+      spiritual mystery turns up&mdash;that a man who sends a note recommending
+      a crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at least
+      tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral tastes.
+      Can I have that revolver?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; said Basil, getting up. &ldquo;But I am coming with you.&rdquo; And he
+      flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the
+      corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You!&rdquo; said Rupert, with some surprise, &ldquo;you scarcely ever leave your hole
+      to look at anything on the face of the earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I scarcely ever,&rdquo; he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance,
+      &ldquo;hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at
+      once, without going to see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he led the way out into the purple night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
+      Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet
+      Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major
+      Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop and
+      flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike
+      delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest
+      among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and
+      poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly
+      to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight at
+      danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we go in now?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not get police?&rdquo; asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the
+      street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not sure,&rdquo; answered Rupert, knitting his brows. &ldquo;Of course, it's
+      quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of us, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shouldn't get the police,&rdquo; said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert glanced
+      at him and stared hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;you're trembling. What's the matter&mdash;are you
+      afraid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cold, perhaps,&rdquo; said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he
+      was shaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're laughing,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I know that confounded, silent, shaky laugh
+      of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all three
+      of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I shouldn't call the police,&rdquo; said Basil. &ldquo;We four heroes are quite
+      equal to a host,&rdquo; and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the rest
+      of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned abruptly,
+      the revolver glittering in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand close,&rdquo; he said in the voice of a commander. &ldquo;The scoundrel may be
+      attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and rush
+      in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the
+      old judge and his convulsion of merriment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
+      suddenly over his shoulder, &ldquo;when I say 'Four', follow me with a rush. If
+      I say 'Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say 'Stop',
+      stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If they attack us I
+      shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your sword-stick ready. Now&mdash;one,
+      two, three, four!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the room
+      like an invasion, only to stop dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared, at
+      the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful glance, we
+      saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and drawers of
+      bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed moustache, and
+      the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked up as we came to
+      a standstill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you knock?&rdquo; he asked pleasantly. &ldquo;I am sorry if I did not hear. What
+      can I do for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
+      himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is your name P. G. Northover?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is my name,&rdquo; replied the other, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his
+      face, &ldquo;that this letter was written by you.&rdquo; And with a loud clap he
+      struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man called
+      Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; said the Major, breathing hard, &ldquo;what about that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about it, precisely,&rdquo; said the man with the moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Major Brown,&rdquo; said that gentleman sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Northover bowed. &ldquo;Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say!&rdquo; cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; &ldquo;why, I want this
+      confounded thing settled. I want&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly, sir,&rdquo; said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of
+      the eyebrows. &ldquo;Will you take a chair for a moment.&rdquo; And he pressed an
+      electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room beyond.
+      The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but stood
+      chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy, young
+      man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Hopson,&rdquo; said Northover, &ldquo;this is Major Brown. Will you please finish
+      that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will excuse me, gentlemen,&rdquo; said the egregious Northover, with his
+      radiant smile, &ldquo;if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have
+      some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday
+      tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we? Ha! ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence ensued;
+      a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G. Northover; a raging
+      silence on the part of everybody else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled
+      with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the
+      handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity, placed
+      a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few
+      moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him. He took
+      up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered something,
+      muttering&mdash;&ldquo;Careless.&rdquo; Then he read it again with the same
+      impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown,
+      whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you will find that all right, Major,&rdquo; he said briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear
+      later, but he found it like this:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Major Brown to P. G. Northover.                                    £ s. d.
+   January 1, to account rendered                                    5  6 0
+   May 9, to potting and embedding of 200 pansies                    2  0 0
+   To cost of trolley with flowers                                   0 15 0
+   To hiring of man with trolley                                     0  5 0
+   To hire of house and garden for one day                           1  0 0
+   To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3  0 0
+   To salary of Miss Jameson                                         1  0 0
+   To salary of Mr Plover                                            1  0 0
+                                                                 &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+                                                             Total £14  6 0
+  A Remittance will oblige.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What,&rdquo; said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly
+      rising out of his head, &ldquo;What in heaven's name is this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement.
+      &ldquo;It's your account, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My account!&rdquo; The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. &ldquo;My
+      account! And what have I got to do with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Northover, laughing outright, &ldquo;naturally I prefer you to pay
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words
+      came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into
+      the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on
+      the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the
+      united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the
+      empty floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me go, you scamps,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;Let me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand still,&rdquo; cried Rupert authoritatively. &ldquo;Major Brown's action is
+      excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A customer has a perfect right,&rdquo; said Northover hotly, &ldquo;to question an
+      alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?&rdquo;
+       shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain or
+      danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and
+      exasperating mystery. &ldquo;Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent
+      tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mad,&rdquo; said Northover, gazing blankly round; &ldquo;all of them mad. I didn't
+      know they travelled in quartettes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enough of this prevarication,&rdquo; said Rupert; &ldquo;your crimes are discovered.
+      A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though only a private
+      detective myself, I will take the responsibility of telling you that
+      anything you say&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mad,&rdquo; repeated Northover, with a weary air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the
+      strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;may I ask you a question?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You?&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;certainly, Mr Grant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you tell me,&rdquo; said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow, as
+      he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, &ldquo;can you tell me
+      what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and futile
+      irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something&mdash;a name with a hyphen&mdash;Gurney-Brown;
+      that was it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when did the house change hands?&rdquo; said Basil, looking up sharply. His
+      strange eyes were burning brilliantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came in last month,&rdquo; said the Major.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great
+      office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! it's too perfect&mdash;it's too exquisite,&rdquo; he gasped, beating the
+      arms with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing
+      voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like
+      weathercocks in a whirlwind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound it, Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert, stamping. &ldquo;If you don't want me to go
+      mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Northover rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Permit me, sir, to explain,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And, first of all, permit me to
+      apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable
+      blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you
+      will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and
+      dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand the
+      loss.&rdquo; And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the
+      waste-paper basket and bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. &ldquo;But I don't even
+      begin to understand,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;What bill? what blunder? what loss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and
+      with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration, there
+      were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,
+      especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn
+      intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know where you are, Major?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows I don't,&rdquo; said the warrior, with fervour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are standing,&rdquo; replied Northover, &ldquo;in the office of the Adventure and
+      Romance Agency, Limited.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what's that?&rdquo; blankly inquired Brown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark
+      eyes on the other's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon
+      some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen&mdash;something,
+      in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread;
+      something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved;
+      something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving
+      free.' Did you ever feel that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not,&rdquo; said the Major shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I must explain with more elaboration,&rdquo; said Mr Northover, with a
+      sigh. &ldquo;The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great
+      modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear
+      of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us
+      and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for a
+      varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance
+      Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround
+      him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door,
+      an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his
+      life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a
+      mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of
+      incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of
+      the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in
+      the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I
+      consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did not
+      see the end of it. I need scarcely explain further the monstrous mistake.
+      Your predecessor in your present house, Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber
+      to our agency, and our foolish clerks, ignoring alike the dignity of the
+      hyphen and the glory of military rank, positively imagined that Major
+      Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the same person. Thus you were suddenly
+      hurled into the middle of another man's story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How on earth does the thing work?&rdquo; asked Rupert Grant, with bright and
+      fascinated eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We believe that we are doing a noble work,&rdquo; said Northover warmly. &ldquo;It
+      has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is
+      more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic
+      existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he
+      reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a
+      book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to
+      slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but
+      we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall
+      to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from
+      pursuers&mdash;all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse
+      of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one
+      great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his
+      childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes,
+      and at the same instant dance and dream.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery
+      had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased
+      speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good
+      humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course; awfully dense, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No doubt at all, the scheme
+      excellent. But I don't think&mdash;&rdquo; He paused a moment, and looked
+      dreamily out of the window. &ldquo;I don't think you will find me in it.
+      Somehow, when one's seen&mdash;seen the thing itself, you know&mdash;blood
+      and men screaming, one feels about having a little house and a little
+      hobby; in the Bible, you know, 'There remaineth a rest'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire, at
+      any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown's view of the matter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should be obliged for your card, sir,&rdquo; said the Major, in his abrupt
+      but courteous voice. &ldquo;Pay for chair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It ran, &ldquo;P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency, 14
+      Tanner's Court, Fleet Street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth is 'C.Q.T.'?&rdquo; asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major's
+      shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you know?&rdquo; returned Northover. &ldquo;Haven't you ever heard of the Club
+      of Queer Trades?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't heard of,&rdquo;
+       said the little Major reflectively. &ldquo;What's this one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people
+      who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one of
+      the earliest members.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You deserve to be,&rdquo; said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a
+      smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer
+      smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. &ldquo;A fine chap, that
+      Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance of being
+      a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all people
+      getting into the nets of one of Grigsby's tales,&rdquo; and he laughed out aloud
+      in the silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An
+      owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and
+      somewhat absurd inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! back again, Major?&rdquo; cried Northover in surprise. &ldquo;What can I do for
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's horribly absurd,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Something must have got started in me
+      that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate
+      desire to know the end of it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The end of it all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Major. &ldquo;'Jackals', and the title-deeds, and 'Death to
+      Major Brown'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am terribly sorry, Major,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;but what you ask is impossible. I
+      don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules of the
+      agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an outsider; I
+      am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you
+      understand&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no one,&rdquo; said Brown, &ldquo;who understands discipline better than I
+      do. Thank you very much. Good night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the little man withdrew for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
+      garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance
+      Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in her
+      languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly that she
+      had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades provided for
+      them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who went down into a
+      coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a murderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa, and
+      the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged&mdash;except,
+      perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine unselfishness
+      as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his
+      wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue
+      eyes, that he is wondering what were the title-deeds, and why he was not
+      allowed to mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is
+      religious, and believes that he will realize the rest of those purple
+      adventures in a better world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect
+      place for talking on earth&mdash;the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar.
+      To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying
+      hill is a fairy tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us
+      a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
+      infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor
+      parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented
+      by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow
+      streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a
+      narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do
+      not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was
+      civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its
+      morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going through
+      a criminal slum, &ldquo;I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals.&rdquo; But here
+      there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums. Here
+      there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway engineers and
+      philanthropists&mdash;two dingy classes of men united by their common
+      contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were the
+      churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here, above
+      all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines and
+      hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But though one never
+      knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing we knew
+      we should not see&mdash;anything really great, central, of the first
+      class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable
+      our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked entries,
+      to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the
+      Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that
+      at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may
+      strike down the street like a thunderbolt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must always remember also,&rdquo; said Grant to me, in his heavy
+      abstracted way, when I had urged this view, &ldquo;that the very vileness of the
+      life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the
+      human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something
+      worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization. But
+      yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good
+      people. And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than
+      sailing round the world. Besides&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No answer came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on,&rdquo; I said, looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he was
+      paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of the tram.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; I asked, peering over also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very odd,&rdquo; said Grant at last, grimly, &ldquo;that I should have been
+      caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these
+      people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo; I asked, leaning over further, &ldquo;where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I was right enough,&rdquo; he went on, in that strange continuous and
+      sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, &ldquo;I was
+      right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes; they
+      are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two; they may
+      beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the same; they
+      are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings and haloes&mdash;at
+      any rate compared to that man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which man?&rdquo; I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which
+      Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly
+      passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to
+      attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious
+      consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black
+      top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the
+      decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something
+      as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was
+      curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey
+      and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental;
+      he had two black tufts of moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has he done?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not sure of the details,&rdquo; said Grant, &ldquo;but his besetting sin is a
+      desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has adopted
+      some imposture or other to effect his plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What plan?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;If you know all about him, why don't you tell me
+      why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you've made a mistake in my meaning,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don't know his
+      name. I never saw him before in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never saw him before!&rdquo; I cried, with a kind of anger; &ldquo;then what in
+      heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in
+      England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I meant what I said,&rdquo; said Basil Grant calmly. &ldquo;The moment I saw that
+      man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid innocence.
+      I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being
+      themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in these
+      slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest sense,
+      trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be evil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you never saw him before&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In God's name, look at his face,&rdquo; cried out Basil in a voice that
+      startled the driver. &ldquo;Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal pride
+      which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one
+      of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to
+      insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at his hair. In
+      the name of God and the stars, look at his hat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I stirred uncomfortably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, after all,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;this is very fanciful&mdash;perfectly absurd.
+      Look at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the mere facts,&rdquo; he cried out in a kind of despair. &ldquo;The mere facts!
+      Do you really admit&mdash;are you still so sunk in superstitions, so
+      clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you
+      not trust an immediate impression?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, an immediate impression may be,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a little less practical
+      than facts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosh,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;On what else is the whole world run but immediate
+      impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this
+      world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual
+      impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you
+      measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook?
+      Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may save
+      your business&mdash;you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely
+      upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which I
+      pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man
+      walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You always put things well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;but, of course, such things cannot
+      immediately be put to the test.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us get off and follow him,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I bet you five pounds it will
+      turn out as I say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked
+      along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him. Then
+      he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down an
+      ill-lit alley. We swung silently after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man of what kind?&rdquo; asked my friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I
+      thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part
+      of the world at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes,&rdquo; said Basil, and said no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like
+      the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the glare of
+      intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The intervals
+      between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the whole city. Our
+      pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts;
+      but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped
+      also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness
+      in front of us was the darkness of his body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a
+      yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on a
+      very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas cut
+      the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the interview
+      was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could be. Our
+      exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At once. Take a cab.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A heavy, deep voice from inside said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the
+      striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just
+      helping us. It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it
+      like midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,&rdquo; I
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Basil humbly. &ldquo;It leads to Berkeley Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and tried
+      to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I wondered and
+      doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right. We were coming
+      to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London&mdash;more dreary, one
+      must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very extraordinary!&rdquo; said Basil Grant, as we turned into Berkeley
+      Square.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is extraordinary?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;I thought you said it was quite
+      natural.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wonder,&rdquo; answered Basil, &ldquo;at his walking through nasty streets;
+      I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do wonder at his
+      going to the house of a very good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What very good man?&rdquo; I asked with exasperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The operation of time is a singular one,&rdquo; he said with his imperturbable
+      irrelevancy. &ldquo;It is not a true statement of the case to say that I have
+      forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man. I remember it all
+      vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But fifteen years ago I
+      knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long
+      sight better than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's
+      house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is old Beaumont?&rdquo; I asked irritably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood&mdash;don't you know
+      his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more
+      work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't know what; anyhow,
+      he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight
+      disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that real
+      disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and
+      novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you
+      went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you,
+      so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap
+      alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a
+      matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or
+      the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession of literary
+      and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is romantic; men
+      who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on their feet only
+      to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands for fear of
+      tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons are generally
+      fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself, good men. I am
+      really surprised to see a criminal enter there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My good fellow,&rdquo; I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, &ldquo;the
+      truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language,
+      you have the 'slight disadvantage' of being off your head. You see a total
+      stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about
+      his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an honest
+      man's door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come
+      home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet with the
+      distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I had outlived vanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want now?&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he cried out, &ldquo;what a girl wants when she wears her new frock; I
+      want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a monitor&mdash;I
+      want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right about that
+      man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say it cannot be
+      tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend Beaumont. He is
+      a delightful man to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you really mean&mdash;?&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will apologize,&rdquo; he said calmly, &ldquo;for our not being dressed for a
+      call,&rdquo; and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark
+      stone steps and rang at the bell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving my
+      friend's name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to respect.
+      We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly but that
+      our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet
+      us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again, &ldquo;I have
+      not seen you for years. Have you been&mdash;er&mdash;&rdquo; he said, rather
+      wildly, &ldquo;have you been in the country?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for all that time,&rdquo; answered Basil, smiling. &ldquo;I have long given up my
+      official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a deliberate
+      retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An inopportune moment,&rdquo; cried the ardent gentleman. &ldquo;You come at the most
+      opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not,&rdquo; answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of
+      laughter came from the inner room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Lord Beaumont solemnly, &ldquo;I have Wimpole here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who is Wimpole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; cried the other, &ldquo;you must have been in the country. You must
+      have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is
+      Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to who Shakespeare was,&rdquo; answered my friend placidly, &ldquo;my views go no
+      further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was Mary
+      Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is&mdash;&rdquo; and his speech also was
+      cloven with a roar of laughter from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wimpole!&rdquo; cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. &ldquo;Haven't you heard
+      of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation, I do
+      not say into an art&mdash;for that, perhaps, it always was but into a
+      great art, like the statuary of Michael Angelo&mdash;an art of
+      masterpieces. His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot
+      dead. They are final; they are&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the
+      very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of the
+      inner house into the hall where we were standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, my dear chap,&rdquo; began Lord Beaumont hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it,&rdquo; exploded the large old
+      gentleman. &ldquo;I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like
+      that. I won't be made a guy. I won't&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come,&rdquo; said Beaumont feverishly. &ldquo;Let me introduce you. This is Mr
+      Justice Grant&mdash;that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of
+      Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who has not?&rdquo; asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing
+      him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger, but
+      even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his face
+      and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart though
+      corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent
+      courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show an
+      unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so
+      much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,&rdquo; he said gruffly, &ldquo;to fail
+      in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in
+      your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but
+      that flashy half-caste jackanapes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre air
+      came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly enjoying
+      the intellectual banquet within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond,&rdquo; said Lord
+      Beaumont, turning to Grant, &ldquo;even if you only remember him as a
+      schoolboy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfectly,&rdquo; said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and
+      respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter
+      Cholmondeliegh, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going
+      yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
+      struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of obeisance
+      and a vague utterance of, &ldquo;If Lady Beaumont... a lady, of course,&rdquo; he
+      followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely been deposited
+      there half a minute before another peal of laughter told that he had (in
+      all probability) been scored off again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh,&rdquo; said Beaumont, as he
+      helped us off with our coats. &ldquo;He has not the modern mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the modern mind?&rdquo; asked Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive&mdash;and faces the facts
+      of life seriously.&rdquo; At this moment another roar of laughter came from
+      within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only ask,&rdquo; said Basil, &ldquo;because of the last two friends of yours who
+      had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
+      thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon&mdash;this way, if I
+      remember right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish entertainment,
+      as he trotted after us towards the interior, &ldquo;I can never quite make out
+      which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so
+      reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
+      drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
+      slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon. Two
+      people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the house,
+      Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and with the
+      intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal amusement
+      and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at him
+      with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the
+      window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from
+      the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair
+      suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man&mdash;the
+      unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North
+      London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole,&rdquo; said Muriel Beaumont eagerly, &ldquo;is
+      how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite
+      philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm
+      sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree with Miss Beaumont,&rdquo; said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
+      indignation. &ldquo;If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it
+      difficult to keep my countenance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Difficult to keep your countenance,&rdquo; cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
+      alarm; &ldquo;oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
+      readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never talk tomfooleries,&rdquo; said the other, &ldquo;without first knowing my
+      audience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on
+      the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding the
+      whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very
+      particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house
+      rapturously listening to Wimpole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?&rdquo; asked Grant. &ldquo;It is about
+      business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this
+      strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of side room
+      out of the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drummond,&rdquo; said Basil sharply, &ldquo;there are a great many good people, and a
+      great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of
+      coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are
+      wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has also
+      some common sense. What do you make of Wimpole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face
+      became suddenly as red as his moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a fair judge of him,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; asked Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I hate him like hell,&rdquo; said the other, after a long pause and
+      violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss
+      Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating. Grant said
+      quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But before&mdash;before you came to hate him, what did you really think
+      of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in a terrible difficulty,&rdquo; said the young man, and his voice told
+      us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. &ldquo;If I spoke about him as
+      I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to be
+      able to say that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But
+      again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him, that is my private affair. But I
+      also disapprove of him&mdash;really I do believe I disapprove of him quite
+      apart from my private feelings. When first he came, I admit he was much
+      quieter, but I did not like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then
+      that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this
+      fellow, with his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the way
+      he does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be bad to
+      fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap savagely,
+      unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if you want it,
+      the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate the man because
+      a certain person admires him. But I believe that apart from that I should
+      hate the man because old Sir Walter hates him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the
+      young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless
+      worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct
+      realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I
+      was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could not
+      help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however nobly
+      disguised from himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was
+      perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the name of God, let's get away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected me.
+      I only know that for some reason or other he so affected me that I was,
+      within a few minutes, in the street outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is a beastly but amusing affair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is?&rdquo; I asked, baldly enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have
+      just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very night, at which
+      Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very
+      extraordinary about that. The extraordinary thing is that we are not
+      going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;it is already six o'clock and I doubt if we could
+      get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the fact that we are
+      not going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you?&rdquo; said Grant. &ldquo;I'll bet you'll see something extraordinary in
+      what we're doing instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at him blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doing instead?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;What are we doing instead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house on
+      a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is only to
+      show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this cigar, wait
+      until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole have left this
+      house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;But I do not know which is likely to leave first.
+      Have you any notion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again, Mr
+      Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is a thing to be
+      flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some time to
+      analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will both have to leave within
+      reasonable time, for they will both have to get dressed and come back to
+      dinner here tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house
+      drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened that we
+      really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh came out
+      at the same moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt;
+      then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of them, made Sir
+      Walter smile and say: &ldquo;The night is foggy. Pray take my cab.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with
+      both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had hissed in my
+      ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog&mdash;run.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
+      streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but we are
+      running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at the
+      fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away
+      rejoicing, having just come in contact with the more generous among the
+      rich. Then the two men talked together as men do talk together after
+      giving and receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to
+      forgiveness or a duel&mdash;at least so it seemed as we watched it from
+      ten yards off. Then the two men shook hands heartily, and one went down
+      one fork of the road and one down another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run after that scoundrel,&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;let us catch him now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; I shouted wildly to Grant. &ldquo;That's the wrong turning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He ran on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idiot!&rdquo; I howled. &ldquo;Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has slipped us.
+      He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong... Are you deaf? You're
+      wrong!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think I am,&rdquo; he panted, and ran on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I saw him!&rdquo; I cried. &ldquo;Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It's the
+      old man... What are you doing? What are we to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep running,&rdquo; said Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet,
+      whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was
+      utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charlie,&rdquo; said Basil hoarsely, &ldquo;can you believe in my common sense for
+      four minutes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I said, panting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at once
+      when I say 'Now'. Now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
+      gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we got him
+      tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and
+      full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him;
+      when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil's
+      arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street side and
+      waited. As I say, I had no notion why.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry to incommode you,&rdquo; said Basil calmly out of the darkness; &ldquo;but
+      I have made an appointment here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An appointment!&rdquo; I said blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged on
+      the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. &ldquo;I have
+      made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow. An old
+      friend. Jasper Drummond his name is&mdash;you may have met him this
+      afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the
+      Beaumonts' dinner is over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness. By
+      the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my mind that the
+      same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the bench of a
+      British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine no
+      other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old country
+      gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the
+      court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white face of
+      Jasper Drummond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said blankly, &ldquo;the thing is incredible. You were right; but
+      what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where dukes and
+      duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him, that
+      extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn't say a funny thing.
+      He didn't say anything at all. What does it mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what it means,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the place,
+      jumped back, as from a mouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; he said weakly, &ldquo;... what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's
+      breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered state,
+      seemed to make some effort to retain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
+      Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As far as he
+      could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or at
+      least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism. The
+      greater part of the document had been torn and obliterated in the
+      struggle, but the termination remained. It ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      C. Says... Keep countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      W. Keep... British Museum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      C. Know whom talk... absurdities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      W. Never talk absurdities without...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of final
+      fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid
+      chant. &ldquo;What is it? It is a great new profession. A great new trade. A
+      trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A new profession!&rdquo; said the young man with the red moustache vaguely; &ldquo;a
+      new trade!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A new trade,&rdquo; repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, &ldquo;a new
+      profession! What a pity it is immoral.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what the deuce is it?&rdquo; cried Drummond and I in a breath of blasphemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said Grant calmly, &ldquo;the great new trade of the Organizer of
+      Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I
+      have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character.
+      He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really at
+      all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and his name is
+      not Cholmondeliegh. He is a swindler, and a swindler of a perfectly
+      delightful and novel kind. He hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead
+      up to other people's repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which
+      you may find on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has
+      arranged for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for
+      him. In short, he allows himself to be scored off for a guinea a night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this fellow Wimpole&mdash;&rdquo; began Drummond with indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This fellow Wimpole,&rdquo; said Basil Grant, smiling, &ldquo;will not be an
+      intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and
+      silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the
+      floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That fellow,&rdquo; cried Drummond furiously, &ldquo;that fellow ought to be in
+      gaol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Basil indulgently; &ldquo;he ought to be in the Club of Queer
+      Trades.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been
+      reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the
+      large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones
+      of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no
+      longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell
+      over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small
+      things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I
+      was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections,
+      was one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when a loud
+      knock came at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me. He
+      and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in the act
+      of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head to come
+      my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a small and
+      confidential affair at the table of a good but unconventional political
+      lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a third guest, a
+      Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was an authority on
+      chimpanzees. As Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never
+      seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual social
+      sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break the ice.
+      The theory, like all my theories, was complete; but as a fact it was not
+      Basil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was handed a visiting card inscribed: &ldquo;Rev. Ellis Shorter&rdquo;, and
+      underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry could
+      not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, &ldquo;Asking the favour of
+      a few moments' conversation on a most urgent matter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of God
+      has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on my
+      dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at my
+      entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He flapped
+      a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black
+      gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he
+      flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired,
+      white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come&mdash;I
+      can only say&mdash;I can only say in my defence, that I come&mdash;upon an
+      important matter. Pray forgive me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I have to say,&rdquo; he said brokenly, &ldquo;is so dreadful&mdash;it is so
+      dreadful&mdash;I have lived a quiet life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in
+      time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's honest air of
+      bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger and
+      more tragic than my own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said gently: &ldquo;Pray go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old, noticed
+      my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so sorry,&rdquo; he said meekly; &ldquo;I wouldn't have come&mdash;but for&mdash;your
+      friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Major Brown!&rdquo; I said, with some interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid shawl
+      about. &ldquo;He told me you helped him in a great difficulty&mdash;and my
+      difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. &ldquo;Will it take long, Mr Shorter?&rdquo;
+       I asked. &ldquo;I have to go out to dinner almost at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his
+      moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no right, Mr Swinburne&mdash;I have no right at all,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If
+      you have to go out to dinner, you have of course&mdash;a perfect right&mdash;of
+      course a perfect right. But when you come back&mdash;a man will be dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and
+      drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and a
+      captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this dear,
+      doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you have a cigar?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you,&rdquo; he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not
+      smoking cigars was a social disgrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A glass of wine?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now,&rdquo; he repeated with that
+      hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often try
+      to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all night
+      drinking rum-punch. &ldquo;Not just now, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing else I can get for you?&rdquo; I said, feeling genuinely sorry for the
+      well-mannered old donkey. &ldquo;A cup of tea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he
+      drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these excitements.
+      As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex&rdquo;&mdash;he threw this in with an
+      indescribable airiness of vanity&mdash;&ldquo;I have never known such things
+      happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What things happen?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened himself with sudden dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have never been forcibly
+      dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the
+      character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It may
+      be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never heard of it,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;as among the duties of a clergyman.
+      But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
+      follow you correctly. Dressed up&mdash;as what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As an old woman,&rdquo; said the vicar solemnly, &ldquo;as an old woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make an
+      old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic, and
+      I said respectfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I ask how it occurred?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will begin at the beginning,&rdquo; said Mr Shorter, &ldquo;and I will tell my
+      story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past eleven
+      this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and pay
+      certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the
+      treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded
+      some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the matter
+      of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very
+      earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of
+      several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled (unless
+      my memory misleads me) Eglantine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that
+      can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation. He had,
+      I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the detective
+      stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be kept back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I then proceeded,&rdquo; he went on, with the same maddening conscientiousness
+      of manner, &ldquo;to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course; Mr Robert Carr) who
+      is temporarily assisting our organist, and having consulted with him (on
+      the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I cannot as yet say whether
+      justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ pipes), I finally dropped in
+      upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings are
+      usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss Brett, a
+      newcomer in our village, but very active in church work, had very kindly
+      consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is entirely under my wife's
+      management as a rule, and except for Miss Brett, who, as I say, is very
+      active, I scarcely know any members of it. I had, however, promised to
+      drop in on them, and I did so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss Brett,
+      but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of course, for any
+      person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in these matters of
+      full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and repeat the actual
+      details of a conversation, particularly a conversation which (though
+      inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one
+      which did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was in
+      fact&mdash;er&mdash;mostly about socks. I can, however, remember
+      distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a
+      woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she was
+      introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather was very
+      changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted, I
+      cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with
+      white hair. The only other figure in the group that caught my attention
+      was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners, silver
+      hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic member of the
+      party; and her views on the subject of pinafores, though expressed with a
+      natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong and advanced.
+      Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply in black) it
+      could not be denied that the others looked in some way what you men of the
+      world would call dowdy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did so I
+      heard something which&mdash;I cannot describe it&mdash;something which
+      seemed to&mdash;but I really cannot describe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you hear?&rdquo; I asked, with some impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard,&rdquo; said the vicar solemnly, &ldquo;I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with
+      the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl), the
+      following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the spot, and
+      as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them down on a
+      piece of paper. I believe I have it here.&rdquo; He fumbled in his
+      breast-pocket, bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and
+      programmes of village concerts. &ldquo;I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James,
+      the following words: 'Now's your time, Bill.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely
+      and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about his
+      facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand it.
+      It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should address
+      another maiden lady as 'Bill'. My experience, as I have said, may be
+      incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in exclusively
+      spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But it seemed to me
+      odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand the
+      phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time that
+      the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', were by no means pronounced with that
+      upper-class intonation which, as I have already said, had up to now
+      characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation. In fact, the words, 'Now's your
+      time, Bill', would have been, I fancy, unsuitable if pronounced with that
+      upper-class intonation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
+      surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
+      hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against
+      the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still
+      knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was only
+      an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said genially, 'I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
+      really be going. I have&mdash;er&mdash;' I stopped here, for the words she
+      had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely
+      business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I think,
+      natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have not the
+      least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render them
+      phonetically. But she said,&rdquo; and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly at his
+      papers, &ldquo;she said: 'Chuck it, fat 'ead,' and she added something that
+      sounded like 'It's a kop', or (possibly) 'a kopt'. And then the last cord,
+      either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My
+      esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said:
+      'Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up before you start jawin'.
+      You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days with this way of doin'
+      things, har lar theater.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
+      fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
+      society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
+      dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but now,
+      alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange
+      female freemasonry. I remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was just, in my
+      absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana's
+      nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The moment
+      it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Brett&mdash;or what I had called Miss Brett&mdash;was standing in
+      front of me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
+      Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an
+      attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a
+      shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her
+      cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wo&mdash;no, that is I saw
+      that instead of being a woman she&mdash;he, I mean&mdash;that is, it was a
+      man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to
+      arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed
+      with a higher fever of nervousness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As for Miss Mowbray, she&mdash;he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her
+      arm&mdash;that is she had his arm&mdash;round her neck&mdash;my neck I
+      mean&mdash;and I could not cry out. Miss Brett&mdash;that is, Mr Brett, at
+      least Mr something who was not Miss Brett&mdash;had the revolver pointed
+      at me. The other two ladies&mdash;or er&mdash;gentlemen, were rummaging in
+      some bag in the background. It was all clear at last: they were criminals
+      dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in
+      Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ''Urry up,
+      'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get off.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett&mdash;I mean the man with the revolver&mdash;'why
+      should we show 'im the game?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at the door,
+      whom they called Bill. 'A man wot knows wot 'e's doin' is worth ten wot
+      don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it
+      had been Miss Mowbray's). 'Bring out the picture, 'Arry.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other two
+      women&mdash;I mean men&mdash;were turning over baggage, and asked them for
+      something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room and
+      held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that display,
+      all the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands
+      of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise; but no
+      more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely
+      good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional
+      photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and was relieved
+      against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no
+      snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth
+      was that I had never sat for such a photograph. It was a photograph that I
+      had never had taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good
+      deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the
+      details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,
+      my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never
+      posed so for any photographer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver, with
+      ill-timed facetiousness. 'Parson, prepare to meet your God.' And with this
+      he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that part of
+      the picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair of white
+      whiskers and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait of an old
+      lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand against the
+      woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin is like
+      another. It had required only the whiskers and the collar to make it me in
+      every hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he shot the
+      glass back again. 'Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin' to the lady.
+      Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin' to us, as bein'
+      the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the
+      man who's come to live in these parts, don't you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, 'that's 'is mother.
+      'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he flung his fingers in a
+      general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who was exactly
+      like me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke out
+      Bill from the door. 'Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain't goin' to do you
+      no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as for
+      the old woman's clothes&mdash;why, you'll look lovely in 'em.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man behind
+      me. 'Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this man Hawker tonight.
+      Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne when 'e sees us. Maybe
+      on the other 'and&mdash;'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be dead when we goes away.
+      Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now as you know, 'e shuts 'isself up
+      and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why and we does.
+      The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded
+      funny coincidence,' he said, accenting the penultimate, 'it's a very
+      unusual piece of good luck, but you're 'is mother.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his head in a
+      ruminant manner, 'when I first saw it I said&mdash;old Shorter. Those were
+      my exact words&mdash;old Shorter.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'What do you mean, you wild creatures?' I gasped. 'What am I to do?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver,
+      good-humouredly; 'you've got to put on those clothes,' and he pointed to a
+      poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I had
+      no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a loaded pistol.
+      In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an old woman&mdash;as
+      somebody else's mother, if you please&mdash;and was dragged out of the
+      house to take part in a crime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were
+      closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out towards the
+      lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that ever
+      straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every
+      external, we were six very respectable old ladies of small means, in black
+      dresses and refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really five
+      criminals and a clergyman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as I
+      walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To cry out, so long as
+      we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for the
+      ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the other
+      hand, to attempt to stop strangers and explain the situation was
+      impossible, because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long
+      before I had persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a story,
+      my companions would certainly have got off themselves, and in all
+      probability would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had the
+      misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an
+      inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this, that the
+      Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and keeping
+      pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like step, until at
+      length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing under it. I had made up
+      my mind. Until we reached them we were all equally demure and silent and
+      swift. When we reached them I suddenly flung myself against the railings
+      and roared out: 'Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Rule Britannia! Get your 'air
+      cut. Hoop-la! Boo!' It was a condition of no little novelty for a man in
+      my position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled,
+      drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' he began gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear hoarsely.
+      'Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear the words and see the
+      neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I yelled, and yelled&mdash;I was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains
+      that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our village concerts; I
+      rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the policeman, 'I
+      shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly she is right enough.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of thing;
+      but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I had ever
+      heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'When we get you past,' whispered Bill, 'you'll howl louder; you'll howl
+      louder when we're burning your feet off.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares
+      that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting and
+      horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their
+      poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I
+      cannot think there is anything so heart-breaking in hell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions and
+      the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome the policeman
+      and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one can describe
+      anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched suddenly forward
+      and ran my head into his chest, calling out (if I remember correctly),
+      'Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was at that moment that I remembered most
+      dearly that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back of the
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect
+      imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor friend. We
+      will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but she is quite a
+      lady&mdash;only eccentric.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed character of
+      Miss James, 'she wants looking after.' 'She does,' said the policeman,
+      'but I'll look after her.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. 'She wants her friends. She
+      wants a particular medicine we've got.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, 'no other medicine any
+      good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal shame, the
+      Vicar of Chuntsey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, 'I don't like the
+      eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er 'ead in my
+      stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the looks of you, I've
+      seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong 'uns. Who are you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable
+      dignity. 'Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office
+      who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If you
+      choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend, no
+      doubt you are legally entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have any
+      legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment. Under
+      cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned for an instant on me
+      faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the darkness.
+      When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions on to them,
+      I had seen the telegraphic look flash from face to face saying that only
+      retreat was possible now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute
+      reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not quit the
+      role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the
+      real case, the officer would merely have thought that I was slightly
+      recovered and would have put me in charge of my friends. Now, however, if
+      I liked I might safely undeceive him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
+      doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of the
+      Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but such
+      necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many
+      improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be drunk.
+      Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
+      quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that I
+      was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly and
+      easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four
+      turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure. At
+      the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the
+      street like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
+      dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was
+      gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and
+      blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried
+      them in clean earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair. Both
+      the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on, impressed
+      me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind these things he
+      was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed courage and a
+      sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told his story with
+      many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing
+      realism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now&mdash;&rdquo; I began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like servile
+      energy, &ldquo;and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man Hawker. I
+      cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said was real. But
+      surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for reasons that you
+      perceive. Among other things, they wouldn't believe me. What is to be
+      done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend Basil Grant,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is the best man we can go to. He and I
+      were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
+      back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd
+      plaid shawl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's
+      flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden
+      staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and scrappy
+      interior, the white gleam of Basil's shirt-front and the lustre of his fur
+      coat flung on the wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He was drinking
+      a glass of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come back from the
+      dinner-party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter with
+      the genuine simplicity and respect which he never failed to exhibit in
+      dealing with any human being. When it was over he said simply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy
+      collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening,
+      that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at Mr
+      Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer or
+      his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the old
+      clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more and
+      more from his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite sure, Mr Shorter,&rdquo; he repeated, &ldquo;that you don't know
+      Captain Fraser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him
+      returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his
+      tone when he first entered my presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil sprang smartly to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then our course is clear,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You have not even begun your
+      investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go
+      together to see Captain Fraser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When?&rdquo; asked the clergyman, stammering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really do not think that it is necessary,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again, and
+      put his hands in his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; he said, with emphasis. &ldquo;Oh&mdash;you don't think it necessary;
+      then,&rdquo; and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation,
+      &ldquo;then, Mr Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you
+      without your whiskers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my
+      life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact with
+      an intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that splendour
+      and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived perpetually near
+      the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason. And
+      I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart
+      disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a
+      sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very moment of
+      delivering a judgement for the salvation of a fellow creature, Basil Grant
+      had gone mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your whiskers,&rdquo; he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. &ldquo;Give me your
+      whiskers. And your bald head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, Basil,&rdquo; I implored, &ldquo;you're a little excited. Finish your
+      wine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whiskers,&rdquo; he answered sternly, &ldquo;whiskers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for the
+      door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was the quiet
+      room was turned into something between a pantomime and a pandemonium by
+      those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables were vaulted with a
+      noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery scattered in
+      smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed after the Rev.
+      Ellis Shorter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last
+      half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of
+      Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed
+      him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have
+      expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting would
+      have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old vicar
+      looked like a sort of farcical fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not seem to be
+      so much astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of something
+      like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the
+      unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length Shorter was cornered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he panted, &ldquo;you can't do anything to me. It's
+      quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm. It's only a social
+      fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't blame you, my man,&rdquo; said Basil coolly. &ldquo;But I want your whiskers.
+      And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; said Mr Shorter, laughing, &ldquo;we provide them ourselves. They
+      don't belong to Captain Fraser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the deuce does all this mean?&rdquo; I almost screamed. &ldquo;Are you all in an
+      infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald head belong to Captain
+      Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do with the
+      affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Grant, &ldquo;I didn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?&rdquo; I asked, staring. &ldquo;Why
+      not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, &ldquo;the fact is I was
+      detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your bedroom?&rdquo; I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point
+      when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
+      Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
+      night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner, and
+      by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers
+      and a plaid shawl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, gentlemen,&rdquo; cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. &ldquo;Sit down
+      all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm in it,
+      and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him
+      from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that,
+      eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
+      duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly
+      pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades. These
+      two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking) are
+      Professional Detainers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what on earth's that?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne,&rdquo; began he who had once been the
+      Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
+      indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no longer
+      its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of a young
+      city man. &ldquo;It is really nothing very important. We are paid by our clients
+      to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people whom they want
+      out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser&mdash;&rdquo; and with that
+      he hesitated and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil smiled also. He intervened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted us
+      both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa, and
+      the lady with whom we were all to have dined is&mdash;er&mdash;what is I
+      believe described as 'the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours
+      with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our
+      houses so as to let him have the field to himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And of course,&rdquo; said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, &ldquo;as I had
+      to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady, I had
+      to come with something rather hot and strong&mdash;rather urgent. It
+      wouldn't have done to be tame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I acquit you of tameness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, sir,&rdquo; said the man respectfully, &ldquo;always very grateful for any
+      recommendation, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close
+      red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil's
+      admirable Burgundy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy
+      from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often knocked up against us
+      before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you with
+      hunting stories, when you're burning to be introduced to somebody, he's
+      from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours, just
+      when you wanted to go to the Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The
+      Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one thing I don't understand,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Why you are both
+      vicars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in Essex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That may have been a mistake, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But it was not our fault.
+      It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the
+      highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain you
+      gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who
+      impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain. We
+      are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to satisfy the
+      firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars. Before that we had
+      two years as colonels, the next in our scale. Colonels are four guineas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst
+      like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose from many
+      separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who wore light,
+      loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he was lean
+      and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a degree
+      so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of the
+      unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There are
+      inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial
+      civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that
+      restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant
+      officer in the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in his
+      time, to judge from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but
+      his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that &ldquo;the moon&rdquo; had been not
+      unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is a
+      fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which
+      consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed
+      spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a
+      green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big
+      game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These
+      always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in
+      quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of
+      the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental
+      sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as
+      he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey,
+      though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness,
+      and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety. To find a
+      middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant
+      is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and
+      solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman
+      no good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man
+      admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good
+      man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells;
+      they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange smoke
+      from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which discredit
+      a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If Keith's tales
+      were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at any rate, every
+      opportunity of being a scamp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his brother
+      Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was invariably the
+      case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was a clever young
+      fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and cleverness, when sharply
+      combined, so often produce, a somewhat extravagant scepticism. He saw
+      doubt and guilt everywhere, and it was meat and drink to him. I had often
+      got irritated with this boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular
+      occasion I am bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I
+      was astounded at Basil's opposing him, however banteringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I could
+      not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seriously mean, Basil,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that you think that that
+      fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad
+      Mullah and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has one fault,&rdquo; said Basil thoughtfully, &ldquo;or virtue, as you may happen
+      to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style; he is too
+      veracious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,&rdquo; said Rupert contemptuously, &ldquo;be
+      a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all his life
+      in one ancestral manor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, he's extremely fond of change of scene,&rdquo; replied Basil
+      dispassionately, &ldquo;and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his
+      chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is
+      that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
+      frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort of
+      things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they are too
+      absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if he were
+      sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far from paradox,&rdquo; said his brother, with something rather like a
+      sneer, &ldquo;you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe
+      that truth is stranger than fiction?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,&rdquo; said Basil placidly.
+      &ldquo;For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial
+      to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than anything
+      I ever heard of,&rdquo; said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. &ldquo;Do you, on your
+      soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe Keith's words,&rdquo; answered the other. &ldquo;He is an honest man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,&rdquo; said Rupert
+      cynically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely in
+      himself,&rdquo; I said mildly; &ldquo;his mode of life&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and Drummond
+      Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Grant,&rdquo; he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the door,
+      &ldquo;I've got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me a
+      hundred pounds? There's a good chap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was
+      sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked up
+      a quill-pen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I cross it?&rdquo; he asked, opening a cheque-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, &ldquo;since Lieutenant
+      Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before his family, I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here you are, Ugly,&rdquo; said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction of
+      the quite nonchalant officer. &ldquo;Are you in a hurry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. &ldquo;As a matter of fact I want
+      it now. I want to see my&mdash;er&mdash;business man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on the
+      tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, &ldquo;Receiver of stolen goods,
+      perhaps.&rdquo; What he did say was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A business man? That's rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like
+      ill-temper:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?&rdquo; said Rupert Grant
+      grimly. &ldquo;Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to go with
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a
+      little; his brow blackened sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What did you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony, and
+      he answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along
+      with you to this house-agent's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my bedroom. Look
+      under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!&rdquo; And with a furious energy
+      which took away our breath he banged his way out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
+      excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
+      transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the
+      disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation was
+      certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable unrest,
+      annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil and I
+      tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other that we
+      had both noticed this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
+      unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
+      Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets
+      grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser
+      with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the
+      figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a
+      gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or fifth
+      lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the
+      mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a sort of sulky
+      desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all indescribably dingy
+      in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for a penny toyshop, ran
+      the inscription: &ldquo;P. Montmorency, House-Agent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the office of which I spoke,&rdquo; said Keith, in a cutting voice.
+      &ldquo;Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about my
+      welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
+      business adviser?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
+      would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you will excuse me,&rdquo; he said, clenching his hands behind his back, &ldquo;I
+      think I should feel myself justified in&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Come along in,&rdquo; exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture of
+      savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at his
+      heels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind a
+      bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey
+      hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
+      combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black frock-coat,
+      a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical angle, and looked,
+      generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as anything could look,
+      short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
+      gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he was,
+      did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon
+      something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was a
+      ferret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and steely
+      voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised for hours
+      together in his bedroom. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Montmorency, I think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment,
+      picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive into his trousers
+      pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a house-agent, are you not?&rdquo; asked Rupert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes
+      wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present that he
+      knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A house-agent,&rdquo; cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were
+      &ldquo;burglar&rdquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes... oh, yes,&rdquo; said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish
+      smile. &ldquo;I am a house-agent... oh, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think,&rdquo; said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, &ldquo;that Lieutenant
+      Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his request.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter.
+      &ldquo;It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your suggestions er&mdash;about
+      the br&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right,&rdquo; cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness
+      of a gunshot. &ldquo;We needn't bother about all that. If you've done what I
+      told you, all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he turned sharply towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
+      stammering a moment he said: &ldquo;Excuse me... Mr Keith... there was another
+      matter... about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried to get all the heating
+      apparatus possible under the circumstances ... but in winter... at that
+      elevation...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't expect much, eh?&rdquo; said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same
+      sudden skill. &ldquo;No, of course not. That's all right, Montmorency. There
+      can't be any more difficulties,&rdquo; and he put his hand on the handle of the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, &ldquo;that Mr Montmorency
+      has something further to say to you, lieutenant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only,&rdquo; said the house-agent, in desperation, &ldquo;what about the birds?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; said Rupert, in a general blank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about the birds?&rdquo; said the house-agent doggedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, who had remained throughout the proceedings in a state of
+      Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a state of
+      Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before you go, Lieutenant Keith,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Come now. Really, what about
+      the birds?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take care of them,&rdquo; said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long back
+      turned to us; &ldquo;they shan't suffer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, sir, thank you,&rdquo; cried the incomprehensible house-agent, with
+      an air of ecstasy. &ldquo;You'll excuse my concern, sir. You know I'm wild on
+      wild animals. I'm as wild as any of them on that. Thank you, sir. But
+      there's another thing...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an indescribable
+      laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh, the purport of which was
+      direct and essential, and yet which one cannot exactly express. As near as
+      it said anything, verbally speaking, it said: &ldquo;Well, if you must spoil it,
+      you must. But you don't know what you're spoiling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is another thing,&rdquo; continued Mr Montmorency weakly. &ldquo;Of course, if
+      you don't want to be visited you'll paint the house green, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Green!&rdquo; shouted Keith. &ldquo;Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won't have a
+      house of another colour. Green!&rdquo; and before we could realize anything the
+      door had banged between us and the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he spoke
+      before the echoes of the door died away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What
+      is the matter with him? Is he unwell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I should think not,&rdquo; said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. &ldquo;The
+      negotiations have been somewhat difficult&mdash;the house is rather&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Green,&rdquo; said Rupert calmly. &ldquo;That appears to be a very important point.
+      It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin my
+      companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for
+      houses by their colour? Do clients write to a house-agent asking for a
+      pink house or a blue house? Or, to take another instance, for a green
+      house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only,&rdquo; said Montmorency, trembling, &ldquo;only to be inconspicuous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert had his ruthless smile. &ldquo;Can you tell me any place on earth in
+      which a green house would be inconspicuous?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing out
+      a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the counter, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; I can't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't suggest an explanation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to
+      suggest a sudden situation, &ldquo;I can't. And may I, as a busy man, be excused
+      if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in
+      connection with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to get
+      for you, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
+      staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
+      answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has unduly
+      delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my apparent
+      impertinence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all, sir,&rdquo; said the house-agent, taking a South American spider
+      idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the slope of his
+      desk. &ldquo;Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious to face
+      Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was deserted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say now?&rdquo; cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said
+      nothing now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself
+      dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey
+      street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely
+      meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly to
+      thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then into
+      a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a knowledge
+      of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a crowd stirs
+      ever so slightly it means that there is madness in the heart and core of
+      the mob. It soon became evident that something really important had
+      happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front,
+      with the cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we soon
+      learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl concerned
+      with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead on the stones of the
+      street. Of the other four, all interesting matters were, as far as we were
+      concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous fact. One of the four survivors
+      of the brutal and perhaps fatal scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant
+      Keith, his clothes torn to ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his
+      knuckles. One other thing, however, pointed at him in a worse manner. A
+      short sword, or very long knife, had been drawn out of his elegant
+      walking-stick, and lay in front of him upon the stones. It did not,
+      however, appear to be bloody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
+      omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with his
+      incontrollable and intolerable secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the man, constable,&rdquo; he shouted, pointing at the battered
+      lieutenant. &ldquo;He is a suspicious character. He did the murder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's been no murder done, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, with his automatic
+      civility. &ldquo;The poor man's only hurt. I shall only be able to take the
+      names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good eye kept on
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have a good eye kept on that one,&rdquo; said Rupert, pale to the lips, and
+      pointing to the ragged Keith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round of
+      the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had completed his
+      task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately connected
+      with the examination had gone away. He still found, however, one
+      eager-faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It was
+      Rupert Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Constable,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have a very particular reason for asking you a
+      question. Would you mind telling me whether that military fellow who
+      dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address or not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, after a reflective pause; &ldquo;yes, he gave me
+      his address.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Rupert Grant,&rdquo; said that individual, with some pomp. &ldquo;I have
+      assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder whether you would
+      tell me, as a special favour, what address?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable looked at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton
+      Common, near Purley, Surrey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as fast
+      as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to breakfast;
+      he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always the attitude of the
+      indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when Basil and I came
+      down we found him ready and restless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the
+      meal. &ldquo;What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do I think of him?&rdquo; inquired Basil slowly. &ldquo;I don't think anything
+      of him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm glad to hear it,&rdquo; said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy
+      that was somewhat exultant. &ldquo;I thought you'd come round to my view, but I
+      own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man is a
+      translucent liar and knave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, &ldquo;that I did
+      not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of him I meant
+      grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that he
+      did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of him,
+      since you think him a knave. I should say he was glaringly good myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake,&rdquo; said Rupert,
+      breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. &ldquo;What the deuce is the sense
+      of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our common agreement,
+      dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who doesn't
+      conceal his acquaintance with all the blackest and bloodiest scenes on
+      earth. We take the trouble to follow him to one of his appointments, and
+      if ever two human beings were plotting together and lying to every one
+      else, he and that impossible house-agent were doing it. We followed him
+      home, and the very same night he is in the thick of a fatal, or nearly
+      fatal, brawl, in which he is the only man armed. Really, if this is being
+      glaringly good, I must confess that the glare does not dazzle me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil was quite unmoved. &ldquo;I admit his moral goodness is of a certain kind,
+      a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of change and experiment.
+      But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are mere
+      coincidence or special pleading. It's true he didn't want to talk about
+      his house business in front of us. No man would. It's true that he carries
+      a sword-stick. Any man might. It's true he drew it in the shock of a
+      street fight. Any man would. But there's nothing really dubious in all
+      this. There's nothing to confirm&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As he spoke a knock came at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you please, sir,&rdquo; said the landlady, with an alarmed air, &ldquo;there's a
+      policeman wants to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show him in,&rdquo; said Basil, amid the blank silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost as
+      soon as he appeared there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think one of you gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, curtly but respectfully, &ldquo;was
+      present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew my attention
+      very strongly to a particular man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
+      constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn
+      in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is amusing,&rdquo; said Basil, laughing. &ldquo;I was in the very act of
+      clearing that poor officer's character of rather fanciful aspersions. What
+      about him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir,&rdquo; said the constable, &ldquo;I took all the men's addresses and had
+      them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more than that. All the
+      other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address.
+      The place doesn't exist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping
+      both his thighs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, by all that's good,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;This is a sign from heaven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's certainly very extraordinary,&rdquo; said Basil quietly, with knitted
+      brows. &ldquo;It's odd the fellow should have given a false address, considering
+      he was perfectly innocent in the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer,&rdquo; cried Rupert, in a sort of
+      rapture, &ldquo;I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You think every one as
+      good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful
+      acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean streets,
+      a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false address.
+      That's what we call glaring goodness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's certainly very extraordinary,&rdquo; repeated Basil. And he strolled
+      moodily about the room. Then he said: &ldquo;You are quite sure, constable, that
+      there's no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have really
+      gone to it and found it was a fraud?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was very simple, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, chuckling. &ldquo;The place he
+      named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were down
+      there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no such
+      house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is so near
+      London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to say nothing of
+      Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right enough. He was a
+      clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost England that people
+      know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a
+      particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there
+      isn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and
+      darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered almost for the
+      first time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather wondered
+      at the almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his original
+      prejudice in favour of the wildly questionable lieutenant. At length he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in
+      the district&mdash;by the way, what was the address?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but
+      before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the window in a
+      perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with the
+      sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I can tell you that, Basil,&rdquo; he said graciously as he idly plucked
+      leaves from a plant in the window. &ldquo;I took the precaution to get this
+      man's address from the constable last night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what was it?&rdquo; asked his brother gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The constable will correct me if I am wrong,&rdquo; said Rupert, looking
+      sweetly at the ceiling. &ldquo;It was: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley,
+      Surrey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right, sir,&rdquo; said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few
+      seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair so suddenly
+      that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his
+      lips had flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic
+      laughter struck and shook the ceiling&mdash;laughter that shook the
+      laughter, laughter redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not
+      stop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with
+      laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this time ill
+      almost with terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet. &ldquo;I am
+      awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also unpractical,
+      because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down to that place.
+      The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to know. It's quite out
+      of proportion to the comparatively small distance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get down to that place?&rdquo; I repeated blankly. &ldquo;Get down to what place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have forgotten its name,&rdquo; said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his
+      pockets as he rose. &ldquo;Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a
+      timetable?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seriously mean,&rdquo; cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort
+      of confusion of emotions. &ldquo;You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton
+      Common, do you? You can't mean that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?&rdquo; asked Basil, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you?&rdquo; said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the
+      plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,&rdquo; said Basil Grant. &ldquo;I
+      thought you wanted to find him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on
+      the floor. &ldquo;And in order to find him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you suggest the admirable
+      expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know
+      he can't be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting
+      laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on with
+      a reiterated gesture:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of St
+      Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be in the
+      Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store cupboard; but
+      out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only one where he has
+      just been systematically looked for and where we know that he is not to be
+      found&mdash;and that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to
+      go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; &ldquo;I thought you
+      might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly here
+      till I come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if they
+      really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I cannot
+      say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished decisively
+      with his great-coat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with a
+      considerable flurry of rationality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear chap,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;do you really mean that you see any good in
+      going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten
+      tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that
+      came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying
+      reference in a scrape?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Basil, taking out his watch, &ldquo;and, what's worse, we've lost
+      the train.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused a moment and then added: &ldquo;As a matter of fact, I think we may
+      just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and I
+      think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich
+      Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn't be in. But if
+      we get down by the 5.15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we shall
+      just catch him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Catch him!&rdquo; cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. &ldquo;I wish we
+      could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I keep forgetting the name of the common,&rdquo; said Basil, as he buttoned up
+      his coat. &ldquo;The Elms&mdash;what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That's
+      where we shall find him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is no such place,&rdquo; groaned Rupert; but he followed his brother
+      downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our
+      sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and do
+      not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the
+      fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was
+      that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared the
+      thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from our
+      breakfast table and said: &ldquo;I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten
+      Tails,&rdquo; we should have followed him to the end of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this
+      occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the
+      strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense
+      twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the
+      London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if
+      ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human
+      spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland
+      hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that
+      silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It seems to be one of
+      the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God&mdash;such a place
+      was Buxton Common, near Purley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But
+      it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our
+      expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional
+      wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless
+      than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the
+      foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which has led
+      men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under
+      the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not
+      there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at
+      us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the
+      gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell of
+      the windy common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly Basil
+      stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the dusk I
+      could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
+      slapping them together, &ldquo;here we are at last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked
+      above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign of
+      man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of that
+      wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
+      innkeeper standing at an open door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How jolly it is,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;to get back to civilization. That notion
+      that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till you've
+      really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel
+      flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man
+      that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the
+      good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you,
+      will be drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
+      wind died in the dreary trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own house.
+      I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth, and again
+      in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good fellow. But his
+      greatest virtue remains what I said originally.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort of
+      sanity. &ldquo;What is his greatest virtue?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His greatest virtue,&rdquo; replied Basil, &ldquo;is that he always tells the literal
+      truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger, and
+      slapping himself like a cabman, &ldquo;he doesn't seem to have been very literal
+      or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have
+      you brought us out to this infernal place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was too truthful, I confess,&rdquo; said Basil, leaning against the tree;
+      &ldquo;too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in a
+      little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time we
+      went in. We shall be late for dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert whispered to me with a white face:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
+      house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose so,&rdquo; I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a
+      cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as strange
+      as the wind:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, up here,&rdquo; cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above our
+      heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come up, all of you,&rdquo; he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a
+      schoolboy. &ldquo;Come up. You'll be late for dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a yard
+      anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them. Thus
+      occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of footholds
+      that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I supposed, have
+      been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the
+      waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly mystical
+      in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant's staircase
+      going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious voice above
+      called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
+      suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the
+      whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw
+      three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible
+      suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how,
+      half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer and
+      all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all probability,
+      laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us
+      about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when I thought what
+      his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly
+      let go of the tree and fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Swinburne,&rdquo; said Rupert suddenly, from above, &ldquo;what are we doing? Let's
+      get down again,&rdquo; and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he too
+      felt the shock of wakening to reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't leave poor Basil,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Can't you call to him or get hold of
+      him by the leg?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's too far ahead,&rdquo; answered Rupert; &ldquo;he's nearly at the top of the
+      beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks' nests, I
+      suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The
+      mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind. Then
+      I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far from
+      the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw
+      that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little
+      in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines taper
+      towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me feel lost
+      in space, like a falling star.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can nothing be done to stop Basil?&rdquo; I called out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; answered my fellow climber. &ldquo;He's too far up. He must get to the
+      top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again.
+      Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps he's talking to us,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rupert, &ldquo;he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to talk to
+      himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight; it's a known sign of
+      the brain going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was sounding
+      above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous tones in which he
+      had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now and
+      then, up there among the leaves and stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said, &ldquo;My
+      God!&rdquo; with a violent voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter&mdash;are you hurt?&rdquo; I cried, alarmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Listen to Basil,&rdquo; said the other in a very strange voice. &ldquo;He's not
+      talking to himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he is talking to us,&rdquo; I cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rupert simply, &ldquo;he's talking to somebody else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a sudden
+      burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear the conversational
+      voice above. I could hear two voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as before: &ldquo;Come
+      up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard in our
+      chambers more than once. It called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in the
+      branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face and fierce
+      moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly Southern
+      air that belonged to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily into
+      the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned, tiny
+      room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table, and a
+      circular seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was Basil,
+      who, in the instant after alighting there, had fallen into an attitude of
+      marmoreal ease as if he had been there from boyhood; he was smoking a
+      cigar with a slow pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who
+      looked happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with his granite
+      guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with the wild
+      whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the green umbrella,
+      and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The sealed jar of
+      strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle in the corner. In
+      the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne. Glasses were already
+      set for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot of a
+      light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then Basil
+      spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further
+      question about the cold veracity of our injured host.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't quite grasp it all,&rdquo; said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden
+      glare. &ldquo;Lieutenant Keith said his address was&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's really quite right, sir,&rdquo; said Keith, with an open smile. &ldquo;The bobby
+      asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully, that I lived in the
+      elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr
+      Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses of
+      this kind. He has a special line in arboreal villas. It's being kept
+      rather quiet at present, because the people who want these houses don't
+      want them to get too common. But it's just the sort of thing a fellow like
+      myself, racketing about in all sorts of queer corners of London, naturally
+      knocks up against.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?&rdquo; asked Rupert eagerly,
+      recovering his ease with the romance of reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and
+      nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;W-well, yes, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The fact was&mdash;er&mdash;my people wanted
+      me very much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared
+      myself for anything but natural history and botany and things like that.
+      My poor parents have been dead some years now, but&mdash;naturally I like
+      to respect their wishes. And I thought somehow that an arboreal villa
+      agency was a sort of&mdash;of compromise between being a botanist and
+      being a house-agent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert could not help laughing. &ldquo;Do you have much custom?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;N-not much,&rdquo; replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith, who
+      was (I am convinced) his only client. &ldquo;But what there is&mdash;very
+      select.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear friends,&rdquo; said Basil, puffing his cigar, &ldquo;always remember two
+      facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about any one who is
+      sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing about any
+      one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the most likely.
+      The second is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems
+      fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham
+      with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The Elms' over
+      it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic about that.
+      Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have
+      believed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink your wine, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Keith, laughing, &ldquo;for this confounded
+      wind will upset it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
+      mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
+      tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was the
+      reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and talk
+      not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for that
+      person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he were
+      always on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of these
+      chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his life. A
+      few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his
+      lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of them as
+      if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods
+      train or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a
+      veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a mild
+      prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a young captain in
+      the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in the Lancers;
+      another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable certainty
+      precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry,
+      and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his acquaintance over a
+      discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which
+      reduced the little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the
+      compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an
+      old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined with each
+      other twice a week until they died. I myself was another. I had met Grant
+      while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the National Liberal Club,
+      and exchanged a few words about the weather. Then we had talked for about
+      an hour about politics and God; for men always talk about the most
+      important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger
+      we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances
+      to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was
+      Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
+      interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest, if
+      not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language. He
+      was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded
+      man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an
+      unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to
+      and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-shops,
+      with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He was never seen
+      without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by the lighter wits
+      of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his little brick villa
+      in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There he lived with three
+      sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister demeanour. His life was
+      happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical students, but one would
+      not have called it exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred
+      when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a
+      tornado of conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
+      these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly in
+      the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember vividly
+      (for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with them) the
+      gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange calamity fell
+      upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class
+      and type (the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a Radical
+      of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical himself, but he
+      was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of Radical who passes
+      most of his time in abusing the Radical party. Chadd had just contributed
+      to a magazine an article called &ldquo;Zulu Interests and the New Makango
+      Frontier&rdquo;, in which a precise scientific report of his study of the
+      customs of the people of T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest
+      against certain interferences with these customs both by the British and
+      the Germans. He was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the
+      lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead, not of
+      anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and down the room,
+      shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his heavy tread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd,&rdquo; he was
+      saying, &ldquo;it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for all
+      that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way of
+      cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but for
+      all that you don't understand them as well as I do, who don't know an
+      assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more
+      Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always
+      championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are
+      sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are
+      not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass.
+      Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at
+      this umbrella.&rdquo; And he held up that sad but still respectable article.
+      &ldquo;Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge you have carried
+      that object under your arm, and I have no sort of doubt that you carried
+      it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to you to give one
+      wild yell and hurl it like a javelin&mdash;thus&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head, so that
+      it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase rocking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to
+      the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mental processes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;always go a little too fast. And they
+      are stated without method. There is no kind of inconsistency&rdquo;&mdash;and no
+      words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the word&mdash;&ldquo;between
+      valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their stage in the
+      evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial and requisite to
+      do so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this concession which I
+      have just described to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in
+      question is, nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in
+      the variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an inferior
+      evolutionary stage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone
+      like two pallid moons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear. But
+      there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I am very far from
+      being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage, whatever
+      the blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything stupid or
+      ignorant about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils in the dark.
+      It seems to me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be thought a sort
+      of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself?
+      Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are
+      not afraid of devils in the dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paper-knife
+      and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beyond all question,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude to
+      the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that our civilization
+      is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I apprehend you), is
+      or may be a retrogression from states identical with or analogous to the
+      state of the Zulus. Moreover, I shall be inclined to concede that such a
+      proposition is of the nature, in some degree at least, of a primary
+      proposition, and cannot adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean,
+      that the primary proposition of pessimism, or the primary proposition of
+      the non-existence of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do not
+      conceive you to be under the impression that you have demonstrated
+      anything more concerning this proposition than that it is tenable, which,
+      after all, amounts to little more than the statement that it is not a
+      contradiction in terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't understand,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but, on the other hand, as a
+      compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that
+      disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I began it
+      when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was
+      that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense that you are a
+      scientist, I know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For
+      instance, your theory of the origin of language, something about its
+      having come from the formulated secret language of some individual
+      creature, though you knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its
+      favour, still does not convince me, because I have a feeling that that is
+      not the way that things happen. If you ask me why I think so I can only
+      answer that I am a Zulu; and if you ask me (as you most certainly will)
+      what is my definition of a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has
+      climbed a Sussex apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost in an
+      English lane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your process of thought&mdash;&rdquo; began the immovable Chadd, but his speech
+      was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which always in such
+      families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm and
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in such men
+      the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but practical
+      life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out of the
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,&rdquo; said Basil
+      Grant, &ldquo;but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the men
+      who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it not, that
+      Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper of Asiatic manuscripts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a
+      great deal of pathos also. &ldquo;I believe it's true,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;If it is, it
+      will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great deal,
+      but great relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a lot of
+      things. James' health has never been good, and while we are as poor as we
+      are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his own dreadful
+      grinding notions and discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or
+      child. I have often been afraid that unless something of this kind
+      occurred we should really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe
+      it is practically settled.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am delighted,&rdquo; began Basil, but with a worried face, &ldquo;but these
+      red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't advise
+      you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I've known
+      men, and good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be
+      disappointed. Of course, if it is true&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is true,&rdquo; said the woman fiercely, &ldquo;it means that people who have
+      never lived may make an attempt at living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed
+      look in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it true?&rdquo; asked Basil, with burning eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a bit true,&rdquo; answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment. &ldquo;Your
+      argument was in three points fallacious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; demanded Grant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the professor slowly, &ldquo;in saying that you could possess a
+      knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! confound Zulu life,&rdquo; cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. &ldquo;I mean,
+      have you got the post?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts,&rdquo; he said, opening
+      his eye with childlike wonder. &ldquo;Oh, yes, I got that. But the real
+      objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me since
+      I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose a Zulu
+      truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it is
+      absolutely impeded by the facts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am crushed,&rdquo; said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's
+      sister retired to her room, possibly to laugh, possibly not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely long
+      and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may be our
+      excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with Grant) got
+      down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in
+      point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a
+      very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so
+      dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and
+      I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the
+      top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in being
+      really urgent and coercive&mdash;a telegram. This he opened with the same
+      heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he
+      read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but something, I know not
+      what, made me feel that the motionless figure had been pulled together
+      suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said
+      nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been for an instant cleared
+      and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to
+      me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it,
+      kicked it away like a cur from under him and came round to me in two
+      strides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you make of that?&rdquo; he said, and flattened out the wire in front
+      of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It ran: &ldquo;Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous. Chadd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does the woman mean?&rdquo; I said after a pause, irritably. &ldquo;Those women
+      have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he was
+      born.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are mistaken,&rdquo; said Grant composedly. &ldquo;It is true that all sensible
+      women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that, all
+      women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don't put it in
+      telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or God
+      all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at that. If
+      Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman in a
+      post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain
+      that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can
+      think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will force us of course,&rdquo; I said, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he replied; &ldquo;there is a cab-rank near.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge, through
+      Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road. Only as he
+      was opening the gate he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you will take my word for it, my friend,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;this is one
+      of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever
+      happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't quite see
+      it,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a dreamy
+      somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of the
+      inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so very
+      extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul like a
+      spider's web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of
+      fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should
+      lose his wits from excitement?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would not be extraordinary in the least,&rdquo; answered Basil, with
+      placidity. &ldquo;It would not be extraordinary in the least,&rdquo; he repeated, &ldquo;if
+      the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary circumstance to
+      which I referred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What,&rdquo; I asked, stamping my foot, &ldquo;was the extraordinary thing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The extraordinary thing,&rdquo; said Basil, ringing the bell, &ldquo;is that he has
+      not gone mad from excitement.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway
+      as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be
+      blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general
+      sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three
+      black-clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the
+      catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, won't you?&rdquo; said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat
+      rigid with pain. &ldquo;I think you had better be told first what has happened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she
+      continued, in an even and mechanical voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This
+      morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both
+      somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out of
+      the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however, without
+      it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said, 'Were you
+      looking for anything I could get?' He did not answer, but this constantly
+      happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my question, and still
+      he did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that
+      nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's
+      presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really do not know how
+      to describe the sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly, but at
+      the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one's brain. The fact
+      is, James was standing on one leg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Standing on one leg?&rdquo; I repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
+      suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. &ldquo;He was
+      standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the toe
+      pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only answer was
+      to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as if pointing to
+      the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at
+      the fireplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened.
+      James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the other,
+      gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a teetotum
+      the other way. 'Are you mad?' I cried. 'Why don't you answer me?' He had
+      come to a standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he always does,
+      with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he
+      remained a second or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift
+      his left foot slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the
+      air. I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on
+      the dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to him, implored
+      him to speak to us with appeals that might have brought back the dead, but
+      he has done nothing but hop and dance and kick with a solemn silent face.
+      It looks as if his legs belonged to some one else or were possessed by
+      devils. He has never spoken to us from that time to this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he now?&rdquo; I said, getting up in some agitation. &ldquo;We ought not to
+      leave him alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Colman is with him,&rdquo; said Miss Chadd calmly. &ldquo;They are in the
+      garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he can
+      scarcely go into the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden.
+      It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a little
+      too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this shining
+      and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something natural,
+      I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and verdant but
+      painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a small,
+      sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume
+      Dr Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous
+      twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend, listening
+      with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong sunlight
+      gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the night before,
+      when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious decorum. But for
+      one thing the figure of this morning might have been the identical figure
+      of last night. That one thing was that while the face listened reposefully
+      the legs were industriously dancing like the legs of a marionette. The
+      neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable
+      sharpness and incredibility to the prodigy&mdash;the prodigy of the head
+      of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen
+      in broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore
+      commonplace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat
+      drearily to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, Adelaide,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that Mr Bingham from the Museum is coming
+      again at three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. &ldquo;I suppose we shall have to tell
+      him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to
+      us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant suddenly turned round. &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What will you
+      have to tell Mr Bingham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what I shall have to tell him,&rdquo; said the professor's sister,
+      almost fiercely. &ldquo;I don't know that we need give it its wretched name. Do
+      you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to go on
+      like that?&rdquo; And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the garden,
+      the shining, listening face and the unresting feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. &ldquo;When did you say
+      the British Museum man was coming?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three o'clock,&rdquo; said Miss Chadd briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I have an hour before me,&rdquo; said Grant, and without another word
+      threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk
+      straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden path
+      drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood a couple
+      of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his trousers pocket,
+      but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a loud
+      familiar voice, &ldquo;Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our
+      inferiors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to
+      speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a
+      friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?&rdquo; Basil continued, still in
+      the same loud and lucid tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg, his
+      expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather
+      sharply. &ldquo;Shall we go inside, professor?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Now you have shown me
+      the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go in,&rdquo;
+       and he tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the same
+      time whispering to Grant: &ldquo;I must ask you not to trouble him with
+      questions. Most risky. He must be soothed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will endeavour
+      to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if you will
+      leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour. I want to
+      watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very little to him,
+      and that little shall be as soothing as&mdash;as syrup.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is rather dangerous for him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to be long in the strong sun
+      without his hat. With his bald head, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is soon settled,&rdquo; said Basil composedly, and took off his own big
+      hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did
+      not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for some
+      seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and then saying,
+      shortly, &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; strutted away into the house, where the three Misses
+      Chadd were all looking out from the parlour window on to the garden. They
+      looked out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without moving, and they
+      saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding in
+      making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he had done this
+      slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large pencil out of
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from
+      him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again. Thus
+      they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of turf, the
+      one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a problem, the
+      other leaping and playing like a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put
+      the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and
+      walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild morning
+      had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil in front
+      of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and then drew up
+      his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his sister had
+      described as being the first of all his antics. And the moment he had done
+      it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out rigid before him,
+      confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped
+      his bent leg, and swinging his weight on to it kicked out the other
+      behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a saltire cross,
+      and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air. Then before
+      any of the spectators could say a word or even entertain a thought about
+      the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of jig or hornpipe opposite
+      each other; and the sun shone down on two madmen instead of one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that
+      they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the garden
+      with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor Chadd was
+      in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed about to
+      turn a cart-wheel, when they were frozen in their follies by the steely
+      voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, &ldquo;Mr Bingham of the British Museum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly
+      effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable
+      manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was of
+      the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some
+      credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a
+      considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But
+      neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
+      grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves
+      about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant
+      stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny
+      black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them
+      to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr Colman,&rdquo; said Basil, turning to him, &ldquo;will you entertain Professor
+      Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham,
+      might I have the pleasure of a few moments' private conversation? My name
+      is Grant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful
+      but a trifle bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Chadd will excuse me,&rdquo; continued Basil easily, &ldquo;if I know my way
+      about the house.&rdquo; And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the back
+      door into the parlour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Bingham,&rdquo; said Basil, setting a chair for him, &ldquo;I imagine that Miss
+      Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has, Mr Grant,&rdquo; said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort of
+      compassionate nervousness. &ldquo;I am more pained than I can say by this
+      dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should have
+      happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend a position
+      which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of course&mdash;really, I
+      don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of course, retain&mdash;I
+      sincerely trust he will&mdash;his extraordinarily valuable intellect. But
+      I am afraid&mdash;I am really afraid&mdash;that it would not do to have
+      the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts&mdash;er&mdash;dancing about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a suggestion to make,&rdquo; said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his
+      chair, drawing it up to the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am delighted, of course,&rdquo; said the gentleman from the British Museum,
+      coughing and drawing up his chair also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
+      Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
+      could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
+      character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
+      through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd £800 a year until he stops
+      dancing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight hundred a year!&rdquo; said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted his
+      mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor&mdash;and he raised them with
+      a mild blue stare. &ldquo;I think I have not quite understood you. Did I
+      understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his
+      present state, in the Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a
+      year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant shook his head resolutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said firmly. &ldquo;No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
+      anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought to
+      take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely say
+      that until he stops dancing you ought to pay him £800 Surely you have some
+      general fund for the endowment of research.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham looked bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know,&rdquo; he said, blinking his eyes, &ldquo;what you are talking
+      about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a year
+      for life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. &ldquo;I never said for
+      life. Not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What for, then?&rdquo; asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly
+      to tear his hair. &ldquo;How long is this endowment to run? Not till his death?
+      Till the Judgement day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Basil, beaming, &ldquo;but just what I said. Till he has stopped
+      dancing.&rdquo; And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and kept
+      them there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do I seriously understand you to suggest that
+      the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary simply
+      on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he should be
+      paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he is flinging
+      his boots about in the back yard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Grant composedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
+      but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must stop somewhere,&rdquo; said Grant. &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said coldly. &ldquo;What
+      you are trying to explain to me may be a joke&mdash;a slightly unfeeling
+      joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your pardon for the
+      former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite irrelevant to my
+      duties. The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is
+      a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But
+      it is clear there is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel
+      went mad it would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the
+      British Museum Library.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in dramatic
+      warning, arrested him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; said Basil sternly. &ldquo;Stop while there is yet time. Do you want to
+      take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help in the glory of
+      Europe&mdash;in the glory of science? Do you want to carry your head in
+      the air when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in a
+      great discovery? Do you want&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham cut in sharply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if I do want this, Mr Grant&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said Basil lightly, &ldquo;your task is easy. Get Chadd £800 a year till
+      he stops dancing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently to
+      the door, but in passing out of it found it blocked. Dr Colman was coming
+      in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, &ldquo;the
+      fact is, Mr Grant, I&mdash;er&mdash;have made a most disturbing discovery
+      about Mr Chadd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was afraid so,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Drink, I imagine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink!&rdquo; echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. &ldquo;Oh, no,
+      it's not drink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and vague.
+      &ldquo;Homicidal mania&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; said the medical man impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thinks he's made of glass,&rdquo; said Bingham feverishly, &ldquo;or says he's God&mdash;or&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Dr Colman sharply; &ldquo;the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of a
+      different character. The awful thing about him is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, go on, sir,&rdquo; cried Bingham, in agony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The awful thing about him is,&rdquo; repeated Colman, with deliberation, &ldquo;that
+      he isn't mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not mad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy,&rdquo; said the doctor
+      shortly; &ldquo;he hasn't got any of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why does he dance?&rdquo; cried the despairing Bingham. &ldquo;Why doesn't he
+      answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil knows,&rdquo; said Dr Colman coolly. &ldquo;I'm paid to judge of lunatics,
+      but not of fools. The man's not mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?&rdquo; said Mr Bingham.
+      &ldquo;Can none get into any kind of communication with him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be very happy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to give him any message you like to
+      send.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Both men stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give him a message?&rdquo; they cried simultaneously. &ldquo;How will you give him a
+      message?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil smiled in his slow way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you really want to know how I shall give him your message,&rdquo; he began,
+      but Bingham cried:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; with a sort of frenzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Basil, &ldquo;like this.&rdquo; And he suddenly sprang a foot into the
+      air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on one leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact
+      that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You drive me to it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You drive me to betray my friend. And I
+      will, for his own sake, betray him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as
+      of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure. &ldquo;Anything painful, of
+      course&mdash;&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck them
+      all rigid in their feeble attitudes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idiots!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James Chadd
+      going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to your miserable library,
+      with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never seen that he
+      has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck casually behind
+      his spectacles and above his seedy old collar, the face of a man who might
+      have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my
+      fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I argued against
+      him on the score of his famous theory about language&mdash;the theory that
+      language was complete in certain individuals and was picked up by others
+      simply by watching them. I also chaffed him about not understanding things
+      in rough and ready practice. What has this glorious bigot done? He has
+      answered me. He has worked out a system of language of his own (it would
+      take too long to explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own.
+      And he has sworn that till people understand it, till he can speak to us
+      in this language, he will not speak in any other. And he shall not. I have
+      understood, by taking careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others.
+      This shall not be blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall
+      have £800 a year from somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him
+      now is an infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, Mr Grant,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I hope I shall be able to answer for
+      the source of the £800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my cab?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham,&rdquo; said Grant heartily. &ldquo;I think I
+      will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
+      friendly. They were still dancing when I left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of interest&mdash;first,
+      the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he was engaged, and,
+      second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of London. His brother
+      Basil said of him: &ldquo;His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and
+      invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him
+      right.&rdquo; Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was
+      certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I think worth
+      telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
+      was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight in
+      summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
+      darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth
+      were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of
+      the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them,
+      Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out of
+      the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to
+      me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective theories. He
+      would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing a
+      conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a falling fusee.
+      His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy milkman who walked
+      in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which afterwards overtook
+      us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten what were the main
+      outlines of the milkman's crime. I think it had something to do with the
+      fact that he had only one small can of milk to carry, and that of that he
+      had left the lid loose and walked so quickly that he spilled milk on the
+      pavement. This showed that he was not thinking of his small burden, and
+      this again showed that he anticipated some other than lacteal business at
+      the end of his walk, and this (taken in conjunction with something about
+      muddy boots) showed something else that I have entirely forgotten. I am
+      afraid that I derided this detailed revelation unmercifully; and I am
+      afraid that Rupert Grant, who, though the best of fellows, had a good deal
+      of the sensitiveness of the artistic temperament, slightly resented my
+      derision. He endeavoured to take a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity
+      which he associated with his profession, but the cigar, I think, was
+      nearly bitten through.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; he said acidly, &ldquo;I'll bet you half a crown that wherever
+      that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out something curious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My resources are equal to that risk,&rdquo; I said, laughing. &ldquo;Done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of the
+      mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some ado to
+      keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of milk, silver
+      in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it, he disappeared
+      down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really believed that the
+      milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him as having
+      vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took no hold on my
+      mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared himself into the
+      area.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post in the
+      lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps without his can
+      and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more
+      elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet
+      laughing; a not uncommon contradiction in him, denoting excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; he said, rubbing his hands, &ldquo;so much for all your scepticism.
+      So much for your philistine ignorance of the possibilities of a romantic
+      city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your prosaic good
+      nature will have to express itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; I said incredulously, &ldquo;do you mean to say that you really did find
+      anything the matter with the poor milkman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the milkman,&rdquo; he said, with a miserable affectation at having
+      misunderstood me. &ldquo;No, I&mdash;I&mdash;didn't exactly bring anything home
+      to the milkman himself, I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did the milkman say and do?&rdquo; I said, with inexorable sternness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, to tell the truth,&rdquo; said Rupert, shifting restlessly from one foot
+      to another, &ldquo;the milkman himself, as far as merely physical appearances
+      went, just said, 'Milk, Miss,' and handed in the can. That is not to say,
+      of course, that he did not make some secret sign or some&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I broke into a violent laugh. &ldquo;You idiot,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;why don't you own
+      yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made a secret
+      sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did nothing
+      worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face grew grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that the
+      milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that I was wrong about
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then come along with you,&rdquo; I said, with a certain amicable anger, &ldquo;and
+      remember that you owe me half a crown.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to that, I differ from you,&rdquo; said Rupert coolly. &ldquo;The milkman's
+      remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman may have been. But
+      I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I think, as
+      follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came to a real
+      stop I should find out something curious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;I jolly well have. You just come with me,&rdquo; and
+      before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked through the
+      blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost before
+      I made any decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally, as
+      the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a closed door, shuttered
+      windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous well in which I
+      found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me there, and who
+      stood there with dancing eyes. I was just about to turn back when Rupert
+      caught me by the elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just listen to that,&rdquo; he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right
+      hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters of the
+      basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined
+      my head for a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an
+      unmistakable human voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been talking to somebody inside?&rdquo; I asked suddenly, turning to
+      Rupert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I haven't,&rdquo; he replied, with a grim smile, &ldquo;but I should very much
+      like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of course not,&rdquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I recommend you to listen,&rdquo; said Rupert sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a
+      moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which there was
+      a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which took
+      the form of the words: &ldquo;When shall I get out? When shall I get out? Will
+      they ever let me out?&rdquo; or words to that effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know anything about this?&rdquo; I said, turning upon Rupert very
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you think I am the criminal,&rdquo; he said sardonically, &ldquo;instead of
+      being in some small sense the detective. I came into this area two or
+      three minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something funny
+      going on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a woman)
+      was moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do not know
+      anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited
+      daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being
+      wailing that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman
+      and beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two or three
+      minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning, that is all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I apologize; this is no time for arguing. What
+      is to be done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;house-breaking.&rdquo; And he forced the blade into
+      the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap and
+      glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely
+      unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead and
+      opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization
+      which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our breath.
+      Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window itself seemed
+      suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass
+      within, and with increased distinctness, with the increase of the opening
+      came the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When shall I get out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can all this be?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing the
+      ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in it, smaller
+      and more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he had
+      done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and
+      querulous and clear, making the same demand for liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't you get out, madam?&rdquo; I said, drawing near the hole in some
+      perturbation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get out? Of course I can't,&rdquo; moaned the unknown female bitterly. &ldquo;They
+      won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them I'd call the
+      police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me
+      as long as they liked only&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick,
+      incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held my arm hard,
+      held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to
+      stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment,
+      and in the act swung slightly round, so that I was facing the supporting
+      wall of the front door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness
+      like that of Rupert, for a figure almost as motionless as the pillars of
+      the portico, but unmistakably human, had put his head out from between the
+      doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted lamps of
+      the street was just behind his head, throwing it into abrupt darkness.
+      Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of his face beyond one fact,
+      that he was unquestionably staring at us. I must say I thought Rupert's
+      calmness magnificent. He rang the area bell quite idly, and went on
+      talking to me with the easy end of a conversation which had never had any
+      beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost
+      thought it was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was golden
+      with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a small and
+      decorous housemaid stood in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray excuse me,&rdquo; said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make
+      somehow or other at once affable and underbred, &ldquo;but we thought perhaps
+      that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don't expect&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not here,&rdquo; said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of the
+      menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very sad, very sad&mdash;the indifference of these people,&rdquo; said the
+      philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As we did
+      so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what do you make of that?&rdquo; asked Rupert, slapping his gloves
+      together when we got into the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such conditions
+      I had but one thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think,&rdquo; I said a trifle timidly, &ldquo;that we had better tell your
+      brother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if you like,&rdquo; said Rupert, in a lordly way. &ldquo;He is quite near, as I
+      promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall we take a cab?
+      Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted look.
+      After a little looking about we discovered Basil Grant with his great head
+      and his great white hat blocking the ticket-office window. I thought at
+      first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly
+      long time about it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing religion with
+      the booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the hole in
+      his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time before he would
+      talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental fatalism in modern thought,
+      which had been well typified by some of the official's ingenious but
+      perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get him to understand that we
+      had made an astounding discovery. When he did listen, he listened
+      attentively, walking between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we
+      told him in a rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington,
+      of the equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement, and the
+      man staring from the porch. At length he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
+      careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice on the
+      same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would look
+      worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman who looked
+      at you looked thoroughly, and will wear, so to speak, your portraits next
+      to his heart. If you want to find out if there is anything in this without
+      a police raid I fancy you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the
+      house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor of
+      twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think it's safe, Basil,&rdquo; said his brother, pausing, a little pale,
+      under the lamp, &ldquo;to go into that place alone? Of course we shall be near
+      enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do something&mdash;something
+      sudden&mdash;or odd. I can't feel it's safe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know of nothing that is safe,&rdquo; said Basil composedly, &ldquo;except, possibly&mdash;death,&rdquo;
+       and he went up the steps and rang at the bell. When the massive
+      respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of gaslight in
+      the gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying our friend
+      inside, we could not repress a shudder. It had been like the heavy gaping
+      and closing of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A freshening night
+      breeze began to blow up the street, and we turned up the collars of our
+      coats. At the end of twenty minutes, in which we had scarcely moved or
+      spoken, we were as cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from apprehension
+      than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an abrupt movement towards the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't stand this,&rdquo; he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into
+      the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the black house
+      front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming
+      out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you could
+      have heard every syllable across the street. Another voice, or, possibly,
+      two voices, were laughing and talking back at him from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, no,&rdquo; Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility.
+      &ldquo;That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of all. It's the soul,
+      my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When you see a
+      cosmic force you don't like, trick it, my boy. But I must really be off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and pitch into us again,&rdquo; came the laughing voice from out of the
+      house. &ldquo;We still have some bones unbroken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks very much, I will&mdash;good night,&rdquo; shouted Grant, who had by
+      this time reached the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; came the friendly call in reply, before the door closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, &ldquo;what are we to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is to be done, Basil?&rdquo; I repeated in uncontrollable excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not sure,&rdquo; said Basil doubtfully. &ldquo;What do you say to getting some
+      dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get
+      those fellows to come, but they couldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We stared blankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go to the Court Theatre?&rdquo; repeated Rupert. &ldquo;What would be the good of
+      that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good? What do you mean?&rdquo; answered Basil, staring also. &ldquo;Have you turned
+      Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!&rdquo; cried Rupert.
+      &ldquo;What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I go for the
+      police?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some mistake,
+      possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm sorry those
+      fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of these green omnibuses?
+      There is a restaurant in Sloane Square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us,&rdquo; I said irritably.
+      &ldquo;How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a mere private
+      affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be
+      private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's drawing-room, would you
+      think it bad taste to talk about it just as if it was a confounded dado or
+      an infernal etching?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil laughed heartily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's very forcible,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;As a matter of fact, though, I know it's
+      all right in this case. And there comes the green omnibus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know it's all right in this ease?&rdquo; persisted his brother
+      angrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear chap, the thing's obvious,&rdquo; answered Basil, holding a return
+      ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. &ldquo;Those
+      two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They're not the kind.
+      Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a paper before the
+      omnibus comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, curse the paper!&rdquo; cried Rupert, in a fury. &ldquo;Do you mean to tell me,
+      Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch
+      darkness in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with
+      the keepers of it and thought them rather good men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good men do commit crimes sometimes,&rdquo; said Basil, taking the ticket out
+      of his mouth. &ldquo;But this kind of good man doesn't commit that kind of
+      crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the dim
+      wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an
+      instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it and
+      been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, &ldquo;I simply won't leave
+      this street and this house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor will I,&rdquo; said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers. &ldquo;There's
+      some black work going on there. If I left it I should never sleep again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course if you feel like that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we'll investigate further.
+      You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two young Oxford fellows.
+      Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this pseudo-Darwinian
+      business. Ethics of evolution and all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, &ldquo;that we shall enlighten
+      you further about their ethics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And may I ask,&rdquo; said Basil gloomily, &ldquo;what it is that you propose to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I propose, first of all,&rdquo; said Rupert, &ldquo;to get into this house; secondly,
+      to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to knock them
+      down, bind them, gag them, and search the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an
+      instant with one of his sudden laughs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor little boys,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But it almost serves them right for holding
+      such silly views, after all,&rdquo; and he quaked again with amusement &ldquo;there's
+      something confoundedly Darwinian about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you mean to help us?&rdquo; said Rupert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I'll be in it,&rdquo; answered Basil, &ldquo;if it's only to prevent your
+      doing the poor chaps any harm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking indifferent
+      and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door opened he
+      stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So sorry to haunt you like this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I met two friends outside who
+      very much want to know you. May I bring them in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Delighted, of course,&rdquo; said a young voice, the unmistakable voice of the
+      Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the decorous
+      little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was a short,
+      but shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a square, snub-nosed
+      face. He wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some incredible college
+      purple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This way,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;mind the steps by the staircase. This house is more
+      crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish exterior.
+      There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Rupert, with a savage smile, &ldquo;I can quite believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young
+      inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines and
+      books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who stood
+      with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly, with dead
+      brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket. He was that particular
+      type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet
+      who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any more arguments?&rdquo; he said, when introductions had been effected. &ldquo;I
+      must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science
+      such as we. I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bosh,&rdquo; answered Grant. &ldquo;I never said a word against eminent men of
+      science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes
+      itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new
+      religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of
+      man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't
+      understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they
+      think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they
+      have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian
+      movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of
+      talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically
+      about science.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is all very well,&rdquo; said the big young man, whose name appeared to be
+      Burrows. &ldquo;Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or the violin,
+      can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the rudiments may
+      be of public use. Greenwood here,&rdquo; indicating the little man in the
+      blazer, &ldquo;doesn't know one note of music from another. Still, he knows
+      something. He knows enough to take off his hat when they play 'God Save
+      the King'. He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play 'Oh, Dem
+      Golden Slippers'. Just in the same way science&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
+      uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.
+      Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his
+      throat, and bent the giant backwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne,&rdquo; he called out, and before I knew
+      where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple blazer.
+      He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but I was
+      heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of his feet
+      from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and then we fell
+      with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's voice
+      finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and I need
+      not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old friends against the
+      most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying you up in this
+      antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be
+      while...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
+      garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty hands.
+      Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows; how
+      strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by Rupert's
+      arm, but a convulsive heave went over his whole frame. An instant after
+      his head plunged forward like a bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung head
+      over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him.
+      Simultaneously the bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him
+      also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar,
+      leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the
+      waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously to his feet.
+      Basil did the same. But they had the best of it now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
+      through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and before
+      Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments, could even lift
+      his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room. Defeated even when
+      we were in a majority, we were now outnumbered. Greenwood and one of the
+      footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me back into the corner upon
+      the wreck of the paper basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned him
+      against the wall. Rupert lifted himself on his elbow, but he was still
+      dazed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil
+      come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now this,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is what I call enjoying oneself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase,
+      from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To my astonishment
+      his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child heated
+      by a favourite game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of
+      me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to him. He turned
+      quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The
+      latter's head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship, as
+      his enemies pressed him down. He flung up one hand just as I thought him
+      falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards
+      discovered, of St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across
+      the room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome bodily out of
+      the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air, so that it
+      struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over like a rolling
+      ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness broke, and he sank, his
+      enemies closing over him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he
+      could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each
+      other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert
+      certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor was a
+      sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense waste-paper
+      basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the knees in them, as
+      in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a
+      sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some
+      fantastic trouser frill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies, might
+      be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of Mr
+      Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in it
+      as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad back
+      swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil, somehow, had
+      hold of the other. Burrows' huge fists and those of the footman were
+      battering Basil's sunken head like an anvil, but nothing could get the
+      giant's ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his own head was
+      forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor
+      was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face.
+      Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook together, as
+      the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the floor. Basil sprang
+      up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like battering-rams knocked the
+      footman into a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows, with one
+      antimacassar in his hand and another in his teeth, and bound him hand and
+      foot almost before he knew clearly that his head had struck the floor.
+      Then Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down,
+      and between them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let
+      go and turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and,
+      to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other footman,
+      bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the
+      room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the
+      battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood,
+      Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
+      perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;since you have got your own way, perhaps
+      you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive,
+      &ldquo;this is what we call the survival of the fittest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
+      phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the
+      end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a
+      handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he sang
+      out quite coolly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
+      antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way
+      in an armchair. &ldquo;Don't hurry for us,&rdquo; he said, glancing round at the
+      litter of the room, &ldquo;we have all the illustrated papers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even more
+      slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed through the
+      room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice continuing
+      conversationally:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now, Mr Burrows,&rdquo; he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
+      &ldquo;there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument. I'm
+      sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor,
+      and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there than the
+      man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely
+      be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were saying, if I
+      remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments
+      of science might with advantage be made public.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. &ldquo;I hold that
+      nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can
+      be...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I noticed
+      that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy. Strange as it
+      may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a slight
+      degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all philosophy and
+      chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper
+      into the under-world of that mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to
+      us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of
+      its semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
+      that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the
+      servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with
+      indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty
+      apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a bandbox,
+      and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
+      abyss:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you captive
+      are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to deliver you.
+      We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are free.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
+      silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
+      easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
+      heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
+      drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has anybody got a match?&rdquo; said Rupert grimly. &ldquo;I fancy we have come
+      pretty near the end of this business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare, yellow-papered
+      apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window.
+      An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It
+      had, however, revealed something more practical&mdash;an iron gas bracket
+      just above my head. I struck another match and lit the gas. And we found
+      ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room sat
+      an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver
+      hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of
+      Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of
+      the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
+      background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
+      place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
+      wood about an hour before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam,&rdquo; said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, &ldquo;permit me to have
+      the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your complaints
+      happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have
+      therefore ventured to come to your rescue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a
+      moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said,
+      with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had
+      rescued me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, madam,&rdquo; said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. &ldquo;We have very
+      satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled
+      affairs with them very satisfactorily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We persuaded them, my dear madam,&rdquo; said Rupert, laughing, &ldquo;by knocking
+      them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat
+      by the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I understand,&rdquo; she said, with the air of a person about to begin
+      knitting, &ldquo;that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have,&rdquo; said Rupert proudly; &ldquo;we have resisted their oppression and
+      conquered it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, thanks,&rdquo; answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A considerable pause followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The road is quite clear for you, madam,&rdquo; said Rupert pleasantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us
+      for an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what about Greenwood and Burrows?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;What did I understand
+      you to say had become of them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are lying on the floor upstairs,&rdquo; said Rupert, chuckling. &ldquo;Tied hand
+      and foot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that settles it,&rdquo; said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang
+      into her seat again, &ldquo;I must stop where I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert looked bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop where you are?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Why should you stop any longer where you
+      are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The question rather is,&rdquo; said the old lady, with composure, &ldquo;what power
+      can force me to go anywhere else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last I said, &ldquo;Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you don't intend to tie me up,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and carry me off? I
+      certainly shall not go otherwise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear madam,&rdquo; cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, &ldquo;we
+      heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,&rdquo; replied the captive
+      grimly. &ldquo;I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to
+      myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some sense of honour?&rdquo; repeated Rupert, and the last light of
+      intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with
+      rolling eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once
+      more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. &ldquo;Can we do nothing for
+      you, madam?&rdquo; I said forlornly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; said the lady, &ldquo;if you are particularly anxious to do me a little
+      favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague
+      violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the
+      sitting-room and scene of battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,&rdquo; Mr Burrows was saying,
+      lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; &ldquo;but we must consider the
+      matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; cried Rupert, gasping, &ldquo;she won't come out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who won't come out?&rdquo; asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in
+      an argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lady downstairs,&rdquo; replied Rupert. &ldquo;The lady who was locked up. She
+      won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these
+      fellows loose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a jolly sensible suggestion,&rdquo; cried Basil, and with a bound he was on
+      top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds with
+      hands and teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple
+      jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as particularly
+      sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other hand, was
+      heaving with herculean laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Basil, in his cheeriest way, &ldquo;I think we must be getting
+      away. We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to
+      stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we've made ourselves at
+      home. Good night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert desperately, &ldquo;for God's sake come and see what you
+      can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the discomfort out of my
+      mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these
+      gentlemen won't mind perhaps...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. &ldquo;No,
+      no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make a tour of
+      the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others
+      which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil Grant,
+      days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to have gone
+      mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the end of the day
+      and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the sky after rain,
+      and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me. But this
+      day's work was destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we
+      left that house, ten minutes afterwards, one half-witted touch was added
+      which rolled all our minds in cloud. If Rupert's head had suddenly fallen
+      off on the floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of Greenwood's
+      shoulders, we could scarcely have been more suddenly stricken. And yet of
+      this we had no explanation. We had to go to bed that night with the
+      prodigy and get up next morning with it and let it stand in our memories
+      for weeks and months. As will be seen, it was not until months afterwards
+      that by another accident and in another way it was explained. For the
+      present I only state what happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading,
+      the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison again
+      closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as pitch. The
+      old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she seemed to
+      have a weird preference for sitting in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady turned
+      her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong gaslight.
+      Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up and swept a
+      sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked quickly at Greenwood
+      and Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this subservience had been
+      offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in this subservience, and
+      desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they received it. To my
+      surprise they did not seem to have seen it at all: Burrows was paring his
+      nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the group and
+      had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing fact became apparent. It
+      was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the group, the golden gaslight
+      lighting up his strong face and figure. His face wore an expression
+      indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of a very grave smile. His
+      head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It was he who had
+      acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was he, beyond any shadow of
+      reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I hear,&rdquo; he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, &ldquo;I hear,
+      madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without
+      success.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you,&rdquo; answered the lady
+      with a high colour. &ldquo;But you have not found me guilty of treachery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I willingly attest it, madam,&rdquo; replied Basil, in the same level tones,
+      &ldquo;and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of
+      loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large
+      discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of
+      these gentlemen. But you know that you can safely leave it at mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The captive made another reverence. &ldquo;I have never complained of your
+      injustice,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I need scarcely say what I think of your
+      generosity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room,
+      Basil holding the door open for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. &ldquo;This will be a
+      relief to you,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it will,&rdquo; replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like a
+      sphinx.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as if
+      we had fallen into it from some high tower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Basil,&rdquo; said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, &ldquo;I always thought you were
+      my brother. But are you a man? I mean&mdash;are you only a man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At present,&rdquo; replied Basil, &ldquo;my mere humanity is proved by one of the
+      most unmistakable symbols&mdash;hunger. We are too late for the theatre in
+      Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes the
+      green omnibus!&rdquo; and he had leaped on it before we could speak. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my room,
+      swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having jumped
+      over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the latest and
+      wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less a thing than
+      the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and headquarters of the
+      source of all our joys and sorrows&mdash;the Club of Queer Trades. I
+      should expand this story for ever if I explained how ultimately we ran
+      this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting
+      things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of
+      roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a cellar, the
+      finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding of the subterranean
+      passage, the finding of the Club of Queer Trades.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger one
+      than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and
+      seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and
+      hospitable dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces that I
+      knew. There was Mr Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated between
+      the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
+      Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
+      Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented the
+      Dancing Language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their chairs,
+      and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat gaped at us
+      like a missing tooth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The president's not here,&rdquo; said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to
+      Professor Chadd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;N-no,&rdquo; said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness.
+      &ldquo;I can't imagine where he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens,&rdquo; said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, &ldquo;I really feel a little
+      nervous. I'll go and see.&rdquo; And he ran out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's there, gentlemen&mdash;he's there all right&mdash;he's coming in
+      now,&rdquo; he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the
+      beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who was the
+      first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought indistinctly,
+      could be maddest in this world of madmen: what fantastic was it whose
+      shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an expectation?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled and
+      shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and in
+      evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person
+      particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But on
+      this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses.
+      Hors-d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort of
+      ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was over.
+      The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon being made
+      of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of the
+      moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and eating and
+      drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he was there,
+      the king of these capering idiots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the
+      time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his
+      feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it is a custom in this society that the president
+      for the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast of sentiment,
+      but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of his trade. We
+      then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It is my business, as
+      the senior member, to open by stating my claim to membership of this club.
+      Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to do
+      justice and to administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in
+      my work, as it was, I was not touching even the fringe of justice. I was
+      seated in the seat of the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and ermine;
+      nevertheless, I held a small and lowly and futile post. I had to go by a
+      mean rule as much as a postman, and my red and gold was worth no more than
+      his. Daily there passed before me taut and passionate problems, the
+      stringency of which I had to pretend to relieve by silly imprisonments or
+      silly damages, while I knew all the time, by the light of my living common
+      sense, that they would have been far better relieved by a kiss or a
+      thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West
+      Highlands. Then, as this grew on me, there grew on me continuously the
+      sense of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper
+      or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had to say.
+      Then came the time when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed
+      as a madman and melted from public life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I who
+      were listening with intensity to this statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself
+      privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral differences.
+      Before very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly secret)
+      had spread over the whole of society. People were tried before me not for
+      the practical trifles for which nobody cares, such as committing a murder,
+      or keeping a dog without a licence. My criminals were tried for the faults
+      which really make social life impossible. They were tried before me for
+      selfishness, or for an impossible vanity, or for scandalmongering, or for
+      stinginess to guests or dependents. Of course these courts had no sort of
+      real coercive powers. The fulfilment of their punishments rested entirely
+      on the honour of the ladies and gentlemen involved, including the honour
+      of the culprits. But you would be amazed to know how completely our orders
+      were always obeyed. Only lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden
+      lady in South Kensington whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for
+      being the means of breaking off an engagement through backbiting,
+      absolutely refused to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons
+      had been inopportune enough to rescue her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for
+      the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the explanation of
+      the old lady's strange discontent and her still stranger content with her
+      lot. She was one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court. She was
+      one of the clients of his Queer Trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health of
+      Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of everything having
+      been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the presence
+      of God. We dimly heard Basil say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance Agency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had made
+      long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it had begun, like a
+      true cycle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Club of Queer Trades, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1696-h.htm or 1696-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/9/1696/
+
+Produced by Anonomous Project Gutenberg Volunteers, and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/tcoqt10.txt b/old/tcoqt10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d91f3ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/tcoqt10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5598 @@
+Project Gutenberg Etext The Club of Queer Trades, by Chesterton
+#8 in our series by G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The Club of Queer Trades
+
+by G.K.Chesterton
+
+April, 1999  [Etext #1696]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext The Club of Queer Trades, by Chesterton
+*****This file should be named tcoqt10.txt or tcoqt10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, tcoqt11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, tcoqt10a.txt
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
+of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text
+files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly
+from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an
+assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few
+more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we
+don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email.
+
+******
+
+To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser
+to view http://promo.net/pg.  This site lists Etexts by
+author and by title, and includes information about how
+to get involved with Project Gutenberg.  You could also
+download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here.  This
+is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,
+for a more complete list of our various sites.
+
+To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any
+Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror
+sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed
+at http://promo.net/pg).
+
+Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
+
+Example FTP session:
+
+ftp sunsite.unc.edu
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+***
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+The Club of Queer Trades
+
+by G.K.Chesterton
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
+
+Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had
+something to do with the designing of the things called flats in
+England and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the
+idea of economising space by piling houses on top of each other,
+front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those
+perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in
+one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of
+the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance
+that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing
+attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is
+only looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro
+Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and
+passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the
+twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers'
+Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk
+Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries,
+no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in
+a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.
+
+The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to
+be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club,
+of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that
+the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his
+living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of
+this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it
+must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade.
+Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent
+simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being
+burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against
+being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock
+Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring
+speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in
+the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same.
+Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income,
+the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man
+simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine
+tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor
+Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor
+Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or
+cry.
+
+The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing
+thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was
+like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man
+feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of
+the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body
+was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have
+a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be
+said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic
+variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I
+collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell
+tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will
+recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that
+superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will
+explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of
+which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall
+know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the
+Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a
+word. The first of my revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned
+with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said, was one of
+this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner or
+later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the
+metropolis call me facetiously `The King of Clubs'. They also call
+me `The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful
+appearance I have presented in my declining years. I only hope the
+spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have. But
+the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing
+about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not
+discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a
+star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his
+attic.
+
+Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the
+least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into
+his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people
+knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he
+welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour
+in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties
+than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds. He lived in a
+queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was
+surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to the
+slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour--the whole
+dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic
+relics, appeared curiously keen and modern--a powerful, legal
+face. And no one but I knew who he was.
+
+Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque
+scene that occurred in--, when one of the most acute and forcible
+of the English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own
+view of that occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is
+no question at all. For some months, indeed for some years, people
+had detected something curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed
+to have lost interest in the law, in which he had been beyond
+expression brilliant and terrible as a K.C., and to be occupied in
+giving personal and moral advice to the people concerned. He
+talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken one at
+that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man
+who had attempted a crime of passion: "I sentence you to three
+years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given
+conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside."
+He accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious
+legal crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a
+court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity
+deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated
+diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant
+patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to
+give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the
+household had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the
+Premier again to step forward, which he did with quiet dignity.
+The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: "Get a new soul.
+That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul." All this, of
+course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that
+melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him
+in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent and
+powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable
+defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the
+advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of
+work and rhetoric, the time came for the great judge to give a
+summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of lucidity
+and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken very
+little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering
+at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst
+into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows:
+
+"O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
+tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow."
+
+He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.
+
+I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of
+that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter
+folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of
+his, one of the great swords in his collection; the red glare of
+the strong fire struck his square features and his fierce grey
+hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of dreams, and he had
+opened his mouth to speak dreamily, when the door was flung open,
+and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a huge furred overcoat,
+swung himself panting into the room.
+
+"Sorry to bother you, Basil," he gasped. "I took a liberty--made an
+appointment here with a man--a client--in five minutes--I beg your
+pardon, sir," and he gave me a bow of apology.
+
+Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had a
+practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does
+all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he
+is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist, a
+house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a
+schoolmaster, a--what are you now, Rupert?"
+
+"I am and have been for some time," said Rupert, with some dignity,
+"a private detective, and there's my client."
+
+A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being
+given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man
+walked swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the
+table, and said, "Good evening, gentlemen," with a stress on the
+last syllable that somehow marked him out as a martinet, military,
+literary and social. He had a large head streaked with black and
+grey, and an abrupt black moustache, which gave him a look of
+fierceness which was contradicted by his sad sea-blue eyes.
+
+Basil immediately said to me, "Let us come into the next room,
+Gully," and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
+
+"Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly."
+
+The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain
+Major Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had
+forgotten altogether the black dandified figure and the large
+solemn head, but I remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted
+of only saying about a quarter of each sentence, and that sharply,
+like the crack of a gun. I do not know, it may have come from
+giving orders to troops.
+
+Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but
+he was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men
+who recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs
+and tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet
+demure; in his habits he was precise to the point of the exact
+adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm he had, which was of the
+nature of a religion--the cultivation of pansies. And when he
+talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered like a child's
+at a new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when the troops
+were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.
+
+"Well, Major," said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness,
+flinging himself into a chair, "what is the matter with you?"
+
+"Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover," said the Major,
+with righteous indignation.
+
+We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his
+eyes shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+"Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me.
+Something. Preposterous."
+
+We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
+sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's
+fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit
+the reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of
+Major Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the
+scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit,
+and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder and rounder as
+we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the world,
+from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in
+his chair and talking like a telegram.
+
+Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no
+means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement
+on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small neat villa,
+very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life to
+pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he
+had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with
+two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken himself
+instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to
+him like having come into a harbour in heaven. He was Dutch-like
+and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some
+tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those
+men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather
+than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
+life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he
+would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told
+him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined
+to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he
+had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat
+of battle.
+
+One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his
+usual faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional.
+In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he
+happened to pass along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie
+along the back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which in
+their empty and discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation as
+of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean and sulky as the
+scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether so
+in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming a
+thing which was to him what the passing of a religious procession
+is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes and
+a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a barrow,
+which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid
+specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite
+pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation,
+and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of
+collectors and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with
+a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent,
+praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a
+thrilling worth and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then
+bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when he
+stopped and came close to the Major.
+
+"I'll tell you what, sir," he said. "If you're interested in them
+things, you just get on to that wall."
+
+"On the wall!" cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
+quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.
+
+"Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden,
+sir," hissed the tempter. "I'll help you up, sir."
+
+How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm
+of the Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions,
+and with an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need
+of physical assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the
+strange garden. The second after, the flapping of the frock-coat
+at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool. But the next
+instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up by the most
+appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in all
+his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden,
+and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast
+pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it
+was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for
+the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to
+form the sentence:
+
+DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
+
+A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them.
+Brown looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the
+barrow had suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn
+with its incredible inscription. Another man might have thought he
+had gone mad, but Brown did not. When romantic ladies gushed over
+his V.C. and his military exploits, he sometimes felt himself to
+be a painfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew he
+was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have thought himself
+a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not easily
+believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the garden
+arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it
+extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money like
+water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to
+offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man,
+and waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with six
+legs.
+
+At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and
+the watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down
+the gravel path.
+
+"Who on earth are you?" he gasped, trembling violently.
+
+"I am Major Brown," said that individual, who was always cool in
+the hour of action.
+
+The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
+stammered wildly, "Come down--come down here!"
+
+"At your service," said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the
+grass beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.
+
+The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling
+run towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His
+guide led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously
+appointed house, until they reached the door of the front room.
+Then the old man turned with a face of apoplectic terror dimly
+showing in the twilight.
+
+"For heaven's sake," he said, "don't mention jackals."
+
+Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight,
+and ran downstairs with a clatter.
+
+The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper,
+and peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest
+manners in the world, and, though mystified, was not in the least
+embarrassed to see that the only occupant was a lady, sitting by
+the window, looking out.
+
+"Madam," he said, bowing simply, "I am Major Brown."
+
+"Sit down," said the lady; but she did not turn her head.
+
+She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a
+flavour of Bedford Park. "You have come, I suppose," she said
+mournfully, "to tax me about the hateful title-deeds."
+
+"I have come, madam," he said, "to know what is the matter. To know
+why my name is written across your garden. Not amicably either."
+
+He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to
+describe the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny
+garden scene, the frame for a stunning and brutal personality.
+The evening air was still, and the grass was golden in the place
+where the little flowers he studied cried to heaven for his
+blood.
+
+"You know I must not turn round," said the lady; "every afternoon
+till the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street."
+
+Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier
+resolute to accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.
+
+"It is almost six," he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric
+copper clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour.
+At the sixth the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of
+the queerest and yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in
+his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf.
+
+"That makes the third year I have waited," she cried. "This is an
+anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing
+would happen once and for all."
+
+And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness.
+From low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already
+twilight) a voice cried out with a raucous and merciless
+distinctness:
+
+"Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?"
+
+Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front
+door and looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming
+of the street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their
+lemon sparks. On returning, he found the lady in green trembling.
+
+"It is the end," she cried, with shaking lips; "it may be death for
+both of us. Whenever--"
+
+But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse
+proclamation from the dark street, again horribly articulate.
+
+"Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?"
+
+Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
+frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far
+too long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the
+rational Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain time
+to the drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific
+voice came:
+
+"Major Brown, Major Brown, where did--"
+
+Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time--in
+time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The
+cries appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the
+pavement.
+
+The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a
+man thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment,
+again, it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady.
+"Where's your coal-cellar?" he said, and stepped out into the
+passage.
+
+She looked at him with wild grey eyes. "You will not go down," she
+cried, "alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?"
+
+"Is this the way?" replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs
+three at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and
+stepped in, feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand
+was thus occupied, a pair of great slimy hands came out of the
+darkness, hands clearly belonging to a man of gigantic stature,
+and seized him by the back of the head. They forced him down, down
+in the suffocating darkness, a brutal image of destiny. But the
+Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly clear and
+intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure until he had slid
+down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of the
+invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one of
+his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a
+muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with
+a crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top
+like a cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had
+evidently now no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and
+thither to get past the Major to the door, but that tenacious
+person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the other
+hand to a beam. At length there came a strain in holding back this
+human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to rend
+and part from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and the
+dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the cellar, leaving
+the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his adventure
+and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out at
+the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole
+equipment of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards
+and whitewashed walls.
+
+"The lady was in the conspiracy, of course," said Rupert, nodding.
+Major Brown turned brick red. "I beg your pardon," he said, "I
+think not."
+
+Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
+nothing. When next he spoke he asked:
+
+"Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?"
+
+"There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,"
+said the Major carefully; "there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of
+string, and this letter," and he laid it on the table. It ran as
+follows:
+
+Dear Mr Plover,
+
+I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the
+arrangements re Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as
+per arrangement tomorrow The coal-cellar, of course.
+
+Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.
+
+Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He
+cut in:
+
+"Is it dated from anywhere?"
+
+"No--oh, yes!" replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; "14 Tanner's
+Court, North--"
+
+Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.
+
+"Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me your
+revolver."
+
+Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it
+was some time before he answered:
+
+"I don't think you'll need it."
+
+"Perhaps not," said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. "One never
+knows. But going down a dark court to see criminals--"
+
+"Do you think they are criminals?" asked his brother.
+
+Rupert laughed stoutly. "Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle
+a harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very
+blameless experiment, but--"
+
+"Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?" asked Basil, in
+the same distant and monotonous voice.
+
+"My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter."
+
+"I am looking at the letter," said the mad judge calmly; though, as
+a matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. "I don't think it's
+the sort of letter one criminal would write to another."
+
+"My dear boy, you are glorious," cried Rupert, turning round, with
+laughter in his blue bright eyes. "Your methods amaze me. Why,
+there is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a
+crime. You might as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all
+the sort of thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar
+Square."
+
+Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did
+not otherwise move.
+
+"That's rather good," he said; "but, of course, logic like that's
+not what is really wanted. It's a question of spiritual atmosphere.
+It's not a criminal letter."
+
+"It is. It's a matter of fact," cried the other in an agony of
+reasonableness.
+
+"Facts," murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
+animals, "how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly--in fact,
+I'm off my head--but I never could believe in that man--what's his
+name, in those capital stories?--Sherlock Holmes. Every detail
+points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing.
+Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands
+of twigs on a tree. It's only the life of the tree that has unity
+and goes up--only the green blood that springs, like a fountain,
+at the stars."
+
+"But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?"
+
+"We have eternity to stretch our legs in," replied the mystic. "It
+can be an infinity of things. I haven't seen any of them--I've
+only seen the letter. I look at that, and say it's not criminal."
+
+"Then what's the origin of it?"
+
+"I haven't the vaguest idea."
+
+"Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?"
+
+Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed
+collecting his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he
+said:
+
+"Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed
+through silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an
+open and deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld
+one dressed as a ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And
+suppose you looked, and saw it was a man disguised. And suppose
+you looked again, and saw it was Lord Kitchener. What would you
+think?"
+
+He paused a moment, and went on:
+
+"You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary
+explanation of putting on singular clothes is that you look nice
+in them; you would not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a
+ballet girl out of ordinary personal vanity. You would think it
+much more likely that he inherited a dancing madness from a great
+grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a seance; or threatened by
+a secret society with death if he refused the ordeal. With
+Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet--but not with Kitchener. I
+should know all that, because in my public days I knew him quite
+well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals quite well.
+It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres." And he closed
+his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.
+
+Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect
+and pity. The former said
+
+"Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think--until your
+spiritual mystery turns up--that a man who sends a note
+recommending a crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually
+carried out, at least tentatively, is, in all probability, a
+little casual in his moral tastes. Can I have that revolver?"
+
+"Certainly," said Basil, getting up. "But I am coming with you."
+And he flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a
+sword-stick from the corner.
+
+"You!" said Rupert, with some surprise, "you scarcely ever leave
+your hole to look at anything on the face of the earth."
+
+Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.
+
+"I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and colossal
+arrogance, "hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do
+not understand at once, without going to see it."
+
+And he led the way out into the purple night.
+
+We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
+Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of
+Fleet Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black
+figure of Major Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to
+the hound-like stoop and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who
+adopted, with childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of the
+detective of fiction. The finest among his many fine qualities was
+his boyish appetite for the colour and poetry of London. Basil, who
+walked behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars, had the
+look of a somnambulist.
+
+Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of
+delight at danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat
+pocket.
+
+"Shall we go in now?" he asked.
+
+"Not get police?" asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down
+the street.
+
+"I am not sure," answered Rupert, knitting his brows. "Of course,
+it's quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of
+us, and--"
+
+"I shouldn't get the police," said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert
+glanced at him and stared hard.
+
+"Basil," he cried, "you're trembling. What's the matter--are you
+afraid?"
+
+"Cold, perhaps," said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt
+that he was shaking.
+
+At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.
+
+"You're laughing," he cried. "I know that confounded, silent,
+shaky laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil?
+Here we are, all three of us, within a yard of a den of
+ruffians--"
+
+"But I shouldn't call the police," said Basil. "We four heroes
+are quite equal to a host," and he continued to quake with his
+mysterious mirth.
+
+Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court,
+the rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he
+turned abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.
+
+"Stand close," he said in the voice of a commander. "The scoundrel
+may be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the
+door and rush in."
+
+The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except
+for the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.
+
+"Now," hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
+suddenly over his shoulder, "when I say `Four', follow me with a
+rush. If I say `Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are.
+If I say `Stop', stop. I shall say that if there are more than
+three. If they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil,
+have your sword-stick ready. Now--one, two three, four!"
+
+With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into
+the room like an invasion, only to stop dead.
+
+The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office,
+appeared, at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and
+more careful glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk with
+pigeonholes and drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small man
+with a black waxed moustache, and the air of a very average clerk,
+writing hard. He looked up as we came to a standstill.
+
+"Did you knock?" he asked pleasantly. "I am sorry if I did not
+hear. What can I do for you?"
+
+There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
+himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.
+
+The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.
+
+"Is your name P. G. Northover?" he asked.
+
+"That is my name," replied the other, smiling.
+
+"I think," said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of
+his face, "that this letter was written by you." And with a loud
+clap he struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist.
+The man called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and
+merely nodded.
+
+"Well, sir," said the Major, breathing hard, "what about that?"
+
+"What about it, precisely," said the man with the moustache.
+
+"I am Major Brown," said that gentleman sternly.
+
+Northover bowed. "Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to
+me?"
+
+"Say!" cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; "why, I want this
+confounded thing settled. I want--"
+
+"Certainly, sir," said Northover, jumping up with a slight
+elevation of the eyebrows. "Will you take a chair for a moment."
+And he pressed an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and
+tinkled in a room beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of the
+chair offered him, but stood chafing and beating the floor with his
+polished boot.
+
+The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy,
+young man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.
+
+"Mr Hopson," said Northover, "this is Major Brown. Will you please
+finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.
+
+"You will excuse me, gentlemen," said the egregious Northover, with
+his radiant smile, "if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready.
+I have some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my
+holiday tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we?
+Ha! ha!"
+
+The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a
+silence ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G.
+Northover; a raging silence on the part of everybody else.
+
+At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was
+mingled with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the
+turning of the handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same
+silent rapidity, placed a paper before his principal, and
+disappeared again.
+
+The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a
+few moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to
+him. He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and
+altered something, muttering--"Careless." Then he read it again
+with the same impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it
+to the frantic Brown, whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo
+on the back of the chair.
+
+"I think you will find that all right, Major," he said briefly.
+
+The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will
+appear later, but he found it like this:
+
+Major Brown to P. G. Northover.                                    L s. d.
+ January 1, to account rendered                                    5  6 0
+ May 9, to potting and embedding of zoo pansies                    2  0 0
+ To cost of trolley with flowers                                   0 15 0
+ To hiring of man with trolley                                     0  5 0
+ To hire of house and garden for one day                           1  0 0
+ To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3  0 0
+ To salary of Miss Jameson                                         1  0 0
+ To salary of Mr Plover                                            1  0 0
+                                                               ----------
+                                                           Total L14  6 0
+A Remittance will oblige.
+
+"What," said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed
+slowly rising out of his head, "What in heaven's name is this?"
+
+"What is it?" repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with
+amusement. "It's your account, of course."
+
+"My account!" The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede.
+"My account! And what have I got to do with it?"
+
+"Well," said Northover, laughing outright, "naturally I prefer you
+to pay it."
+
+The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the
+words came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair
+bodily into the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's
+head.
+
+The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a
+blow on the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be
+seized by the united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen
+clattering on the empty floor.
+
+"Let me go, you scamps," he shouted. "Let me--"
+
+"Stand still," cried Rupert authoritatively. "Major Brown's action
+is excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted--"
+
+"A customer has a perfect right," said Northover hotly, "to
+question an alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw
+furniture."
+
+"What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and
+overcharges?" shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature,
+steady in pain or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence
+of a long and exasperating mystery. "Who are you? I've never seen
+you or your insolent tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed
+brutes tried to choke me--"
+
+"Mad," said Northover, gazing blankly round; "all of them mad. I
+didn't know they travelled in quartettes."
+
+"Enough of this prevarication," said Rupert; "your crimes are
+discovered. A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court.
+Though only a private detective myself, I will take the
+responsibility of telling you that anything you say--"
+
+"Mad," repeated Northover, with a weary air.
+
+And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them
+the strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.
+
+"Major Brown," he said, "may I ask you a question?"
+
+The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.
+
+"You?" he cried; "certainly, Mr Grant."
+
+"Can you tell me," said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering
+brow, as he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick,
+"can you tell me what was the name of the man who lived in your
+house before you?"
+
+The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and
+futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:
+
+"Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something--a name with a
+hyphen--Gurney-Brown; that was it."
+
+"And when did the house change hands?" said Basil, looking up
+sharply. His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.
+
+"I came in last month," said the Major.
+
+And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his
+great office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.
+
+"Oh! it's too perfect--it's too exquisite," he gasped, beating the
+arms with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was
+laughing voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads
+were like weathercocks in a whirlwind.
+
+"Confound it, Basil," said Rupert, stamping. "If you don't want me
+to go mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all
+this means."
+
+Northover rose.
+
+"Permit me, sir, to explain," he said. "And, first of all, permit
+me to apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and
+unpardonable blunder, which has caused you menace and
+inconvenience, in which, if you will allow me to say so, you have
+behaved with astonishing courage and dignity. Of course you need
+not trouble about the bill. We will stand the loss." And, tearing
+the paper across, he flung the halves into the waste-paper basket
+and bowed.
+
+Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. "But I don't
+even begin to understand," he cried. "What bill? what blunder?
+what loss?"
+
+Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room,
+thoughtfully, and with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On
+closer consideration, there were apparent about him other things
+beside a screwed moustache, especially a lean, sallow face,
+hawk-like, and not without a careworn intelligence. Then he looked
+up abruptly.
+
+"Do you know where you are, Major?" he said.
+
+"God knows I don't," said the warrior, with fervour.
+
+"You are standing," replied Northover, "in the office of the
+Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited."
+
+"And what's that?" blankly inquired Brown.
+
+The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed
+his dark eyes on the other's face.
+
+"Major," said he, "did you ever, as you walked along the empty
+street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for
+something to happen--something, in the splendid words of Walt
+Whitman: `Something pernicious and dread; something far removed
+from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a
+trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.'
+Did you ever feel that?"
+
+"Certainly not," said the Major shortly.
+
+"Then I must explain with more elaboration," said Mr Northover,
+with a sigh. "The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to
+meet a great modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in
+literature, we hear of the desire for a larger theatre of events
+for something to waylay us and lead us splendidly astray. Now the
+man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a
+quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the
+Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with
+startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an
+excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his
+life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he
+receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is
+immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving
+story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished
+novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room.
+Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I consider
+peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did not
+see the end of it. I need scarcely explain further the monstrous
+mistake. Your predecessor in your present house, Mr Gurney-Brown,
+was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks, ignoring
+alike the dignity of the hyphen and the glory of military rank,
+positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the
+same person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle of
+another man's story."
+
+"How on earth does the thing work?" asked Rupert Grant, with bright
+and fascinated eyes.
+
+"We believe that we are doing a noble work," said Northover
+warmly. "It has continually struck us that there is no element in
+modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern
+man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he
+wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to
+dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to
+soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the
+banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give
+him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall
+to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long
+streets from pursuers--all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give
+him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the
+Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid
+sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can
+act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and
+dream."
+
+Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological
+discovery had been reserved to the end, for as the little business
+man ceased speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.
+
+Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and
+good humour.
+
+"Of course; awfully dense, sir," he said. "No doubt at all, the
+scheme excellent. But I don't think--" He paused a moment, and
+looked dreamily out of the window. "I don't think you will find me
+in it. Somehow, when one's seen--seen the thing itself, you
+know--blood and men screaming, one feels about having a little
+house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you know, `There remaineth
+a rest'."
+
+Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:
+
+"Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you
+desire, at any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown's
+view of the matter--"
+
+"I should be obliged for your card, sir," said the Major, in his
+abrupt but courteous voice. "Pay for chair."
+
+The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.
+
+It ran, "P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance
+Agency, 14 Tanner's Court, Fleet Street."
+
+"What on earth is "C.QT."?" asked Rupert Grant, looking over the
+Major's shoulder.
+
+"Don't you know?" returned Northover. "Haven't you ever heard of
+the Club of Queer Trades?"
+
+"There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't
+heard of," said the little Major reflectively. "What's this one?"
+
+"The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of
+people who have invented some new and curious way of making money.
+I was one of the earliest members."
+
+"You deserve to be," said Basil, taking up his great white hat,
+with a smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.
+
+When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a
+queer smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. "A
+fine chap, that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one
+stands some chance of being a poem. But to think of such a
+clockwork little creature of all people getting into the nets of
+one of Grigsby's tales," and he laughed out aloud in the silence.
+
+Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the
+door. An owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with
+deprecating and somewhat absurd inquiry.
+
+"What! back again, Major?" cried Northover in surprise. "What can
+I do for you?"
+
+The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.
+
+"It's horribly absurd," he said. "Something must have got started
+in me that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most
+desperate desire to know the end of it all."
+
+"The end of it all?"
+
+"Yes," said the Major. "`Jackals', and the title-deeds, and `Death
+to Major Brown'."
+
+The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.
+
+"I am terribly sorry, Major," said he, "but what you ask is
+impossible. I don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you;
+but the rules of the agency are strict. The Adventures are
+confidential; you are an outsider; I am not allowed to let you
+know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you understand--"
+
+"There is no one," said Brown, "who understands discipline better
+than I do. Thank you very much. Good night."
+
+And the little man withdrew for the last time.
+
+He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
+garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the
+Romance Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused
+some stir in her languid and intellectualized set. She always
+replied very quietly that she had met scores of men who acted
+splendidly in the charades provided for them by Northover, but that
+she had only met one man who went down into a coal-cellar when he
+really thought it contained a murderer.
+
+The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd
+villa, and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is
+unchanged--except, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full
+of feminine unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into
+a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed
+smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering
+what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention
+jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and
+believes that he will realize the rest of those purple adventures
+in a better world.
+
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
+
+Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
+perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
+tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the
+top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.
+
+The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace
+gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it
+were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real
+horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally
+missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict
+it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals
+and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den of
+vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But
+the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that
+there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity,
+and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going through a
+criminal slum, "I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals." But here
+there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums.
+Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway
+engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united by
+their common contempt for the people. Here there were churches;
+only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites
+or Irvingites. Here, above all, there were broad roads and vast
+crossings and tramway lines and hospitals and all the real marks of
+civilization. But though one never knew, in one sense, what one
+would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not
+see--anything really great, central, of the first class, anything
+that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable our
+emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked
+entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which
+lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real
+possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of
+the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a
+thunderbolt.
+
+"But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his heavy
+abstracted way, when I had urged this view, "that the very vileness
+of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the
+victory of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have
+to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a
+fourth-rate civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the
+majority of people here are good people. And being good is an
+adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world.
+Besides--"
+
+"Go on," I said.
+
+No answer came.
+
+"Go on," I said, looking up.
+
+The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and
+he was paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of
+the tram.
+
+"What is the matter?" I asked, peering over also.
+
+"It is very odd," said Grant at last, grimly, "that I should have
+been caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said
+all these people were good, and there is the wickedest man in
+England."
+
+"Where?" I asked, leaning over further, "where?"
+
+"Oh, I was right enough," he went on, in that strange continuous
+and sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments,
+"I was right enough when I said all these people were good. They
+are heroes; they are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a
+spoon or two; they may beat a wife or two with the poker. But they
+are saints all the same; they are angels; they are robed in white;
+they are clad with wings and haloes--at any rate compared to that
+man."
+
+"Which man?" I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at
+which Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.
+
+He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the
+quickly passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him
+sufficient to attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to
+demand a curious consideration when once that notice was attracted.
+He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those
+strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to
+turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase.
+His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of
+one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The rest
+of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental; he had two
+black tufts of moustache.
+
+"What has he done?" I asked.
+
+"I am not sure of the details," said Grant, "but his besetting sin
+is a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he
+has adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan."
+
+"What plan?" I asked. "If you know all about him, why don't you
+tell me why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?"
+
+Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.
+
+"I think you've made a mistake in my meaning," he said. "I don't
+know his name. I never saw him before in my life."
+
+"Never saw him before!" I cried, with a kind of anger; "then what
+in heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man
+in England?"
+
+"I meant what I said," said Basil Grant calmly. "The moment I saw
+that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and
+splendid innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the
+streets were being themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that
+all the men in these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are
+all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good. And I saw that that
+man was trying to be evil."
+
+"But if you never saw him before--" I began.
+
+"In God's name, look at his face," cried out Basil in a voice that
+startled the driver. "Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal
+pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when
+he was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they
+are so grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the sacred
+heavens look at his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at
+his hat."
+
+I stirred uncomfortably.
+
+"But, after all," I said, "this is very fanciful--perfectly absurd.
+Look at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you--"
+
+"Oh, the mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair. "The mere
+facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in superstitions,
+so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in
+facts? Do you not trust an immediate impression?"
+
+"Well, an immediate impression may be," I said, "a little less
+practical than facts."
+
+"Bosh," he said. "On what else is the whole world run but immediate
+impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of
+this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on
+spiritual impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept
+a clerk? Do you measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological
+state in a handbook? Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You
+accept a clerk who may save your business--you refuse a clerk that
+may rob your till, entirely upon those immediate mystical
+impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce, with a perfect
+sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man walking in that
+street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind."
+
+"You always put things well," I said, "but, of course, such things
+cannot immediately be put to the test."
+
+Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
+
+"Let us get off and follow him," he said. "I bet you five pounds
+it will turn out as I say."
+
+And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.
+
+The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face
+walked along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying
+behind him. Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road
+and disappeared down an ill-lit alley. We swung silently after
+him.
+
+"This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take," I said.
+
+"A man of what kind?" asked my friend.
+
+"Well," I said, "a man with that kind of expression and those
+boots. I thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should
+be in this part of the world at all."
+
+"Ah, yes," said Basil, and said no more.
+
+We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant
+figure, like the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly
+against the glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed
+again in night. The intervals between the lights were long, and a
+fog was thickening the whole city. Our pace, therefore, had become
+swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts; but Basil came to a
+standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped also. We had
+almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness in
+front of us was the darkness of his body.
+
+At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were
+hardly a yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped
+four times on a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed
+street. A gleam of gas cut the darkness as it opened slowly. We
+listened intently, but the interview was short and simple and
+inexplicable as an interview could be. Our exquisite friend handed
+in what looked like a paper or a card and said:
+
+"At once. Take a cab."
+
+A heavy, deep voice from inside said:
+
+"Right you are."
+
+And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding
+after the striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes,
+the lights just helping us. It was only five o'clock, but winter
+and the fog had made it like midnight.
+
+"This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather
+boots," I repeated.
+
+"I don't know," said Basil humbly. "It leads to Berkeley Square."
+
+As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere
+and tried to make out the direction described. For some ten
+minutes I wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that
+my friend was right. We were coming to the great dreary spaces
+of fashionable London--more dreary, one must admit, even than
+the dreary plebeian spaces.
+
+"This is very extraordinary!" said Basil Grant, as we turned into
+Berkeley Square.
+
+"What is extraordinary?" I asked. "I thought you said it was quite
+natural."
+
+"I do not wonder," answered Basil, "at his walking through nasty
+streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do
+wonder at his going to the house of a very good man."
+
+"What very good man?" I asked with exasperation.
+
+"The operation of time is a singular one," he said with his
+imperturbable irrelevancy. "It is not a true statement of the case
+to say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a
+public man. I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering
+some novel. But fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as
+Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better than that
+man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's house."
+
+"Who is old Beaumont?" I asked irritably.
+
+"A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood--don't you know
+his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who
+does more work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't
+know what; anyhow, he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit
+he has the slight disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off
+his head. He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of
+the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks anything
+odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and proposed to
+eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you put
+it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap alternative to
+cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a matter
+of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or
+the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession of
+literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it
+is romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical; men
+who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who
+walk on their hands for fear of tiring their feet. But though the
+inhabitants of his salons are generally fools, like himself, they
+are almost always, like himself, good men. I am really surprised
+to see a criminal enter there."
+
+"My good fellow," I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement,
+"the truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent
+language, you have the `slight disadvantage' of being off your
+head. You see a total stranger in a public street; you choose to
+start certain theories about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a
+burglar because he enters an honest man's door. The thing is too
+monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come home with me. Though
+these people are still having tea, yet with the distance we have to
+go, we shall be late for dinner."
+
+Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.
+
+"I thought," he said, "that I had outlived vanity."
+
+"What do you want now?" I cried.
+
+"I want," he cried out, "what a girl wants when she wears her new
+frock; I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match
+with a monitor--I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I
+am as right about that man as I am about your having a hat on your
+head. You say it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to
+see my old friend Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know."
+
+"Do you really mean--?" I began.
+
+"I will apologize," he said calmly, "for our not being dressed
+for a call," and walking across the vast misty square, he walked
+up the dark stone steps and rang at the bell.
+
+A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on
+receiving my friend's name his manner passed in a flash from
+astonishment to respect. We were ushered into the house very
+quickly, but not so quickly but that our host, a white-haired
+man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet us.
+
+"My dear fellow," he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again,
+"I have not seen you for years. Have you been--er--" he said,
+rather wildly, "have you been in the country?"
+
+"Not for all that time," answered Basil, smiling. "I have long
+given up my official position, my dear Philip, and have been
+living in a deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at an
+inopportune moment."
+
+"An inopportune moment," cried the ardent gentleman. "You come at
+the most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is
+here?"
+
+"I do not," answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar
+of laughter came from the inner room.
+
+"Basil," said Lord Beaumont solemnly, "I have Wimpole here."
+
+"And who is Wimpole?"
+
+"Basil," cried the other, "you must have been in the country.
+You must have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the
+moon. Who is Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?"
+
+"As to who Shakespeare was," answered my friend placidly, "my views
+go no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he
+was Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is--" and his speech
+also was cloven with a roar of laughter from within.
+
+"Wimpole!" cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. "Haven't
+you heard of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned
+conversation, I do not say into an art--for that, perhaps, it
+always was but into a great art, like the statuary of Michael
+Angelo--an art of masterpieces. His repartees, my good friend,
+startle one like a man shot dead. They are final; they are--"
+
+Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with
+the very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came
+out of the inner house into the hall where we were standing.
+
+"Now, my dear chap," began Lord Beaumont hastily.
+
+"I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it," exploded the large old
+gentleman. "I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary
+adventurer like that. I won't be made a guy. I won't--"
+
+"Come, come," said Beaumont feverishly. "Let me introduce you.
+This is Mr Justice Grant--that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you
+have heard of Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh."
+
+"Who has not?" asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet,
+eyeing him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his
+momentary anger, but even that could not conceal the noble though
+opulent outline of his face and body, the florid white hair, the
+Roman nose, the body stalwart though corpulent, the chin
+aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent courtly gentleman;
+so much of a gentleman that he could show an unquestionable
+weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so much of a
+gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.
+
+"I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont," he said gruffly,
+"to fail in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially
+to fail in it in your house. But it is not you or they that are
+in any way concerned, but that flashy half-caste jackanapes--"
+
+At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a
+sombre air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be
+greatly enjoying the intellectual banquet within.
+
+"I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond," said
+Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, "even if you only remember him as
+a schoolboy."
+
+"Perfectly," said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly
+and respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to
+Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, he said:
+
+"I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not
+going yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of
+you."
+
+The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
+struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of
+obeisance and a vague utterance of, "If Lady Beaumont . . . a lady,
+of course," he followed the young man back into the salon. He had
+scarcely been deposited there half a minute before another peal of
+laughter told that he had (in all probability) been scored off
+again.
+
+"Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh," said Beaumont,
+as he helped us off with our coats. "He has not the modern mind."
+
+"What is the modern mind?" asked Grant.
+
+"Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive--and faces the
+facts of life seriously." At this moment another roar of laughter
+came from within.
+
+"I only ask," said Basil, "because of the last two friends of yours
+who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the
+other thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way, if
+I remember right."
+
+"Do you know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
+entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I can
+never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so
+liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?"
+
+"No," said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
+drawing-room.
+
+This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away
+from our slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time
+that afternoon. Two people, however, still looked at him. One was
+the daughter of the house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with
+great violet eyes and with the intense and awful thirst of the
+female upper class for verbal amusement and stimulus. The other
+was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at him with a still and
+sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the window.
+
+He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair;
+everything from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his
+silvered hair suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the
+straight limbs of a man--the unmistakable, splendid serpentine
+gentleman we had seen walking in North London, his eyes shining
+with repeated victory.
+
+"What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole," said Muriel Beaumont
+eagerly, "is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say
+things quite philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought
+of such things, I'm sure I should laugh outright when the thought
+first came."
+
+"I agree with Miss Beaumont," said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding
+with indignation. "If I had thought of anything so futile, I should
+find it difficult to keep my countenance."
+
+"Difficult to keep your countenance," cried Mr Wimpole, with an air
+of alarm; "oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British
+Museum."
+
+Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already
+admitted readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple,
+shouted out:
+
+"Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded
+tomfooleries?"
+
+"I never talk tomfooleries," said the other, "without first knowing
+my audience."
+
+Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached
+secretary on the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the
+wall regarding the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I
+fancied, with very particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young
+lady of the house rapturously listening to Wimpole.
+
+"May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?" asked Grant. "It is
+about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us."
+
+I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to
+this strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of
+side room out of the hall.
+
+"Drummond," said Basil sharply, "there are a great many good
+people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon.
+Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are
+mad, and all the sane people are wicked. You are the only person I
+know of here who is honest and has also some common sense. What do
+you make of Wimpole?"
+
+Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his
+face became suddenly as red as his moustache.
+
+"I am not a fair judge of him," he said.
+
+"Why not?" asked Grant.
+
+"Because I hate him like hell," said the other, after a long pause
+and violently.
+
+Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards
+Miss Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating.
+Grant said quietly:
+
+"But before--before you came to hate him, what did you really think
+of him?"
+
+"I am in a terrible difficulty," said the young man, and his voice
+told us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. "If I spoke
+about him as I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I
+should like to be able to say that when I first saw him I thought
+he was charming. But again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him, that
+is my private affair. But I also disapprove of him--really I do
+believe I disapprove of him quite apart from my private feelings.
+When first he came, I admit he was much quieter, but I did not
+like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then that jolly old Sir
+Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this fellow, with
+his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the way he
+does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be bad to
+fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap
+savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take,
+if you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that
+I hate the man because a certain person admires him. But I believe
+that apart from that I should hate the man because old Sir Walter
+hates him."
+
+This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for
+the young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously
+hopeless worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of
+the direct realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had
+given. Still, I was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against
+the man, and could not help referring it to an instinct of his
+personal relations, however nobly disguised from himself.
+
+In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what
+was perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.
+
+"In the name of God, let's get away."
+
+I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man
+affected me. I only know that for some reason or other he so
+affected me that I was, within a few minutes, in the street
+outside.
+
+"This," he said, "is a beastly but amusing affair."
+
+"What is?" I asked, baldly enough.
+
+"This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont
+have just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very
+night, at which Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there
+is nothing very extraordinary about that. The extraordinary thing
+is that we are not going."
+
+"Well, really," I said, "it is already six o'clock and I doubt if
+we could get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the
+fact that we are not going."
+
+"Don't you?" said Grant. "I'll bet you'll see something
+extraordinary in what we're doing instead."
+
+I looked at him blankly.
+
+"Doing instead?" I asked. "What are we doing instead?"
+
+"Why," said he, "we are waiting for one or two hours outside this
+house on a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my
+vanity. It is only to show you that I am right. Can you, with the
+assistance of this cigar, wait until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh
+and the mystic Wimpole have left this house?"
+
+"Certainly," I said. "But I do not know which is likely to leave
+first. Have you any notion?"
+
+"No," he said. "Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or
+again, Mr Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is
+a thing to be flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may
+remain some time to analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will
+both have to leave within reasonable time, for they will both have
+to get dressed and come back to dinner here tonight."
+
+As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great
+house drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened
+that we really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter
+Cholmondeliegh came out at the same moment.
+
+They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural
+doubt; then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of
+them, made Sir Walter smile and say: "The night is foggy. Pray
+take my cab."
+
+Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street
+with both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had
+hissed in my ear:
+
+"Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog--
+run."
+
+We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
+streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but
+we are running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled
+up at the fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who
+drove away rejoicing, having just come in contact with the more
+generous among the rich. Then the two men talked together as men do
+talk together after giving and receiving great insults, the talk
+which leads either to forgiveness or a duel--at least so it seemed
+as we watched it from ten yards off. Then the two men shook hands
+heartily, and one went down one fork of the road and one down
+another.
+
+Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.
+
+"Run after that scoundrel," he cried; "let us catch him now."
+
+We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.
+
+"Stop!" I shouted wildly to Grant. "That's the wrong turning."
+
+He ran on.
+
+"Idiot!" I howled. "Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has
+slipped us. He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong . . .
+Are you deaf? You're wrong!"
+
+"I don't think I am," he panted, and ran on.
+
+"But I saw him!" I cried. "Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole?
+It's the old man . . . What are you doing? What are we to do?"
+
+"Keep running," said Grant.
+
+Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old
+baronet, whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight.
+My brain was utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.
+
+"Charlie," said Basil hoarsely, "can you believe in my common sense
+for four minutes?"
+
+"Of course," I said, panting.
+
+"Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it
+at once when I say `Now'. Now!"
+
+We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
+gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we
+got him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid
+and full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we
+bound him; when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him.
+Then, by Basil's arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by
+the street side and waited. As I say, I had no notion why.
+
+"I am sorry to incommode you," said Basil calmly out of the
+darkness; "but I have made an appointment here."
+
+"An appointment!" I said blankly.
+
+"Yes," he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged on the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. "I have made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow. An old friend. Jasper Drummond his name is--you may have met him this afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the Beaumonts' dinner is over."
+
+For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness. By the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my mind that the same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the bench of a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine no other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old country gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of wood.
+
+After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into
+the court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white
+face of Jasper Drummond.
+
+"Mr Grant," he said blankly, "the thing is incredible. You were
+right; but what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where
+dukes and duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially
+to hear him, that extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He
+didn't say a funny thing. He didn't say anything at all. What does
+it mean?"
+
+Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.
+
+"That is what it means," he said.
+
+Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the
+place, jumped back, as from a mouse.
+
+"What?" he said weakly, ". . . what?"
+
+Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's
+breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered
+state, seemed to make some effort to retain.
+
+It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
+Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As
+far as he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and
+answers, or at least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner
+of a catechism. The greater part of the document had been torn and
+obliterated in the struggle, but the termination remained. It ran
+as follows:
+
+C. Says . . . Keep countenance.
+
+W. Keep . . . British Museum.
+
+C. Know whom talk . . . absurdities.
+
+W. Never talk absurdities without
+
+"What is it?" cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of
+final fury.
+
+"What is it?" replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of
+splendid chant. "What is it? It is a great new profession. A great
+new trade. A trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like
+piracy."
+
+"A new profession!" said the young man with the red moustache
+vaguely; "a new trade!"
+
+"A new trade," repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, "a new
+profession! What a pity it is immoral."
+
+"But what the deuce is it?" cried Drummond and I in a breath of
+blasphemy.
+
+"It is," said Grant calmly, "the great new trade of the Organizer
+of Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes
+you, as I have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear
+his character. He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He
+is also not really at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not
+particularly old, and his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He is a
+swindler, and a swindler of a perfectly delightful and novel kind.
+He hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead up to other people's
+repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which you may find
+on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has arranged
+for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for
+him. In short, he allows himself to be scored off for a guinea a
+night."
+
+"And this fellow Wimpole--" began Drummond with indignation.
+
+"This fellow Wimpole," said Basil Grant, smiling, "will not be an
+intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance
+and silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend
+on the floor."
+
+"That fellow," cried Drummond furiously, "that fellow ought to be
+in gaol."
+
+"Not at all," said Basil indulgently; "he ought to be in the Club
+of Queer Trades."
+
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
+
+The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now
+been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather
+than the large things which make war against us and, I may add,
+beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a
+mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the
+mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are
+engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with
+microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I was engaged
+(on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections, was
+one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when a
+loud knock came at the door.
+
+My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch
+me. He and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I
+was in the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it
+into his head to come my way, though we had arranged to go
+separately. It was a small and confidential affair at the table of
+a good but unconventional political lady, an old friend of his. She
+had asked us both to meet a third guest, a Captain Fraser, who had
+made something of a name and was an authority on chimpanzees. As
+Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never seen her, I
+felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual social
+sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break the
+ice. The theory, like all my theories, was complete; but as a fact
+it was not Basil.
+
+I was handed a visiting card inscribed: "Rev. Ellis Shorter", and
+underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry
+could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, "Asking
+the favour of a few moments' conversation on a most urgent
+matter."!
+
+I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image
+of God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and
+throwing on my dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the
+drawing-room. He rose at my entrance, flapping like a seal; I can
+use no other description. He flapped a plaid shawl over his right
+arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black gloves; he flapped his
+clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he flapped his
+eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired,
+white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type. He
+said:
+
+"I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come
+--I can only say--I can only say in my defence, that I come--upon
+an important matter. Pray forgive me."
+
+I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.
+
+"What I have to say," he said brokenly, "is so dreadful--it is so
+dreadful--I have lived a quiet life."
+
+I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should
+be in time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's
+honest air of bitterness that seemed to open to me the
+possibilities of life larger and more tragic than my own.
+
+I said gently: "Pray go on."
+
+Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old,
+noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.
+
+"I'm so sorry," he said meekly; "I wouldn't have come--but for--
+your friend Major Brown recommended me to come here."
+
+"Major Brown!" I said, with some interest.
+
+"Yes," said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid
+shawl about. "He told me you helped him in a great difficulty--and
+my difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death."
+
+I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. "Will it take long, Mr
+Shorter?" I asked. "I have to go out to dinner almost at once."
+
+He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with
+all his moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his
+office.
+
+"I have no right, Mr Swinburne--I have no right at all," he said.
+"If you have to go out to dinner, you have of course--a perfect
+right--of course a perfect right. But when you come back--a man
+will be dead."
+
+And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.
+
+The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed
+and drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political
+widow, and a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had
+brought this dear, doddering old vicar into relation with immediate
+perils.
+
+"Will you have a cigar?" I said.
+
+"No, thank you," he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if
+not smoking cigars was a social disgrace.
+
+"A glass of wine?" I said.
+
+"No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now," he repeated with
+that hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at
+all often try to convey that on any other night of the week they
+would sit up all night drinking rum-punch. "Not just now, thank
+you."
+
+"Nothing else I can get for you?" I said, feeling genuinely sorry
+for the well-mannered old donkey. "A cup of tea?"
+
+I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea
+came he drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell
+back and said:
+
+"I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these
+excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex'--he threw this in
+with an indescribable airiness of vanity--'I have never known
+such things happen."
+
+"What things happen?" I asked.
+
+He straightened himself with sudden dignity.
+
+"As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex," he said, "I have never been
+forcibly dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a
+crime in the character of an old woman. Never once. My experience
+may be small. It may be insufficient. But it has never occurred
+to me before."
+
+"I have never heard of it," I said, "as among the duties of a
+clergyman. But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if
+perhaps I failed to follow you correctly. Dressed up--as what?"
+
+"As an old woman," said the vicar solemnly, "as an old woman."
+
+I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to
+make an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic
+than comic, and I said respectfully:
+
+"May I ask how it occurred?"
+
+"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr Shorter, "and I will tell
+my story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes
+past eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain
+appointments and pay certain visits in the village. My first visit
+was to Mr Jervis, the treasurer of our League of Christian
+Amusements, with whom I concluded some business touching the claim
+made by Parkes the gardener in the matter of the rolling of our
+tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very earnest
+churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of
+several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled
+(unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine."
+
+He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something
+that can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager
+deliberation. He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the
+detectives in the detective stories, who always sternly require
+that nothing should be kept back.
+
+"I then proceeded," he went on, with the same maddening
+conscientiousness of manner, "to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of
+course; Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist,
+and having consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who
+is accused, I cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting
+holes in the organ pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas
+meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings are
+usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss
+Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in church work,
+had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is
+entirely under my wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss
+Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members
+of it. I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.
+
+"When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
+Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of
+course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the
+necessity in these matters of full and exact exposition of the
+facts, to remember and repeat the actual details of a
+conversation, particularly a conversation which (though inspired
+with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one which
+did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was in
+fact--er--mostly about socks. I can, however, remember distinctly
+that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a
+woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure
+she was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather
+was very changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea,
+which I accepted, I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a
+short and stout lady with white hair. The only other figure in the
+group that caught my attention was a Miss Mowbray, a small and
+neat lady of aristocratic manners, silver hair, and a high voice
+and colour. She was the most emphatic member of the party; and her
+views on the subject of pinafores, though expressed with a natural
+deference to myself, were in themselves strong and advanced.
+Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply in black)
+it could not be denied that the others looked in some way what you
+men of the world would call dowdy.
+
+"After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did
+so I heard something which--I cannot describe it--something which
+seemed to--but I really cannot describe it."
+
+"What did you hear?" I asked, with some impatience.
+
+"I heard," said the vicar solemnly, "I heard Miss Mowbray (the
+lady with the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the
+woollen shawl), the following extraordinary words. I committed
+them to memory on the spot, and as soon as circumstances set me
+free to do so, I noted them down on a piece of paper. I believe I
+have it here." He fumbled in his breast-pocket, bringing out mild
+things, note-books, circulars and programmes of village concerts.
+"I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James, the following words:
+`Now's your time, Bill.'"
+
+He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement,
+gravely and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was
+unshaken about his facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head
+more towards the fire.
+
+"This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means
+understand it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one
+maiden lady should address another maiden lady as `Bill'. My
+experience, as I have said, may be incomplete; maiden ladies may
+have among themselves and in exclusively spinster circles wilder
+customs than I am aware of. But it seemed to me odd, and I could
+almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand the phrase), I
+should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time that
+the words, `Now's your time, Bill', were by no means pronounced
+with that upper-class intonation which, as I have already said,
+had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation. In fact,
+the words, `Now's your time, Bill', would have been, I fancy,
+unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.
+
+"I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still
+more surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and
+umbrella in hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl
+leaning upright against the door out of which I was just about to
+make my exit. She was still knitting, and I supposed that this
+erect posture against the door was only an eccentricity of
+spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended departure.
+
+"I said genially, `I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I
+must really be going. I have--er--' I stopped here, for the words
+she had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone
+extremely business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my
+remarks, I think, natural and excusable. I have these words also
+noted down. I have not the least idea of their meaning; so I have
+only been able to render them phonetically. But she said," and Mr
+Shorter peered short-sightedly at his papers, "she said: `Chuck it,
+fat 'ead,' and she added something that sounded like `It's a kop',
+or (possibly) `a kopt'. And then the last cord, either of my sanity
+or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My esteemed friend
+and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said: `Put 'is
+old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up before you start jawin'.
+You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days with this way of coin'
+things, har lar theater.'
+
+"My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had
+suddenly fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some
+dreadful riotous society of their own from which all others were
+excluded? I remembered dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar
+in a small way once, but now, alas! rusty), I remembered the
+mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange female freemasonry. I
+remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was just, in my absurd
+lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana's
+nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The
+moment it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.
+
+"Miss Brett--or what I had called Miss Brett--was standing in front
+of me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
+Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into
+an attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave
+one a shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her
+pockets and her cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a
+wo--no, that is I saw that instead of being a woman she--he, I
+mean--that is, it was a man."
+
+Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in
+endeavouring to arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the
+same time. He resumed with a higher fever of nervousness:
+
+"As for Miss Mowbray, she--he, held me in a ring of iron. He had
+her arm--that is she had his arm--round her neck--my neck I mean--
+and I could not cry out. Miss Brett--that is, Mr Brett, at least Mr
+something who was not Miss Brett--had the revolver pointed at me.
+The other two ladies--or er--gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag
+in the background. It was all clear at last: they were criminals
+dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey,
+in Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?
+
+"The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, `'Urry
+up, 'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get off.'
+
+"`Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett--I mean the man with the
+revolver--`why should we show 'im the game?'
+
+"`If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at
+the door, whom they called Bill. `A man wot knows wet 'e's doin' is
+worth ten wot don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'
+
+"`Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held
+me (it had been Miss Mowbray's). `Bring out the picture, 'Arry.'
+
+"The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the
+other two women--I mean men--were turning over baggage, and asked
+them for something which they gave him. He came back with it across
+the room and held it out in front of me. And compared to the
+surprise of that display, all the previous surprises of this awful
+day shrank suddenly.
+
+"It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the
+hands of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild
+surprise; but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The
+likeness was an extremely good one, worked up with all the
+accessories of the conventional photographic studio. I was leaning
+my head on my hand and was relieved against a painted landscape of
+woodland. It was obvious that it was no snapshot; it was clear that
+I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was that I had never
+sat for such a photograph. It was a photograph that I had never had
+taken.
+
+"I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a
+good deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred
+some of the details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes,
+my nose and mouth, my head and hand, posed for a professional
+photographer. And I had never posed so for any photographer.
+
+"`Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver,
+with ill-timed facetiousness. `Parson, prepare to meet your God.'
+And with this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass
+moved, I saw that part of the picture was painted on it in Chinese
+white, notably a pair of white whiskers and a clerical collar. And
+underneath was a portrait of an old lady in a quiet black dress,
+leaning her head on her hand against the woodland landscape. The
+old lady was as like me as one pin is like another. It had required
+only the whiskers and the collar to make it me in every hair.
+
+"`Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he
+shot the glass back again. `Remarkable resemblance, parson.
+Gratifyin' to the lady. Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd,
+particlery gratifyin' to us, as bein' the probable source of a
+very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the man who's come
+to live in these parts, don't you?'
+
+"I nodded.
+
+"`Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, `that's 'is
+mother. 'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he flung
+his fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the old
+lady who was exactly like me.
+
+"`Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke
+out Bill from the door. `Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain't
+goin' to do you no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if
+you like. And as for the old woman's clothes--why, you'll look
+lovely in 'em.'
+
+"`You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man
+behind me. `Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this man
+Hawker tonight. Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne
+when 'e sees us. Maybe on the other 'and--'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be
+dead when we goes away. Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now as
+you know, 'e shuts 'isself up and never opens the door to a soul;
+only you don't know why and we does. The only one as can ever get
+at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded funny coincidence,'
+he said, accenting the penultimate, `it's a very unusual piece of
+good luck, but you're 'is mother.'
+
+"`When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his
+head in a ruminant manner, `when I first saw it I said--old
+Shorter. Those were my exact words--old Shorter.'
+
+"`What do you mean, you wild creatures?'  I gasped. `What am I to
+do?'
+
+"`That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver,
+good-humouredly; `you've got to put on those clothes,' and he
+pointed to a poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner
+of the room.
+
+"I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed.
+I had no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a
+loaded pistol. In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was
+dressed as an old woman--as somebody else's mother, if you
+please--and was dragged out of the house to take part in a crime.
+
+"It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter
+were closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out
+towards the lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest
+cortege that ever straggled up that or any other road. To every
+human eye, in every external, we were six very respectable old
+ladies of small means, in black dresses and refined but antiquated
+bonnets; and we were really five criminals and a clergyman.
+
+"I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a
+windmill as I walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To
+cry out, so long as we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for
+it would be easy for the ruffians to knife me or to gag me and
+fling me into a ditch. On the other hand, to attempt to stop
+strangers and explain the situation was impossible, because of the
+frantic folly of the situation itself. Long before I had persuaded
+the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a story, my companions
+would certainly have got off themselves, and in all probability
+would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had the
+misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an
+inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this, that
+the Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come
+to this.
+
+"I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and
+keeping pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like
+step, until at length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing
+under it. I had made up my mind. Until we reached them we were all
+equally demure and silent and swift. When we reached them I
+suddenly flung myself against the railings and roared out: `Hooray!
+Hooray! Hooray! Rule Britannia! Get your 'air cut. Hoop-la! Boo!'
+It was a condition of no little novelty for a man in my position.
+
+"The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the
+draggled, drunken old woman that was my travesty. `Now then, mum,'
+he began gruffly.
+
+"`Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear
+hoarsely. `Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear the
+words and see the neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.
+
+"I yelled, and yelled--I was in for it now. I screamed comic
+refrains that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our
+village concerts; I rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.
+
+"`If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the
+policeman, `I shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly she
+is right enough.'
+
+"I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of
+thing; but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I
+had ever heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.
+
+"`When we get you past,' whispered Bill, `you'll howl louder;
+you'll howl louder when we're burning your feet off.'
+
+"I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the
+nightmares that men have ever dreamed, there has never been
+anything so blighting and horrible as the faces of those five men,
+looking out of their poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors
+with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything so
+heart-breaking in hell.
+
+"For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions
+and the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome
+the policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as
+one can describe anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I
+lurched suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest, calling
+out (if I remember correctly), `Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was
+at that moment that I remembered most dearly that I was the Vicar
+of Chuntsey, in Essex.
+
+"My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back
+of the neck.
+
+"`You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his
+perfect imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.
+
+"`Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor
+friend. We will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but
+she is quite a lady--only eccentric.'
+
+"`She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.
+
+"`Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.
+
+"`Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed
+character of Miss James, `she wants looking after.' `She does,'
+said the policeman, `but I'll look after her.'
+
+"`That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. `She wants her friends.
+She wants a particular medicine we've got.'
+
+"`Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, `no other medicine
+any good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'
+
+"`I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal
+shame, the Vicar of Chuntsey.
+
+"`Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, `I don't like the
+eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er
+'ead in my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the
+looks of you I've seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong
+'uns. Who are you?'
+
+"`We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with
+indescribable dignity. `Nor do we see why we should be insulted by
+any Jack-in-office who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is
+paid to protect them. If you choose to take advantage of the
+weakness of our unfortunate friend, no doubt you are legally
+entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have any legal right to
+bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'
+
+"The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a
+moment. Under cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned
+for an instant on me faces like faces of the damned and then
+swished off into the darkness. When the constable first turned his
+lantern and his suspicions on to them, I had seen the telegraphic
+look flash from face to face saying that only retreat was possible
+now.
+
+"By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of
+acute reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not
+quit the role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably
+and explain the real case, the officer would merely have thought
+that I was slightly recovered and would have put me in charge of my
+friends. Now, however, if I liked I might safely undeceive him.
+
+"But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and
+it may doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a
+clergyman of the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old
+woman; but such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to
+appear to many improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had
+pretended to be drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was
+pretence!
+
+"I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly
+and quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently
+thought that I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and
+so held me lightly and easily enough. Past one turning, two
+turnings, three turnings, four turnings, he trailed me with him,
+a limp and slow and reluctant figure. At the fourth turning, I
+suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the street like a
+maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was dark.
+I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was
+gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy
+and blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet
+and buried them in clean earth."
+
+The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his
+chair. Both the matter and the manner of his narration had, as
+time went on, impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and
+pedant, but behind these things he was a country-bred man and
+gentleman, and had showed courage and a sporting instinct in the
+hour of desperation. He had told his story with many quaint
+formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing realism.
+
+"And now--" I began.
+
+"And now," said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like
+servile energy, "and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy
+man Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what
+they said was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the
+police, for reasons that you perceive. Among other things, they
+wouldn't believe me. What is to be done?"
+
+I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.
+
+"My friend Basil Grant," I said, "is the best man we can go to. He
+and I were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will
+just have come back by now. Have you any objection to taking a
+cab?"
+
+"Not at all," he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his
+absurd plaid shawl.
+
+A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of
+workmen's flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a
+wearisome wooden staircase brought us to his garret. When I
+entered that wooden and scrappy interior, the white gleam of
+Basil's shirt-front and the lustre of his fur coat flung on the
+wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He was drinking a glass
+of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come back from the
+dinner-party.
+
+He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis
+Shorter with the genuine simplicity and respect which he never
+failed to exhibit in dealing with any human being. When it was
+over he said simply:
+
+"Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?"
+
+I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the
+worthy collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined
+that evening, that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was
+that I did not look at Mr Shorter. I only heard him answer, in
+his most nervous tone, "No."
+
+Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his
+answer or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes
+fixed on the old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet
+they stood out more and more from his head.
+
+"You are quite sure, Mr Shorter," he repeated, "that you don't
+know Captain Fraser?"
+
+"Quite," answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to
+find him returning so much to the timidity, not to say the
+demoralization, of his tone when he first entered my presence.
+
+Basil sprang smartly to his feet.
+
+"Then our course is clear," he said. "You have not even begun your
+investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is
+to go together to see Captain Fraser."
+
+"When?" asked the clergyman, stammering.
+
+"Now," said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.
+
+The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.
+
+"I really do not think that it is necessary," he said.
+
+Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair
+again, and put his hands in his pockets.
+
+"Oh," he said, with emphasis. "Oh--you don't think it necessary;
+then," and he added the words with great clearness and
+deliberation, "then, Mr Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would
+like to see you without your whiskers."
+
+And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy
+of my life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in
+continual contact with an intellect like Basil's, I had always the
+feeling that that splendour and excitement were on the borderland
+of sanity. He lived perpetually near the vision of the reason of
+things which makes men lose their reason. And I felt of his
+insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart disease.
+It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a
+sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very moment
+of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a fellow creature,
+Basil Grant had gone mad.
+
+"Your whiskers," he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. "Give me
+your whiskers. And your bald head."
+
+The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped
+between.
+
+"Sit down, Basil," I implored, "you're a little excited. Finish
+your wine."
+
+"Whiskers," he answered sternly, "whiskers."
+
+And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash
+for the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I
+was the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime
+and a pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with a
+crash, tables were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens were
+smashed, crockery scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant
+bounded and bellowed after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.
+
+And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last
+half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of
+Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously
+noticed him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I
+should have expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping,
+and fighting would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in
+this doddering old vicar looked like a sort of farcical
+fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not seem to be so much astonished as
+I had thought. There was even a look of something like enjoyment
+in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the
+unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.
+
+At length Shorter was cornered.
+
+"Come, come, Mr Grant," he panted, "you can't do anything to me.
+It's quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm. It's
+only a social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant."
+
+"I don't blame you, my man," said Basil coolly. "But I want your
+whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?"
+
+"No, no," said Mr Shorter, laughing, "we provide them ourselves.
+They don't belong to Captain Fraser."
+
+"What the deuce does all this mean?" I almost screamed. "Are you
+all in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald head
+belong to Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain
+Fraser to do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You
+dined with him, Basil."
+
+"No," said Grant, "I didn't."
+
+"Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?" I asked, staring.
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well," said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, "the fact is I
+was detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my
+bedroom."
+
+"In your bedroom?" I repeated; but my imagination had reached that
+point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat
+pocket.
+
+Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and
+walked in. Then he came out again with the last of the bodily
+wonders of that wild night. He introduced into the sitting-room,
+in an apologetic manner, and by the nape of the neck, a limp
+clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers and a plaid shawl.
+
+"Sit down, gentlemen," cried Grant, striking his hands heartily.
+"Sit down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is
+no harm in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I
+could have saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that
+you would have liked that, eh?"
+
+The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with
+two duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them
+carelessly pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
+
+"Basil," I said, "if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?"
+
+He laughed again.
+
+"Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades.
+These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of
+drinking) are Professional Detainers."
+
+"And what on earth's that?" I asked.
+
+"It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne," began he who had once
+been the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave
+me a shock indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar
+form come no longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the
+brisk sharp tones of a young city man. "It is really nothing very
+important. We are paid by our clients to detain in conversation,
+on some harmless pretext, people whom they want out of the way
+for a few hours. And Captain Fraser--" and with that he hesitated
+and smiled.
+
+Basil smiled also. He intervened.
+
+"The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends,
+wanted us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for
+East Africa, and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is--
+er--what is I believe described as `the romance of his life'. He
+wanted that two hours with her, and employed these two reverend
+gentlemen to detain us at our houses so as to let him have the
+field to himself."
+
+"And of course," said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, "as
+I had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with
+a lady, I had to come with something rather hot and strong--rather
+urgent. It wouldn't have done to be tame."
+
+"Oh," I said, "I acquit you of tameness."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the man respectfully, "always very grateful
+for any recommendation, sir."
+
+The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing
+close red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of
+Basil's admirable Burgundy.
+
+"It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is
+busy from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often knocked
+up against us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor
+goes on boring you with hunting stories, when you're burning to be
+introduced to somebody, he's from our bureau. When a lady calls on
+parish work and stops hours, just when you wanted to go to the
+Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The Robinson hand, sir, may be
+darkly seen."
+
+"There is one thing I don't understand," I said. "Why you are both
+vicars."
+
+A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in
+Essex.
+
+"That may have been a mistake, sir," he said. "But it was not our
+fault. It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested
+that the highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed
+to detain you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes
+to those who impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and
+more of a strain. We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the
+good fortune to satisfy the firm with our work; and we are now
+permanently vicars. Before that we had two years as colonels, the
+next in our scale. Colonels are four guineas."
+
+
+
+Chapter 4
+
+The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
+
+Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always
+burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose
+from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose
+person, who wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he
+were in the tropics; he was lean and graceful, like a panther, and
+he had restless black eyes.
+
+He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor,
+in a degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most
+miserable of the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change
+of lodgings. There are inland tracts of London where, in the very
+heart of artificial civilization, humanity has almost become
+nomadic once more. But in that restless interior there was no
+ragged tramp so restless as the elegant officer in the loose white
+clothes. He had shot a great many things in his time, to judge
+from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but his
+slangier acquaintances were of opinion that "the moon" had been
+not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The
+phrase is a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal
+hunting.
+
+He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit
+which consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking,
+large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of
+some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of
+the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of
+some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new
+lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite undisguised,
+tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic
+gutter boys in the little grey streets.
+
+I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old
+regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him.
+Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair,
+indeed, was quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian
+moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under
+its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged man who has left
+the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and not
+necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this
+fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no
+good.
+
+Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a
+man admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places,
+where a good man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and
+gambling hells; they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or
+smelled of a strange smoke from cannibal incantations. These are
+the kind of stories which discredit a person almost equally whether
+they are believed or no. If Keith's tales were false he was a liar;
+if they were true he had had, at any rate, every opportunity of
+being a scamp.
+
+He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his
+brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was
+invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant
+was a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and
+cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat
+extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it
+was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this
+boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am
+bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I was
+astounded at Basil's opposing him, however banteringly.
+
+I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but
+I could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.
+
+"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think that
+that fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to
+be the Mad Mullah and--"
+
+"He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as you
+may happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald
+a style; he is too veracious."
+
+"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert
+contemptuously, "be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance,
+that he has lived all his life in one ancestral manor."
+
+"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied Basil
+dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That doesn't
+prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people
+don't understand is that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as
+it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of things
+Keith recounts are not the sort of things that a man would make up
+to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they are
+the sort of things that a man would do if he were sufficiently
+filled with the soul of skylarking."
+
+"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something rather
+like a sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do
+you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?"
+
+"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil
+placidly. "For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and
+therefore is congenial to it."
+
+"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
+anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy.
+"Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the
+camera?"
+
+"I believe Keith's words," answered the other. "He is an honest
+man."
+
+"I should like to question a regiment of his landladies," said
+Rupert cynically.
+
+"I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable
+merely in himself," I said mildly; "his mode of life--"
+
+Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and
+Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama
+on his head.
+
+"I say, Grant," he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against
+the door, "I've got no money in the world till next April. Could
+you lend me a hundred pounds? There's a good chap."
+
+Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil,
+who was sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its
+screw and picked up a quill-pen.
+
+"Shall I cross it?" he asked, opening a cheque-book.
+
+"Really," began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, "since
+Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil
+before his family, I--"
+
+"Here you are, Ugly," said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the
+direction of the quite nonchalant officer. "Are you in a hurry?"
+
+"Yes," replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. "As a matter of fact
+I want it now. I want to see my--er--business man."
+
+Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was
+on the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, "Receiver of stolen
+goods, perhaps." What he did say was:
+
+"A business man? That's rather a general description, Lieutenant
+Keith."
+
+Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather
+like ill-temper:
+
+"He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see him."
+
+"Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?" said Rupert Grant
+grimly. "Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to
+go with you?"
+
+Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started
+a little; his brow blackened sharply.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said. "What did you say?"
+
+Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious
+irony, and he answered:
+
+"I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling
+along with you to this house-agent's."
+
+The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.
+
+"Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my bedroom.
+Look under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!" And with a
+furious energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of
+the room.
+
+Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
+excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
+transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from
+the disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His
+interpretation was certainly corroborated by one particular detail,
+the unmistakable unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with
+whom he walked. Basil and I tramped behind, and it was not
+necessary for us to tell each other that we had both noticed this.
+
+Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
+unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable
+house-agent. Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this
+fact. As the streets grew closer and more crooked and the roofs
+lower and the gutters grosser with mud, a darker curiosity deepened
+on the brows of Basil, and the figure of Rupert seen from behind
+seemed to fill the street with a gigantic swagger of success. At
+length, at the end of the fourth or fifth lean grey street in that
+sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the mysterious
+lieutenant looking once more about him with a sort of sulky
+desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all indescribably
+dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for a penny
+toyshop, ran the inscription: "P. Montmorency, House-Agent."
+
+"This is the office of which I spoke," said Keith, in a cutting
+voice. "Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing
+tenderness about my welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything
+I have to say to my business adviser?"
+
+Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on
+earth would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.
+
+"If you will excuse me," he said, clenching his hands behind his
+back, "I think I should feel myself justified in--"
+
+"Oh! Come along in," exploded the lieutenant. He made the same
+gesture of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the
+rest of us at his heels.
+
+P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting
+behind a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws,
+and a grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his
+face; the whole combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a
+shabby black frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very
+unclerical angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a
+house-agent as anything could look, short of something like a
+sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.
+
+We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
+gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he
+was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed,
+upon something that was crawling about on the counter in front of
+him. It was a ferret.
+
+The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and
+steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised
+for hours together in his bedroom. He said:
+
+"Mr Montmorency, I think?"
+
+The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland
+bewilderment, picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive
+into his trousers pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:
+
+"Sir."
+
+"You are a house-agent, are you not?" asked Rupert.
+
+To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes
+wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present
+that he knew.
+
+"A house-agent," cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it
+were "burglar'.
+
+"Yes . . . oh, yes," said the man, with a quavering and almost
+coquettish smile. "I am a house-agent . . . oh, yes."
+
+"Well, I think," said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, "that
+Lieutenant Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his
+request."
+
+Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.
+
+"I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat
+counter. "It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your
+suggestions er--about the br--"
+
+"Right," cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling
+neatness of a gunshot. "We needn't bother about all that. If
+you've done what I told you, all right."
+
+And he turned sharply towards the door.
+
+Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
+stammering a moment he said: "Excuse me . . . Mr Keith . . . there
+was another matter . . . about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried
+to get all the heating apparatus possible under the circumstances
+ . . . but in winter . . . at that elevation . . ."
+
+"Can't expect much, eh?" said the lieutenant, cutting in with
+the same sudden skill. "No, of course not. That's all right,
+Montmorency. There can't be any more difficulties," and he put
+his hand on the handle of the door.
+
+"I think," said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, "that Mr
+Montmorency has something further to say to you, lieutenant."
+
+"Only," said the house-agent, in desperation, "what about the
+birds?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Rupert, in a general blank.
+
+"What about the birds?" said the house-agent doggedly.
+
+Basil, who had remained throughout the procedings in a state of
+Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a
+state of Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.
+
+"Before you go, Lieutenant Keith," he said. "Come now. Really,
+what about the birds?"
+
+"I'll take care of them," said Lieutenant Keith, still with his
+long back turned to us; "they shan't suffer."
+
+"Thank you, sir, thank you," cried the incomprehensible
+house-agent, with an air of ecstasy. "You'll excuse my concern,
+sir. You know I'm wild on wild animals. I'm as wild as any of
+them on that. Thank you, sir. But there's another thing. . ."
+
+The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an
+indescribable laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh,
+the purport of which was direct and essential, and yet which one
+cannot exactly express. As near as it said anything, verbally
+speaking, it said: "Well, if you must spoil it, you must. But you
+don't know what you're spoiling."
+
+"There is another thing," continued Mr Montmorency weakly. "Of
+course, if you don't want to be visited you'll paint the house
+green, but--"
+
+"Green!" shouted Keith. "Green! Let it be green or nothing. I
+won't have a house of another colour. Green!" and before we could
+realize anything the door had banged between us and the street.
+
+Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but
+he spoke before the echoes of the door died away.
+
+"Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited," he
+said. "What is the matter with him? Is he unwell?"
+
+"Oh, I should think not," said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion.
+"The negotiations have been somewhat difficult--the house is
+rather--"
+
+"Green," said Rupert calmly. "That appears to be a very important
+point. It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency,
+before I rejoin my companion outside, whether, in your business,
+it is usual to ask for houses by their colour? Do clients write
+to a house-agent asking for a pink house or a blue house? Or, to
+take another instance, for a green house?"
+
+"Only," said Montmorency, trembling, "only to be inconspicuous."
+
+Rupert had his ruthless smile. "Can you tell me any place on earth
+in which a green house would be inconspicuous?"
+
+The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly
+drawing out a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the
+counter, he said:
+
+"No; I can't."
+
+"You can't suggest an explanation?"
+
+"No," said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as
+to suggest a sudden situation, "I can't. And may I, as a busy man,
+be excused if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make
+of me in connection with my business. What kind of house would you
+desire me to get for you, sir?"
+
+He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
+staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
+answered:
+
+"I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has
+unduly delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my
+apparent impertinence."
+
+"Not at all, sir," said the house-agent, taking a South American
+spider idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the
+slope of his desk. "Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me
+again."
+
+Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious
+to face Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was
+deserted.
+
+"What do you say now?" cried Rupert to his brother. His brother
+said nothing now.
+
+We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish,
+myself dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked
+through grey street after grey street, turning corners, traversing
+squares, scarcely meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots
+of two or three.
+
+In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began
+abruptly to thicken into knots of five or six and then into great
+groups and then into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly.
+But anyone with a knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if
+the outside rim of a crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that
+there is madness in the heart and core of the mob. It soon became
+evident that something really important had happened in the centre
+of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front, with the
+cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we soon
+learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl
+concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead on the
+stones of the street. Of the other four, all interesting matters
+were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous
+fact. One of the four survivors of the brutal and perhaps fatal
+scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn to
+ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other thing,
+however, pointed at him in a worse manner. A short sword, or very
+long knife, had been drawn out of his elegant walking-stick, and
+lay in front of him upon the stones. It did not, however, appear to
+be bloody.
+
+The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
+omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward
+with his incontrollable and intolerable secret.
+
+"That is the man, constable," he shouted, pointing at the battered
+lieutenant. "He is a suspicious character. He did the murder."
+
+"There's been no murder done, sir," said the policeman, with his
+automatic civility. "The poor man's only hurt. I shall only be
+able to take the names and addresses of the men in the scuffle
+and have a good eye kept on them."
+
+"Have a good eye kept on that one," said Rupert, pale to the lips,
+and pointing to the ragged Keith.
+
+"All right, sir," said the policeman unemotionally, and went the
+round of the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had
+completed his task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not
+immediately connected with the examination had gone away. He still
+found, however, one eager-faced stranger lingering on the
+outskirts of the affair. It was Rupert Grant.
+
+"Constable," he said, "I have a very particular reason for asking
+you a question. Would you mind telling me whether that military
+fellow who dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address
+or not?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said the policeman, after a reflective pause; "yes, he
+gave me his address."
+
+"My name is Rupert Grant," said that individual, with some pomp.
+"I have assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder
+whether you would tell me, as a special favour, what address?"
+
+The constable looked at him.
+
+"Yes," he said slowly, "if you like. His address is: The Elms,
+Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey."
+
+"Thank you," said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night
+as fast as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to
+himself.
+
+Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to
+breakfast; he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always the
+attitude of the indulged younger brother. Next morning, however,
+when Basil and I came down we found him ready and restless.
+
+"Well," he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to
+the meal. "What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?"
+
+"What do I think of him?" inquired Basil slowly. "I don't think
+anything of him."
+
+"I'm glad to hear it," said Rupert, buttering his toast with an
+energy that was somewhat exultant. "I thought you'd come round to
+my view, but I own I was startled at your not seeing it from the
+beginning. The man is a translucent liar and knave."
+
+"I think," said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, "that
+I did not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of
+him I meant grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think
+about him; that he did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me
+to think a lot of him, since you think him a knave. I should say he
+was glaringly good myself."
+
+"I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake," said Rupert,
+breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. "What the deuce is the
+sense of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our
+common agreement, dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales,
+a man who doesn't conceal his acquaintance with all the blackest
+and bloodiest scenes on earth. We take the trouble to follow him to
+one of his appointments, and if ever two human beings were plotting
+together and lying to every one else, he and that impossible
+house-agent were doing it. We followed him home, and the very same
+night he is in the thick of a fatal, or nearly fatal, brawl, in
+which he is the only man armed. Really, if this is being glaringly
+good, I must confess that the glare does not dazzle me."
+
+Basil was quite unmoved. "I admit his moral goodness is of a
+certain kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of
+change and experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously make
+against him are mere coincidence or special pleading. It's true he
+didn't want to talk about his house business in front of us. No
+man would. It's true that he carries a sword-stick. Any man might.
+It's true he drew it in the shock of a street fight. Any man
+would. But there's nothing really dubious in all this. There's
+nothing to confirm--"
+
+As he spoke a knock came at the door.
+
+"If you please, sir," said the landlady, with an alarmed air,
+"there's a policeman wants to see you."
+
+"Show him in," said Basil, amid the blank silence.
+
+The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke
+almost as soon as he appeared there.
+
+"I think one of you gentlemen," he said, curtly but respectfully,
+"was present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew
+my attention very strongly to a particular man."
+
+Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
+constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.
+
+"A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but
+torn in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith."
+
+"This is amusing," said Basil, laughing. "I was in the very act of
+clearing that poor officer's character of rather fanciful
+aspersions. What about him?"
+
+"Well, sir," said the constable, "I took all the men's addresses
+and had them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more than
+that. All the other addresses are all right. But this man Keith
+gave a false address. The place doesn't exist."
+
+The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up,
+slapping both his thighs.
+
+"Well, by all that's good," he cried. "This is a sign from heaven."
+
+"It's certainly very extraordinary," said Basil quietly, with
+knitted brows. "It's odd the fellow should have given a false
+address, considering he was perfectly innocent in the--"
+
+"Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer," cried Rupert, in a
+sort of rapture, "I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You
+think every one as good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough
+now? A doubtful acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious
+conversation, mean streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly
+killed, and, finally, a false address. That's what we call glaring
+goodness."
+
+"It's certainly very extraordinary," repeated Basil. And he
+strolled moodily about the room. Then he said: "You are quite
+sure, constable, that there's no mistake? You got the address
+right, and the police have really gone to it and found it was a
+fraud?"
+
+"It was very simple, sir," said the policeman, chuckling. "The
+place he named was a well-known common quite near London, and our
+people were down there this morning before any of you were awake.
+And there's no such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at
+all. Though it is so near London, it's a blank moor with hardly
+five trees on it, to say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the
+address was a fraud right enough. He was a clever rascal, and
+chose one of those scraps of lost England that people know nothing
+about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a particular
+house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there
+isn't."
+
+Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker
+and darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered
+almost for the first time since I had known him; and to tell the
+truth I rather wondered at the almost childish obstinacy which kept
+him so close to his original prejudice in favour of the wildly
+questionable lieutenant. At length he said:
+
+"You really searched the common? And the address was really not
+known in the district--by the way, what was the address?"
+
+The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it,
+but before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the
+window in a perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective,
+struck in with the sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.
+
+"Why, I can tell you that, Basil," he said graciously as he idly
+plucked leaves from a plant in the window. "I took the precaution
+to get this man's address from the constable last night."
+
+"And what was it?" asked his brother gruffly.
+
+"The constable will correct me if I am wrong," said Rupert,
+looking sweetly at the ceiling. "It was: The Elms, Buxton
+Common, near Purley, Surrey."
+
+"Right, sir," said the policeman, laughing and folding up his
+papers.
+
+There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for
+a few seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair
+so suddenly that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could
+move further his lips had flown apart (I can use no other phrase)
+and a peal of gigantic laughter struck and shook the ceiling--
+laughter that shook the laughter, laughter redoubled, laughter
+incurable, laughter that could not stop.
+
+Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill
+with laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this
+time ill almost with terror.
+
+"Excuse me," said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet.
+"I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also
+unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we're to get
+down to that place. The train service is confoundedly bad, as I
+happen to know. It's quite out of proportion to the comparatively
+small distance."
+
+"Get down to that place?" I repeated blankly. "Get down to what
+place?"
+
+"I have forgotten its name," said Basil vaguely, putting his hands
+in his pockets as he rose. "Something Common near Purley. Has any
+one got a timetable?"
+
+"You don't seriously mean," cried Rupert, who had been staring in
+a sort of confusion of emotions. "You don't mean that you want to
+go to Buxton Common, do you? You can't mean that!"
+
+"Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?" asked Basil, smiling.
+
+"Why should you?" said his brother, catching hold again restlessly
+of the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
+
+"To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course," said Basil Grant.
+"I thought you wanted to find him?"
+
+Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it
+impatiently on the floor. "And in order to find him," he said,
+"you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only place
+on the habitable earth where we know he can't be."
+
+The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of
+assenting laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was
+encouraged to go on with a reiterated gesture:
+
+"He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the
+cross of St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely);
+he may be in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in
+your store cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points of
+space, there is only one where he has just been systematically
+looked for and where we know that he is not to be found--and that,
+if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to go."
+
+"Exactly," said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; "I
+thought you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make
+yourselves jolly here till I come back."
+
+It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them
+if they really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil,
+and I cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that
+he vanished decisively with his great-coat and his stick. Rupert
+ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.
+
+"My dear chap," he cried, "do you really mean that you see any good
+in going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but
+beaten tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the
+first place that came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted
+to give a lying reference in a scrape?"
+
+"Yes," said Basil, taking out his watch, "and, what's worse, we've
+lost the train."
+
+He paused a moment and then added: "As a matter of fact, I think
+we may just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing
+to do, and I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going
+to the Dulwich Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he
+wouldn't be in. But if we get down by the 5.15, which gets to
+Purley about 6, I expect we shall just catch him."
+
+"Catch him!" cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. "I wish
+we could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?"
+
+"I keep forgetting the name of the common," said Basil, as he
+buttoned up his coat. "The Elms--what is it? Buxton Common, near
+Purley. That's where we shall find him."
+
+"But there is no such place," groaned Rupert; but he followed his
+brother downstairs.
+
+We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and
+our sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did
+not and do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the
+meaning of the fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And
+the strange thing was that we followed him the more completely the
+more nonsensical appeared the thing which he said. At bottom, I
+believe, if he had risen from our breakfast table and said: "I am
+going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails," we should have followed
+him to the end of the world.
+
+I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on
+this occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to
+speak, of the strange journey that we made the same evening. It was
+already very dense twilight when we struck southward from Purley.
+Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most cases,
+commonplace and comfortable. But if ever by any chance they really
+are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate and
+dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the
+suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has
+something about it as of evil elf-land. It seems to be one of the
+ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God--such a place
+was Buxton Common, near Purley.
+
+There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape
+itself. But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey
+futility in our expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked
+useless, the occasional wind-stricken trees looked useless, but
+we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless turf or the
+idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for we
+were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left men
+in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under the
+captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not
+there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to
+look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.
+
+Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in
+the gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after
+swell of the windy common in increasing darkness and entire
+silence. Suddenly Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his
+pockets. Through the dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad
+grin as of comfortable success.
+
+"Well," he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his
+pockets and slapping them together, "here we are at last."
+
+The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms
+rocked above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was
+not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and
+in the midst of that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands
+with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.
+
+"How jolly it is," he cried, "to get back to civilization. That
+notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion.
+Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish
+woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no
+star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no
+river like the red river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr
+Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in
+two or three minutes in enormous quantities."
+
+Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as
+the wind died in the dreary trees.
+
+"You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own
+house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at
+Yarmouth, and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really
+a very good fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I said
+originally."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked, finding his speech straying towards a
+sort of sanity. "What is his greatest virtue?"
+
+"His greatest virtue," replied Basil, "is that he always tells the
+literal truth."
+
+"Well, really," cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and
+anger, and slapping himself like a cabman, "he doesn't seem to have
+been very literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the
+deuce, may I ask, have you brought us out to this infernal place?"
+
+"He was too truthful, I confess," said Basil, leaning against the
+tree; "too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have
+indulged in a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance.
+But come, it's time we went in. We shall be late for dinner."
+
+Rupert whispered to me with a white face:
+
+"Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees
+a house?"
+
+"I suppose so," I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be
+a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as
+strange as the wind:
+
+"Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?"
+
+"Why, up here," cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was
+above our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
+
+"Come up, all of you," he shouted out of the darkness, with the
+voice of a schoolboy. "Come up. You'll be late for dinner."
+
+The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely
+a yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between
+them. Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a
+series of footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder.
+They must, I supposed, have been some sport of growth, Siamese
+twins of vegetation.
+
+Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery
+of the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something
+wholly mystical in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there
+was a giant's staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and
+the victorious voice above called to us out of heaven. We hoisted
+ourselves up after him.
+
+Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
+suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw
+the whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were
+printed. I saw three modern men in black coats who had begun with a
+perfectly sensible suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had
+ended, God knows how, half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland,
+far from that adventurer and all his works, that adventurer who was
+at that moment, in all probability, laughing at us in some dirty
+Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us about, and no doubt
+he was laughing his loudest; but when I thought what his laughter
+would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly let go
+of the tree and fell.
+
+"Swinburne," said Rupert suddenly, from above, "what are we doing?
+Let's get down again," and by the mere sound of his voice I knew
+that he too felt the shock of wakening to reality.
+
+"We can't leave poor Basil," I said. "Can't you call to him or get
+hold of him by the leg?"
+
+"He's too far ahead," answered Rupert; "he's nearly at the top
+of the beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks'
+nests, I suppose."
+
+We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical
+journey. The mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake
+slightly in the wind. Then I looked down and saw something which
+made me feel that we were far from the world in a sense and to a
+degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw that the almost
+straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little in
+perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines
+taper towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth
+made me feel lost in space, like a falling star.
+
+"Can nothing be done to stop Basil?" I called out.
+
+"No," answered my fellow climber. "He's too far up. He must get
+to the top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may
+go sane again. Hark at him above there; you can just hear him
+talking to himself."
+
+"Perhaps he's talking to us," I said.
+
+"No," said Rupert, "he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to
+talk to himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight; it's
+a known sign of the brain going."
+
+"Yes," I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was
+sounding above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous
+tones in which he had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly,
+and laughing every now and then, up there among the leaves and
+stars.
+
+After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly
+said, "My God!" with a violent voice.
+
+"What's the matter--are you hurt?" I cried, alarmed.
+
+"No. Listen to Basil," said the other in a very strange voice.
+"He's not talking to himself."
+
+"Then he is talking to us," I cried.
+
+"No," said Rupert simply, "he's talking to somebody else."
+
+Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a
+sudden burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear
+the conversational voice above. I could hear two voices.
+
+Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as
+before: "Come up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith."
+
+And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard
+in our chambers more than once. It called out:
+
+"Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in."
+
+Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in
+the branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face and
+fierce moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that
+slightly Southern air that belonged to him.
+
+Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves
+heavily into the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit,
+cushioned, tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a
+circular table, and a circular seat around it. At this table sat
+three people. One was Basil, who, in the instant after alighting
+there, had fallen into an attitude of marmoreal ease as if he had
+been there from boyhood; he was smoking a cigar with a slow
+pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who looked
+happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with his granite
+guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with the
+wild whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the
+green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the
+wall. The sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the
+enormous rifle in the corner. In the middle of the table was a
+magnum of champagne. Glasses were already set for us.
+
+The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the
+foot of a light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might
+in a mild sea.
+
+Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb.
+Then Basil spoke.
+
+"You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no
+further question about the cold veracity of our injured host."
+
+"I don't quite grasp it all," said Rupert, blinking still in the
+sudden glare. "Lieutenant Keith said his address was--"
+
+"It's really quite right, sir," said Keith, with an open smile.
+"The bobby asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully,
+that I lived in the elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do.
+This gentleman, Mr Montmorency, whom I think you have met before,
+is an agent for houses of this kind. He has a special line in
+arboreal villas. It's being kept rather quiet at present, because
+the people who want these houses don't want them to get too common.
+But it's just the sort of thing a fellow like myself, racketing
+about in all sorts of queer corners of London, naturally knocks up
+against."
+
+"Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?" asked Rupert
+eagerly, recovering his ease with the romance of reality.
+
+Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets
+and nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.
+
+"W-well, yes, sir," he said. "The fact was--er--my people wanted me
+very much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared
+myself for anything but natural history and botany and things like
+that. My poor parents have been dead some years now, but--naturally
+I like to respect their wishes. And I thought somehow that an
+arboreal villa agency was a sort of--of compromise between being a
+botanist and being a house-agent."
+
+Rupert could not help laughing. "Do you have much custom?" he asked.
+
+"N-not much," replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at
+Keith, who was (I am convinced) his only client. "But what there
+is--very select."
+
+"My dear friends," said Basil, puffing his cigar, "always remember
+two facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about
+any one who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you
+are guessing about any one who is, like our host, insane, the
+maddest thing is the most likely. The second is to remember that
+very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken
+a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings
+in front of it and had written `The Elms' over it, you wouldn't
+have thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply
+because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have
+believed it."
+
+"Drink your wine, gentlemen," said Keith, laughing, "for this
+confounded wind will upset it."
+
+We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a
+cunning mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great
+head of the elm tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.
+
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
+
+Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he
+was the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one
+anywhere, and talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern
+and enthusiasm for that person's affairs. He went through the
+world, as it were, as if he were always on the top of an omnibus or
+waiting for a train. Most of these chance acquaintances, of course,
+vanished into darkness out of his life. A few here and there got
+hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong intimates,
+but there was an accidental look about all of them as if they were
+windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods train
+or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a
+veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a mild
+prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a young
+captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in
+the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all
+reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist from
+Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these;
+Basil had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel
+cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which reduced the
+little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the compound
+of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an
+old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined with
+each other twice a week until they died. I myself was another. I
+had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the
+National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about the weather.
+Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for
+men always talk about the most important things to total strangers.
+It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the
+image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts
+of the wisdom of a moustache.
+
+One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of
+acquaintances was Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological
+world (which is a very interesting world, but a long way off this
+one) as the second greatest, if not the greatest, authority on the
+relations of savages to language. He was known to the neighbourhood
+of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man with a bald head,
+spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an unaccountable
+Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to and fro
+between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-shops,
+with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He was
+never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by
+the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in
+his little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush.
+There he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but
+sinister demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives
+of methodical students, but one would not have called it
+exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred when his
+friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a tornado
+of conversation.
+
+Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness,
+and these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him
+particularly in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend.
+I can remember vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and
+often dined with them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular
+evening when the strange calamity fell upon the professor.
+Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class and type
+(the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a Radical
+of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical himself,
+but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of
+Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical party.
+Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called "Zulu
+Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise
+scientific report of his study of the customs of the people of
+T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain
+interferences with these customs both by the British and the
+Germans. He-was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the
+lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead,
+not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and down
+the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his
+heavy tread.
+
+"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd," he
+was saying, "it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus,
+but for all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you
+know the Zulu way of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before
+blowing one's nose; but for all that you don't understand them as
+well as I do, who don't know an assegai from an alligator. You are
+more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is it that the jolly
+old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people who
+are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are
+benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage.
+Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask
+your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at
+this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still respectable
+article. "Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge
+you have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of
+doubt that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never
+occurred to you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin--
+thus--"
+
+And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head,
+so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a
+vase rocking.
+
+Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still
+lifted to the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.
+
+"Your mental processes," he said, "always go a little too fast.
+And they are stated without method. There is no kind of
+inconsistency"--and no words can convey the time he took to get to
+the end of the word--"between valuing the right of the aborigines
+to adhere to their stage in the evolutionary process, so long as
+they find it congenial and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no
+inconsistency between this concession which I have just described
+to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in question is,
+nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in the
+variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an
+inferior evolutionary stage."
+
+Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still
+shone like two pallid moons.
+
+Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.
+
+"True," he said, "there is no inconsistency, my son of the red
+spear. But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I
+am very far from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior
+evolutionary stage, whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not
+think there is anything stupid or ignorant about howling at the
+moon or being afraid of devils in the dark. It seems to me
+perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be thought a sort of
+idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself?
+Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots
+because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?"
+
+Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone
+paper-knife and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.
+
+"Beyond all question," he said, "it is a tenable hypothesis. I
+allude to the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that
+our civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed
+(if I apprehend you), is or may be a retrogression from states
+identical with or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover, I
+shall be inclined to concede that such a proposition is of the
+nature, in some degree at least, of a primary proposition, and
+cannot adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean, that the
+primary proposition of pessimism, or the primary proposition of the
+non-existence of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do not
+conceive you to be under the impression that you have demonstrated
+anything more concerning this proposition than that it is tenable,
+which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement that it
+is not a contradiction in terms."
+
+Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.
+
+"You don't understand," he said, "but, on the other hand, as a
+compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that
+disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I
+began it when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I
+maintained was that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense
+that you are a scientist, I know more about them in the sense that
+I am a savage. For instance, your theory of the origin of language,
+something about its having come from the formulated secret language
+of some individual creature, though you knocked me silly with facts
+and scholarship in its favour, still does not convince me, because
+I have a feeling that that is not the way that things happen. If
+you ask me why I think so I can only answer that I am a Zulu; and
+if you ask me (as you most certainly will) what is my definition of
+a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has climbed a Sussex
+apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost in an English lane."
+
+"Your process of thought--" began the immovable Chadd, but his
+speech was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which
+always in such families concentrates in sisters, flung open the
+door with a rigid arm and said:
+
+"James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again."
+
+The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in
+such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing,
+but practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked
+dubiously out of the room.
+
+"I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd," said
+Basil Grant, "but I hear that the British Museum has recognized
+one of the men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is
+true, is it not, that Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper
+of Asiatic manuscripts?"
+
+The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and
+a great deal of pathos also. "I believe it's true," she said. "If
+it is, it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you,
+feel a great deal, but great relief, which they feel more; relief
+from worry from a lot of things. James' health has never been good,
+and while we are as poor as we are he had to do journalism and
+coaching, in addition to his own dreadful grinding notions and
+discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or child. I have
+often been afraid that unless something of this kind occurred we
+should really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe it is
+practically settled."
+
+"I am delighted," began Basil, but with a worried face, "but these
+red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't
+advise you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into
+bitterness. I've known men, and good men like your brother, come
+nearer than this and be disappointed. Of course, if it is true--"
+
+"If it is true," said the woman fiercely, "it means that people who
+have never lived may make an attempt at living."
+
+Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the
+dazed look in his eyes.
+
+"Is it true?" asked Basil, with burning eyes.
+
+"Not a bit true," answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment.
+"Your argument was in three points fallacious."
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Grant.
+
+"Well," said the professor slowly, "in saying that you could
+possess a knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from--"
+
+"Oh! confound Zulu life," cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. "I
+mean, have you got the post?"
+
+"You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he said,
+opening his eye with childlike wonder. "Oh, yes, I got that. But
+the real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit,
+occurred to me since I have been out of the room, is that it does
+not merely presuppose a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but
+infers that the discovery of it is absolutely impeded by the
+facts."
+
+"I am crushed," said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the
+professor's sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly not.
+
+It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an
+extremely long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to
+Lambeth. This may be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was
+stopping the night with Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a
+time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point of fact, close upon
+noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very lounging and
+leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at table
+that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt
+if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the
+top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in
+being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he opened with
+the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank
+his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but
+something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure
+had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a
+slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that
+he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of
+cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had
+drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away
+like a cur from under him and came round to me in two strides.
+
+"What do you make of that?" he said, and flattened out the wire
+in front of me.
+
+It ran: "Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous.
+Chadd."
+
+"What does the woman mean?" I said after a pause, irritably.
+"Those women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad
+ever since he was born."
+
+"You are mistaken," said Grant composedly. "It is true that all
+sensible women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the
+matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any kind
+mad. But they don't put it in telegrams, any more than they wire
+to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are
+truisms, and often private ones at that. If Miss Chadd has written
+down under the eye of a strange woman in a post-office that her
+brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she did
+it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can think of
+no other way of forcing us to come promptly."
+
+"It will force us of course," I said, smiling.
+
+"Oh, yes," he replied; "there is a cab-rank near."
+
+Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge,
+through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge
+Road. Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.
+
+"I think you will take my word for it, my friend," he said; "this
+is one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents
+that ever happened in London or, for that matter, in any high
+civilization."
+
+"I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't
+quite see it," I said. "Is it so very extraordinary or complicated
+that a dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on
+the borders of the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of
+great joy? Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a head like
+a turnip and a soul like a spider's web should not find his
+strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes? Is it, in
+short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits
+from excitement?"
+
+"It would not be extraordinary in the least," answered Basil,
+with placidity. "It would not be extraordinary in the least," he
+repeated, "if the professor had gone mad. That was not the
+extraordinary circumstance to which I referred."
+
+"What," I asked, stamping my foot, "was the extraordinary thing?"
+
+"The extraordinary thing," said Basil, ringing the bell, "is that
+he has not gone mad from excitement."
+
+The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the
+doorway as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the
+same way to be blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour.
+There was a general sense of their keeping something from view.
+They seemed like three black-clad ladies in some strange play of
+Maeterlinck, veiling the catastrophe from the audience in the
+manner of the Greek chorus.
+
+"Sit down, won't you?" said one of them, in a voice that was
+somewhat rigid with pain. "I think you had better be told first
+what has happened."
+
+Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window,
+she continued, in an even and mechanical voice:
+
+"I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred.
+This morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters
+were both somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had
+just gone out of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back
+again, however, without it, and stood for some time staring at the
+empty grate. I said, `Were you looking for anything I could get?'
+He did not answer, but this constantly happens, as he is often very
+abstracted. I repeated my question, and still he did not answer.
+Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that nothing but a
+touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's presence, so I
+came round the table towards him. I really do not know how to
+describe the sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly, but
+at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one's brain.
+The fact is, James was standing on one leg."
+
+Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.
+
+"Standing on one leg?" I repeated.
+
+"Yes," replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
+suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. "He was
+standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle,
+the toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His
+only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the
+other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was
+still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.
+
+"`James, what is the matter?'  I cried, for I was thoroughly
+frightened. James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg,
+flung up the other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and
+spun round like a teetotum the other way. `Are you mad?' I cried.
+`Why don't you answer me?' He had come to a standstill facing me,
+and was looking at me as he always does, with his lifted eyebrows
+and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he remained a second
+or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift his left
+foot slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the air.
+I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on
+the dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to him,
+implored him to speak to us with appeals that might have brought
+back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop and dance and kick
+with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs belonged to some
+one else or were possessed by devils. He has never spoken to us
+from that time to this."
+
+"Where is he now?" I said, getting up in some agitation. "We ought
+not to leave him alone."
+
+"Doctor Colman is with him," said Miss Chadd calmly. "They are in
+the garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he
+can scarcely go into the street."
+
+Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the
+garden. It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the
+flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured
+carpet; but on this shining and opulent summer day even they had
+the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said tropical.
+In the middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular lawn
+stood two figures. One of them was a small, sharp-looking man with
+black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume Dr Colman), who
+was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous twitch, as
+it were, in his face. The other was our old friend, listening with
+his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong sunlight
+gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the night
+before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious
+decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have
+been the identical figure of last night. That one thing was that
+while the face listened reposefully the legs were industriously
+dancing like the legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and the
+sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and
+incredibility to the prodigy--the prodigy of the head of a hermit
+and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen in
+broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore
+commonplace.
+
+The second sister had by this time entered the room and came
+somewhat drearily to the window.
+
+"You know, Adelaide," she said, "that Mr Bingham from the Museum is
+coming again at three."
+
+"I know," said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. "I suppose we shall have to
+tell him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come
+easily to us."
+
+Grant suddenly turned round. "What do you mean?" he said. "What
+will you have to tell Mr Bingham?"
+
+"You know what I shall have to tell him," said the professor's
+sister, almost fiercely. "I don't know that we need give it its
+wretched name. Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts
+will be allowed to go on like that?" And she pointed for an
+instant at the figure in the garden, the shining, listening face
+and the unresting feet.
+
+Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. "When did
+you say the British Museum man was coming?" he said.
+
+"Three o'clock," said Miss Chadd briefly.
+
+"Then I have an hour before me," said Grant, and without another
+word threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did
+not walk straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling
+round the garden path drew near them cautiously and yet apparently
+carelessly. He stood a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting
+halfpence out of his trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking
+up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.
+
+Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a
+loud familiar voice, "Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus
+our inferiors?"
+
+The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be
+about to speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head
+towards Grant in a friendly manner, but made no answer, idly
+flinging his left leg about.
+
+"Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?" Basil continued,
+still in the same loud and lucid tone.
+
+Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other
+leg, his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut
+in rather sharply. "Shall we go inside, professor?" he said. "Now
+you have shown me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful
+garden. Let us go in," and he tried to draw the kicking
+ethnologist by the elbow, at the same time whispering to Grant: "I
+must ask you not to trouble him with questions. Most risky. He
+must be soothed."
+
+Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:
+
+"Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will
+endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with
+them if you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden
+for an hour. I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I
+shall say very little to him, and that little shall be as soothing
+as--as syrup."
+
+The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.
+
+"It is rather dangerous for him," he said, "to be long in the
+strong sun without his hat. With his bald head, too."
+
+"That is soon settled," said Basil composedly, and took off his
+own big hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor.
+The latter did not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the
+horizon.
+
+The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two
+for some seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and
+then saying, shortly, "All right," strutted away into the house,
+where the three Misses Chadd were all looking out from the parlour
+window on to the garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes
+for a full hour without moving, and they saw a sight which was
+more extraordinary than madness itself.
+
+Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without
+succeeding in making him do anything but continue to caper, and
+when he had done this slowly took a red note-book out of one
+pocket and a large pencil out of another.
+
+He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped
+away from him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and
+make notes again. Thus they followed each other round and round
+the foolish circle of turf, the one writing in pencil with the
+face of a man working out a problem, the other leaping and
+playing like a child.
+
+After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene,
+Grant put the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open
+in his hand, and walking round the mad professor, planted himself
+directly in front of him.
+
+Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild
+morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding
+Basil in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few
+seconds, and then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the
+attitude that his sister had described as being the first of all
+his antics. And the moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his
+own leg and held it out rigid before him, confronting Chadd with
+the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped his bent leg,
+and swinging his weight on to it kicked out the other behind,
+like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a saltire cross,
+and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air. Then
+before any of the spectators could say a word or even entertain a
+thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of jig
+or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two
+madmen instead of one.
+
+They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of
+monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out
+feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman
+following her. Professor Chadd was in the wildest posture of a
+pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed about to turn a cart-wheel,
+when they were frozen in their follies by the steely voice of
+Adelaide Chadd saying, "Mr Bingham of the British Museum."
+
+Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and
+slightly effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal
+but agreeable manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as
+Professor Chadd was of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and
+agreeableness did him some credit under the circumstances. He had
+a vast experience of books and a considerable experience of the
+more dilettante fashionable salons. But neither branch of
+knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two grey-haired
+middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves
+about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.
+
+The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but
+Grant stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene,
+and his shiny black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved
+restlessly from one of them to the other.
+
+"Dr Colman," said Basil, turning to him, "will you entertain
+Professor Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs
+you. Mr Bingham, might I have the pleasure of a few moments'
+private conversation? My name is Grant."
+
+Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was
+respectful but a trifle bewildered.
+
+"Miss Chadd will excuse me," continued Basil easily, "if I know
+my way about the house." And he led the dazed librarian rapidly
+through the back door into the parlour.
+
+"Mr Bingham," said Basil, setting a chair for him, "I imagine that
+Miss Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence."
+
+"She has, Mr Grant," said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort
+of compassionate nervousness. "I am more pained than I can say by
+this dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing
+should have happened just as we have decided to give your eminent
+friend a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of
+course--really, I don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of
+course, retain--I sincerely trust he will--his extraordinarily
+valuable intellect. But I am afraid--I am really afraid--that it
+would not do to have the curator of the Asiatic
+manuscripts--er--dancing about."
+
+"I have a suggestion to make," said Basil, and sat down abruptly in
+his chair, drawing it up to the table.
+
+"I am delighted, of course," said the gentleman from the British
+Museum, coughing and drawing up his chair also.
+
+The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required
+for Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he
+said:
+
+"My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words
+you could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something
+of that character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I
+presume, through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd L800 a
+year until he stops dancing."
+
+"Eight hundred a year!" said Mr Bingham, and for the first time
+lifted his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and he
+raised them with a mild blue stare. "I think I have not quite
+understood you. Did I understand you to say that Professor Chadd
+ought to be employed, in his present state, in the Asiatic
+manuscript department at eight hundred a year?"
+
+Grant shook his head resolutely.
+
+"No," he said firmly. "No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would
+say anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that
+he ought to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as
+that. I merely say that until he stops dancing you ought to pay
+him L800 Surely you have some general fund for the endowment of
+research."
+
+Mr Bingham looked bewildered.
+
+"I really don't know," he said, blinking his eyes, "what you are
+talking about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a
+thousand a year for life?"
+
+"Not at all," cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. "I never said
+for life. Not at all."
+
+"What for, then?" asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct
+meekly to tear his hair. "How long is this endowment to run? Not
+till his death? Till the Judgement day?"
+
+"No," said Basil, beaming, "but just what I said. Till he has
+stopped dancing." And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands
+in his pockets.
+
+Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant
+and kept them there.
+
+"Come, Mr Grant," he said. "Do I seriously understand you to
+suggest that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily
+high salary simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase)
+gone mad? That he should be paid more than four good clerks solely
+on the ground that he is flinging his boots about in the back
+yard?"
+
+"Precisely," said Grant composedly.
+
+"That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd
+dancing, but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?"
+
+"One must stop somewhere," said Grant. "Of course."
+
+Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.
+
+"There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant," he said
+coldly. "What you are trying to explain to me may be a joke--a
+slightly unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case
+I ask your pardon for the former suggestion. But, in any case, it
+appears quite irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity, the
+mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me
+that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But it is clear there
+is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel went mad it
+would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the British
+Museum Library."
+
+He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in
+dramatic warning, arrested him.
+
+"Stop!" said Basil sternly. "Stop while there is yet time. Do you
+want to take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help
+in the glory of Europe--in the glory of science? Do you want to
+carry your head in the air when it is bald or white because of the
+part that you bore in a great discovery? Do you want--"
+
+Bingham cut in sharply:
+
+"And if I do want this, Mr Grant--"
+
+"Then," said Basil lightly, "your task is easy. Get Chadd L800 a
+year till he stops dancing."
+
+With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned
+impatiently to the door, but in passing out of it found it
+blocked. Dr Colman was coming in.
+
+"Forgive me, gentlemen," he said, in a nervous, confidential voice,
+"the fact is, Mr Grant, I--er--have made a most disturbing
+discovery about Mr Chadd."
+
+Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.
+
+"I was afraid so," he said. "Drink, I imagine."
+
+"Drink!" echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. "Oh,
+no, it's not drink."
+
+Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and
+vague. "Homicidal mania--" he began.
+
+"No, no," said the medical man impatiently.
+
+"Thinks he's made of glass," said Bingham feverishly, "or says he's
+God--or--"
+
+"No," said Dr Colman sharply; "the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery
+is of a different character. The awful thing about him is--"
+
+"Oh, go on, sir," cried Bingham, in agony.
+
+"The awful thing about him is," repeated Colman, with deliberation,
+"that he isn't mad."
+
+"Not mad!"
+
+"There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy," said the
+doctor shortly; "he hasn't got any of them."
+
+"But why does he dance?" cried the despairing Bingham. "Why doesn't
+he answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?"
+
+"The devil knows," said Dr Colman coolly. "I'm paid to judge of
+lunatics, but not of fools. The man's not mad."
+
+"What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?" said Mr
+Bingham. "Can none get into any kind of communication with him?"
+
+Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:
+
+"I shall be very happy," he said, "to give him any message you like
+to send."
+
+Both men stared at him.
+
+"Give him a message?" they cried simultaneously. "How will you give
+him a message?"
+
+Basil smiled in his slow way.
+
+"If you really want to know how I shall give him your message," he
+began, but Bingham cried:
+
+"Of course, of course," with a sort of frenzy.
+
+"Well," said Basil, "like this." And he suddenly sprang a foot
+into the air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on
+one leg.
+
+His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the
+fact that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.
+
+"You drive me to it," he said. "You drive me to betray my friend.
+And I will, for his own sake, betray him."
+
+The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of
+distress as of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure.
+"Anything painful, of course--" he began.
+
+Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that
+struck them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.
+
+"Idiots!" he cried. "Have you seen the man? Have you looked at
+James Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to
+your miserable library, with his futile books and his confounded
+umbrella, and never seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have
+you never noticed, stuck casually behind his spectacles and above
+his seedy old collar, the face of a man who might have burned
+heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my
+fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I argued
+against him on the score of his famous theory about language--the
+theory that language was complete in certain individuals and was
+picked up by others simply by watching them. I also chaffed him
+about not understanding things in rough and ready practice. What
+has this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has worked
+out a system of language of his own (it would take too long to
+explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own. And he
+has sworn that till people understand it, till he can speak to us
+in this language, he will not speak in any other. And he shall
+not. I have understood, by taking careful notice; and, by heaven,
+so shall the others. This shall not be blown upon. He shall
+finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year from somewhere
+till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an infamous war
+on a great idea. It is religious persecution."
+
+Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.
+
+"I thank you, Mr Grant," he said. "I hope I shall be able to answer
+for the source of the L800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come
+in my cab?"
+
+"No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham," said Grant heartily. "I
+think I will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden."
+
+The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal
+and friendly. They were still dancing when I left.
+
+
+
+Chapter 6
+
+The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
+
+The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of
+interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in
+which he was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest
+in the life of London. His brother Basil said of him: "His
+reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably leads
+him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him right."
+Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was
+certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I
+think worth telling.
+
+We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The
+street was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about
+half past eight in summer, and which seems for the moment to be
+not so much a coming of darkness as the turning on of a new azure
+illuminator, as if the earth were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun.
+In the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had already begun to
+flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert talking excitedly,
+one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk. Rupert
+was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to me the
+nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective theories.
+He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing
+a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a
+falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an
+unhappy milkman who walked in front of us. So arresting were the
+incidents which afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid
+that I have forgotten what were the main outlines of the milkman's
+crime. I think it had something to do with the fact that he had
+only one small can of milk to carry, and that of that he had left
+the lid loose and walked so quickly that he spilled milk on the
+pavement. This showed that he was not thinking of his small
+burden, and this again showed that he anticipated some other than
+lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this (taken in
+conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed something
+else that I have entirely forgotten. I am afraid that I derided
+this detailed revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that Rupert
+Grant, who, though the best of fellows, had a good deal of the
+sensitiveness of the artistic temperament, slightly resented my
+derision. He endeavoured to take a whiff of his cigar, with the
+placidity which he associated with his profession, but the cigar,
+I think, was nearly bitten through.
+
+"My dear fellow," he said acidly, "I'll bet you half a crown that
+wherever that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out something
+curious."
+
+"My resources are equal to that risk," I said, laughing. "Done."
+
+We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the
+trail of the mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker,
+and we had some ado to keep up with him; and every now and then he
+left a splash of milk, silver in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost
+before we could note it, he disappeared down the area steps of a
+house. I believe Rupert really believed that the milkman was a
+fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him as having vanished.
+Then calling something to me which somehow took no hold on my
+mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared himself
+into the area.
+
+I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post
+in the lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps
+without his can and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or
+three minutes more elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up
+also, his face pale but yet laughing; a not uncommon
+contradiction in him, denoting excitement.
+
+"My friend," he said, rubbing his hands, "so much for all your
+scepticism. So much for your philistine ignorance of the
+possibilities of a romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is
+the form in which your prosaic good nature will have to express
+itself."
+
+"What?" I said incredulously, "do you mean to say that you really
+did find anything the matter with the poor milkman?"
+
+His face fell.
+
+"Oh, the milkman," he said, with a miserable affectation at having
+misunderstood me. "No, I--I--didn't exactly bring anything home to
+the milkman himself, I--"
+
+"What did the milkman say and do?" I said, with inexorable
+sternness.
+
+"Well, to tell the truth," said Rupert, shifting restlessly from
+one foot to another, "the milkman himself, as far as merely
+physical appearances went, just said, `Milk, Miss,' and handed in
+the can. That is not to say, of course, that he did not make some
+secret sign or some--"
+
+I broke into a violent laugh. "You idiot," I said, "why don't you
+own yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made
+a secret sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing
+and did nothing worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?"
+
+His face grew grave.
+
+"Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible
+that the milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that
+I was wrong about him."
+
+"Then come along with you," I said, with a certain amicable anger,
+"and remember that you owe me half a crown."
+
+"As to that, I differ from you," said Rupert coolly. "The
+milkman's remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman
+may have been. But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of
+the bet were, I think, as follows, as I propounded them, that
+wherever that milkman came to a real stop I should find out
+something curious."
+
+"Well?" I said.
+
+"Well," he answered, "I jolly well have. You just come with me,"
+and before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked
+through the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I
+followed almost before I made any decision.
+
+When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish
+literally, as the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a
+closed door, shuttered windows, the steps down which we had come,
+the ridiculous well in which I found myself, and the ridiculous
+man who had brought me there, and who stood there with dancing
+eyes. I was just about to turn back when Rupert caught me by the
+elbow.
+
+"Just listen to that," he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his
+right hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters
+of the basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and
+even inclined my head for a moment towards it. From inside was
+coming the murmur of an unmistakable human voice.
+
+"Have you been talking to somebody inside?" I asked suddenly,
+turning to Rupert.
+
+"No, I haven't," he replied, with a grim smile, "but I should very
+much like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?"
+
+"No, of course not," I replied.
+
+"Then I recommend you to listen," said Rupert sharply.
+
+In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood
+a moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which
+there was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning
+sound which took the form of the words: "When shall I get out? When
+shall I get out? Will they ever let me out?" or words to that
+effect.
+
+"Do you know anything about this?" I said, turning upon Rupert very
+abruptly.
+
+"Perhaps you think I am the criminal," he said sardonically,
+"instead of being in some small sense the detective. I came into
+this area two or three minutes ago, having told you that I knew
+there was something funny going on, and this woman behind the
+shutters (for it evidently is a woman) was moaning like mad. No,
+my dear friend, beyond that I do not know anything about her. She
+is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited daughter, or a
+member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being wailing
+that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman and
+beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two or
+three minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning, that is all."
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "I apologize; this is no time for
+arguing. What is to be done?"
+
+Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.
+
+"First of all," he said, "house-breaking." And he forced the blade
+into the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter,
+leaving a gap and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room
+within was entirely unlighted, so that for the first few seconds
+the window seemed a dead and opaque surface, as dark as a strip of
+slate. Then came a realization which, though in a sense gradual,
+made us step back and catch our breath. Two large dim human eyes
+were so close to us that the window itself seemed suddenly to be a
+mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass within, and
+with increased distinctness, with the increase of the opening came
+the words:
+
+"When shall I get out?"
+
+"What can all this be?" I said.
+
+Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing
+the ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in
+it, smaller and more accurate than I should have supposed possible.
+The moment he had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to
+speak, piercing and querulous and clear, making the same demand for
+liberty.
+
+"Can't you get out, madam?" I said, drawing near the hole in some
+perturbation.
+
+"Get out? Of course I can't," moaned the unknown female bitterly.
+"They won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them
+I'd call the police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes.
+They could keep me as long as they liked only--"
+
+I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my
+stick, incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held
+my arm hard, held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as
+if he desired to stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do
+so. I paused a moment, and in the act swung slightly round, so
+that I was facing the supporting wall of the front door steps. The
+act froze me into a sudden stillness like that of Rupert, for a
+figure almost as motionless as the pillars of the portico, but
+unmistakably human, had put his head out from between the
+doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted
+lamps of the street was just behind his head, throwing it into
+abrupt darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of
+his face beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring at
+us. I must say I thought Rupert's calmness magnificent. He rang
+the area bell quite idly, and went on talking to me with the easy
+end of a conversation which had never had any beginning. The black
+glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost thought it
+was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was golden
+with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a small
+and decorous housemaid stood in it.
+
+"Pray excuse me," said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to
+make somehow or other at once affable and underbred, "but we
+thought perhaps that you might do something for the Waifs and
+Strays. We don't expect--"
+
+"Not here," said the small servant, with the incomparable severity
+of the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in
+our faces.
+
+"Very sad, very sad--the indifference of these people," said the
+philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As
+we did so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly
+disappeared.
+
+"Well, what do you make of that?" asked Rupert, slapping his
+gloves together when we got into the street.
+
+I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such
+conditions I had but one thought.
+
+"Don't you think," I said a trifle timidly, "that we had better
+tell your brother?"
+
+"Oh, if you like," said Rupert, in a lordly way. "He is quite
+near, as I promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall
+we take a cab? Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him."
+
+Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat
+deserted look. After a little looking about we discovered Basil
+Grant with his great head and his great white hat blocking the
+ticket-office window. I thought at first that he was taking a
+ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly long time about
+it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing religion with the
+booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the hole
+in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time
+before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental
+fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some
+of the official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we
+managed to get him to understand that we had made an astounding
+discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively, walking
+between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a
+rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington, of
+the equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement, and
+the man staring from the porch. At length he said:
+
+"If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
+careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice
+on the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different
+pretext would look worse. You may be quite certain that the
+inquisitive gentleman who looked at you looked thoroughly, and will
+wear, so to speak, your portraits next to his heart. If you want to
+find out if there is anything in this without a police raid I fancy
+you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see them."
+
+His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of
+the house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor
+of twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it
+was.
+
+"Do you think it's safe, Basil," said his brother, pausing, a
+little pale, under the lamp, "to go into that place alone? Of
+course we shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but these
+devils might do something--something sudden--or odd. I can't feel
+it's safe."
+
+"I know of nothing that is safe," said Basil composedly, "except,
+possibly--death," and he went up the steps and rang at the bell.
+When the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a
+square of gaslight in the gathering dark, and then closed with a
+bang, burying our friend inside, we could not repress a shudder.
+It had been like the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips of
+some evil leviathan. A freshening night breeze began to blow up
+the street, and we turned up the collars of our coats. At the end
+of twenty minutes, in which we had scarcely moved or spoken, we
+were as cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from apprehension
+than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an abrupt movement
+towards the house.
+
+"I can't stand this," he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back
+into the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the
+black house front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted
+against it coming out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so
+loudly that you could have heard every syllable across the street.
+Another voice, or, possibly, two voices, were laughing and talking
+back at him from within.
+
+"No, no, no," Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious
+hostility. "That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of
+all. It's the soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of
+cosmic forces. When you see a cosmic force you don't like, trick
+it, my boy. But I must really be off."
+
+"Come and pitch into us again," came the laughing voice from out
+of the house. "We still have some bones unbroken."
+
+"Thanks very much, I will--good night," shouted Grant, who had by
+this time reached the street.
+
+"Good night," came the friendly call in reply, before the door
+closed.
+
+"Basil," said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, "what are we to
+do?"
+
+The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.
+
+"What is to be done, Basil?" I repeated in uncontrollable
+excitement.
+
+"I'm not sure," said Basil doubtfully. "What do you say to getting
+some dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I
+tried to get those fellows to come, but they couldn't."
+
+We stared blankly.
+
+"Go to the Court Theatre?" repeated Rupert. "What would be the good
+of that?"
+
+"Good? What do you mean?" answered Basil, staring also. "Have you
+turned Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of
+course."
+
+"But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!" cried
+Rupert. "What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I
+go for the police?"
+
+Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.
+
+"Oh, that," he said. "I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some
+mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm
+sorry those fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of
+these green omnibuses? There is a restaurant in Sloane Square."
+
+"I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us," I said
+irritably. "How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a
+mere private affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for
+all I know, be private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's
+drawing-room, would you think it bad taste to talk about it just
+as if it was a confounded dado or an infernal etching?"
+
+Basil laughed heartily.
+
+"That's very forcible," he said. "As a matter of fact, though, I
+know it's all right in this case. And there comes the green
+omnibus."
+
+"How do you know it's all right in this ease?" persisted his
+brother angrily.
+
+"My dear chap, the thing's obvious," answered Basil, holding a
+return ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat
+pocket. "Those two fellows never committed a crime in their lives.
+They're not the kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I
+want to get a paper before the omnibus comes."
+
+"Oh, curse the paper!" cried Rupert, in a fury. "Do you mean to
+tell me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow
+creature in pitch darkness in a private dungeon, because you've
+had ten minutes' talk with the keepers of it and thought them
+rather good men?"
+
+"Good men do commit crimes sometimes," said Basil, taking the
+ticket out of his mouth. "But this kind of good man doesn't
+commit that kind of crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?"
+
+The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along
+the dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb,
+and for an instant it was touch and go whether we should all have
+leaped on to it and been borne away to the restaurant and the
+theatre.
+
+"Basil," I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, "I simply
+won't leave this street and this house."
+
+"Nor will I," said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers.
+"There's some black work going on there. If I left it I should
+never sleep again."
+
+Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.
+
+"Of course if you feel like that," he said, "we'll investigate
+further. You'll find it's all right, though. They're only two
+young Oxford fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected
+with this pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution and all
+that."
+
+"I think," said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, "that we shall
+enlighten you further about their ethics."
+
+"And may I ask," said Basil gloomily, "what it is that you propose
+to do?"
+
+"I propose, first of all," said Rupert, "to get into this house;
+secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly,
+to knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house."
+
+Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for
+an instant with one of his sudden laughs.
+
+"Poor little boys," he said. "But it almost serves them right for
+holding such silly views, after all," and he quaked again with
+amusement "there's something confoundedly Darwinian about it."
+
+"I suppose you mean to help us?" said Rupert.
+
+"Oh, yes, I'll be in it," answered Basil, "if it's only to prevent
+your doing the poor chaps any harm."
+
+He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking
+indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the
+door opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.
+
+"So sorry to haunt you like this," he said. "I met two friends
+outside who very much want to know you. May I bring them in?"
+
+"Delighted, of course," said a young voice, the unmistakable voice
+of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by
+the decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in
+person. He was a short, but shapely young gentleman, with curly
+dark hair and a square, snub-nosed face. He wore slippers and a
+sort of blazer of some incredible college purple.
+
+"This way," he said; "mind the steps by the staircase. This house
+is more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its
+snobbish exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in the
+place really."
+
+"That," said Rupert, with a savage smile, "I can quite believe."
+
+We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the
+young inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with
+magazines and books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The
+other youth, who stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob,
+was big and burly, with dead brown hair brushed forward and a
+Norfolk jacket. He was that particular type of man whose every
+feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet who is, you would
+say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.
+
+"Any more arguments?" he said, when introductions had been
+effected. "I must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon
+eminent men of science such as we. I've half a mind to chuck
+my D.Sc. and turn minor poet."
+
+"Bosh," answered Grant. "I never said a word against eminent men
+of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which
+supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a
+sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people
+talked about the fall of man they knew they were talking about a
+mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now that they talk about
+the survival of the fittest they think they do understand it,
+whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately
+false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian movement has
+made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking
+unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically
+about science."
+
+"That is all very well," said the big young man, whose name
+appeared to be Burrows. "Of course, in a sense, science, like
+mathematics or the violin, can only be perfectly understood by
+specialists. Still, the rudiments may be of public use. Greenwood
+here," indicating the little man in the blazer, "doesn't know one
+note of music from another. Still, he knows something. He knows
+enough to take off his hat when they play `God save the King'. He
+doesn't take it off by mistake when they play `Oh, dem Golden
+Slippers'. Just in the same way science--"
+
+Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
+uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly
+legitimate. Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an
+arm round his throat, and bent the giant backwards.
+
+"Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne," he called out, and before
+I knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the
+purple blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a
+whalebone, but I was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise.
+I twitched one of his feet from under him; he swung for a moment on
+the single foot, and then we fell with a crash amid the litter of
+newspapers, myself on top.
+
+My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's
+voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the
+beginning.
+
+". . . wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir,
+and I need not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old
+friends against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me,
+therefore, in tying you up in this antimacassar, to make it as
+commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be while. . ."
+
+I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
+garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty
+hands. Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was
+Mr Burrows; how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was
+held back by Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave went over his
+whole frame. An instant after his head plunged forward like a
+bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung head over heels, a catherine
+wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him. Simultaneously the
+bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him also to the
+ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar, leaped
+at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the
+waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously to
+his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it now.
+
+Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
+through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and
+before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments,
+could even lift his head from the floor, two footmen were in the
+room. Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were now
+outnumbered. Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves upon
+me, crushing me back into the corner upon the wreck of the paper
+basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned him against the
+wall. Rupert lifted himself on his elbow, but he was still dazed.
+
+In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of
+Basil come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.
+
+"Now this," he said, "is what I call enjoying oneself."
+
+I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the
+bookcase, from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To
+my astonishment his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like
+those of a child heated by a favourite game.
+
+I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on
+top of me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to
+him. He turned quickly to come to reinforce the two who were
+mastering Basil. The latter's head was already sinking lower and
+lower, like a leaking ship, as his enemies pressed him down. He
+flung up one hand just as I thought him falling and hung on to a
+huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards discovered, of
+St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across the
+room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome bodily
+out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air,
+so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over
+like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness
+broke, and he sank, his enemies closing over him.
+
+Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as
+best he could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling
+over each other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their
+falls, but Rupert certainly the more so. I was still successfully
+held down. The floor was a sea of torn and trampled papers and
+magazines, like an immense waste-paper basket. Burrows and his
+companion were almost up to the knees in them, as in a drift of
+dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a sheet
+of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some
+fantastic trouser frill.
+
+Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
+might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad
+back of Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend
+of effort in it as if my friend still needed some holding down.
+Suddenly that broad back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying
+on one leg; Basil, somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows' huge
+fists and those of the footman were battering Basil's sunken head
+like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant's ankle out of his
+sudden and savage grip. While his own head was forced slowly down
+in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor was being
+forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face.
+Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook
+together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the
+floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like
+battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he
+sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and
+another in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he
+knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang
+at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between
+them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let go and
+turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and,
+to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other
+footman, bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling
+out of the room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him,
+seeing that the battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride the
+pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.
+
+To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke
+in a perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.
+
+"And now, gentlemen," he said, "since you have got your own way,
+perhaps you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?"
+
+"This," said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his
+captive, "this is what we call the survival of the fittest."
+
+Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the
+latter phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself
+again at the end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood,
+and knotting a handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding
+from a blow, he sang out quite coolly:
+
+"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear
+and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison
+downstairs."
+
+"All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a
+leisured way in an armchair. "Don't hurry for us," he said,
+glancing round at the litter of the room, "we have all the
+illustrated papers."
+
+Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him
+even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I
+passed through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs,
+Basil's voice continuing conversationally:
+
+"And now, Mr Burrows," he said, settling himself sociably in the
+chair, "there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing
+argument. I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your
+back on the floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more notion
+why you are there than the man in the moon. A conversationalist
+like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by
+any bodily posture. You were saying, if I remember right, when this
+incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might
+with advantage be made public."
+
+"Precisely," said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. "I
+hold that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen
+by science can be. . ."
+
+And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I
+noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
+Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our
+proceedings with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows,
+however, was all philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say,
+together, and sank deeper and deeper into the under-world of that
+mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more
+Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its
+semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.
+
+The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house;
+doors that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the
+pantry, the servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the
+doors with indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on
+entirely empty apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the
+door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of
+the sealed, unlighted room.
+
+Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling
+into an abyss:
+
+"Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you
+captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to
+deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You
+are free."
+
+For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was
+a dead silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and
+moaning. We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we
+had not happened to have heard it before. It was unmistakably the
+voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just as
+we had heard her demand it.
+
+"Has anybody got a match?" said Rupert grimly. "I fancy we have
+come pretty near the end of this business."
+
+I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare,
+yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end
+of it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and
+dropped, leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something
+more practical--an iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck
+another match and lit the gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and
+seriously in the presence of the captive.
+
+At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean
+breakfast-room sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour
+and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly to
+relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelian black eyebrows
+and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her
+piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background of
+the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one place;
+at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
+wood about an hour before.
+
+"Madam," said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, "permit me
+to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your
+complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the
+street, and we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue."
+
+The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us
+for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot.
+Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
+
+"Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say
+you had rescued me?"
+
+"Yes, madam," said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. "We have
+very satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have
+settled affairs with them very satisfactorily."
+
+The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
+
+"What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?" she cried.
+
+"We persuaded them, my dear madam," said Rupert, laughing, "by
+knocking them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?"
+
+To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to
+her seat by the window.
+
+"Do I understand," she said, with the air of a person about to
+begin knitting, "that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied
+him up?"
+
+"We have," said Rupert proudly; "we have resisted their oppression
+and conquered it."
+
+"Oh, thanks," answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
+
+A considerable pause followed.
+
+"The road is quite clear for you, madam," said Rupert pleasantly.
+
+The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest
+at us for an instant.
+
+"But what about Greenwood and Burrows?" she said. "What did I
+understand you to say had become of them?"
+
+"They are lying on the floor upstairs," said Rupert, chuckling.
+"Tied hand and foot."
+
+"Well, that settles it," said the old lady, coming with a kind of
+bang into her seat again, "I must stop where I am."
+
+Rupert looked bewildered.
+
+"Stop where you are?" he said. "Why should you stop any longer
+where you are? What power can force you now to stop in this
+miserable cell?"
+
+"The question rather is," said the old lady, with composure, "what
+power can force me to go anywhere else?"
+
+We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.
+
+At last I said, "Do you really mean to say that we are to leave
+you here?"
+
+"I suppose you don't intend to tie me up," she said, "and carry me
+off? I certainly shall not go otherwise."
+
+"But, my dear madam," cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation,
+"we heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get
+out."
+
+"Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things," replied the
+captive grimly. "I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my
+temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for all
+that."
+
+"Some sense of honour?" repeated Rupert, and the last light of
+intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot
+with rolling eyes.
+
+He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet
+once more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. "Can we do
+nothing for you, madam?" I said forlornly.
+
+"Why," said the lady, "if you are particularly anxious to do me a
+little favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs."
+
+Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with
+his vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the
+door of the sitting-room and scene of battle.
+
+"Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true," Mr Burrows was
+saying, lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; "but we
+must consider the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin
+of morality. . ."
+
+"Basil," cried Rupert, gasping, "she won't come out."
+
+"Who won't come out?" asked Basil, a little cross at being
+interrupted in an argument.
+
+"The lady downstairs," replied Rupert. "The lady who was locked up.
+She won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to
+let these fellows loose."
+
+"And a jolly sensible suggestion," cried Basil, and with a bound he
+was on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting
+his bonds with hands and teeth.
+
+"A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood."
+
+In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the
+purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as
+particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the
+other hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.
+
+"Well," said Basil, in his cheeriest way, "I think we must be
+getting away. We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much
+regard for you to stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself,
+we've made ourselves at home. Good night. Thanks so much. Come
+along, Rupert."
+
+"Basil," said Rupert desperately, "for God's sake come and see what
+you can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the discomfort
+out of my mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a
+mistake. But these gentlemen won't mind perhaps. . ."
+
+"No, no," cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness.
+"No, no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make
+a tour of the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I
+assure you."
+
+This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from
+others which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days
+with Basil Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the
+moon seemed to have gone mad. But it had almost invariably happened
+that towards the end of the day and its adventure things had
+cleared themselves like the sky after rain, and a luminous and
+quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me. But this day's work was
+destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we left that
+house, ten minutes afterwards, one half-witted touch was added
+which rolled all our minds in cloud. If Rupert's head had suddenly
+fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of
+Greenwood's shoulders, we could scarcely have been more suddenly
+stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We had to go to
+bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it and
+let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As will be seen,
+it was not until months afterwards that by another accident and in
+another way it was explained. For the present I only state what
+happened.
+
+When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert
+leading, the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of
+the prison again closed. Throwing it open we found the place again
+as black as pitch. The old lady, if she was still there, had turned
+out the gas: she seemed to have a weird preference for sitting in
+the dark.
+
+Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady
+turned her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong
+gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she
+sprang up and swept a sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I
+looked quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to whom it was natural to
+suppose this subservience had been offered. I felt irritated at
+what was implied in this subservience, and desired to see the faces
+of the tyrants as they received it. To my surprise they did not
+seem to have seen it at all: Burrows was paring his nails with a
+small penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the group and had
+hardly entered the room. And then an amazing fact became apparent.
+It was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the group, the golden
+gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His face wore an
+expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of a very
+grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It
+was he who had acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was he,
+beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been
+directed.
+
+"So I hear," he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, "I
+hear, madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But
+without success."
+
+"No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you," answered the
+lady with a high colour. "But you have not found me guilty of
+treachery."
+
+"I willingly attest it, madam," replied Basil, in the same level
+tones, "and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your
+exhibition of loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of
+exercising some very large discretionary powers. You would not
+leave this room at the request of these gentlemen. But you know
+that you can safely leave it at mine."
+
+The captive made another reverence. "I have never complained of
+your injustice," she said. "I need scarcely say what I think of
+your generosity."
+
+And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the
+room, Basil holding the door open for her.
+
+He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. "This will
+be a relief to you," he said.
+
+"Yes, it will," replied that immovable young gentleman with a face
+like a sphinx.
+
+We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed
+as if we had fallen into it from some high tower.
+
+"Basil," said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, "I always thought
+you were my brother. But are you a man? I mean--are you only a
+man?"
+
+"At present," replied Basil, "my mere humanity is proved by one
+of the most unmistakable symbols--hunger. We are too late for
+the theatre in Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the
+restaurant. Here comes the green omnibus!" and he had leaped on
+it before we could speak.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered
+my room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of
+having jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him
+upon the latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to
+himself no less a thing than the discovery of the actual origin,
+whereabouts, and headquarters of the source of all our joys and
+sorrows--the Club of Queer Trades. I should expand this story for
+ever if I explained how ultimately we ran this strange entity to
+its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting things. The
+tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of
+roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a cellar,
+the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding of the
+subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer Trades.
+
+I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a
+stranger one than that I felt when I came out of those rambling,
+sightless, and seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden
+splendour of a sumptuous and hospitable dining-room, surrounded
+upon almost every side by faces that I knew. There was Mr
+Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated between the two brisk
+young men who were occasionally vicars, and always Professional
+Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the Adventure
+and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented the
+dancing Language.
+
+As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their
+chairs, and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential
+seat gaped at us like a missing tooth.
+
+"The president's not here," said Mr P. G. Northover, turning
+suddenly to Professor Chadd.
+
+"N--no," said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary
+vagueness. "I can't imagine where he is."
+
+"Good heavens," said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, "I really feel a
+little nervous. I'll go and see." And he ran out of the room.
+
+An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid
+ecstasy.
+
+"He's there, gentlemen--he's there all right--he's coming in now,"
+he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the
+beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who
+was the first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought
+indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of madmen: what
+fantastic was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with so
+loyal an expectation?
+
+Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was
+filled and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant,
+smiling and in evening dress, took his seat at the head of the
+table.
+
+How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a
+person particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club
+dinner. But on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless
+string of courses. Hors-d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as
+herrings, soup seemed a sort of ocean, larks were ducks, ducks
+were ostriches until that dinner was over. The cheese course was
+maddening. I had often heard of the moon being made of green
+cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of the
+moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and eating and
+drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he was
+there, the king of these capering idiots.
+
+At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us,
+the time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose
+to his feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "it is a custom in this society that the
+president for the year opens the proceedings not by any general
+toast of sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a brief
+account of his trade. We then drink to that calling and to all who
+follow it. It is my business, as the senior member, to open by
+stating my claim to membership of this club. Years ago, gentlemen,
+I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to do justice and to
+administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in my work,
+as it was, I was not touching even the fringe of justice. I was
+seated in the seat of the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and
+ermine; nevertheless, I held a small and lowly and futile post. I
+had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and my red and gold
+was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me taut and
+passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend to
+relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all
+the time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would
+have been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few
+words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands.
+Then, as this grew on me, there grew on me continuously the sense
+of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper
+or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had to
+say. Then came the time when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh,
+was classed as a madman and melted from public life."
+
+Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and
+I who were listening with intensity to this statement.
+
+"Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered
+myself privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral
+differences. Before very long these unofficial courts of honour
+(kept strictly secret) had spread over the whole of society. People
+were tried before me not for the practical trifles for which nobody
+cares, such as committing a murder, or keeping a dog without a
+licence. My criminals were tried for the faults which really make
+social life impossible. They were tried before me for selfishness,
+or for an impossible vanity, or for scandalmongering, or for
+stinginess to guests or dependents. Of course these courts had no
+sort of real coercive powers. The fulfilment of their punishments
+rested entirely on the honour of the ladies and gentlemen involved,
+including the honour of the culprits. But you would be amazed to
+know how completely our orders were always obeyed. Only lately I
+had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South Kensington whom
+I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means of
+breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely refused
+to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had been
+inopportune enough to rescue her."
+
+Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape.
+So, for the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the
+explanation of the old lady's strange discontent and her still
+stranger content with her lot. She was one of the culprits of his
+Voluntary Criminal Court. She was one of the clients of his Queer
+Trade.
+
+We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the
+health of Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of
+everything having been put right, the sense men will have when
+they come into the presence of God. We dimly heard Basil say:
+
+"Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance
+Agency."
+
+And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he
+had made long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it
+had begun, like a true cycle.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext The Club of Queer Trades, by Chesterton
+
diff --git a/old/tcoqt10.zip b/old/tcoqt10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c61d8a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/tcoqt10.zip
diff --git a/old/tcoqt10h.htm b/old/tcoqt10h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5f1c97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/tcoqt10h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,8758 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>The Club of Queer Trades</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=
+"text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Club of Queer Trades, by G.K.Chesterton
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Club of Queer Trades
+
+Author: G.K.Chesterton
+
+Release Date: April, 1999 [EBook #1696]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 6, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+
+
+
+This HTM version was produced by Walter Debeuf
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h2>The Club of Queer Trades</h2>
+
+<h3>by G.K.Chesterton</h3>
+
+<h2><br>
+ Chapter 1</h2>
+
+<h3>The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown</h3>
+
+<p>Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have
+had<br>
+ something to do with the designing of the things called flats
+in<br>
+ England and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in
+the<br>
+ idea of economising space by piling houses on top of each
+other,<br>
+ front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of
+those<br>
+ perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is
+in<br>
+ one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices
+of<br>
+ the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first
+glance<br>
+ that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but
+nothing<br>
+ attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by
+is<br>
+ only looking for his own melancholy destination, the
+Montenegro<br>
+ Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel,
+and<br>
+ passes through the twilight passages as one passes through
+the<br>
+ twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a
+Strangers'<br>
+ Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in
+Norfolk<br>
+ Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer
+inquiries,<br>
+ no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns
+in<br>
+ a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of
+fossils.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it
+to<br>
+ be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian
+Club,<br>
+ of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this,
+that<br>
+ the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns
+his<br>
+ living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition
+of<br>
+ this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First,
+it<br>
+ must not be a mere application or variation of an existing
+trade.<br>
+ Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance
+agent<br>
+ simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against
+being<br>
+ burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers
+against<br>
+ being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock<br>
+ Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and
+soaring<br>
+ speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised
+in<br>
+ the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the
+same.<br>
+ Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of
+income,<br>
+ the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a
+man<br>
+ simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken
+sardine<br>
+ tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them.
+Professor<br>
+ Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what
+Professor<br>
+ Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh
+or<br>
+ cry.</p>
+
+<p>The discovery of this strange society was a curiously
+refreshing<br>
+ thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world
+was<br>
+ like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a
+man<br>
+ feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood
+of<br>
+ the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a
+body<br>
+ was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I
+have<br>
+ a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may
+be<br>
+ said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and
+fantastic<br>
+ variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I<br>
+ collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may
+tell<br>
+ tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I
+will<br>
+ recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society (that<br>
+ superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I
+will<br>
+ explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name
+of<br>
+ which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world
+shall<br>
+ know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with
+the<br>
+ Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say
+a<br>
+ word. The first of my revelations, at any rate, shall be
+concerned<br>
+ with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said, was one
+of<br>
+ this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner
+or<br>
+ later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the<br>
+ metropolis call me facetiously `The King of Clubs'. They also
+call<br>
+ me `The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful<br>
+ appearance I have presented in my declining years. I only hope
+the<br>
+ spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have.
+But<br>
+ the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious
+thing<br>
+ about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not<br>
+ discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant,
+a<br>
+ star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of
+his<br>
+ attic.</p>
+
+<p>Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in
+the<br>
+ least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked
+into<br>
+ his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few
+people<br>
+ knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them;
+he<br>
+ welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of
+colour<br>
+ in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to
+parties<br>
+ than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds. He lived in
+a<br>
+ queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was<br>
+ surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to
+the<br>
+ slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour--the
+whole<br>
+ dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these
+quixotic<br>
+ relics, appeared curiously keen and modern--a powerful,
+legal<br>
+ face. And no one but I knew who he was.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and
+grotesque<br>
+ scene that occurred in--, when one of the most acute and
+forcible<br>
+ of the English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my
+own<br>
+ view of that occurrence; but about the facts themselves there
+is<br>
+ no question at all. For some months, indeed for some years,
+people<br>
+ had detected something curious in the judge's conduct. He
+seemed<br>
+ to have lost interest in the law, in which he had been
+beyond<br>
+ expression brilliant and terrible as a K.C., and to be occupied
+in<br>
+ giving personal and moral advice to the people concerned. He<br>
+ talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken one
+at<br>
+ that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a
+man<br>
+ who had attempted a crime of passion: "I sentence you to
+three<br>
+ years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and
+God-given<br>
+ conviction, that what you require is three months at the
+seaside."<br>
+ He accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their
+obvious<br>
+ legal crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in
+a<br>
+ court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and
+morbidity<br>
+ deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in that
+celebrated<br>
+ diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that
+brilliant<br>
+ patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly,
+to<br>
+ give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of
+the<br>
+ household had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested
+the<br>
+ Premier again to step forward, which he did with quiet
+dignity.<br>
+ The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: "Get a new
+soul.<br>
+ That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new soul." All this,
+of<br>
+ course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of
+that<br>
+ melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually deserted
+him<br>
+ in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent
+and<br>
+ powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of
+considerable<br>
+ defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the<br>
+ advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks
+of<br>
+ work and rhetoric, the time came for the great judge to give
+a<br>
+ summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of
+lucidity<br>
+ and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken
+very<br>
+ little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and
+lowering<br>
+ at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then
+burst<br>
+ into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as
+follows:</p>
+
+<p>"O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty
+Highty-ighty<br>
+ tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow."</p>
+
+<p>He then retired from public life and took the garret in
+Lambeth.</p>
+
+<p>I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a
+glass of<br>
+ that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of
+black-letter<br>
+ folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit
+of<br>
+ his, one of the great swords in his collection; the red glare
+of<br>
+ the strong fire struck his square features and his fierce
+grey<br>
+ hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of dreams, and he
+had<br>
+ opened his mouth to speak dreamily, when the door was flung
+open,<br>
+ and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a huge furred
+overcoat,<br>
+ swung himself panting into the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry to bother you, Basil," he gasped. "I took a
+liberty--made an<br>
+ appointment here with a man--a client--in five minutes--I beg
+your<br>
+ pardon, sir," and he gave me a bow of apology.</p>
+
+<p>Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had
+a<br>
+ practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and
+does<br>
+ all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing,
+he<br>
+ is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist,
+a<br>
+ house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a<br>
+ schoolmaster, a--what are you now, Rupert?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am and have been for some time," said Rupert, with some
+dignity,<br>
+ "a private detective, and there's my client."</p>
+
+<p>A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission
+being<br>
+ given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper
+man<br>
+ walked swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on
+the<br>
+ table, and said, "Good evening, gentlemen," with a stress on
+the<br>
+ last syllable that somehow marked him out as a martinet,
+military,<br>
+ literary and social. He had a large head streaked with black
+and<br>
+ grey, and an abrupt black moustache, which gave him a look
+of<br>
+ fierceness which was contradicted by his sad sea-blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Basil immediately said to me, "Let us come into the next
+room,<br>
+ Gully," and was moving towards the door, but the stranger
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly."</p>
+
+<p>The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a
+certain<br>
+ Major Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had<br>
+ forgotten altogether the black dandified figure and the
+large<br>
+ solemn head, but I remembered the peculiar speech, which
+consisted<br>
+ of only saying about a quarter of each sentence, and that
+sharply,<br>
+ like the crack of a gun. I do not know, it may have come
+from<br>
+ giving orders to troops.</p>
+
+<p>Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier,
+but<br>
+ he was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron
+men<br>
+ who recovered British India, he was a man with the natural
+beliefs<br>
+ and tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and
+yet<br>
+ demure; in his habits he was precise to the point of the
+exact<br>
+ adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm he had, which was of
+the<br>
+ nature of a religion--the cultivation of pansies. And when
+he<br>
+ talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered like a
+child's<br>
+ at a new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when the
+troops<br>
+ were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Major," said Rupert Grant, with a lordly
+heartiness,<br>
+ flinging himself into a chair, "what is the matter with
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover," said the
+Major,<br>
+ with righteous indignation.</p>
+
+<p>We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had
+his<br>
+ eyes shut in his abstracted way, said simply:</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon."</p>
+
+<p>"Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to
+me.<br>
+ Something. Preposterous."</p>
+
+<p>We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the
+seemingly<br>
+ sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the
+Major's<br>
+ fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to
+submit<br>
+ the reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story
+of<br>
+ Major Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the<br>
+ scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his
+habit,<br>
+ and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder and rounder
+as<br>
+ we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the
+world,<br>
+ from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright
+in<br>
+ his chair and talking like a telegram.</p>
+
+<p>Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by
+no<br>
+ means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his
+retirement<br>
+ on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small neat
+villa,<br>
+ very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life
+to<br>
+ pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when
+he<br>
+ had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along
+with<br>
+ two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken
+himself<br>
+ instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was
+to<br>
+ him like having come into a harbour in heaven. He was
+Dutch-like<br>
+ and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps,
+some<br>
+ tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of
+those<br>
+ men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand
+rather<br>
+ than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he
+saw<br>
+ life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly
+he<br>
+ would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had
+told<br>
+ him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was
+destined<br>
+ to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as
+he<br>
+ had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the
+heat<br>
+ of battle.</p>
+
+<p>One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in
+his<br>
+ usual faultless manner, had set out for his usual
+constitutional.<br>
+ In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another,
+he<br>
+ happened to pass along one of those aimless-looking lanes which
+lie<br>
+ along the back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which
+in<br>
+ their empty and discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation
+as<br>
+ of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean and sulky as
+the<br>
+ scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether
+so<br>
+ in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming
+a<br>
+ thing which was to him what the passing of a religious
+procession<br>
+ is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes
+and<br>
+ a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a
+barrow,<br>
+ which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were
+splendid<br>
+ specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own
+favourite<br>
+ pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into
+conversation,<br>
+ and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner
+of<br>
+ collectors and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and
+with<br>
+ a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less
+excellent,<br>
+ praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging
+from a<br>
+ thrilling worth and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and
+then<br>
+ bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when
+he<br>
+ stopped and came close to the Major.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you what, sir," he said. "If you're interested in
+them<br>
+ things, you just get on to that wall."</p>
+
+<p>"On the wall!" cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional
+soul<br>
+ quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic
+trespass.</p>
+
+<p>"Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there
+garden,<br>
+ sir," hissed the tempter. "I'll help you up, sir."</p>
+
+<p>How it happened no one will ever know but that positive
+enthusiasm<br>
+ of the Major's life triumphed over all its negative
+traditions,<br>
+ and with an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no
+need<br>
+ of physical assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of
+the<br>
+ strange garden. The second after, the flapping of the
+frock-coat<br>
+ at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool. But the
+next<br>
+ instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up by the
+most<br>
+ appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in
+all<br>
+ his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the
+garden,<br>
+ and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a
+vast<br>
+ pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once
+it<br>
+ was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld,
+for<br>
+ the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as
+to<br>
+ form the sentence:</p>
+
+<h3>DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN</h3>
+
+<p>A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering
+them.<br>
+ Brown looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with
+the<br>
+ barrow had suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the
+lawn<br>
+ with its incredible inscription. Another man might have thought
+he<br>
+ had gone mad, but Brown did not. When romantic ladies gushed
+over<br>
+ his V.C. and his military exploits, he sometimes felt himself
+to<br>
+ be a painfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew
+he<br>
+ was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have thought
+himself<br>
+ a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not
+easily<br>
+ believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the
+garden<br>
+ arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought
+it<br>
+ extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money
+like<br>
+ water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever
+to<br>
+ offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed
+man,<br>
+ and waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with
+six<br>
+ legs.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up,
+and<br>
+ the watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water
+down<br>
+ the gravel path.</p>
+
+<p>"Who on earth are you?" he gasped, trembling violently.</p>
+
+<p>"I am Major Brown," said that individual, who was always cool
+in<br>
+ the hour of action.</p>
+
+<p>The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last
+he<br>
+ stammered wildly, "Come down--come down here!"</p>
+
+<p>"At your service," said the Major, and alighted at a bound on
+the<br>
+ grass beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.</p>
+
+<p>The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of
+waddling<br>
+ run towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major.
+His<br>
+ guide led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but
+gorgeously<br>
+ appointed house, until they reached the door of the front
+room.<br>
+ Then the old man turned with a face of apoplectic terror
+dimly<br>
+ showing in the twilight.</p>
+
+<p>"For heaven's sake," he said, "don't mention jackals."</p>
+
+<p>Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red
+lamplight,<br>
+ and ran downstairs with a clatter.</p>
+
+<p>The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red
+copper,<br>
+ and peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the
+finest<br>
+ manners in the world, and, though mystified, was not in the
+least<br>
+ embarrassed to see that the only occupant was a lady, sitting
+by<br>
+ the window, looking out.</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," he said, bowing simply, "I am Major Brown."</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down," said the lady; but she did not turn her head.</p>
+
+<p>She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and
+a<br>
+ flavour of Bedford Park. "You have come, I suppose," she
+said<br>
+ mournfully, "to tax me about the hateful title-deeds."</p>
+
+<p>"I have come, madam," he said, "to know what is the matter. To
+know<br>
+ why my name is written across your garden. Not amicably
+either."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible
+to<br>
+ describe the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and
+sunny<br>
+ garden scene, the frame for a stunning and brutal
+personality.<br>
+ The evening air was still, and the grass was golden in the
+place<br>
+ where the little flowers he studied cried to heaven for his<br>
+ blood.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I must not turn round," said the lady; "every
+afternoon<br>
+ till the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the
+street."</p>
+
+<p>Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic
+soldier<br>
+ resolute to accept these outrageous riddles without
+surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"It is almost six," he said; and even as he spoke the
+barbaric<br>
+ copper clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the
+hour.<br>
+ At the sixth the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one
+of<br>
+ the queerest and yet most attractive faces he had ever seen
+in<br>
+ his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf.</p>
+
+<p>"That makes the third year I have waited," she cried. "This is
+an<br>
+ anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful
+thing<br>
+ would happen once and for all."</p>
+
+<p>And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the
+stillness.<br>
+ From low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was
+already<br>
+ twilight) a voice cried out with a raucous and merciless<br>
+ distinctness:</p>
+
+<p>"Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?"</p>
+
+<p>Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the
+front<br>
+ door and looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue
+gloaming<br>
+ of the street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light
+their<br>
+ lemon sparks. On returning, he found the lady in green
+trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the end," she cried, with shaking lips; "it may be
+death for<br>
+ both of us. Whenever--"</p>
+
+<p>But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another
+hoarse<br>
+ proclamation from the dark street, again horribly
+articulate.</p>
+
+<p>"Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?"</p>
+
+<p>Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he
+was<br>
+ frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was
+far<br>
+ too long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even
+the<br>
+ rational Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain
+time<br>
+ to the drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the
+terrific<br>
+ voice came:</p>
+
+<p>"Major Brown, Major Brown, where did--"</p>
+
+<p>Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in
+time--in<br>
+ time to see something which at first glance froze the blood.
+The<br>
+ cries appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on
+the<br>
+ pavement.</p>
+
+<p>The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of
+a<br>
+ man thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next
+moment,<br>
+ again, it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady.<br>
+ "Where's your coal-cellar?" he said, and stepped out into
+the<br>
+ passage.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with wild grey eyes. "You will not go down,"
+she<br>
+ cried, "alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is this the way?" replied Brown, and descended the kitchen
+stairs<br>
+ three at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity
+and<br>
+ stepped in, feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right
+hand<br>
+ was thus occupied, a pair of great slimy hands came out of
+the<br>
+ darkness, hands clearly belonging to a man of gigantic
+stature,<br>
+ and seized him by the back of the head. They forced him down,
+down<br>
+ in the suffocating darkness, a brutal image of destiny. But
+the<br>
+ Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly clear and<br>
+ intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure until he had
+slid<br>
+ down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of
+the<br>
+ invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one
+of<br>
+ his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a<br>
+ muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man,
+with<br>
+ a crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on
+top<br>
+ like a cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he
+had<br>
+ evidently now no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither
+and<br>
+ thither to get past the Major to the door, but that
+tenacious<br>
+ person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the
+other<br>
+ hand to a beam. At length there came a strain in holding back
+this<br>
+ human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to
+rend<br>
+ and part from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and
+the<br>
+ dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the cellar,
+leaving<br>
+ the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his
+adventure<br>
+ and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out
+at<br>
+ the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole<br>
+ equipment of the house had disappeared. It had only bare
+boards<br>
+ and whitewashed walls.</p>
+
+<p>"The lady was in the conspiracy, of course," said Rupert,
+nodding.<br>
+ Major Brown turned brick red. "I beg your pardon," he said,
+"I<br>
+ think not."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but
+said<br>
+ nothing. When next he spoke he asked:</p>
+
+<p>"Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a
+threepenny-bit,"<br>
+ said the Major carefully; "there was a cigarette-holder, a piece
+of<br>
+ string, and this letter," and he laid it on the table. It ran
+as<br>
+ follows:</p>
+
+<p>Dear Mr Plover,</p>
+
+<p>I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the<br>
+ arrangements re Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked
+as<br>
+ per arrangement tomorrow The coal-cellar, of course.</p>
+
+<p>Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like
+eyes. He<br>
+ cut in:</p>
+
+<p>"Is it dated from anywhere?"</p>
+
+<p>"No--oh, yes!" replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; "14
+Tanner's<br>
+ Court, North--"</p>
+
+<p>Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me
+your<br>
+ revolver."</p>
+
+<p>Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and
+it<br>
+ was some time before he answered:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you'll need it."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not," said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. "One
+never<br>
+ knows. But going down a dark court to see criminals--"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think they are criminals?" asked his brother.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert laughed stoutly. "Giving orders to a subordinate to
+strangle<br>
+ a harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a
+very<br>
+ blameless experiment, but--"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?" asked Basil,
+in<br>
+ the same distant and monotonous voice.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter."</p>
+
+<p>"I am looking at the letter," said the mad judge calmly;
+though, as<br>
+ a matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. "I don't think
+it's<br>
+ the sort of letter one criminal would write to another."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear boy, you are glorious," cried Rupert, turning round,
+with<br>
+ laughter in his blue bright eyes. "Your methods amaze me.
+Why,<br>
+ there is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for
+a<br>
+ crime. You might as well say that the Nelson Column was not at
+all<br>
+ the sort of thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar<br>
+ Square."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but
+did<br>
+ not otherwise move.</p>
+
+<p>"That's rather good," he said; "but, of course, logic like
+that's<br>
+ not what is really wanted. It's a question of spiritual
+atmosphere.<br>
+ It's not a criminal letter."</p>
+
+<p>"It is. It's a matter of fact," cried the other in an agony
+of<br>
+ reasonableness.</p>
+
+<p>"Facts," murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange,
+far-off<br>
+ animals, "how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly--in
+fact,<br>
+ I'm off my head--but I never could believe in that man--what's
+his<br>
+ name, in those capital stories?--Sherlock Holmes. Every
+detail<br>
+ points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong
+thing.<br>
+ Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the
+thousands<br>
+ of twigs on a tree. It's only the life of the tree that has
+unity<br>
+ and goes up--only the green blood that springs, like a
+fountain,<br>
+ at the stars."</p>
+
+<p>"But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have eternity to stretch our legs in," replied the mystic.
+"It<br>
+ can be an infinity of things. I haven't seen any of
+them--I've<br>
+ only seen the letter. I look at that, and say it's not
+criminal."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what's the origin of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't the vaguest idea."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and
+seemed<br>
+ collecting his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then
+he<br>
+ said:</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you
+passed<br>
+ through silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into
+an<br>
+ open and deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you
+beheld<br>
+ one dressed as a ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer.
+And<br>
+ suppose you looked, and saw it was a man disguised. And
+suppose<br>
+ you looked again, and saw it was Lord Kitchener. What would
+you<br>
+ think?"</p>
+
+<p>He paused a moment, and went on:</p>
+
+<p>"You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The
+ordinary<br>
+ explanation of putting on singular clothes is that you look
+nice<br>
+ in them; you would not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like
+a<br>
+ ballet girl out of ordinary personal vanity. You would think
+it<br>
+ much more likely that he inherited a dancing madness from a
+great<br>
+ grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a seance; or threatened
+by<br>
+ a secret society with death if he refused the ordeal. With<br>
+ Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet--but not with Kitchener.
+I<br>
+ should know all that, because in my public days I knew him
+quite<br>
+ well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals quite
+well.<br>
+ It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres." And he
+closed<br>
+ his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of
+respect<br>
+ and pity. The former said</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think--until
+your<br>
+ spiritual mystery turns up--that a man who sends a note<br>
+ recommending a crime, that is, actually a crime that is
+actually<br>
+ carried out, at least tentatively, is, in all probability, a<br>
+ little casual in his moral tastes. Can I have that
+revolver?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," said Basil, getting up. "But I am coming with
+you."<br>
+ And he flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a<br>
+ sword-stick from the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"You!" said Rupert, with some surprise, "you scarcely ever
+leave<br>
+ your hole to look at anything on the face of the earth."</p>
+
+<p>Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.</p>
+
+<p>"I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and
+colossal<br>
+ arrogance, "hear of anything on the face of the earth that I
+do<br>
+ not understand at once, without going to see it."</p>
+
+<p>And he led the way out into the purple night.</p>
+
+<p>We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across
+Westminster<br>
+ Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part
+of<br>
+ Fleet Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect,
+black<br>
+ figure of Major Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast
+to<br>
+ the hound-like stoop and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant,
+who<br>
+ adopted, with childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of
+the<br>
+ detective of fiction. The finest among his many fine qualities
+was<br>
+ his boyish appetite for the colour and poetry of London. Basil,
+who<br>
+ walked behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars, had
+the<br>
+ look of a somnambulist.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver
+of<br>
+ delight at danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his
+great-coat<br>
+ pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we go in now?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Not get police?" asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and
+down<br>
+ the street.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sure," answered Rupert, knitting his brows. "Of
+course,<br>
+ it's quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three
+of<br>
+ us, and--"</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't get the police," said Basil in a queer voice.
+Rupert<br>
+ glanced at him and stared hard.</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," he cried, "you're trembling. What's the matter--are
+you<br>
+ afraid?"</p>
+
+<p>"Cold, perhaps," said the Major, eyeing him. There was no
+doubt<br>
+ that he was shaking.</p>
+
+<p>At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a
+curse.</p>
+
+<p>"You're laughing," he cried. "I know that confounded,
+silent,<br>
+ shaky laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement,
+Basil?<br>
+ Here we are, all three of us, within a yard of a den of<br>
+ ruffians--"</p>
+
+<p>"But I shouldn't call the police," said Basil. "We four
+heroes<br>
+ are quite equal to a host," and he continued to quake with
+his<br>
+ mysterious mirth.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the
+court,<br>
+ the rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14
+he<br>
+ turned abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Stand close," he said in the voice of a commander. "The
+scoundrel<br>
+ may be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open
+the<br>
+ door and rush in."</p>
+
+<p>The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid,
+except<br>
+ for the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning
+eyes<br>
+ suddenly over his shoulder, "when I say `Four', follow me with
+a<br>
+ rush. If I say `Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they
+are.<br>
+ If I say `Stop', stop. I shall say that if there are more
+than<br>
+ three. If they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them.
+Basil,<br>
+ have your sword-stick ready. Now--one, two three, four!"</p>
+
+<p>With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell
+into<br>
+ the room like an invasion, only to stop dead.</p>
+
+<p>The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed
+office,<br>
+ appeared, at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second
+and<br>
+ more careful glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk
+with<br>
+ pigeonholes and drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small
+man<br>
+ with a black waxed moustache, and the air of a very average
+clerk,<br>
+ writing hard. He looked up as we came to a standstill.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you knock?" he asked pleasantly. "I am sorry if I did
+not<br>
+ hear. What can I do for you?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the
+Major<br>
+ himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.</p>
+
+<p>The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.</p>
+
+<p>"Is your name P. G. Northover?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"That is my name," replied the other, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow
+of<br>
+ his face, "that this letter was written by you." And with a
+loud<br>
+ clap he struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched
+fist.<br>
+ The man called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest
+and<br>
+ merely nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," said the Major, breathing hard, "what about
+that?"</p>
+
+<p>"What about it, precisely," said the man with the
+moustache.</p>
+
+<p>"I am Major Brown," said that gentleman sternly.</p>
+
+<p>Northover bowed. "Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to
+say to<br>
+ me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Say!" cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; "why, I want
+this<br>
+ confounded thing settled. I want--"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, sir," said Northover, jumping up with a slight<br>
+ elevation of the eyebrows. "Will you take a chair for a
+moment."<br>
+ And he pressed an electric bell just above him, which thrilled
+and<br>
+ tinkled in a room beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of
+the<br>
+ chair offered him, but stood chafing and beating the floor with
+his<br>
+ polished boot.</p>
+
+<p>The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair,
+weedy,<br>
+ young man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Hopson," said Northover, "this is Major Brown. Will you
+please<br>
+ finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it
+in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.</p>
+
+<p>"You will excuse me, gentlemen," said the egregious Northover,
+with<br>
+ his radiant smile, "if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is
+ready.<br>
+ I have some books that must be cleared up before I get away on
+my<br>
+ holiday tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't
+we?<br>
+ Ha! ha!"</p>
+
+<p>The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a<br>
+ silence ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P.
+G.<br>
+ Northover; a raging silence on the part of everybody else.</p>
+
+<p>At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness
+was<br>
+ mingled with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with
+the<br>
+ turning of the handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the
+same<br>
+ silent rapidity, placed a paper before his principal, and<br>
+ disappeared again.</p>
+
+<p>The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for
+a<br>
+ few moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented
+to<br>
+ him. He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown,
+and<br>
+ altered something, muttering--"Careless." Then he read it
+again<br>
+ with the same impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed
+it<br>
+ to the frantic Brown, whose hand was beating the devil's
+tattoo<br>
+ on the back of the chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you will find that all right, Major," he said
+briefly.</p>
+
+<p>The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not
+will<br>
+ appear later, but he found it like this:</p>
+
+<p>Major Brown to P. G. Northover. L s. d.<br>
+ January 1, to account rendered 5 6 0<br>
+ May 9, to potting and embedding of zoo pansies 2 0 0<br>
+ To cost of trolley with flowers 0 15 0<br>
+ To hiring of man with trolley 0 5 0<br>
+ To hire of house and garden for one day 1 0 0<br>
+ To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments,
+etc. 3 0 0<br>
+ To salary of Miss Jameson 1 0 0<br>
+ To salary of Mr Plover 1 0 0<br>
+ ----------<br>
+ Total L14 6 0<br>
+ A Remittance will oblige.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ "What," said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that
+seemed<br>
+ slowly rising out of his head, "What in heaven's name is
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with<br>
+ amusement. "It's your account, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"My account!" The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague
+stampede.<br>
+ "My account! And what have I got to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Northover, laughing outright, "naturally I prefer
+you<br>
+ to pay it."</p>
+
+<p>The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as
+the<br>
+ words came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the
+chair<br>
+ bodily into the air with one hand and hurled it at
+Northover's<br>
+ head.</p>
+
+<p>The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got
+a<br>
+ blow on the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to
+be<br>
+ seized by the united rush of the rest of us. The chair had
+fallen<br>
+ clattering on the empty floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go, you scamps," he shouted. "Let me--"</p>
+
+<p>"Stand still," cried Rupert authoritatively. "Major Brown's
+action<br>
+ is excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted--"</p>
+
+<p>"A customer has a perfect right," said Northover hotly,
+"to<br>
+ question an alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to
+throw<br>
+ furniture."</p>
+
+<p>"What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and<br>
+ overcharges?" shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine
+nature,<br>
+ steady in pain or danger, became almost hysterical in the
+presence<br>
+ of a long and exasperating mystery. "Who are you? I've never
+seen<br>
+ you or your insolent tomfool bills. I know one of your
+cursed<br>
+ brutes tried to choke me--"</p>
+
+<p>"Mad," said Northover, gazing blankly round; "all of them mad.
+I<br>
+ didn't know they travelled in quartettes."</p>
+
+<p>"Enough of this prevarication," said Rupert; "your crimes
+are<br>
+ discovered. A policeman is stationed at the corner of the
+court.<br>
+ Though only a private detective myself, I will take the<br>
+ responsibility of telling you that anything you say--"</p>
+
+<p>"Mad," repeated Northover, with a weary air.</p>
+
+<p>And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among
+them<br>
+ the strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.</p>
+
+<p>"Major Brown," he said, "may I ask you a question?"</p>
+
+<p>The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.</p>
+
+<p>"You?" he cried; "certainly, Mr Grant."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you tell me," said the mystic, with sunken head and
+lowering<br>
+ brow, as he traced a pattern in the dust with his
+sword-stick,<br>
+ "can you tell me what was the name of the man who lived in
+your<br>
+ house before you?"</p>
+
+<p>The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last
+and<br>
+ futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something--a name with
+a<br>
+ hyphen--Gurney-Brown; that was it."</p>
+
+<p>"And when did the house change hands?" said Basil, looking
+up<br>
+ sharply. His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.</p>
+
+<p>"I came in last month," said the Major.</p>
+
+<p>And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into
+his<br>
+ great office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! it's too perfect--it's too exquisite," he gasped, beating
+the<br>
+ arms with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant
+was<br>
+ laughing voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our
+heads<br>
+ were like weathercocks in a whirlwind.</p>
+
+<p>"Confound it, Basil," said Rupert, stamping. "If you don't
+want me<br>
+ to go mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what
+all<br>
+ this means."</p>
+
+<p>Northover rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Permit me, sir, to explain," he said. "And, first of all,
+permit<br>
+ me to apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable
+and<br>
+ unpardonable blunder, which has caused you menace and<br>
+ inconvenience, in which, if you will allow me to say so, you
+have<br>
+ behaved with astonishing courage and dignity. Of course you
+need<br>
+ not trouble about the bill. We will stand the loss." And,
+tearing<br>
+ the paper across, he flung the halves into the waste-paper
+basket<br>
+ and bowed.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. "But I
+don't<br>
+ even begin to understand," he cried. "What bill? what
+blunder?<br>
+ what loss?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room,<br>
+ thoughtfully, and with a great deal of unconscious dignity.
+On<br>
+ closer consideration, there were apparent about him other
+things<br>
+ beside a screwed moustache, especially a lean, sallow face,<br>
+ hawk-like, and not without a careworn intelligence. Then he
+looked<br>
+ up abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know where you are, Major?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"God knows I don't," said the warrior, with fervour.</p>
+
+<p>"You are standing," replied Northover, "in the office of
+the<br>
+ Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited."</p>
+
+<p>"And what's that?" blankly inquired Brown.</p>
+
+<p>The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and
+fixed<br>
+ his dark eyes on the other's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Major," said he, "did you ever, as you walked along the
+empty<br>
+ street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for<br>
+ something to happen--something, in the splendid words of
+Walt<br>
+ Whitman: `Something pernicious and dread; something far
+removed<br>
+ from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in
+a<br>
+ trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving
+free.'<br>
+ Did you ever feel that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not," said the Major shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I must explain with more elaboration," said Mr
+Northover,<br>
+ with a sigh. "The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started
+to<br>
+ meet a great modern desire. On every side, in conversation and
+in<br>
+ literature, we hear of the desire for a larger theatre of
+events<br>
+ for something to waylay us and lead us splendidly astray. Now
+the<br>
+ man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or
+a<br>
+ quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return,
+the<br>
+ Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with<br>
+ startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door,
+an<br>
+ excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against
+his<br>
+ life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he<br>
+ receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is<br>
+ immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and
+moving<br>
+ story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished<br>
+ novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining
+room.<br>
+ Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I consider<br>
+ peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did
+not<br>
+ see the end of it. I need scarcely explain further the
+monstrous<br>
+ mistake. Your predecessor in your present house, Mr
+Gurney-Brown,<br>
+ was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks,
+ignoring<br>
+ alike the dignity of the hyphen and the glory of military
+rank,<br>
+ positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were
+the<br>
+ same person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle
+of<br>
+ another man's story."</p>
+
+<p>"How on earth does the thing work?" asked Rupert Grant, with
+bright<br>
+ and fascinated eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"We believe that we are doing a noble work," said
+Northover<br>
+ warmly. "It has continually struck us that there is no element
+in<br>
+ modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the
+modern<br>
+ man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If
+he<br>
+ wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes
+to<br>
+ dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes
+to<br>
+ soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down
+the<br>
+ banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we
+give<br>
+ him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from
+wall<br>
+ to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long<br>
+ streets from pursuers--all healthy and pleasant exercises. We
+give<br>
+ him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or
+the<br>
+ Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the
+splendid<br>
+ sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we
+can<br>
+ act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance
+and<br>
+ dream."</p>
+
+<p>Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular
+psychological<br>
+ discovery had been reserved to the end, for as the little
+business<br>
+ man ceased speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.</p>
+
+<p>Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity
+and<br>
+ good humour.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course; awfully dense, sir," he said. "No doubt at all,
+the<br>
+ scheme excellent. But I don't think--" He paused a moment,
+and<br>
+ looked dreamily out of the window. "I don't think you will find
+me<br>
+ in it. Somehow, when one's seen--seen the thing itself, you<br>
+ know--blood and men screaming, one feels about having a
+little<br>
+ house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you know, `There
+remaineth<br>
+ a rest'."</p>
+
+<p>Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of
+you<br>
+ desire, at any time, to communicate with me, despite Major
+Brown's<br>
+ view of the matter--"</p>
+
+<p>"I should be obliged for your card, sir," said the Major, in
+his<br>
+ abrupt but courteous voice. "Pay for chair."</p>
+
+<p>The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card,
+laughing.</p>
+
+<p>It ran, "P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and
+Romance<br>
+ Agency, 14 Tanner's Court, Fleet Street."</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth is "C.QT."?" asked Rupert Grant, looking over
+the<br>
+ Major's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know?" returned Northover. "Haven't you ever heard
+of<br>
+ the Club of Queer Trades?"</p>
+
+<p>"There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we
+haven't<br>
+ heard of," said the little Major reflectively. "What's this
+one?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively
+of<br>
+ people who have invented some new and curious way of making
+money.<br>
+ I was one of the earliest members."</p>
+
+<p>"You deserve to be," said Basil, taking up his great white
+hat,<br>
+ with a smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.</p>
+
+<p>When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore
+a<br>
+ queer smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk.
+"A<br>
+ fine chap, that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet
+one<br>
+ stands some chance of being a poem. But to think of such a<br>
+ clockwork little creature of all people getting into the nets
+of<br>
+ one of Grigsby's tales," and he laughed out aloud in the
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at
+the<br>
+ door. An owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in,
+with<br>
+ deprecating and somewhat absurd inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>"What! back again, Major?" cried Northover in surprise. "What
+can<br>
+ I do for you?"</p>
+
+<p>The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.</p>
+
+<p>"It's horribly absurd," he said. "Something must have got
+started<br>
+ in me that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the
+most<br>
+ desperate desire to know the end of it all."</p>
+
+<p>"The end of it all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the Major. "`Jackals', and the title-deeds, and
+`Death<br>
+ to Major Brown'."</p>
+
+<p>The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.</p>
+
+<p>"I am terribly sorry, Major," said he, "but what you ask
+is<br>
+ impossible. I don't know any one I would sooner oblige than
+you;<br>
+ but the rules of the agency are strict. The Adventures are<br>
+ confidential; you are an outsider; I am not allowed to let
+you<br>
+ know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you
+understand--"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no one," said Brown, "who understands discipline
+better<br>
+ than I do. Thank you very much. Good night."</p>
+
+<p>And the little man withdrew for the last time.</p>
+
+<p>He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the
+green<br>
+ garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by
+the<br>
+ Romance Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran
+caused<br>
+ some stir in her languid and intellectualized set. She
+always<br>
+ replied very quietly that she had met scores of men who
+acted<br>
+ splendidly in the charades provided for them by Northover, but
+that<br>
+ she had only met one man who went down into a coal-cellar when
+he<br>
+ really thought it contained a murderer.</p>
+
+<p>The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an
+absurd<br>
+ villa, and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is<br>
+ unchanged--except, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and
+full<br>
+ of feminine unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls
+into<br>
+ a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a
+concealed<br>
+ smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is
+wondering<br>
+ what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to
+mention<br>
+ jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious,
+and<br>
+ believes that he will realize the rest of those purple
+adventures<br>
+ in a better world.</p>
+
+<h2>Chapter 2</h2>
+
+<h3>The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation</h3>
+
+<p>Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the
+most<br>
+ perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably
+deserted<br>
+ tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on
+the<br>
+ top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.</p>
+
+<p>The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very
+pace<br>
+ gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as
+it<br>
+ were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the
+real<br>
+ horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so
+totally<br>
+ missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who
+depict<br>
+ it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses,
+criminals<br>
+ and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den
+of<br>
+ vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order.
+But<br>
+ the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization,
+that<br>
+ there was order, but that civilisation only showed its
+morbidity,<br>
+ and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going through
+a<br>
+ criminal slum, "I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals." But
+here<br>
+ there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic
+asylums.<br>
+ Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of
+railway<br>
+ engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united
+by<br>
+ their common contempt for the people. Here there were
+churches;<br>
+ only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects,
+Agapemonites<br>
+ or Irvingites. Here, above all, there were broad roads and
+vast<br>
+ crossings and tramway lines and hospitals and all the real marks
+of<br>
+ civilization. But though one never knew, in one sense, what
+one<br>
+ would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not<br>
+ see--anything really great, central, of the first class,
+anything<br>
+ that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable
+our<br>
+ emotions returned, I think, to those really close and
+crooked<br>
+ entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums
+which<br>
+ lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a
+real<br>
+ possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross
+of<br>
+ the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like
+a<br>
+ thunderbolt.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ "But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his
+heavy<br>
+ abstracted way, when I had urged this view, "that the very
+vileness<br>
+ of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to
+the<br>
+ victory of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they
+have<br>
+ to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in
+a<br>
+ fourth-rate civilization. But yet I am practically certain that
+the<br>
+ majority of people here are good people. And being good is
+an<br>
+ adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the
+world.<br>
+ Besides--"</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," I said.</p>
+
+<p>No answer came.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," I said, looking up.</p>
+
+<p>The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head
+and<br>
+ he was paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side
+of<br>
+ the tram.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter?" I asked, peering over also.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very odd," said Grant at last, grimly, "that I should
+have<br>
+ been caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I
+said<br>
+ all these people were good, and there is the wickedest man
+in<br>
+ England."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?" I asked, leaning over further, "where?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I was right enough," he went on, in that strange
+continuous<br>
+ and sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute
+moments,<br>
+ "I was right enough when I said all these people were good.
+They<br>
+ are heroes; they are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal
+a<br>
+ spoon or two; they may beat a wife or two with the poker. But
+they<br>
+ are saints all the same; they are angels; they are robed in
+white;<br>
+ they are clad with wings and haloes--at any rate compared to
+that<br>
+ man."</p>
+
+<p>"Which man?" I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure
+at<br>
+ which Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.</p>
+
+<p>He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among
+the<br>
+ quickly passing crowd, but though there was nothing about
+him<br>
+ sufficient to attract a startled notice, there was quite enough
+to<br>
+ demand a curious consideration when once that notice was
+attracted.<br>
+ He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those<br>
+ strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried
+to<br>
+ turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan
+vase.<br>
+ His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct
+of<br>
+ one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The
+rest<br>
+ of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental; he had
+two<br>
+ black tufts of moustache.</p>
+
+<p>"What has he done?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sure of the details," said Grant, "but his besetting
+sin<br>
+ is a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably
+he<br>
+ has adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan."</p>
+
+<p>"What plan?" I asked. "If you know all about him, why don't
+you<br>
+ tell me why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his
+name?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you've made a mistake in my meaning," he said. "I
+don't<br>
+ know his name. I never saw him before in my life."</p>
+
+<p>"Never saw him before!" I cried, with a kind of anger; "then
+what<br>
+ in heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest
+man<br>
+ in England?"</p>
+
+<p>"I meant what I said," said Basil Grant calmly. "The moment I
+saw<br>
+ that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and<br>
+ splendid innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in
+the<br>
+ streets were being themselves, he was not being himself. I saw
+that<br>
+ all the men in these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans,
+are<br>
+ all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good. And I saw that
+that<br>
+ man was trying to be evil."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you never saw him before--" I began.</p>
+
+<p>"In God's name, look at his face," cried out Basil in a voice
+that<br>
+ startled the driver. "Look at the eyebrows. They mean that
+infernal<br>
+ pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven
+when<br>
+ he was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches,
+they<br>
+ are so grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the
+sacred<br>
+ heavens look at his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look
+at<br>
+ his hat."</p>
+
+<p>I stirred uncomfortably.</p>
+
+<p>"But, after all," I said, "this is very fanciful--perfectly
+absurd.<br>
+ Look at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before,
+you--"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair. "The
+mere<br>
+ facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in
+superstitions,<br>
+ so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe
+in<br>
+ facts? Do you not trust an immediate impression?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, an immediate impression may be," I said, "a little
+less<br>
+ practical than facts."</p>
+
+<p>"Bosh," he said. "On what else is the whole world run but
+immediate<br>
+ impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy
+of<br>
+ this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on<br>
+ spiritual impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or
+accept<br>
+ a clerk? Do you measure his skull? Do you read up his
+physiological<br>
+ state in a handbook? Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap.
+You<br>
+ accept a clerk who may save your business--you refuse a clerk
+that<br>
+ may rob your till, entirely upon those immediate mystical<br>
+ impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce, with a
+perfect<br>
+ sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man walking in
+that<br>
+ street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind."</p>
+
+<p>"You always put things well," I said, "but, of course, such
+things<br>
+ cannot immediately be put to the test."</p>
+
+<p>Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us get off and follow him," he said. "I bet you five
+pounds<br>
+ it will turn out as I say."</p>
+
+<p>And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the
+car.</p>
+
+<p>The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern
+face<br>
+ walked along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat
+flying<br>
+ behind him. Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring
+road<br>
+ and disappeared down an ill-lit alley. We swung silently
+after<br>
+ him.</p>
+
+<p>"This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take," I
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"A man of what kind?" asked my friend.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," I said, "a man with that kind of expression and
+those<br>
+ boots. I thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he
+should<br>
+ be in this part of the world at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes," said Basil, and said no more.</p>
+
+<p>We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The
+elegant<br>
+ figure, like the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted
+suddenly<br>
+ against the glare of intermittent gaslight and then
+swallowed<br>
+ again in night. The intervals between the lights were long, and
+a<br>
+ fog was thickening the whole city. Our pace, therefore, had
+become<br>
+ swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts; but Basil came to
+a<br>
+ standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped also. We
+had<br>
+ almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness
+in<br>
+ front of us was the darkness of his body.</p>
+
+<p>At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we
+were<br>
+ hardly a yard off he did not realize that we were there. He
+tapped<br>
+ four times on a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed<br>
+ street. A gleam of gas cut the darkness as it opened slowly.
+We<br>
+ listened intently, but the interview was short and simple
+and<br>
+ inexplicable as an interview could be. Our exquisite friend
+handed<br>
+ in what looked like a paper or a card and said:</p>
+
+<p>"At once. Take a cab."</p>
+
+<p>A heavy, deep voice from inside said:</p>
+
+<p>"Right you are."</p>
+
+<p>And with a click we were in the blackness again, and
+striding<br>
+ after the striding stranger through a labyrinth of London
+lanes,<br>
+ the lights just helping us. It was only five o'clock, but
+winter<br>
+ and the fog had made it like midnight.</p>
+
+<p>"This is really an extraordinary walk for the
+patent-leather<br>
+ boots," I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," said Basil humbly. "It leads to Berkeley
+Square."</p>
+
+<p>As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky
+atmosphere<br>
+ and tried to make out the direction described. For some ten<br>
+ minutes I wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw
+that<br>
+ my friend was right. We were coming to the great dreary
+spaces<br>
+ of fashionable London--more dreary, one must admit, even
+than<br>
+ the dreary plebeian spaces.</p>
+
+<p>"This is very extraordinary!" said Basil Grant, as we turned
+into<br>
+ Berkeley Square.</p>
+
+<p>"What is extraordinary?" I asked. "I thought you said it was
+quite<br>
+ natural."</p>
+
+<p>"I do not wonder," answered Basil, "at his walking through
+nasty<br>
+ streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I
+do<br>
+ wonder at his going to the house of a very good man."</p>
+
+<p>"What very good man?" I asked with exasperation.</p>
+
+<p>"The operation of time is a singular one," he said with
+his<br>
+ imperturbable irrelevancy. "It is not a true statement of the
+case<br>
+ to say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and
+a<br>
+ public man. I remember it all vividly, but it is like
+remembering<br>
+ some novel. But fifteen years ago I knew this square as well
+as<br>
+ Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better than
+that<br>
+ man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's house."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is old Beaumont?" I asked irritably.</p>
+
+<p>"A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood--don't you
+know<br>
+ his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman
+who<br>
+ does more work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I
+don't<br>
+ know what; anyhow, he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I
+admit<br>
+ he has the slight disadvantage of being, beyond all question,
+off<br>
+ his head. He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out
+of<br>
+ the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks
+anything<br>
+ odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and proposed
+to<br>
+ eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you
+put<br>
+ it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap alternative to<br>
+ cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a
+matter<br>
+ of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars
+or<br>
+ the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession
+of<br>
+ literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because
+it<br>
+ is romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical;
+men<br>
+ who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands; and men
+who<br>
+ walk on their hands for fear of tiring their feet. But though
+the<br>
+ inhabitants of his salons are generally fools, like himself,
+they<br>
+ are almost always, like himself, good men. I am really
+surprised<br>
+ to see a criminal enter there."</p>
+
+<p>"My good fellow," I said firmly, striking my foot on the
+pavement,<br>
+ "the truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own
+eloquent<br>
+ language, you have the `slight disadvantage' of being off
+your<br>
+ head. You see a total stranger in a public street; you choose
+to<br>
+ start certain theories about his eyebrows. You then treat him as
+a<br>
+ burglar because he enters an honest man's door. The thing is
+too<br>
+ monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come home with me.
+Though<br>
+ these people are still having tea, yet with the distance we have
+to<br>
+ go, we shall be late for dinner."</p>
+
+<p>Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought," he said, "that I had outlived vanity."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want now?" I cried.</p>
+
+<p>"I want," he cried out, "what a girl wants when she wears her
+new<br>
+ frock; I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging
+match<br>
+ with a monitor--I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am.
+I<br>
+ am as right about that man as I am about your having a hat on
+your<br>
+ head. You say it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you
+to<br>
+ see my old friend Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you really mean--?" I began.</p>
+
+<p>"I will apologize," he said calmly, "for our not being
+dressed<br>
+ for a call," and walking across the vast misty square, he
+walked<br>
+ up the dark stone steps and rang at the bell.</p>
+
+<p>A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us:
+on<br>
+ receiving my friend's name his manner passed in a flash from<br>
+ astonishment to respect. We were ushered into the house very<br>
+ quickly, but not so quickly but that our host, a
+white-haired<br>
+ man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet us.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and
+again,<br>
+ "I have not seen you for years. Have you been--er--" he
+said,<br>
+ rather wildly, "have you been in the country?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not for all that time," answered Basil, smiling. "I have
+long<br>
+ given up my official position, my dear Philip, and have been<br>
+ living in a deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at
+an<br>
+ inopportune moment."</p>
+
+<p>"An inopportune moment," cried the ardent gentleman. "You come
+at<br>
+ the most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who
+is<br>
+ here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not," answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a
+roar<br>
+ of laughter came from the inner room.</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," said Lord Beaumont solemnly, "I have Wimpole
+here."</p>
+
+<p>"And who is Wimpole?"</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," cried the other, "you must have been in the
+country.<br>
+ You must have been in the antipodes. You must have been in
+the<br>
+ moon. Who is Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?"</p>
+
+<p>"As to who Shakespeare was," answered my friend placidly, "my
+views<br>
+ go no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably
+he<br>
+ was Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is--" and his
+speech<br>
+ also was cloven with a roar of laughter from within.</p>
+
+<p>"Wimpole!" cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy.
+"Haven't<br>
+ you heard of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has
+turned<br>
+ conversation, I do not say into an art--for that, perhaps,
+it<br>
+ always was but into a great art, like the statuary of
+Michael<br>
+ Angelo--an art of masterpieces. His repartees, my good
+friend,<br>
+ startle one like a man shot dead. They are final; they
+are--"</p>
+
+<p>Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost
+with<br>
+ the very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman
+came<br>
+ out of the inner house into the hall where we were standing.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my dear chap," began Lord Beaumont hastily.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it," exploded the large
+old<br>
+ gentleman. "I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary<br>
+ adventurer like that. I won't be made a guy. I won't--"</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come," said Beaumont feverishly. "Let me introduce
+you.<br>
+ This is Mr Justice Grant--that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure
+you<br>
+ have heard of Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh."</p>
+
+<p>"Who has not?" asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old
+baronet,<br>
+ eyeing him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his<br>
+ momentary anger, but even that could not conceal the noble
+though<br>
+ opulent outline of his face and body, the florid white hair,
+the<br>
+ Roman nose, the body stalwart though corpulent, the chin<br>
+ aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent courtly
+gentleman;<br>
+ so much of a gentleman that he could show an unquestionable<br>
+ weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so much of
+a<br>
+ gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.</p>
+
+<p>"I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont," he said
+gruffly,<br>
+ "to fail in respect to these gentlemen, and even more
+especially<br>
+ to fail in it in your house. But it is not you or they that
+are<br>
+ in any way concerned, but that flashy half-caste
+jackanapes--"</p>
+
+<p>At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and
+a<br>
+ sombre air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to
+be<br>
+ greatly enjoying the intellectual banquet within.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond,"
+said<br>
+ Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, "even if you only remember him
+as<br>
+ a schoolboy."</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly," said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands
+pleasantly<br>
+ and respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning
+to<br>
+ Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were
+not<br>
+ going yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything
+of<br>
+ you."</p>
+
+<p>The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary
+internal<br>
+ struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture
+of<br>
+ obeisance and a vague utterance of, "If Lady Beaumont . . . a
+lady,<br>
+ of course," he followed the young man back into the salon. He
+had<br>
+ scarcely been deposited there half a minute before another peal
+of<br>
+ laughter told that he had (in all probability) been scored
+off<br>
+ again.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh," said
+Beaumont,<br>
+ as he helped us off with our coats. "He has not the modern
+mind."</p>
+
+<p>"What is the modern mind?" asked Grant.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive--and faces
+the<br>
+ facts of life seriously." At this moment another roar of
+laughter<br>
+ came from within.</p>
+
+<p>"I only ask," said Basil, "because of the last two friends of
+yours<br>
+ who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and
+the<br>
+ other thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way,
+if<br>
+ I remember right."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish<br>
+ entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I
+can<br>
+ never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem
+so<br>
+ liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern,
+Basil?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the
+crowded<br>
+ drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned
+away<br>
+ from our slim friend with the Oriental face for the first
+time<br>
+ that afternoon. Two people, however, still looked at him. One
+was<br>
+ the daughter of the house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him
+with<br>
+ great violet eyes and with the intense and awful thirst of
+the<br>
+ female upper class for verbal amusement and stimulus. The
+other<br>
+ was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at him with a still
+and<br>
+ sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair;<br>
+ everything from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of
+his<br>
+ silvered hair suggesting the circles of a serpent more than
+the<br>
+ straight limbs of a man--the unmistakable, splendid
+serpentine<br>
+ gentleman we had seen walking in North London, his eyes
+shining<br>
+ with repeated victory.</p>
+
+<p>"What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole," said Muriel
+Beaumont<br>
+ eagerly, "is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You
+say<br>
+ things quite philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I
+thought<br>
+ of such things, I'm sure I should laugh outright when the
+thought<br>
+ first came."</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with Miss Beaumont," said Sir Walter, suddenly
+exploding<br>
+ with indignation. "If I had thought of anything so futile, I
+should<br>
+ find it difficult to keep my countenance."</p>
+
+<p>"Difficult to keep your countenance," cried Mr Wimpole, with
+an air<br>
+ of alarm; "oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the
+British<br>
+ Museum."</p>
+
+<p>Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an
+already<br>
+ admitted readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple,<br>
+ shouted out:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded<br>
+ tomfooleries?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never talk tomfooleries," said the other, "without first
+knowing<br>
+ my audience."</p>
+
+<p>Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached<br>
+ secretary on the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against
+the<br>
+ wall regarding the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but,
+I<br>
+ fancied, with very particular gloom when his eyes fell on the
+young<br>
+ lady of the house rapturously listening to Wimpole.</p>
+
+<p>"May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?" asked Grant.
+"It is<br>
+ about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us."</p>
+
+<p>I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering,
+to<br>
+ this strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind
+of<br>
+ side room out of the hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Drummond," said Basil sharply, "there are a great many
+good<br>
+ people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon.<br>
+ Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people
+are<br>
+ mad, and all the sane people are wicked. You are the only person
+I<br>
+ know of here who is honest and has also some common sense. What
+do<br>
+ you make of Wimpole?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at
+this his<br>
+ face became suddenly as red as his moustache.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not a fair judge of him," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" asked Grant.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I hate him like hell," said the other, after a long
+pause<br>
+ and violently.</p>
+
+<p>Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances
+towards<br>
+ Miss Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently
+illuminating.<br>
+ Grant said quietly:</p>
+
+<p>"But before--before you came to hate him, what did you really
+think<br>
+ of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am in a terrible difficulty," said the young man, and his
+voice<br>
+ told us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. "If I
+spoke<br>
+ about him as I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And
+I<br>
+ should like to be able to say that when I first saw him I
+thought<br>
+ he was charming. But again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him,
+that<br>
+ is my private affair. But I also disapprove of him--really I
+do<br>
+ believe I disapprove of him quite apart from my private
+feelings.<br>
+ When first he came, I admit he was much quieter, but I did
+not<br>
+ like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then that jolly old
+Sir<br>
+ Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this fellow,
+with<br>
+ his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the way
+he<br>
+ does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be bad
+to<br>
+ fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old
+chap<br>
+ savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness.
+Take,<br>
+ if you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit
+that<br>
+ I hate the man because a certain person admires him. But I
+believe<br>
+ that apart from that I should hate the man because old Sir
+Walter<br>
+ hates him."</p>
+
+<p>This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and
+pity for<br>
+ the young man; that is, of pity for him because of his
+obviously<br>
+ hopeless worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because
+of<br>
+ the direct realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he
+had<br>
+ given. Still, I was sorry that he seemed so steadily set
+against<br>
+ the man, and could not help referring it to an instinct of
+his<br>
+ personal relations, however nobly disguised from himself.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear
+what<br>
+ was perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.</p>
+
+<p>"In the name of God, let's get away."</p>
+
+<p>I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old
+man<br>
+ affected me. I only know that for some reason or other he so<br>
+ affected me that I was, within a few minutes, in the street<br>
+ outside.</p>
+
+<p>"This," he said, "is a beastly but amusing affair."</p>
+
+<p>"What is?" I asked, baldly enough.</p>
+
+<p>"This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady
+Beaumont<br>
+ have just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this
+very<br>
+ night, at which Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well,
+there<br>
+ is nothing very extraordinary about that. The extraordinary
+thing<br>
+ is that we are not going."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, really," I said, "it is already six o'clock and I doubt
+if<br>
+ we could get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in
+the<br>
+ fact that we are not going."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you?" said Grant. "I'll bet you'll see something<br>
+ extraordinary in what we're doing instead."</p>
+
+<p>I looked at him blankly.</p>
+
+<p>"Doing instead?" I asked. "What are we doing instead?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said he, "we are waiting for one or two hours outside
+this<br>
+ house on a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my<br>
+ vanity. It is only to show you that I am right. Can you, with
+the<br>
+ assistance of this cigar, wait until both Sir Walter
+Cholmondeliegh<br>
+ and the mystic Wimpole have left this house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," I said. "But I do not know which is likely to
+leave<br>
+ first. Have you any notion?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said. "Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage.
+Or<br>
+ again, Mr Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram
+is<br>
+ a thing to be flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter
+may<br>
+ remain some time to analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they
+will<br>
+ both have to leave within reasonable time, for they will both
+have<br>
+ to get dressed and come back to dinner here tonight."</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the
+great<br>
+ house drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing
+happened<br>
+ that we really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter<br>
+ Cholmondeliegh came out at the same moment.</p>
+
+<p>They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a
+natural<br>
+ doubt; then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both
+of<br>
+ them, made Sir Walter smile and say: "The night is foggy.
+Pray<br>
+ take my cab."</p>
+
+<p>Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the
+street<br>
+ with both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant
+had<br>
+ hissed in my ear:</p>
+
+<p>"Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad
+dog--<br>
+ run."</p>
+
+<p>We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark
+mazy<br>
+ streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all,
+but<br>
+ we are running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab
+pulled<br>
+ up at the fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman,
+who<br>
+ drove away rejoicing, having just come in contact with the
+more<br>
+ generous among the rich. Then the two men talked together as men
+do<br>
+ talk together after giving and receiving great insults, the
+talk<br>
+ which leads either to forgiveness or a duel--at least so it
+seemed<br>
+ as we watched it from ten yards off. Then the two men shook
+hands<br>
+ heartily, and one went down one fork of the road and one
+down<br>
+ another.</p>
+
+<p>Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms
+forward.</p>
+
+<p>"Run after that scoundrel," he cried; "let us catch him
+now."</p>
+
+<p>We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of
+two paths.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop!" I shouted wildly to Grant. "That's the wrong
+turning."</p>
+
+<p>He ran on.</p>
+
+<p>"Idiot!" I howled. "Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole
+has<br>
+ slipped us. He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong .
+. .<br>
+ Are you deaf? You're wrong!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I am," he panted, and ran on.</p>
+
+<p>"But I saw him!" I cried. "Look in front of you. Is that
+Wimpole?<br>
+ It's the old man . . . What are you doing? What are we to
+do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Keep running," said Grant.</p>
+
+<p>Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous
+old<br>
+ baronet, whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful
+lamplight.<br>
+ My brain was utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Charlie," said Basil hoarsely, "can you believe in my common
+sense<br>
+ for four minutes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," I said, panting.</p>
+
+<p>"Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do
+it<br>
+ at once when I say `Now'. Now!"</p>
+
+<p>We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly
+old<br>
+ gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but
+we<br>
+ got him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a
+splendid<br>
+ and full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and
+we<br>
+ bound him; when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged
+him.<br>
+ Then, by Basil's arrangement, we dragged him into a small court
+by<br>
+ the street side and waited. As I say, I had no notion why.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to incommode you," said Basil calmly out of
+the<br>
+ darkness; "but I have made an appointment here."</p>
+
+<p>"An appointment!" I said blankly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old
+aristocrat gagged on the ground, whose eyes were starting
+impotently from his head. "I have made an appointment here with a
+thoroughly nice young fellow. An old friend. Jasper Drummond his
+name is--you may have met him this afternoon at the Beaumonts. He
+can scarcely come though till the Beaumonts' dinner is over."</p>
+
+<p>For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the
+darkness. By the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made
+up my mind that the same thing had happened which had happened
+long ago on the bench of a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant
+had gone mad. I could imagine no other explanation of the facts,
+with the portly, purple-faced old country gentleman flung there
+strangled on the floor like a bundle of wood.</p>
+
+<p>After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed
+into<br>
+ the court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and
+white<br>
+ face of Jasper Drummond.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Grant," he said blankly, "the thing is incredible. You
+were<br>
+ right; but what did you mean? All through this dinner-party,
+where<br>
+ dukes and duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come
+especially<br>
+ to hear him, that extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent.
+He<br>
+ didn't say a funny thing. He didn't say anything at all. What
+does<br>
+ it mean?"</p>
+
+<p>Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>"That is what it means," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about
+the<br>
+ place, jumped back, as from a mouse.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" he said weakly, ". . . what?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir
+Walter's<br>
+ breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his
+hampered<br>
+ state, seemed to make some effort to retain.</p>
+
+<p>It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr
+Jasper<br>
+ Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment.
+As<br>
+ far as he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions
+and<br>
+ answers, or at least of remarks and replies, arranged in the
+manner<br>
+ of a catechism. The greater part of the document had been torn
+and<br>
+ obliterated in the struggle, but the termination remained. It
+ran<br>
+ as follows:</p>
+
+<p>C. Says . . . Keep countenance.</p>
+
+<p>W. Keep . . . British Museum.</p>
+
+<p>C. Know whom talk . . . absurdities.</p>
+
+<p>W. Never talk absurdities without</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a
+sort of<br>
+ final fury.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind
+of<br>
+ splendid chant. "What is it? It is a great new profession. A
+great<br>
+ new trade. A trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like<br>
+ piracy."</p>
+
+<p>"A new profession!" said the young man with the red
+moustache<br>
+ vaguely; "a new trade!"</p>
+
+<p>"A new trade," repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, "a
+new<br>
+ profession! What a pity it is immoral."</p>
+
+<p>"But what the deuce is it?" cried Drummond and I in a breath
+of<br>
+ blasphemy.</p>
+
+<p>"It is," said Grant calmly, "the great new trade of the
+Organizer<br>
+ of Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground
+strikes<br>
+ you, as I have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me
+clear<br>
+ his character. He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor.
+He<br>
+ is also not really at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is
+not<br>
+ particularly old, and his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He is
+a<br>
+ swindler, and a swindler of a perfectly delightful and novel
+kind.<br>
+ He hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead up to other
+people's<br>
+ repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which you may
+find<br>
+ on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has
+arranged<br>
+ for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged
+for<br>
+ him. In short, he allows himself to be scored off for a guinea
+a<br>
+ night."</p>
+
+<p>"And this fellow Wimpole--" began Drummond with
+indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"This fellow Wimpole," said Basil Grant, smiling, "will not be
+an<br>
+ intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things,
+elegance<br>
+ and silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our
+friend<br>
+ on the floor."</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ "That fellow," cried Drummond furiously, "that fellow ought to
+be<br>
+ in gaol."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," said Basil indulgently; "he ought to be in the
+Club<br>
+ of Queer Trades."</p>
+
+<h2>Chapter 3</h2>
+
+<h3>The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit</h3>
+
+<p>The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist)
+has now<br>
+ been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things
+rather<br>
+ than the large things which make war against us and, I may
+add,<br>
+ beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed,
+a<br>
+ mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor
+the<br>
+ mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we
+are<br>
+ engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly
+with<br>
+ microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I was
+engaged<br>
+ (on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections,
+was<br>
+ one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when
+a<br>
+ loud knock came at the door.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to
+fetch<br>
+ me. He and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which
+I<br>
+ was in the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken
+it<br>
+ into his head to come my way, though we had arranged to go<br>
+ separately. It was a small and confidential affair at the table
+of<br>
+ a good but unconventional political lady, an old friend of his.
+She<br>
+ had asked us both to meet a third guest, a Captain Fraser, who
+had<br>
+ made something of a name and was an authority on chimpanzees.
+As<br>
+ Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never seen her,
+I<br>
+ felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual
+social<br>
+ sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break
+the<br>
+ ice. The theory, like all my theories, was complete; but as a
+fact<br>
+ it was not Basil.</p>
+
+<p>I was handed a visiting card inscribed: "Rev. Ellis Shorter",
+and<br>
+ underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even
+hurry<br>
+ could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence,
+"Asking<br>
+ the favour of a few moments' conversation on a most urgent<br>
+ matter."!</p>
+
+<p>I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the
+image<br>
+ of God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth),
+and<br>
+ throwing on my dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the<br>
+ drawing-room. He rose at my entrance, flapping like a seal; I
+can<br>
+ use no other description. He flapped a plaid shawl over his
+right<br>
+ arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black gloves; he flapped
+his<br>
+ clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he flapped
+his<br>
+ eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired,<br>
+ white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type.
+He<br>
+ said:</p>
+
+<p>"I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I
+come<br>
+ --I can only say--I can only say in my defence, that I
+come--upon<br>
+ an important matter. Pray forgive me."</p>
+
+<p>I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.</p>
+
+<p>"What I have to say," he said brokenly, "is so dreadful--it is
+so<br>
+ dreadful--I have lived a quiet life."</p>
+
+<p>I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I
+should<br>
+ be in time for dinner. But there was something about the old
+man's<br>
+ honest air of bitterness that seemed to open to me the<br>
+ possibilities of life larger and more tragic than my own.</p>
+
+<p>I said gently: "Pray go on."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as
+old,<br>
+ noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm so sorry," he said meekly; "I wouldn't have come--but
+for--<br>
+ your friend Major Brown recommended me to come here."</p>
+
+<p>"Major Brown!" I said, with some interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his
+plaid<br>
+ shawl about. "He told me you helped him in a great
+difficulty--and<br>
+ my difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and
+death."</p>
+
+<p>I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. "Will it take long,
+Mr<br>
+ Shorter?" I asked. "I have to go out to dinner almost at
+once."</p>
+
+<p>He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow,
+with<br>
+ all his moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and
+his<br>
+ office.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no right, Mr Swinburne--I have no right at all," he
+said.<br>
+ "If you have to go out to dinner, you have of course--a
+perfect<br>
+ right--of course a perfect right. But when you come back--a
+man<br>
+ will be dead."</p>
+
+<p>And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.</p>
+
+<p>The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes
+dwarfed<br>
+ and drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a
+political<br>
+ widow, and a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what
+had<br>
+ brought this dear, doddering old vicar into relation with
+immediate<br>
+ perils.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you have a cigar?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you," he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as
+if<br>
+ not smoking cigars was a social disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>"A glass of wine?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now," he repeated
+with<br>
+ that hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink
+at<br>
+ all often try to convey that on any other night of the week
+they<br>
+ would sit up all night drinking rum-punch. "Not just now,
+thank<br>
+ you."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing else I can get for you?" I said, feeling genuinely
+sorry<br>
+ for the well-mannered old donkey. "A cup of tea?"</p>
+
+<p>I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of
+tea<br>
+ came he drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he
+fell<br>
+ back and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to
+these<br>
+ excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex'--he threw this
+in<br>
+ with an indescribable airiness of vanity--'I have never
+known<br>
+ such things happen."</p>
+
+<p>"What things happen?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He straightened himself with sudden dignity.</p>
+
+<p>"As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex," he said, "I have never
+been<br>
+ forcibly dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in
+a<br>
+ crime in the character of an old woman. Never once. My
+experience<br>
+ may be small. It may be insufficient. But it has never
+occurred<br>
+ to me before."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never heard of it," I said, "as among the duties of
+a<br>
+ clergyman. But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me
+if<br>
+ perhaps I failed to follow you correctly. Dressed up--as
+what?"</p>
+
+<p>"As an old woman," said the vicar solemnly, "as an old
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation
+to<br>
+ make an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more
+tragic<br>
+ than comic, and I said respectfully:</p>
+
+<p>"May I ask how it occurred?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr Shorter, "and I will
+tell<br>
+ my story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen
+minutes<br>
+ past eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain<br>
+ appointments and pay certain visits in the village. My first
+visit<br>
+ was to Mr Jervis, the treasurer of our League of Christian<br>
+ Amusements, with whom I concluded some business touching the
+claim<br>
+ made by Parkes the gardener in the matter of the rolling of
+our<br>
+ tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very earnest<br>
+ churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of<br>
+ several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse,
+entitled<br>
+ (unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine."</p>
+
+<p>He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with
+something<br>
+ that can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager<br>
+ deliberation. He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of
+the<br>
+ detectives in the detective stories, who always sternly
+require<br>
+ that nothing should be kept back.</p>
+
+<p>"I then proceeded," he went on, with the same maddening<br>
+ conscientiousness of manner, "to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr,
+of<br>
+ course; Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our
+organist,<br>
+ and having consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy
+who<br>
+ is accused, I cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of
+cutting<br>
+ holes in the organ pipes), I finally dropped in upon a
+Dorcas<br>
+ meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings are<br>
+ usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss<br>
+ Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in church
+work,<br>
+ had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society
+is<br>
+ entirely under my wife's management as a rule, and except for
+Miss<br>
+ Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any
+members<br>
+ of it. I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did
+so.</p>
+
+<p>"When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with
+Miss<br>
+ Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult,
+of<br>
+ course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the<br>
+ necessity in these matters of full and exact exposition of
+the<br>
+ facts, to remember and repeat the actual details of a<br>
+ conversation, particularly a conversation which (though
+inspired<br>
+ with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one
+which<br>
+ did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was
+in<br>
+ fact--er--mostly about socks. I can, however, remember
+distinctly<br>
+ that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with
+a<br>
+ woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost
+sure<br>
+ she was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the
+weather<br>
+ was very changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of
+tea,<br>
+ which I accepted, I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is
+a<br>
+ short and stout lady with white hair. The only other figure in
+the<br>
+ group that caught my attention was a Miss Mowbray, a small
+and<br>
+ neat lady of aristocratic manners, silver hair, and a high
+voice<br>
+ and colour. She was the most emphatic member of the party; and
+her<br>
+ views on the subject of pinafores, though expressed with a
+natural<br>
+ deference to myself, were in themselves strong and advanced.<br>
+ Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply in
+black)<br>
+ it could not be denied that the others looked in some way what
+you<br>
+ men of the world would call dowdy.</p>
+
+<p>"After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I
+did<br>
+ so I heard something which--I cannot describe it--something
+which<br>
+ seemed to--but I really cannot describe it."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you hear?" I asked, with some impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard," said the vicar solemnly, "I heard Miss Mowbray
+(the<br>
+ lady with the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with
+the<br>
+ woollen shawl), the following extraordinary words. I
+committed<br>
+ them to memory on the spot, and as soon as circumstances set
+me<br>
+ free to do so, I noted them down on a piece of paper. I believe
+I<br>
+ have it here." He fumbled in his breast-pocket, bringing out
+mild<br>
+ things, note-books, circulars and programmes of village
+concerts.<br>
+ "I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James, the following
+words:<br>
+ `Now's your time, Bill.'"</p>
+
+<p>He gazed at me for a few moments after making this
+announcement,<br>
+ gravely and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was<br>
+ unshaken about his facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald
+head<br>
+ more towards the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means<br>
+ understand it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that
+one<br>
+ maiden lady should address another maiden lady as `Bill'. My<br>
+ experience, as I have said, may be incomplete; maiden ladies
+may<br>
+ have among themselves and in exclusively spinster circles
+wilder<br>
+ customs than I am aware of. But it seemed to me odd, and I
+could<br>
+ almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand the phrase),
+I<br>
+ should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time
+that<br>
+ the words, `Now's your time, Bill', were by no means
+pronounced<br>
+ with that upper-class intonation which, as I have already
+said,<br>
+ had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation. In
+fact,<br>
+ the words, `Now's your time, Bill', would have been, I
+fancy,<br>
+ unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.</p>
+
+<p>"I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was
+still<br>
+ more surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat
+and<br>
+ umbrella in hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl<br>
+ leaning upright against the door out of which I was just about
+to<br>
+ make my exit. She was still knitting, and I supposed that
+this<br>
+ erect posture against the door was only an eccentricity of<br>
+ spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended departure.</p>
+
+<p>"I said genially, `I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James,
+but I<br>
+ must really be going. I have--er--' I stopped here, for the
+words<br>
+ she had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in
+tone<br>
+ extremely business-like, were such as to render that arrest of
+my<br>
+ remarks, I think, natural and excusable. I have these words
+also<br>
+ noted down. I have not the least idea of their meaning; so I
+have<br>
+ only been able to render them phonetically. But she said," and
+Mr<br>
+ Shorter peered short-sightedly at his papers, "she said: `Chuck
+it,<br>
+ fat 'ead,' and she added something that sounded like `It's a
+kop',<br>
+ or (possibly) `a kopt'. And then the last cord, either of my
+sanity<br>
+ or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My esteemed
+friend<br>
+ and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said: `Put
+'is<br>
+ old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up before you start
+jawin'.<br>
+ You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days with this way of
+coin'<br>
+ things, har lar theater.'</p>
+
+<p>"My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I
+had<br>
+ suddenly fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had
+some<br>
+ dreadful riotous society of their own from which all others
+were<br>
+ excluded? I remembered dimly in my classical days (I was a
+scholar<br>
+ in a small way once, but now, alas! rusty), I remembered the<br>
+ mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange female freemasonry.
+I<br>
+ remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was just, in my absurd<br>
+ lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about
+Diana's<br>
+ nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind.
+The<br>
+ moment it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Brett--or what I had called Miss Brett--was standing in
+front<br>
+ of me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her
+face.<br>
+ Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen
+into<br>
+ an attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it
+gave<br>
+ one a shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in
+her<br>
+ pockets and her cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was
+a<br>
+ wo--no, that is I saw that instead of being a woman she--he,
+I<br>
+ mean--that is, it was a man."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in<br>
+ endeavouring to arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at
+the<br>
+ same time. He resumed with a higher fever of nervousness:</p>
+
+<p>"As for Miss Mowbray, she--he, held me in a ring of iron. He
+had<br>
+ her arm--that is she had his arm--round her neck--my neck I
+mean--<br>
+ and I could not cry out. Miss Brett--that is, Mr Brett, at least
+Mr<br>
+ something who was not Miss Brett--had the revolver pointed at
+me.<br>
+ The other two ladies--or er--gentlemen, were rummaging in some
+bag<br>
+ in the background. It was all clear at last: they were
+criminals<br>
+ dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of
+Chuntsey,<br>
+ in Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?</p>
+
+<p>"The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly,
+`'Urry<br>
+ up, 'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get
+off.'</p>
+
+<p>"`Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett--I mean the man with
+the<br>
+ revolver--`why should we show 'im the game?'</p>
+
+<p>"`If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man
+at<br>
+ the door, whom they called Bill. `A man wot knows wet 'e's doin'
+is<br>
+ worth ten wot don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'</p>
+
+<p>"`Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who
+held<br>
+ me (it had been Miss Mowbray's). `Bring out the picture,
+'Arry.'</p>
+
+<p>"The man with the revolver walked across the room to where
+the<br>
+ other two women--I mean men--were turning over baggage, and
+asked<br>
+ them for something which they gave him. He came back with it
+across<br>
+ the room and held it out in front of me. And compared to the<br>
+ surprise of that display, all the previous surprises of this
+awful<br>
+ day shrank suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in
+the<br>
+ hands of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a
+mild<br>
+ surprise; but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt.
+The<br>
+ likeness was an extremely good one, worked up with all the<br>
+ accessories of the conventional photographic studio. I was
+leaning<br>
+ my head on my hand and was relieved against a painted landscape
+of<br>
+ woodland. It was obvious that it was no snapshot; it was clear
+that<br>
+ I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was that I had
+never<br>
+ sat for such a photograph. It was a photograph that I had never
+had<br>
+ taken.</p>
+
+<p>"I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched
+up a<br>
+ good deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass
+blurred<br>
+ some of the details. But there unmistakably was my face, my
+eyes,<br>
+ my nose and mouth, my head and hand, posed for a
+professional<br>
+ photographer. And I had never posed so for any photographer.</p>
+
+<p>"`Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the
+revolver,<br>
+ with ill-timed facetiousness. `Parson, prepare to meet your
+God.'<br>
+ And with this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the
+glass<br>
+ moved, I saw that part of the picture was painted on it in
+Chinese<br>
+ white, notably a pair of white whiskers and a clerical collar.
+And<br>
+ underneath was a portrait of an old lady in a quiet black
+dress,<br>
+ leaning her head on her hand against the woodland landscape.
+The<br>
+ old lady was as like me as one pin is like another. It had
+required<br>
+ only the whiskers and the collar to make it me in every
+hair.</p>
+
+<p>"`Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as
+he<br>
+ shot the glass back again. `Remarkable resemblance, parson.<br>
+ Gratifyin' to the lady. Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd,<br>
+ particlery gratifyin' to us, as bein' the probable source of
+a<br>
+ very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the man who's
+come<br>
+ to live in these parts, don't you?'</p>
+
+<p>"I nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"`Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, `that's
+'is<br>
+ mother. 'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he
+flung<br>
+ his fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the
+old<br>
+ lady who was exactly like me.</p>
+
+<p>"`Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,'
+broke<br>
+ out Bill from the door. `Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we
+ain't<br>
+ goin' to do you no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble
+if<br>
+ you like. And as for the old woman's clothes--why, you'll
+look<br>
+ lovely in 'em.'</p>
+
+<p>"`You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the
+man<br>
+ behind me. `Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this
+man<br>
+ Hawker tonight. Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the
+champagne<br>
+ when 'e sees us. Maybe on the other 'and--'e won't. Maybe 'e'll
+be<br>
+ dead when we goes away. Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now
+as<br>
+ you know, 'e shuts 'isself up and never opens the door to a
+soul;<br>
+ only you don't know why and we does. The only one as can ever
+get<br>
+ at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded funny
+coincidence,'<br>
+ he said, accenting the penultimate, `it's a very unusual piece
+of<br>
+ good luck, but you're 'is mother.'</p>
+
+<p>"`When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking
+his<br>
+ head in a ruminant manner, `when I first saw it I said--old<br>
+ Shorter. Those were my exact words--old Shorter.'</p>
+
+<p>"`What do you mean, you wild creatures?' I gasped. `What am I
+to<br>
+ do?'</p>
+
+<p>"`That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the
+revolver,<br>
+ good-humouredly; `you've got to put on those clothes,' and
+he<br>
+ pointed to a poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the
+corner<br>
+ of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what
+followed.<br>
+ I had no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of
+a<br>
+ loaded pistol. In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey
+was<br>
+ dressed as an old woman--as somebody else's mother, if you<br>
+ please--and was dragged out of the house to take part in a
+crime.</p>
+
+<p>"It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of
+winter<br>
+ were closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set
+out<br>
+ towards the lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the
+queerest<br>
+ cortege that ever straggled up that or any other road. To
+every<br>
+ human eye, in every external, we were six very respectable
+old<br>
+ ladies of small means, in black dresses and refined but
+antiquated<br>
+ bonnets; and we were really five criminals and a clergyman.</p>
+
+<p>"I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like
+a<br>
+ windmill as I walked, trying to think of some manner of escape.
+To<br>
+ cry out, so long as we were far from houses, would be suicidal,
+for<br>
+ it would be easy for the ruffians to knife me or to gag me
+and<br>
+ fling me into a ditch. On the other hand, to attempt to stop<br>
+ strangers and explain the situation was impossible, because of
+the<br>
+ frantic folly of the situation itself. Long before I had
+persuaded<br>
+ the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a story, my
+companions<br>
+ would certainly have got off themselves, and in all
+probability<br>
+ would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had the<br>
+ misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was
+an<br>
+ inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this,
+that<br>
+ the Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had
+come<br>
+ to this.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ "I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating
+and<br>
+ keeping pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet
+lady-like<br>
+ step, until at length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman
+standing<br>
+ under it. I had made up my mind. Until we reached them we were
+all<br>
+ equally demure and silent and swift. When we reached them I<br>
+ suddenly flung myself against the railings and roared out:
+`Hooray!<br>
+ Hooray! Hooray! Rule Britannia! Get your 'air cut. Hoop-la!
+Boo!'<br>
+ It was a condition of no little novelty for a man in my
+position.</p>
+
+<p>"The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the<br>
+ draggled, drunken old woman that was my travesty. `Now then,
+mum,'<br>
+ he began gruffly.</p>
+
+<p>"`Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my
+ear<br>
+ hoarsely. `Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear
+the<br>
+ words and see the neatly shawled old spinster who whispered
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"I yelled, and yelled--I was in for it now. I screamed
+comic<br>
+ refrains that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at
+our<br>
+ village concerts; I rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to
+fall.</p>
+
+<p>"`If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the<br>
+ policeman, `I shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly
+she<br>
+ is right enough.'</p>
+
+<p>"I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this
+sort of<br>
+ thing; but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not
+know I<br>
+ had ever heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"`When we get you past,' whispered Bill, `you'll howl
+louder;<br>
+ you'll howl louder when we're burning your feet off.'</p>
+
+<p>"I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all
+the<br>
+ nightmares that men have ever dreamed, there has never been<br>
+ anything so blighting and horrible as the faces of those five
+men,<br>
+ looking out of their poke-bonnets; the figures of district
+visitors<br>
+ with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything
+so<br>
+ heart-breaking in hell.</p>
+
+<p>"For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my
+companions<br>
+ and the perfect respectability of all our dresses would
+overcome<br>
+ the policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far
+as<br>
+ one can describe anything so solid as a policeman as wavering.
+I<br>
+ lurched suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest,
+calling<br>
+ out (if I remember correctly), `Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It
+was<br>
+ at that moment that I remembered most dearly that I was the
+Vicar<br>
+ of Chuntsey, in Essex.</p>
+
+<p>"My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the
+back<br>
+ of the neck.</p>
+
+<p>"`You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with
+his<br>
+ perfect imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.</p>
+
+<p>"`Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our
+poor<br>
+ friend. We will get her quietly home. She does drink too much,
+but<br>
+ she is quite a lady--only eccentric.'</p>
+
+<p>"`She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman
+briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"`Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.</p>
+
+<p>"`Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the
+resumed<br>
+ character of Miss James, `she wants looking after.' `She
+does,'<br>
+ said the policeman, `but I'll look after her.'</p>
+
+<p>"`That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. `She wants her
+friends.<br>
+ She wants a particular medicine we've got.'</p>
+
+<p>"`Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, `no other
+medicine<br>
+ any good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'</p>
+
+<p>"`I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his
+eternal<br>
+ shame, the Vicar of Chuntsey.</p>
+
+<p>"`Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, `I don't
+like the<br>
+ eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or
+'er<br>
+ 'ead in my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like
+the<br>
+ looks of you I've seen many as quiet dressed as you as was
+wrong<br>
+ 'uns. Who are you?'</p>
+
+<p>"`We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with<br>
+ indescribable dignity. `Nor do we see why we should be insulted
+by<br>
+ any Jack-in-office who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he
+is<br>
+ paid to protect them. If you choose to take advantage of the<br>
+ weakness of our unfortunate friend, no doubt you are legally<br>
+ entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have any legal right
+to<br>
+ bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'</p>
+
+<p>"The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for
+a<br>
+ moment. Under cover of their advantage my five persecutors
+turned<br>
+ for an instant on me faces like faces of the damned and then<br>
+ swished off into the darkness. When the constable first turned
+his<br>
+ lantern and his suspicions on to them, I had seen the
+telegraphic<br>
+ look flash from face to face saying that only retreat was
+possible<br>
+ now.</p>
+
+<p>"By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state
+of<br>
+ acute reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared
+not<br>
+ quit the role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk
+reasonably<br>
+ and explain the real case, the officer would merely have
+thought<br>
+ that I was slightly recovered and would have put me in charge of
+my<br>
+ friends. Now, however, if I liked I might safely undeceive
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many,
+and<br>
+ it may doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for
+a<br>
+ clergyman of the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken
+old<br>
+ woman; but such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare
+to<br>
+ appear to many improbable. Suppose the story got about that I
+had<br>
+ pretended to be drunk. Suppose people did not all think it
+was<br>
+ pretence!</p>
+
+<p>"I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along
+weakly<br>
+ and quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently<br>
+ thought that I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape,
+and<br>
+ so held me lightly and easily enough. Past one turning, two<br>
+ turnings, three turnings, four turnings, he trailed me with
+him,<br>
+ a limp and slow and reluctant figure. At the fourth turning,
+I<br>
+ suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the street like a<br>
+ maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
+dark.<br>
+ I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I
+was<br>
+ gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the
+holy<br>
+ and blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and
+bonnet<br>
+ and buried them in clean earth."</p>
+
+<p>The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in
+his<br>
+ chair. Both the matter and the manner of his narration had,
+as<br>
+ time went on, impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer
+and<br>
+ pedant, but behind these things he was a country-bred man
+and<br>
+ gentleman, and had showed courage and a sporting instinct in
+the<br>
+ hour of desperation. He had told his story with many quaint<br>
+ formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing
+realism.</p>
+
+<p>"And now--" I began.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," said Shorter, leaning forward again with something
+like<br>
+ servile energy, "and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that
+unhappy<br>
+ man Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far
+what<br>
+ they said was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to
+the<br>
+ police, for reasons that you perceive. Among other things,
+they<br>
+ wouldn't believe me. What is to be done?"</p>
+
+<p>I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.</p>
+
+<p>"My friend Basil Grant," I said, "is the best man we can go
+to. He<br>
+ and I were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he
+will<br>
+ just have come back by now. Have you any objection to taking
+a<br>
+ cab?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," he replied, rising politely, and gathering up
+his<br>
+ absurd plaid shawl.</p>
+
+<p>A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile
+of<br>
+ workmen's flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up
+a<br>
+ wearisome wooden staircase brought us to his garret. When I<br>
+ entered that wooden and scrappy interior, the white gleam of<br>
+ Basil's shirt-front and the lustre of his fur coat flung on
+the<br>
+ wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He was drinking a
+glass<br>
+ of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come back from
+the<br>
+ dinner-party.</p>
+
+<p>He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev.
+Ellis<br>
+ Shorter with the genuine simplicity and respect which he
+never<br>
+ failed to exhibit in dealing with any human being. When it
+was<br>
+ over he said simply:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?"</p>
+
+<p>I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to
+the<br>
+ worthy collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have
+dined<br>
+ that evening, that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result
+was<br>
+ that I did not look at Mr Shorter. I only heard him answer,
+in<br>
+ his most nervous tone, "No."</p>
+
+<p>Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about
+his<br>
+ answer or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue
+eyes<br>
+ fixed on the old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite
+quiet<br>
+ they stood out more and more from his head.</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite sure, Mr Shorter," he repeated, "that you
+don't<br>
+ know Captain Fraser?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite," answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled
+to<br>
+ find him returning so much to the timidity, not to say the<br>
+ demoralization, of his tone when he first entered my
+presence.</p>
+
+<p>Basil sprang smartly to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Then our course is clear," he said. "You have not even begun
+your<br>
+ investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do
+is<br>
+ to go together to see Captain Fraser."</p>
+
+<p>"When?" asked the clergyman, stammering.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.</p>
+
+<p>The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.</p>
+
+<p>"I really do not think that it is necessary," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the
+chair<br>
+ again, and put his hands in his pockets.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," he said, with emphasis. "Oh--you don't think it
+necessary;<br>
+ then," and he added the words with great clearness and<br>
+ deliberation, "then, Mr Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I
+would<br>
+ like to see you without your whiskers."</p>
+
+<p>And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great
+tragedy<br>
+ of my life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in<br>
+ continual contact with an intellect like Basil's, I had always
+the<br>
+ feeling that that splendour and excitement were on the
+borderland<br>
+ of sanity. He lived perpetually near the vision of the reason
+of<br>
+ things which makes men lose their reason. And I felt of his<br>
+ insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart
+disease.<br>
+ It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at
+a<br>
+ sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very
+moment<br>
+ of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a fellow
+creature,<br>
+ Basil Grant had gone mad.</p>
+
+<p>"Your whiskers," he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. "Give
+me<br>
+ your whiskers. And your bald head."</p>
+
+<p>The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped<br>
+ between.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, Basil," I implored, "you're a little excited.
+Finish<br>
+ your wine."</p>
+
+<p>"Whiskers," he answered sternly, "whiskers."</p>
+
+<p>And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a
+dash<br>
+ for the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where
+I<br>
+ was the quiet room was turned into something between a
+pantomime<br>
+ and a pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with
+a<br>
+ crash, tables were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens
+were<br>
+ smashed, crockery scattered in smithereens, and still Basil
+Grant<br>
+ bounded and bellowed after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.</p>
+
+<p>And now I began to perceive something else, which added the
+last<br>
+ half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter,
+of<br>
+ Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had
+previously<br>
+ noticed him to behave, or as, considering his age and station,
+I<br>
+ should have expected him to behave. His power of dodging,
+leaping,<br>
+ and fighting would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and
+in<br>
+ this doddering old vicar looked like a sort of farcical<br>
+ fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not seem to be so much astonished
+as<br>
+ I had thought. There was even a look of something like
+enjoyment<br>
+ in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the<br>
+ unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.</p>
+
+<p>At length Shorter was cornered.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come, Mr Grant," he panted, "you can't do anything to
+me.<br>
+ It's quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm.
+It's<br>
+ only a social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr
+Grant."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't blame you, my man," said Basil coolly. "But I want
+your<br>
+ whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain
+Fraser?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Mr Shorter, laughing, "we provide them
+ourselves.<br>
+ They don't belong to Captain Fraser."</p>
+
+<p>"What the deuce does all this mean?" I almost screamed. "Are
+you<br>
+ all in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald
+head<br>
+ belong to Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has
+Captain<br>
+ Fraser to do with the affair? What is the matter with him?
+You<br>
+ dined with him, Basil."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Grant, "I didn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?" I asked,
+staring.<br>
+ "Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, "the fact
+is I<br>
+ was detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in
+my<br>
+ bedroom."</p>
+
+<p>"In your bedroom?" I repeated; but my imagination had reached
+that<br>
+ point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his
+waistcoat<br>
+ pocket.</p>
+
+<p>Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open
+and<br>
+ walked in. Then he came out again with the last of the
+bodily<br>
+ wonders of that wild night. He introduced into the
+sitting-room,<br>
+ in an apologetic manner, and by the nape of the neck, a limp<br>
+ clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers and a plaid
+shawl.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, gentlemen," cried Grant, striking his hands
+heartily.<br>
+ "Sit down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there
+is<br>
+ no harm in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a
+hint I<br>
+ could have saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not
+that<br>
+ you would have liked that, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy
+with<br>
+ two duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of
+them<br>
+ carelessly pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," I said, "if you are my friend, save me. What is all
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer
+Trades.<br>
+ These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of<br>
+ drinking) are Professional Detainers."</p>
+
+<p>"And what on earth's that?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne," began he who had
+once<br>
+ been the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it
+gave<br>
+ me a shock indescribable to hear out of that pompous and
+familiar<br>
+ form come no longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but
+the<br>
+ brisk sharp tones of a young city man. "It is really nothing
+very<br>
+ important. We are paid by our clients to detain in
+conversation,<br>
+ on some harmless pretext, people whom they want out of the
+way<br>
+ for a few hours. And Captain Fraser--" and with that he
+hesitated<br>
+ and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>Basil smiled also. He intervened.</p>
+
+<p>"The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best
+friends,<br>
+ wanted us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight
+for<br>
+ East Africa, and the lady with whom we were all to have dined
+is--<br>
+ er--what is I believe described as `the romance of his life'.
+He<br>
+ wanted that two hours with her, and employed these two
+reverend<br>
+ gentlemen to detain us at our houses so as to let him have
+the<br>
+ field to himself."</p>
+
+<p>"And of course," said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to
+me, "as<br>
+ I had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment
+with<br>
+ a lady, I had to come with something rather hot and
+strong--rather<br>
+ urgent. It wouldn't have done to be tame."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," I said, "I acquit you of tameness."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, sir," said the man respectfully, "always very
+grateful<br>
+ for any recommendation, sir."</p>
+
+<p>The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head,
+revealing<br>
+ close red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence
+of<br>
+ Basil's admirable Burgundy.</p>
+
+<p>"It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office
+is<br>
+ busy from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often
+knocked<br>
+ up against us before. You just take notice. When an old
+bachelor<br>
+ goes on boring you with hunting stories, when you're burning to
+be<br>
+ introduced to somebody, he's from our bureau. When a lady calls
+on<br>
+ parish work and stops hours, just when you wanted to go to
+the<br>
+ Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The Robinson hand, sir, may
+be<br>
+ darkly seen."</p>
+
+<p>"There is one thing I don't understand," I said. "Why you are
+both<br>
+ vicars."</p>
+
+<p>A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of
+Chuntsey, in<br>
+ Essex.</p>
+
+<p>"That may have been a mistake, sir," he said. "But it was not
+our<br>
+ fault. It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He
+requested<br>
+ that the highest price and talent on our tariff should be
+employed<br>
+ to detain you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office
+goes<br>
+ to those who impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable
+and<br>
+ more of a strain. We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had
+the<br>
+ good fortune to satisfy the firm with our work; and we are
+now<br>
+ permanently vicars. Before that we had two years as colonels,
+the<br>
+ next in our scale. Colonels are four guineas."</p>
+
+<h2>Chapter 4</h2>
+
+<h3>The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent</h3>
+
+<p>Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation
+always<br>
+ burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This
+arose<br>
+ from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose<br>
+ person, who wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if
+he<br>
+ were in the tropics; he was lean and graceful, like a panther,
+and<br>
+ he had restless black eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the
+poor,<br>
+ in a degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the
+most<br>
+ miserable of the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual
+change<br>
+ of lodgings. There are inland tracts of London where, in the
+very<br>
+ heart of artificial civilization, humanity has almost become<br>
+ nomadic once more. But in that restless interior there was
+no<br>
+ ragged tramp so restless as the elegant officer in the loose
+white<br>
+ clothes. He had shot a great many things in his time, to
+judge<br>
+ from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but his<br>
+ slangier acquaintances were of opinion that "the moon" had
+been<br>
+ not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle.
+The<br>
+ phrase is a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish,
+nocturnal<br>
+ hunting.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a
+kit<br>
+ which consisted practically of five articles. Two
+odd-looking,<br>
+ large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose,
+of<br>
+ some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy
+of<br>
+ the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar
+of<br>
+ some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new<br>
+ lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite
+undisguised,<br>
+ tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the
+poetic<br>
+ gutter boys in the little grey streets.</p>
+
+<p>I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his
+old<br>
+ regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about
+him.<br>
+ Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His
+hair,<br>
+ indeed, was quite grey, though his rather wild almost
+Italian<br>
+ moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn
+under<br>
+ its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged man who has
+left<br>
+ the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and
+not<br>
+ necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid
+this<br>
+ fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman
+no<br>
+ good.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win
+a<br>
+ man admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer
+places,<br>
+ where a good man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens
+and<br>
+ gambling hells; they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens
+or<br>
+ smelled of a strange smoke from cannibal incantations. These
+are<br>
+ the kind of stories which discredit a person almost equally
+whether<br>
+ they are believed or no. If Keith's tales were false he was a
+liar;<br>
+ if they were true he had had, at any rate, every opportunity
+of<br>
+ being a scamp.</p>
+
+<p>He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and
+his<br>
+ brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say
+was<br>
+ invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert
+Grant<br>
+ was a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth
+and<br>
+ cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a
+somewhat<br>
+ extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and
+it<br>
+ was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with
+this<br>
+ boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I
+am<br>
+ bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I
+was<br>
+ astounded at Basil's opposing him, however banteringly.</p>
+
+<p>I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn,
+but<br>
+ I could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think
+that<br>
+ that fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend
+to<br>
+ be the Mad Mullah and--"</p>
+
+<p>"He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as
+you<br>
+ may happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and
+bald<br>
+ a style; he is too veracious."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert<br>
+ contemptuously, "be a bit funnier than that. Say, for
+instance,<br>
+ that he has lived all his life in one ancestral manor."</p>
+
+<p>"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied
+Basil<br>
+ dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That doesn't<br>
+ prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you
+people<br>
+ don't understand is that telling a thing crudely and coarsely
+as<br>
+ it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of
+things<br>
+ Keith recounts are not the sort of things that a man would make
+up<br>
+ to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they
+are<br>
+ the sort of things that a man would do if he were
+sufficiently<br>
+ filled with the soul of skylarking."</p>
+
+<p>"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something
+rather<br>
+ like a sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs.
+Do<br>
+ you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?"</p>
+
+<p>"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said
+Basil<br>
+ placidly. "For fiction is the creation of the human mind,
+and<br>
+ therefore is congenial to it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth,
+than<br>
+ anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing into
+flippancy.<br>
+ "Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and
+the<br>
+ camera?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe Keith's words," answered the other. "He is an
+honest<br>
+ man."</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,"
+said<br>
+ Rupert cynically.</p>
+
+<p>"I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as
+unimpeachable<br>
+ merely in himself," I said mildly; "his mode of life--"</p>
+
+<p>Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open
+and<br>
+ Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white
+Panama<br>
+ on his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, Grant," he said, knocking off his cigarette ash
+against<br>
+ the door, "I've got no money in the world till next April.
+Could<br>
+ you lend me a hundred pounds? There's a good chap."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence.
+Basil,<br>
+ who was sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on
+its<br>
+ screw and picked up a quill-pen.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I cross it?" he asked, opening a cheque-book.</p>
+
+<p>"Really," began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness,
+"since<br>
+ Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to
+Basil<br>
+ before his family, I--"</p>
+
+<p>"Here you are, Ugly," said Basil, fluttering a cheque in
+the<br>
+ direction of the quite nonchalant officer. "Are you in a
+hurry?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. "As a matter of
+fact<br>
+ I want it now. I want to see my--er--business man."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it
+was<br>
+ on the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, "Receiver of
+stolen<br>
+ goods, perhaps." What he did say was:</p>
+
+<p>"A business man? That's rather a general description,
+Lieutenant<br>
+ Keith."</p>
+
+<p>Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something
+rather<br>
+ like ill-temper:</p>
+
+<p>"He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?" said Rupert
+Grant<br>
+ grimly. "Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like
+to<br>
+ go with you?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith
+started<br>
+ a little; his brow blackened sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," he said. "What did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of
+ferocious<br>
+ irony, and he answered:</p>
+
+<p>"I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our
+strolling<br>
+ along with you to this house-agent's."</p>
+
+<p>The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling
+violence.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my
+bedroom.<br>
+ Look under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!" And with
+a<br>
+ furious energy which took away our breath he banged his way out
+of<br>
+ the room.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his
+detective<br>
+ excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with
+that<br>
+ transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate
+from<br>
+ the disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His<br>
+ interpretation was certainly corroborated by one particular
+detail,<br>
+ the unmistakable unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man
+with<br>
+ whom he walked. Basil and I tramped behind, and it was not<br>
+ necessary for us to tell each other that we had both noticed
+this.</p>
+
+<p>Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary
+and<br>
+ unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable<br>
+ house-agent. Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice
+this<br>
+ fact. As the streets grew closer and more crooked and the
+roofs<br>
+ lower and the gutters grosser with mud, a darker curiosity
+deepened<br>
+ on the brows of Basil, and the figure of Rupert seen from
+behind<br>
+ seemed to fill the street with a gigantic swagger of success.
+At<br>
+ length, at the end of the fourth or fifth lean grey street in
+that<br>
+ sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the mysterious<br>
+ lieutenant looking once more about him with a sort of sulky<br>
+ desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all
+indescribably<br>
+ dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for a
+penny<br>
+ toyshop, ran the inscription: "P. Montmorency, House-Agent."</p>
+
+<p>"This is the office of which I spoke," said Keith, in a
+cutting<br>
+ voice. "Will you wait here a moment, or does your
+astonishing<br>
+ tenderness about my welfare lead you to wish to overhear
+everything<br>
+ I have to say to my business adviser?"</p>
+
+<p>Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing
+on<br>
+ earth would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.</p>
+
+<p>"If you will excuse me," he said, clenching his hands behind
+his<br>
+ back, "I think I should feel myself justified in--"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! Come along in," exploded the lieutenant. He made the
+same<br>
+ gesture of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office,
+the<br>
+ rest of us at his heels.</p>
+
+<p>P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman
+sitting<br>
+ behind a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike
+jaws,<br>
+ and a grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of
+his<br>
+ face; the whole combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore
+a<br>
+ shabby black frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a
+very<br>
+ unclerical angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as
+unlike a<br>
+ house-agent as anything could look, short of something like
+a<br>
+ sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.</p>
+
+<p>We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd
+old<br>
+ gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as
+he<br>
+ was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were
+fixed,<br>
+ upon something that was crawling about on the counter in front
+of<br>
+ him. It was a ferret.</p>
+
+<p>The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet
+and<br>
+ steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and
+practised<br>
+ for hours together in his bedroom. He said:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Montmorency, I think?"</p>
+
+<p>The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland<br>
+ bewilderment, picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it
+alive<br>
+ into his trousers pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Sir."</p>
+
+<p>"You are a house-agent, are you not?" asked Rupert.</p>
+
+<p>To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's
+eyes<br>
+ wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man
+present<br>
+ that he knew.</p>
+
+<p>"A house-agent," cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as
+if it<br>
+ were "burglar'.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes . . . oh, yes," said the man, with a quavering and
+almost<br>
+ coquettish smile. "I am a house-agent . . . oh, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I think," said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness,
+"that<br>
+ Lieutenant Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by
+his<br>
+ request."</p>
+
+<p>Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the
+flat<br>
+ counter. "It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your<br>
+ suggestions er--about the br--"</p>
+
+<p>"Right," cried Keith, cutting the word short with the
+startling<br>
+ neatness of a gunshot. "We needn't bother about all that. If<br>
+ you've done what I told you, all right."</p>
+
+<p>And he turned sharply towards the door.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos.
+After<br>
+ stammering a moment he said: "Excuse me . . . Mr Keith . . .
+there<br>
+ was another matter . . . about which I wasn't quite sure. I
+tried<br>
+ to get all the heating apparatus possible under the
+circumstances<br>
+ . . . but in winter . . . at that elevation . . ."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't expect much, eh?" said the lieutenant, cutting in
+with<br>
+ the same sudden skill. "No, of course not. That's all right,<br>
+ Montmorency. There can't be any more difficulties," and he
+put<br>
+ his hand on the handle of the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, "that
+Mr<br>
+ Montmorency has something further to say to you,
+lieutenant."</p>
+
+<p>"Only," said the house-agent, in desperation, "what about
+the<br>
+ birds?"</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," said Rupert, in a general blank.</p>
+
+<p>"What about the birds?" said the house-agent doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>Basil, who had remained throughout the procedings in a state
+of<br>
+ Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as
+a<br>
+ state of Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"Before you go, Lieutenant Keith," he said. "Come now.
+Really,<br>
+ what about the birds?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll take care of them," said Lieutenant Keith, still with
+his<br>
+ long back turned to us; "they shan't suffer."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, sir, thank you," cried the incomprehensible<br>
+ house-agent, with an air of ecstasy. "You'll excuse my
+concern,<br>
+ sir. You know I'm wild on wild animals. I'm as wild as any
+of<br>
+ them on that. Thank you, sir. But there's another thing. .
+."</p>
+
+<p>The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with
+an<br>
+ indescribable laugh and swung round to face us. It was a
+laugh,<br>
+ the purport of which was direct and essential, and yet which
+one<br>
+ cannot exactly express. As near as it said anything,
+verbally<br>
+ speaking, it said: "Well, if you must spoil it, you must. But
+you<br>
+ don't know what you're spoiling."</p>
+
+<p>"There is another thing," continued Mr Montmorency weakly.
+"Of<br>
+ course, if you don't want to be visited you'll paint the
+house<br>
+ green, but--"</p>
+
+<p>"Green!" shouted Keith. "Green! Let it be green or nothing.
+I<br>
+ won't have a house of another colour. Green!" and before we
+could<br>
+ realize anything the door had banged between us and the
+street.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself;
+but<br>
+ he spoke before the echoes of the door died away.</p>
+
+<p>"Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited,"
+he<br>
+ said. "What is the matter with him? Is he unwell?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I should think not," said Mr Montmorency, in some
+confusion.<br>
+ "The negotiations have been somewhat difficult--the house is<br>
+ rather--"</p>
+
+<p>"Green," said Rupert calmly. "That appears to be a very
+important<br>
+ point. It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr
+Montmorency,<br>
+ before I rejoin my companion outside, whether, in your
+business,<br>
+ it is usual to ask for houses by their colour? Do clients
+write<br>
+ to a house-agent asking for a pink house or a blue house? Or,
+to<br>
+ take another instance, for a green house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only," said Montmorency, trembling, "only to be
+inconspicuous."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert had his ruthless smile. "Can you tell me any place on
+earth<br>
+ in which a green house would be inconspicuous?"</p>
+
+<p>The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket.
+Slowly<br>
+ drawing out a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on
+the<br>
+ counter, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"No; I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"You can't suggest an explanation?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way
+as<br>
+ to suggest a sudden situation, "I can't. And may I, as a busy
+man,<br>
+ be excused if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to
+make<br>
+ of me in connection with my business. What kind of house would
+you<br>
+ desire me to get for you, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the
+second<br>
+ staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense
+and<br>
+ answered:</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks
+has<br>
+ unduly delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse
+my<br>
+ apparent impertinence."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all, sir," said the house-agent, taking a South
+American<br>
+ spider idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up
+the<br>
+ slope of his desk. "Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour
+me<br>
+ again."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger,
+anxious<br>
+ to face Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street
+was<br>
+ deserted.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you say now?" cried Rupert to his brother. His
+brother<br>
+ said nothing now.</p>
+
+<p>We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert
+feverish,<br>
+ myself dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We
+walked<br>
+ through grey street after grey street, turning corners,
+traversing<br>
+ squares, scarcely meeting anyone, except occasional drunken
+knots<br>
+ of two or three.</p>
+
+<p>In one small street, however, the knots of two or three
+began<br>
+ abruptly to thicken into knots of five or six and then into
+great<br>
+ groups and then into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very
+slightly.<br>
+ But anyone with a knowledge of the eternal populace knows that
+if<br>
+ the outside rim of a crowd stirs ever so slightly it means
+that<br>
+ there is madness in the heart and core of the mob. It soon
+became<br>
+ evident that something really important had happened in the
+centre<br>
+ of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front, with the<br>
+ cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we
+soon<br>
+ learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl<br>
+ concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead on
+the<br>
+ stones of the street. Of the other four, all interesting
+matters<br>
+ were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one
+stupendous<br>
+ fact. One of the four survivors of the brutal and perhaps
+fatal<br>
+ scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn
+to<br>
+ ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other
+thing,<br>
+ however, pointed at him in a worse manner. A short sword, or
+very<br>
+ long knife, had been drawn out of his elegant walking-stick,
+and<br>
+ lay in front of him upon the stones. It did not, however, appear
+to<br>
+ be bloody.</p>
+
+<p>The police had already pushed into the centre with their
+ponderous<br>
+ omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang
+forward<br>
+ with his incontrollable and intolerable secret.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the man, constable," he shouted, pointing at the
+battered<br>
+ lieutenant. "He is a suspicious character. He did the
+murder."</p>
+
+<p>"There's been no murder done, sir," said the policeman, with
+his<br>
+ automatic civility. "The poor man's only hurt. I shall only
+be<br>
+ able to take the names and addresses of the men in the
+scuffle<br>
+ and have a good eye kept on them."</p>
+
+<p>"Have a good eye kept on that one," said Rupert, pale to the
+lips,<br>
+ and pointing to the ragged Keith.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, sir," said the policeman unemotionally, and went
+the<br>
+ round of the people present, collecting the addresses. When he
+had<br>
+ completed his task the dusk had fallen and most of the people
+not<br>
+ immediately connected with the examination had gone away. He
+still<br>
+ found, however, one eager-faced stranger lingering on the<br>
+ outskirts of the affair. It was Rupert Grant.</p>
+
+<p>"Constable," he said, "I have a very particular reason for
+asking<br>
+ you a question. Would you mind telling me whether that
+military<br>
+ fellow who dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an
+address<br>
+ or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," said the policeman, after a reflective pause;
+"yes, he<br>
+ gave me his address."</p>
+
+<p>"My name is Rupert Grant," said that individual, with some
+pomp.<br>
+ "I have assisted the police on more than one occasion. I
+wonder<br>
+ whether you would tell me, as a special favour, what
+address?"</p>
+
+<p>The constable looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said slowly, "if you like. His address is: The
+Elms,<br>
+ Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering
+night<br>
+ as fast as his legs could carry him, repeating the address
+to<br>
+ himself.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way
+to<br>
+ breakfast; he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always
+the<br>
+ attitude of the indulged younger brother. Next morning,
+however,<br>
+ when Basil and I came down we found him ready and restless.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat
+down to<br>
+ the meal. "What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do I think of him?" inquired Basil slowly. "I don't
+think<br>
+ anything of him."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad to hear it," said Rupert, buttering his toast with
+an<br>
+ energy that was somewhat exultant. "I thought you'd come round
+to<br>
+ my view, but I own I was startled at your not seeing it from
+the<br>
+ beginning. The man is a translucent liar and knave."</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before,
+"that<br>
+ I did not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing
+of<br>
+ him I meant grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not
+think<br>
+ about him; that he did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to
+me<br>
+ to think a lot of him, since you think him a knave. I should say
+he<br>
+ was glaringly good myself."</p>
+
+<p>"I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake," said
+Rupert,<br>
+ breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. "What the deuce is
+the<br>
+ sense of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by
+our<br>
+ common agreement, dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall
+tales,<br>
+ a man who doesn't conceal his acquaintance with all the
+blackest<br>
+ and bloodiest scenes on earth. We take the trouble to follow him
+to<br>
+ one of his appointments, and if ever two human beings were
+plotting<br>
+ together and lying to every one else, he and that impossible<br>
+ house-agent were doing it. We followed him home, and the very
+same<br>
+ night he is in the thick of a fatal, or nearly fatal, brawl,
+in<br>
+ which he is the only man armed. Really, if this is being
+glaringly<br>
+ good, I must confess that the glare does not dazzle me."</p>
+
+<p>Basil was quite unmoved. "I admit his moral goodness is of
+a<br>
+ certain kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond
+of<br>
+ change and experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously
+make<br>
+ against him are mere coincidence or special pleading. It's true
+he<br>
+ didn't want to talk about his house business in front of us.
+No<br>
+ man would. It's true that he carries a sword-stick. Any man
+might.<br>
+ It's true he drew it in the shock of a street fight. Any man<br>
+ would. But there's nothing really dubious in all this.
+There's<br>
+ nothing to confirm--"</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke a knock came at the door.</p>
+
+<p>"If you please, sir," said the landlady, with an alarmed
+air,<br>
+ "there's a policeman wants to see you."</p>
+
+<p>"Show him in," said Basil, amid the blank silence.</p>
+
+<p>The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door
+spoke<br>
+ almost as soon as he appeared there.</p>
+
+<p>"I think one of you gentlemen," he said, curtly but
+respectfully,<br>
+ "was present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and
+drew<br>
+ my attention very strongly to a particular man."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but
+the<br>
+ constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.</p>
+
+<p>"A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very
+good, but<br>
+ torn in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith."</p>
+
+<p>"This is amusing," said Basil, laughing. "I was in the very
+act of<br>
+ clearing that poor officer's character of rather fanciful<br>
+ aspersions. What about him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir," said the constable, "I took all the men's
+addresses<br>
+ and had them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more
+than<br>
+ that. All the other addresses are all right. But this man
+Keith<br>
+ gave a false address. The place doesn't exist."</p>
+
+<p>The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang
+up,<br>
+ slapping both his thighs.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, by all that's good," he cried. "This is a sign from
+heaven."</p>
+
+<p>"It's certainly very extraordinary," said Basil quietly,
+with<br>
+ knitted brows. "It's odd the fellow should have given a
+false<br>
+ address, considering he was perfectly innocent in the--"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer," cried Rupert, in
+a<br>
+ sort of rapture, "I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge.
+You<br>
+ think every one as good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain
+enough<br>
+ now? A doubtful acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most
+suspicious<br>
+ conversation, mean streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly<br>
+ killed, and, finally, a false address. That's what we call
+glaring<br>
+ goodness."</p>
+
+<p>"It's certainly very extraordinary," repeated Basil. And
+he<br>
+ strolled moodily about the room. Then he said: "You are
+quite<br>
+ sure, constable, that there's no mistake? You got the
+address<br>
+ right, and the police have really gone to it and found it was
+a<br>
+ fraud?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was very simple, sir," said the policeman, chuckling.
+"The<br>
+ place he named was a well-known common quite near London, and
+our<br>
+ people were down there this morning before any of you were
+awake.<br>
+ And there's no such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses
+at<br>
+ all. Though it is so near London, it's a blank moor with
+hardly<br>
+ five trees on it, to say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir,
+the<br>
+ address was a fraud right enough. He was a clever rascal,
+and<br>
+ chose one of those scraps of lost England that people know
+nothing<br>
+ about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a
+particular<br>
+ house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact,
+there<br>
+ isn't."</p>
+
+<p>Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing
+darker<br>
+ and darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was
+cornered<br>
+ almost for the first time since I had known him; and to tell
+the<br>
+ truth I rather wondered at the almost childish obstinacy which
+kept<br>
+ him so close to his original prejudice in favour of the
+wildly<br>
+ questionable lieutenant. At length he said:</p>
+
+<p>"You really searched the common? And the address was really
+not<br>
+ known in the district--by the way, what was the address?"</p>
+
+<p>The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted
+it,<br>
+ but before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in
+the<br>
+ window in a perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant
+detective,<br>
+ struck in with the sharp and suave voice he loved so much to
+use.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I can tell you that, Basil," he said graciously as he
+idly<br>
+ plucked leaves from a plant in the window. "I took the
+precaution<br>
+ to get this man's address from the constable last night."</p>
+
+<p>"And what was it?" asked his brother gruffly.</p>
+
+<p>"The constable will correct me if I am wrong," said
+Rupert,<br>
+ looking sweetly at the ceiling. "It was: The Elms, Buxton<br>
+ Common, near Purley, Surrey."</p>
+
+<p>"Right, sir," said the policeman, laughing and folding up
+his<br>
+ papers.</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly
+for<br>
+ a few seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his
+chair<br>
+ so suddenly that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I
+could<br>
+ move further his lips had flown apart (I can use no other
+phrase)<br>
+ and a peal of gigantic laughter struck and shook the
+ceiling--<br>
+ laughter that shook the laughter, laughter redoubled,
+laughter<br>
+ incurable, laughter that could not stop.</p>
+
+<p>Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was
+ill<br>
+ with laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by
+this<br>
+ time ill almost with terror.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," said the insane creature, getting at last to his
+feet.<br>
+ "I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And
+also<br>
+ unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we're to
+get<br>
+ down to that place. The train service is confoundedly bad, as
+I<br>
+ happen to know. It's quite out of proportion to the
+comparatively<br>
+ small distance."</p>
+
+<p>"Get down to that place?" I repeated blankly. "Get down to
+what<br>
+ place?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have forgotten its name," said Basil vaguely, putting his
+hands<br>
+ in his pockets as he rose. "Something Common near Purley. Has
+any<br>
+ one got a timetable?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't seriously mean," cried Rupert, who had been staring
+in<br>
+ a sort of confusion of emotions. "You don't mean that you want
+to<br>
+ go to Buxton Common, do you? You can't mean that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?" asked Basil,
+smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should you?" said his brother, catching hold again
+restlessly<br>
+ of the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>"To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course," said Basil
+Grant.<br>
+ "I thought you wanted to find him?"</p>
+
+<p>Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it<br>
+ impatiently on the floor. "And in order to find him," he
+said,<br>
+ "you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only
+place<br>
+ on the habitable earth where we know he can't be."</p>
+
+<p>The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind
+of<br>
+ assenting laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was<br>
+ encouraged to go on with a reiterated gesture:</p>
+
+<p>"He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride
+the<br>
+ cross of St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most
+likely);<br>
+ he may be in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be
+in<br>
+ your store cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points
+of<br>
+ space, there is only one where he has just been
+systematically<br>
+ looked for and where we know that he is not to be found--and
+that,<br>
+ if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to go."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly," said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat;
+"I<br>
+ thought you might care to accompany me. If not, of course,
+make<br>
+ yourselves jolly here till I come back."</p>
+
+<p>It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value
+them<br>
+ if they really show a resolution to depart. We all followed
+Basil,<br>
+ and I cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing,
+that<br>
+ he vanished decisively with his great-coat and his stick.
+Rupert<br>
+ ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear chap," he cried, "do you really mean that you see any
+good<br>
+ in going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing
+but<br>
+ beaten tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was
+the<br>
+ first place that came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he
+wanted<br>
+ to give a lying reference in a scrape?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Basil, taking out his watch, "and, what's worse,
+we've<br>
+ lost the train."</p>
+
+<p>He paused a moment and then added: "As a matter of fact, I
+think<br>
+ we may just as well go down later in the day. I have some
+writing<br>
+ to do, and I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of
+going<br>
+ to the Dulwich Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely
+he<br>
+ wouldn't be in. But if we get down by the 5.15, which gets
+to<br>
+ Purley about 6, I expect we shall just catch him."</p>
+
+<p>"Catch him!" cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. "I
+wish<br>
+ we could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?"</p>
+
+<p>"I keep forgetting the name of the common," said Basil, as
+he<br>
+ buttoned up his coat. "The Elms--what is it? Buxton Common,
+near<br>
+ Purley. That's where we shall find him."</p>
+
+<p>"But there is no such place," groaned Rupert; but he followed
+his<br>
+ brother downstairs.</p>
+
+<p>We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand
+and<br>
+ our sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we
+did<br>
+ not and do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was
+the<br>
+ meaning of the fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery.
+And<br>
+ the strange thing was that we followed him the more completely
+the<br>
+ more nonsensical appeared the thing which he said. At bottom,
+I<br>
+ believe, if he had risen from our breakfast table and said: "I
+am<br>
+ going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails," we should have
+followed<br>
+ him to the end of the world.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil
+on<br>
+ this occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so
+to<br>
+ speak, of the strange journey that we made the same evening. It
+was<br>
+ already very dense twilight when we struck southward from
+Purley.<br>
+ Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most
+cases,<br>
+ commonplace and comfortable. But if ever by any chance they
+really<br>
+ are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate
+and<br>
+ dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because
+the<br>
+ suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence
+has<br>
+ something about it as of evil elf-land. It seems to be one of
+the<br>
+ ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God--such a
+place<br>
+ was Buxton Common, near Purley.</p>
+
+<p>There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the
+landscape<br>
+ itself. But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey<br>
+ futility in our expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked<br>
+ useless, the occasional wind-stricken trees looked useless,
+but<br>
+ we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless turf or
+the<br>
+ idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for
+we<br>
+ were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left
+men<br>
+ in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under
+the<br>
+ captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was
+not<br>
+ there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed
+to<br>
+ look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.</p>
+
+<p>Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking
+in<br>
+ the gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell
+after<br>
+ swell of the windy common in increasing darkness and entire<br>
+ silence. Suddenly Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in
+his<br>
+ pockets. Through the dusk I could just detect that he wore a
+broad<br>
+ grin as of comfortable success.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of
+his<br>
+ pockets and slapping them together, "here we are at last."</p>
+
+<p>The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate
+elms<br>
+ rocked above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There
+was<br>
+ not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon,
+and<br>
+ in the midst of that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his
+hands<br>
+ with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.</p>
+
+<p>"How jolly it is," he cried, "to get back to civilization.
+That<br>
+ notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised
+delusion.<br>
+ Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the
+devilish<br>
+ woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's
+no<br>
+ star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone;
+no<br>
+ river like the red river of man, the good red wine, which you,
+Mr<br>
+ Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be drinking
+in<br>
+ two or three minutes in enormous quantities."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on
+heartily, as<br>
+ the wind died in the dreary trees.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his
+own<br>
+ house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin
+at<br>
+ Yarmouth, and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's
+really<br>
+ a very good fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I
+said<br>
+ originally."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked, finding his speech straying
+towards a<br>
+ sort of sanity. "What is his greatest virtue?"</p>
+
+<p>"His greatest virtue," replied Basil, "is that he always tells
+the<br>
+ literal truth."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, really," cried Rupert, stamping about between cold
+and<br>
+ anger, and slapping himself like a cabman, "he doesn't seem to
+have<br>
+ been very literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why
+the<br>
+ deuce, may I ask, have you brought us out to this infernal
+place?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was too truthful, I confess," said Basil, leaning against
+the<br>
+ tree; "too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should
+have<br>
+ indulged in a little more suggestiveness and legitimate
+romance.<br>
+ But come, it's time we went in. We shall be late for
+dinner."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert whispered to me with a white face:</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he
+sees<br>
+ a house?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so," I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant
+to be<br>
+ a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost
+as<br>
+ strange as the wind:</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to
+go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, up here," cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he
+was<br>
+ above our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal
+tree.</p>
+
+<p>"Come up, all of you," he shouted out of the darkness, with
+the<br>
+ voice of a schoolboy. "Come up. You'll be late for dinner."</p>
+
+<p>The two great elms stood so close together that there was
+scarcely<br>
+ a yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot,
+between<br>
+ them. Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed
+a<br>
+ series of footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural
+ladder.<br>
+ They must, I supposed, have been some sport of growth,
+Siamese<br>
+ twins of vegetation.</p>
+
+<p>Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the
+mystery<br>
+ of the waste and dark had brought out and made primary
+something<br>
+ wholly mystical in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that
+there<br>
+ was a giant's staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars;
+and<br>
+ the victorious voice above called to us out of heaven. We
+hoisted<br>
+ ourselves up after him.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered
+me<br>
+ suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I
+saw<br>
+ the whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were<br>
+ printed. I saw three modern men in black coats who had begun
+with a<br>
+ perfectly sensible suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who
+had<br>
+ ended, God knows how, half-way up a naked tree on a naked
+moorland,<br>
+ far from that adventurer and all his works, that adventurer who
+was<br>
+ at that moment, in all probability, laughing at us in some
+dirty<br>
+ Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us about, and no
+doubt<br>
+ he was laughing his loudest; but when I thought what his
+laughter<br>
+ would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly let
+go<br>
+ of the tree and fell.</p>
+
+<p>"Swinburne," said Rupert suddenly, from above, "what are we
+doing?<br>
+ Let's get down again," and by the mere sound of his voice I
+knew<br>
+ that he too felt the shock of wakening to reality.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't leave poor Basil," I said. "Can't you call to him or
+get<br>
+ hold of him by the leg?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's too far ahead," answered Rupert; "he's nearly at the
+top<br>
+ of the beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the
+rooks'<br>
+ nests, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical<br>
+ journey. The mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake<br>
+ slightly in the wind. Then I looked down and saw something
+which<br>
+ made me feel that we were far from the world in a sense and to
+a<br>
+ degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw that the almost<br>
+ straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little in<br>
+ perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel
+lines<br>
+ taper towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the
+earth<br>
+ made me feel lost in space, like a falling star.</p>
+
+<p>"Can nothing be done to stop Basil?" I called out.</p>
+
+<p>"No," answered my fellow climber. "He's too far up. He must
+get<br>
+ to the top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he
+may<br>
+ go sane again. Hark at him above there; you can just hear
+him<br>
+ talking to himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps he's talking to us," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Rupert, "he'd shout if he was. I've never known him
+to<br>
+ talk to himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight;
+it's<br>
+ a known sign of the brain going."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly
+was<br>
+ sounding above us, and not by any means in the rich and
+riotous<br>
+ tones in which he had hailed us before. He was speaking
+quietly,<br>
+ and laughing every now and then, up there among the leaves
+and<br>
+ stars.</p>
+
+<p>After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant
+suddenly<br>
+ said, "My God!" with a violent voice.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter--are you hurt?" I cried, alarmed.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Listen to Basil," said the other in a very strange
+voice.<br>
+ "He's not talking to himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Then he is talking to us," I cried.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Rupert simply, "he's talking to somebody else."</p>
+
+<p>Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in
+a<br>
+ sudden burst of wind, but when it died down I could still
+hear<br>
+ the conversational voice above. I could hear two voices.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice
+as<br>
+ before: "Come up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith."</p>
+
+<p>And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had
+heard<br>
+ in our chambers more than once. It called out:</p>
+
+<p>"Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in."</p>
+
+<p>Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent
+in<br>
+ the branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face
+and<br>
+ fierce moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with
+that<br>
+ slightly Southern air that belonged to him.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted
+ourselves<br>
+ heavily into the opening. We fell into the full glow of a
+lamp-lit,<br>
+ cushioned, tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books,
+a<br>
+ circular table, and a circular seat around it. At this table
+sat<br>
+ three people. One was Basil, who, in the instant after
+alighting<br>
+ there, had fallen into an attitude of marmoreal ease as if he
+had<br>
+ been there from boyhood; he was smoking a cigar with a slow<br>
+ pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who
+looked<br>
+ happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with his
+granite<br>
+ guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with
+the<br>
+ wild whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears,
+the<br>
+ green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on
+the<br>
+ wall. The sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece,
+the<br>
+ enormous rifle in the corner. In the middle of the table was
+a<br>
+ magnum of champagne. Glasses were already set for us.</p>
+
+<p>The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at
+the<br>
+ foot of a light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin
+might<br>
+ in a mild sea.</p>
+
+<p>Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and
+dumb.<br>
+ Then Basil spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is
+no<br>
+ further question about the cold veracity of our injured
+host."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't quite grasp it all," said Rupert, blinking still in
+the<br>
+ sudden glare. "Lieutenant Keith said his address was--"</p>
+
+<p>"It's really quite right, sir," said Keith, with an open
+smile.<br>
+ "The bobby asked me where I lived. And I said, quite
+truthfully,<br>
+ that I lived in the elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I
+do.<br>
+ This gentleman, Mr Montmorency, whom I think you have met
+before,<br>
+ is an agent for houses of this kind. He has a special line
+in<br>
+ arboreal villas. It's being kept rather quiet at present,
+because<br>
+ the people who want these houses don't want them to get too
+common.<br>
+ But it's just the sort of thing a fellow like myself,
+racketing<br>
+ about in all sorts of queer corners of London, naturally knocks
+up<br>
+ against."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?" asked
+Rupert<br>
+ eagerly, recovering his ease with the romance of reality.</p>
+
+<p>Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his
+pockets<br>
+ and nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>"W-well, yes, sir," he said. "The fact was--er--my people
+wanted me<br>
+ very much to go into the house-agency business. But I never
+cared<br>
+ myself for anything but natural history and botany and things
+like<br>
+ that. My poor parents have been dead some years now,
+but--naturally<br>
+ I like to respect their wishes. And I thought somehow that
+an<br>
+ arboreal villa agency was a sort of--of compromise between being
+a<br>
+ botanist and being a house-agent."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert could not help laughing. "Do you have much custom?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"N-not much," replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced
+at<br>
+ Keith, who was (I am convinced) his only client. "But what
+there<br>
+ is--very select."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear friends," said Basil, puffing his cigar, "always
+remember<br>
+ two facts. The first is that though when you are guessing
+about<br>
+ any one who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when
+you<br>
+ are guessing about any one who is, like our host, insane,
+the<br>
+ maddest thing is the most likely. The second is to remember
+that<br>
+ very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had
+taken<br>
+ a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but
+railings<br>
+ in front of it and had written `The Elms' over it, you
+wouldn't<br>
+ have thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply<br>
+ because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would
+have<br>
+ believed it."</p>
+
+<p>"Drink your wine, gentlemen," said Keith, laughing, "for
+this<br>
+ confounded wind will upset it."</p>
+
+<p>We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by
+a<br>
+ cunning mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the
+great<br>
+ head of the elm tree swayed in the sky like a stricken
+thistle.</p>
+
+<h2>Chapter 5</h2>
+
+<h3>The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd</h3>
+
+<p>Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet
+he<br>
+ was the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any
+one<br>
+ anywhere, and talk not only well but with perfectly genuine
+concern<br>
+ and enthusiasm for that person's affairs. He went through
+the<br>
+ world, as it were, as if he were always on the top of an omnibus
+or<br>
+ waiting for a train. Most of these chance acquaintances, of
+course,<br>
+ vanished into darkness out of his life. A few here and there
+got<br>
+ hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong
+intimates,<br>
+ but there was an accidental look about all of them as if they
+were<br>
+ windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods
+train<br>
+ or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say,
+a<br>
+ veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a
+mild<br>
+ prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a
+young<br>
+ captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains
+in<br>
+ the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all<br>
+ reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist from<br>
+ Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of
+these;<br>
+ Basil had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel<br>
+ cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which reduced
+the<br>
+ little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the
+compound<br>
+ of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of
+an<br>
+ old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined
+with<br>
+ each other twice a week until they died. I myself was another.
+I<br>
+ had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of
+the<br>
+ National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about the
+weather.<br>
+ Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God;
+for<br>
+ men always talk about the most important things to total
+strangers.<br>
+ It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself;
+the<br>
+ image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or
+doubts<br>
+ of the wisdom of a moustache.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of<br>
+ acquaintances was Professor Chadd. He was known to the
+ethnological<br>
+ world (which is a very interesting world, but a long way off
+this<br>
+ one) as the second greatest, if not the greatest, authority on
+the<br>
+ relations of savages to language. He was known to the
+neighbourhood<br>
+ of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man with a bald
+head,<br>
+ spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an unaccountable<br>
+ Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to and
+fro<br>
+ between the British Museum and a selection of blameless
+tea-shops,<br>
+ with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He
+was<br>
+ never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed
+(by<br>
+ the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them
+in<br>
+ his little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's
+Bush.<br>
+ There he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness,
+but<br>
+ sinister demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the
+lives<br>
+ of methodical students, but one would not have called it<br>
+ exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred when
+his<br>
+ friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a
+tornado<br>
+ of conversation.</p>
+
+<p>Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous
+babyishness,<br>
+ and these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon
+him<br>
+ particularly in the house of his studious and almost dingy
+friend.<br>
+ I can remember vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties
+and<br>
+ often dined with them) the gaiety of Grant on that
+particular<br>
+ evening when the strange calamity fell upon the professor.<br>
+ Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class and
+type<br>
+ (the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a
+Radical<br>
+ of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical
+himself,<br>
+ but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of<br>
+ Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical
+party.<br>
+ Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called
+"Zulu<br>
+ Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise<br>
+ scientific report of his study of the customs of the people
+of<br>
+ T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain<br>
+ interferences with these customs both by the British and the<br>
+ Germans. He-was sitting with the magazine in front of him,
+the<br>
+ lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his
+forehead,<br>
+ not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and
+down<br>
+ the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and
+his<br>
+ heavy tread.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd,"
+he<br>
+ was saying, "it's you. You are quite right to champion the
+Zulus,<br>
+ but for all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt
+you<br>
+ know the Zulu way of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer
+before<br>
+ blowing one's nose; but for all that you don't understand them
+as<br>
+ well as I do, who don't know an assegai from an alligator. You
+are<br>
+ more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is it that the
+jolly<br>
+ old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people
+who<br>
+ are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are<br>
+ benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not
+savage.<br>
+ Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass.
+Ask<br>
+ your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look
+at<br>
+ this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still
+respectable<br>
+ article. "Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain
+knowledge<br>
+ you have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort
+of<br>
+ doubt that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it
+never<br>
+ occurred to you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a
+javelin--<br>
+ thus--"</p>
+
+<p>And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald
+head,<br>
+ so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left
+a<br>
+ vase rocking.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face
+still<br>
+ lifted to the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.</p>
+
+<p>"Your mental processes," he said, "always go a little too
+fast.<br>
+ And they are stated without method. There is no kind of<br>
+ inconsistency"--and no words can convey the time he took to get
+to<br>
+ the end of the word--"between valuing the right of the
+aborigines<br>
+ to adhere to their stage in the evolutionary process, so long
+as<br>
+ they find it congenial and requisite to do so. There is, I say,
+no<br>
+ inconsistency between this concession which I have just
+described<br>
+ to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in question
+is,<br>
+ nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in
+the<br>
+ variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an<br>
+ inferior evolutionary stage."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses
+still<br>
+ shone like two pallid moons.</p>
+
+<p>Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.</p>
+
+<p>"True," he said, "there is no inconsistency, my son of the
+red<br>
+ spear. But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper.
+I<br>
+ am very far from being certain that the Zulu is on an
+inferior<br>
+ evolutionary stage, whatever the blazes that may mean. I do
+not<br>
+ think there is anything stupid or ignorant about howling at
+the<br>
+ moon or being afraid of devils in the dark. It seems to me<br>
+ perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be thought a sort
+of<br>
+ idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence
+itself?<br>
+ Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots<br>
+ because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?"</p>
+
+<p>Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a
+bone<br>
+ paper-knife and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.</p>
+
+<p>"Beyond all question," he said, "it is a tenable hypothesis.
+I<br>
+ allude to the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain,
+that<br>
+ our civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and
+indeed<br>
+ (if I apprehend you), is or may be a retrogression from
+states<br>
+ identical with or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover,
+I<br>
+ shall be inclined to concede that such a proposition is of
+the<br>
+ nature, in some degree at least, of a primary proposition,
+and<br>
+ cannot adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean, that
+the<br>
+ primary proposition of pessimism, or the primary proposition of
+the<br>
+ non-existence of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do
+not<br>
+ conceive you to be under the impression that you have
+demonstrated<br>
+ anything more concerning this proposition than that it is
+tenable,<br>
+ which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement that
+it<br>
+ is not a contradiction in terms."</p>
+
+<p>Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand," he said, "but, on the other hand, as
+a<br>
+ compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to
+that<br>
+ disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that
+I<br>
+ began it when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What
+I<br>
+ maintained was that although you knew more about Zulus in the
+sense<br>
+ that you are a scientist, I know more about them in the sense
+that<br>
+ I am a savage. For instance, your theory of the origin of
+language,<br>
+ something about its having come from the formulated secret
+language<br>
+ of some individual creature, though you knocked me silly with
+facts<br>
+ and scholarship in its favour, still does not convince me,
+because<br>
+ I have a feeling that that is not the way that things happen.
+If<br>
+ you ask me why I think so I can only answer that I am a Zulu;
+and<br>
+ if you ask me (as you most certainly will) what is my definition
+of<br>
+ a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has climbed a
+Sussex<br>
+ apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost in an English
+lane."</p>
+
+<p>"Your process of thought--" began the immovable Chadd, but
+his<br>
+ speech was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity
+which<br>
+ always in such families concentrates in sisters, flung open
+the<br>
+ door with a rigid arm and said:</p>
+
+<p>"James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you
+again."</p>
+
+<p>The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates
+in<br>
+ such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar
+thing,<br>
+ but practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and
+walked<br>
+ dubiously out of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,"
+said<br>
+ Basil Grant, "but I hear that the British Museum has
+recognized<br>
+ one of the men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It
+is<br>
+ true, is it not, that Professor Chadd is likely to be made
+keeper<br>
+ of Asiatic manuscripts?"</p>
+
+<p>The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of
+pleasure and<br>
+ a great deal of pathos also. "I believe it's true," she said.
+"If<br>
+ it is, it will not only be great glory which women, I assure
+you,<br>
+ feel a great deal, but great relief, which they feel more;
+relief<br>
+ from worry from a lot of things. James' health has never been
+good,<br>
+ and while we are as poor as we are he had to do journalism
+and<br>
+ coaching, in addition to his own dreadful grinding notions
+and<br>
+ discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or child. I
+have<br>
+ often been afraid that unless something of this kind occurred
+we<br>
+ should really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe it
+is<br>
+ practically settled."</p>
+
+<p>"I am delighted," began Basil, but with a worried face, "but
+these<br>
+ red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really
+can't<br>
+ advise you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into<br>
+ bitterness. I've known men, and good men like your brother,
+come<br>
+ nearer than this and be disappointed. Of course, if it is
+true--"</p>
+
+<p>"If it is true," said the woman fiercely, "it means that
+people who<br>
+ have never lived may make an attempt at living."</p>
+
+<p>Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with
+the<br>
+ dazed look in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it true?" asked Basil, with burning eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit true," answered Chadd after a moment's
+bewilderment.<br>
+ "Your argument was in three points fallacious."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?" demanded Grant.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the professor slowly, "in saying that you
+could<br>
+ possess a knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct
+from--"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! confound Zulu life," cried Grant, with a burst of
+laughter. "I<br>
+ mean, have you got the post?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he
+said,<br>
+ opening his eye with childlike wonder. "Oh, yes, I got that.
+But<br>
+ the real objection to your argument, which has only, I
+admit,<br>
+ occurred to me since I have been out of the room, is that it
+does<br>
+ not merely presuppose a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but<br>
+ infers that the discovery of it is absolutely impeded by the<br>
+ facts."</p>
+
+<p>"I am crushed," said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while
+the<br>
+ professor's sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly
+not.</p>
+
+<p>It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is
+an<br>
+ extremely long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to<br>
+ Lambeth. This may be our excuse for the fact that we (for I
+was<br>
+ stopping the night with Grant) got down to breakfast next day at
+a<br>
+ time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point of fact, close
+upon<br>
+ noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very lounging
+and<br>
+ leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at
+table<br>
+ that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I
+doubt<br>
+ if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on
+the<br>
+ top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness
+in<br>
+ being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he opened
+with<br>
+ the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and
+drank<br>
+ his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word,
+but<br>
+ something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless
+figure<br>
+ had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on
+a<br>
+ slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew
+that<br>
+ he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock
+of<br>
+ cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man who
+had<br>
+ drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it
+away<br>
+ like a cur from under him and came round to me in two
+strides.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you make of that?" he said, and flattened out the
+wire<br>
+ in front of me.</p>
+
+<p>It ran: "Please come at once. James' mental state
+dangerous.<br>
+ Chadd."</p>
+
+<p>"What does the woman mean?" I said after a pause,
+irritably.<br>
+ "Those women have been saying that the poor old professor was
+mad<br>
+ ever since he was born."</p>
+
+<p>"You are mistaken," said Grant composedly. "It is true that
+all<br>
+ sensible women think all studious men mad. It is true, for
+the<br>
+ matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any
+kind<br>
+ mad. But they don't put it in telegrams, any more than they
+wire<br>
+ to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things
+are<br>
+ truisms, and often private ones at that. If Miss Chadd has
+written<br>
+ down under the eye of a strange woman in a post-office that
+her<br>
+ brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she
+did<br>
+ it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can think
+of<br>
+ no other way of forcing us to come promptly."</p>
+
+<p>"It will force us of course," I said, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," he replied; "there is a cab-rank near."</p>
+
+<p>Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster
+Bridge,<br>
+ through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the
+Uxbridge<br>
+ Road. Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you will take my word for it, my friend," he said;
+"this<br>
+ is one of the most queer and complicated and astounding
+incidents<br>
+ that ever happened in London or, for that matter, in any
+high<br>
+ civilization."</p>
+
+<p>"I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I
+don't<br>
+ quite see it," I said. "Is it so very extraordinary or
+complicated<br>
+ that a dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked
+on<br>
+ the borders of the inconceivable should go mad under the shock
+of<br>
+ great joy? Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a head
+like<br>
+ a turnip and a soul like a spider's web should not find his<br>
+ strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes? Is it,
+in<br>
+ short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his
+wits<br>
+ from excitement?"</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ "It would not be extraordinary in the least," answered
+Basil,<br>
+ with placidity. "It would not be extraordinary in the least,"
+he<br>
+ repeated, "if the professor had gone mad. That was not the<br>
+ extraordinary circumstance to which I referred."</p>
+
+<p>"What," I asked, stamping my foot, "was the extraordinary
+thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"The extraordinary thing," said Basil, ringing the bell, "is
+that<br>
+ he has not gone mad from excitement."</p>
+
+<p>The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked
+the<br>
+ doorway as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in
+the<br>
+ same way to be blocking the narrow passage and the little
+parlour.<br>
+ There was a general sense of their keeping something from
+view.<br>
+ They seemed like three black-clad ladies in some strange play
+of<br>
+ Maeterlinck, veiling the catastrophe from the audience in
+the<br>
+ manner of the Greek chorus.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, won't you?" said one of them, in a voice that
+was<br>
+ somewhat rigid with pain. "I think you had better be told
+first<br>
+ what has happened."</p>
+
+<p>Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the
+window,<br>
+ she continued, in an even and mechanical voice:</p>
+
+<p>"I had better state everything that occurred just as it
+occurred.<br>
+ This morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my
+sisters<br>
+ were both somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother
+had<br>
+ just gone out of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came
+back<br>
+ again, however, without it, and stood for some time staring at
+the<br>
+ empty grate. I said, `Were you looking for anything I could
+get?'<br>
+ He did not answer, but this constantly happens, as he is often
+very<br>
+ abstracted. I repeated my question, and still he did not
+answer.<br>
+ Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that nothing but
+a<br>
+ touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's presence, so
+I<br>
+ came round the table towards him. I really do not know how
+to<br>
+ describe the sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly,
+but<br>
+ at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one's
+brain.<br>
+ The fact is, James was standing on one leg."</p>
+
+<p>Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of
+care.</p>
+
+<p>"Standing on one leg?" I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied the dead voice of the woman without an
+inflection to<br>
+ suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. "He
+was<br>
+ standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp
+angle,<br>
+ the toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him.
+His<br>
+ only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to
+the<br>
+ other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He
+was<br>
+ still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>"`James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was
+thoroughly<br>
+ frightened. James gave three kicks in the air with the right
+leg,<br>
+ flung up the other, gave three kicks in the air with it also
+and<br>
+ spun round like a teetotum the other way. `Are you mad?' I
+cried.<br>
+ `Why don't you answer me?' He had come to a standstill facing
+me,<br>
+ and was looking at me as he always does, with his lifted
+eyebrows<br>
+ and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he remained a
+second<br>
+ or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift his
+left<br>
+ foot slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the
+air.<br>
+ I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell
+on<br>
+ the dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to
+him,<br>
+ implored him to speak to us with appeals that might have
+brought<br>
+ back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop and dance and
+kick<br>
+ with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs belonged to
+some<br>
+ one else or were possessed by devils. He has never spoken to
+us<br>
+ from that time to this."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is he now?" I said, getting up in some agitation. "We
+ought<br>
+ not to leave him alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor Colman is with him," said Miss Chadd calmly. "They are
+in<br>
+ the garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And
+he<br>
+ can scarcely go into the street."</p>
+
+<p>Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on
+the<br>
+ garden. It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden;
+the<br>
+ flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a
+coloured<br>
+ carpet; but on this shining and opulent summer day even they
+had<br>
+ the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said
+tropical.<br>
+ In the middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular
+lawn<br>
+ stood two figures. One of them was a small, sharp-looking man
+with<br>
+ black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume Dr Colman),
+who<br>
+ was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous twitch,
+as<br>
+ it were, in his face. The other was our old friend, listening
+with<br>
+ his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong
+sunlight<br>
+ gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the
+night<br>
+ before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his
+studious<br>
+ decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might
+have<br>
+ been the identical figure of last night. That one thing was
+that<br>
+ while the face listened reposefully the legs were
+industriously<br>
+ dancing like the legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and
+the<br>
+ sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness
+and<br>
+ incredibility to the prodigy--the prodigy of the head of a
+hermit<br>
+ and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen
+in<br>
+ broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore<br>
+ commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>The second sister had by this time entered the room and
+came<br>
+ somewhat drearily to the window.</p>
+
+<p>"You know, Adelaide," she said, "that Mr Bingham from the
+Museum is<br>
+ coming again at three."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. "I suppose we shall
+have to<br>
+ tell him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever
+come<br>
+ easily to us."</p>
+
+<p>Grant suddenly turned round. "What do you mean?" he said.
+"What<br>
+ will you have to tell Mr Bingham?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know what I shall have to tell him," said the
+professor's<br>
+ sister, almost fiercely. "I don't know that we need give it
+its<br>
+ wretched name. Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic
+manuscripts<br>
+ will be allowed to go on like that?" And she pointed for an<br>
+ instant at the figure in the garden, the shining, listening
+face<br>
+ and the unresting feet.</p>
+
+<p>Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. "When
+did<br>
+ you say the British Museum man was coming?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Three o'clock," said Miss Chadd briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I have an hour before me," said Grant, and without
+another<br>
+ word threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He
+did<br>
+ not walk straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but
+strolling<br>
+ round the garden path drew near them cautiously and yet
+apparently<br>
+ carelessly. He stood a couple of feet off them, seemingly
+counting<br>
+ halfpence out of his trousers pocket, but, as I could see,
+looking<br>
+ up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said,
+in a<br>
+ loud familiar voice, "Well, my boy, do you still think the
+Zulus<br>
+ our inferiors?"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to
+be<br>
+ about to speak. The professor turned his bald and placid
+head<br>
+ towards Grant in a friendly manner, but made no answer, idly<br>
+ flinging his left leg about.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?" Basil
+continued,<br>
+ still in the same loud and lucid tone.</p>
+
+<p>Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the
+other<br>
+ leg, his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor
+cut<br>
+ in rather sharply. "Shall we go inside, professor?" he said.
+"Now<br>
+ you have shown me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most
+beautiful<br>
+ garden. Let us go in," and he tried to draw the kicking<br>
+ ethnologist by the elbow, at the same time whispering to Grant:
+"I<br>
+ must ask you not to trouble him with questions. Most risky.
+He<br>
+ must be soothed."</p>
+
+<p>Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I
+will<br>
+ endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent
+with<br>
+ them if you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this
+garden<br>
+ for an hour. I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that
+I<br>
+ shall say very little to him, and that little shall be as
+soothing<br>
+ as--as syrup."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"It is rather dangerous for him," he said, "to be long in
+the<br>
+ strong sun without his hat. With his bald head, too."</p>
+
+<p>"That is soon settled," said Basil composedly, and took off
+his<br>
+ own big hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the
+professor.<br>
+ The latter did not turn round but danced away with his eyes on
+the<br>
+ horizon.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the
+two<br>
+ for some seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's,
+and<br>
+ then saying, shortly, "All right," strutted away into the
+house,<br>
+ where the three Misses Chadd were all looking out from the
+parlour<br>
+ window on to the garden. They looked out on it with hungry
+eyes<br>
+ for a full hour without moving, and they saw a sight which
+was<br>
+ more extraordinary than madness itself.</p>
+
+<p>Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman,
+without<br>
+ succeeding in making him do anything but continue to caper,
+and<br>
+ when he had done this slowly took a red note-book out of one<br>
+ pocket and a large pencil out of another.</p>
+
+<p>He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic
+skipped<br>
+ away from him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop,
+and<br>
+ make notes again. Thus they followed each other round and
+round<br>
+ the foolish circle of turf, the one writing in pencil with
+the<br>
+ face of a man working out a problem, the other leaping and<br>
+ playing like a child.</p>
+
+<p>After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile
+scene,<br>
+ Grant put the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book
+open<br>
+ in his hand, and walking round the mad professor, planted
+himself<br>
+ directly in front of him.</p>
+
+<p>Then occurred something that even those already used to that
+wild<br>
+ morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on
+finding<br>
+ Basil in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a
+few<br>
+ seconds, and then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in
+the<br>
+ attitude that his sister had described as being the first of
+all<br>
+ his antics. And the moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted
+his<br>
+ own leg and held it out rigid before him, confronting Chadd
+with<br>
+ the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped his bent
+leg,<br>
+ and swinging his weight on to it kicked out the other
+behind,<br>
+ like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a saltire
+cross,<br>
+ and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air.
+Then<br>
+ before any of the spectators could say a word or even entertain
+a<br>
+ thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of
+jig<br>
+ or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on
+two<br>
+ madmen instead of one.</p>
+
+<p>They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of<br>
+ monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come
+out<br>
+ feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a
+gentleman<br>
+ following her. Professor Chadd was in the wildest posture of
+a<br>
+ pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed about to turn a
+cart-wheel,<br>
+ when they were frozen in their follies by the steely voice
+of<br>
+ Adelaide Chadd saying, "Mr Bingham of the British Museum."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed
+and<br>
+ slightly effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and
+formal<br>
+ but agreeable manners. He was the type of the over-civilized,
+as<br>
+ Professor Chadd was of the uncivilized pedant. His formality
+and<br>
+ agreeableness did him some credit under the circumstances. He
+had<br>
+ a vast experience of books and a considerable experience of
+the<br>
+ more dilettante fashionable salons. But neither branch of<br>
+ knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
+grey-haired<br>
+ middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves<br>
+ about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.</p>
+
+<p>The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity,
+but<br>
+ Grant stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the
+scene,<br>
+ and his shiny black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved<br>
+ restlessly from one of them to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Dr Colman," said Basil, turning to him, "will you
+entertain<br>
+ Professor Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he
+needs<br>
+ you. Mr Bingham, might I have the pleasure of a few moments'<br>
+ private conversation? My name is Grant."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that
+was<br>
+ respectful but a trifle bewildered.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Chadd will excuse me," continued Basil easily, "if I
+know<br>
+ my way about the house." And he led the dazed librarian
+rapidly<br>
+ through the back door into the parlour.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr Bingham," said Basil, setting a chair for him, "I imagine
+that<br>
+ Miss Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence."</p>
+
+<p>"She has, Mr Grant," said Bingham, looking at the table with a
+sort<br>
+ of compassionate nervousness. "I am more pained than I can say
+by<br>
+ this dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the
+thing<br>
+ should have happened just as we have decided to give your
+eminent<br>
+ friend a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is,
+of<br>
+ course--really, I don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may,
+of<br>
+ course, retain--I sincerely trust he will--his
+extraordinarily<br>
+ valuable intellect. But I am afraid--I am really afraid--that
+it<br>
+ would not do to have the curator of the Asiatic<br>
+ manuscripts--er--dancing about."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a suggestion to make," said Basil, and sat down
+abruptly in<br>
+ his chair, drawing it up to the table.</p>
+
+<p>"I am delighted, of course," said the gentleman from the
+British<br>
+ Museum, coughing and drawing up his chair also.</p>
+
+<p>The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments
+required<br>
+ for Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then
+he<br>
+ said:</p>
+
+<p>"My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of
+words<br>
+ you could altogether call it a compromise, still it has
+something<br>
+ of that character. My proposal is that the Government (acting,
+as I<br>
+ presume, through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd L800
+a<br>
+ year until he stops dancing."</p>
+
+<p>"Eight hundred a year!" said Mr Bingham, and for the first
+time<br>
+ lifted his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and
+he<br>
+ raised them with a mild blue stare. "I think I have not
+quite<br>
+ understood you. Did I understand you to say that Professor
+Chadd<br>
+ ought to be employed, in his present state, in the Asiatic<br>
+ manuscript department at eight hundred a year?"</p>
+
+<p>Grant shook his head resolutely.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said firmly. "No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I
+would<br>
+ say anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say,
+that<br>
+ he ought to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far
+as<br>
+ that. I merely say that until he stops dancing you ought to
+pay<br>
+ him L800 Surely you have some general fund for the endowment
+of<br>
+ research."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Bingham looked bewildered.</p>
+
+<p>"I really don't know," he said, blinking his eyes, "what you
+are<br>
+ talking about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly
+a<br>
+ thousand a year for life?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. "I never
+said<br>
+ for life. Not at all."</p>
+
+<p>"What for, then?" asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an
+instinct<br>
+ meekly to tear his hair. "How long is this endowment to run?
+Not<br>
+ till his death? Till the Judgement day?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Basil, beaming, "but just what I said. Till he
+has<br>
+ stopped dancing." And he lay back with satisfaction and his
+hands<br>
+ in his pockets.</p>
+
+<p>Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil
+Grant<br>
+ and kept them there.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, Mr Grant," he said. "Do I seriously understand you
+to<br>
+ suggest that the Government pay Professor Chadd an
+extraordinarily<br>
+ high salary simply on the ground that he has (pardon the
+phrase)<br>
+ gone mad? That he should be paid more than four good clerks
+solely<br>
+ on the ground that he is flinging his boots about in the
+back<br>
+ yard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely," said Grant composedly.</p>
+
+<p>"That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the
+absurd<br>
+ dancing, but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?"</p>
+
+<p>"One must stop somewhere," said Grant. "Of course."</p>
+
+<p>Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.</p>
+
+<p>"There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant," he
+said<br>
+ coldly. "What you are trying to explain to me may be a
+joke--a<br>
+ slightly unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which
+case<br>
+ I ask your pardon for the former suggestion. But, in any case,
+it<br>
+ appears quite irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity,
+the<br>
+ mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to
+me<br>
+ that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But it is clear
+there<br>
+ is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel went mad
+it<br>
+ would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the
+British<br>
+ Museum Library."</p>
+
+<p>He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out
+in<br>
+ dramatic warning, arrested him.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop!" said Basil sternly. "Stop while there is yet time. Do
+you<br>
+ want to take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to
+help<br>
+ in the glory of Europe--in the glory of science? Do you want
+to<br>
+ carry your head in the air when it is bald or white because of
+the<br>
+ part that you bore in a great discovery? Do you want--"</p>
+
+<p>Bingham cut in sharply:</p>
+
+<p>"And if I do want this, Mr Grant--"</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said Basil lightly, "your task is easy. Get Chadd L800
+a<br>
+ year till he stops dancing."</p>
+
+<p>With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned<br>
+ impatiently to the door, but in passing out of it found it<br>
+ blocked. Dr Colman was coming in.</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me, gentlemen," he said, in a nervous, confidential
+voice,<br>
+ "the fact is, Mr Grant, I--er--have made a most disturbing<br>
+ discovery about Mr Chadd."</p>
+
+<p>Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid so," he said. "Drink, I imagine."</p>
+
+<p>"Drink!" echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair.
+"Oh,<br>
+ no, it's not drink."</p>
+
+<p>Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew
+hurried and<br>
+ vague. "Homicidal mania--" he began.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said the medical man impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>"Thinks he's made of glass," said Bingham feverishly, "or says
+he's<br>
+ God--or--"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Dr Colman sharply; "the fact is, Mr Grant, my
+discovery<br>
+ is of a different character. The awful thing about him is--"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, go on, sir," cried Bingham, in agony.</p>
+
+<p>"The awful thing about him is," repeated Colman, with
+deliberation,<br>
+ "that he isn't mad."</p>
+
+<p>"Not mad!"</p>
+
+<p>"There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy," said
+the<br>
+ doctor shortly; "he hasn't got any of them."</p>
+
+<p>"But why does he dance?" cried the despairing Bingham. "Why
+doesn't<br>
+ he answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?"</p>
+
+<p>"The devil knows," said Dr Colman coolly. "I'm paid to judge
+of<br>
+ lunatics, but not of fools. The man's not mad."</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?" said
+Mr<br>
+ Bingham. "Can none get into any kind of communication with
+him?"</p>
+
+<p>Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel
+bell:</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be very happy," he said, "to give him any message you
+like<br>
+ to send."</p>
+
+<p>Both men stared at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Give him a message?" they cried simultaneously. "How will you
+give<br>
+ him a message?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil smiled in his slow way.</p>
+
+<p>"If you really want to know how I shall give him your
+message," he<br>
+ began, but Bingham cried:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, of course," with a sort of frenzy.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Basil, "like this." And he suddenly sprang a
+foot<br>
+ into the air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood
+on<br>
+ one leg.</p>
+
+<p>His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by
+the<br>
+ fact that one of his feet was making wild circles in the
+air.</p>
+
+<p>"You drive me to it," he said. "You drive me to betray my
+friend.<br>
+ And I will, for his own sake, betray him."</p>
+
+<p>The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression
+of<br>
+ distress as of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure.<br>
+ "Anything painful, of course--" he began.</p>
+
+<p>Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash
+that<br>
+ struck them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.</p>
+
+<p>"Idiots!" he cried. "Have you seen the man? Have you looked
+at<br>
+ James Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house
+to<br>
+ your miserable library, with his futile books and his
+confounded<br>
+ umbrella, and never seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic?
+Have<br>
+ you never noticed, stuck casually behind his spectacles and
+above<br>
+ his seedy old collar, the face of a man who might have
+burned<br>
+ heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my<br>
+ fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I
+argued<br>
+ against him on the score of his famous theory about
+language--the<br>
+ theory that language was complete in certain individuals and
+was<br>
+ picked up by others simply by watching them. I also chaffed
+him<br>
+ about not understanding things in rough and ready practice.
+What<br>
+ has this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has
+worked<br>
+ out a system of language of his own (it would take too long
+to<br>
+ explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own. And
+he<br>
+ has sworn that till people understand it, till he can speak to
+us<br>
+ in this language, he will not speak in any other. And he
+shall<br>
+ not. I have understood, by taking careful notice; and, by
+heaven,<br>
+ so shall the others. This shall not be blown upon. He shall<br>
+ finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year from
+somewhere<br>
+ till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an infamous
+war<br>
+ on a great idea. It is religious persecution."</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you, Mr Grant," he said. "I hope I shall be able to
+answer<br>
+ for the source of the L800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you
+come<br>
+ in my cab?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham," said Grant heartily.
+"I<br>
+ think I will go and have a chat with the professor in the
+garden."</p>
+
+<p>The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be
+personal<br>
+ and friendly. They were still dancing when I left.</p>
+
+<h2>Chapter 6</h2>
+
+<h3>The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady</h3>
+
+<p>The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of<br>
+ interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction
+in<br>
+ which he was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic
+interest<br>
+ in the life of London. His brother Basil said of him: "His<br>
+ reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably
+leads<br>
+ him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him
+right."<br>
+ Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was<br>
+ certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I<br>
+ think worth telling.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together.
+The<br>
+ street was full of that bright blue twilight which comes
+about<br>
+ half past eight in summer, and which seems for the moment to
+be<br>
+ not so much a coming of darkness as the turning on of a new
+azure<br>
+ illuminator, as if the earth were lit suddenly by a sapphire
+sun.<br>
+ In the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had already begun
+to<br>
+ flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert talking
+excitedly,<br>
+ one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk.
+Rupert<br>
+ was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to me
+the<br>
+ nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective
+theories.<br>
+ He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain,
+seeing<br>
+ a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in
+a<br>
+ falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon
+an<br>
+ unhappy milkman who walked in front of us. So arresting were
+the<br>
+ incidents which afterwards overtook us that I am really
+afraid<br>
+ that I have forgotten what were the main outlines of the
+milkman's<br>
+ crime. I think it had something to do with the fact that he
+had<br>
+ only one small can of milk to carry, and that of that he had
+left<br>
+ the lid loose and walked so quickly that he spilled milk on
+the<br>
+ pavement. This showed that he was not thinking of his small<br>
+ burden, and this again showed that he anticipated some other
+than<br>
+ lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this (taken in<br>
+ conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed
+something<br>
+ else that I have entirely forgotten. I am afraid that I
+derided<br>
+ this detailed revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that
+Rupert<br>
+ Grant, who, though the best of fellows, had a good deal of
+the<br>
+ sensitiveness of the artistic temperament, slightly resented
+my<br>
+ derision. He endeavoured to take a whiff of his cigar, with
+the<br>
+ placidity which he associated with his profession, but the
+cigar,<br>
+ I think, was nearly bitten through.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," he said acidly, "I'll bet you half a crown
+that<br>
+ wherever that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out
+something<br>
+ curious."</p>
+
+<p>"My resources are equal to that risk," I said, laughing.
+"Done."</p>
+
+<p>We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in
+the<br>
+ trail of the mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and
+quicker,<br>
+ and we had some ado to keep up with him; and every now and then
+he<br>
+ left a splash of milk, silver in the lamplight. Suddenly,
+almost<br>
+ before we could note it, he disappeared down the area steps of
+a<br>
+ house. I believe Rupert really believed that the milkman was
+a<br>
+ fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him as having
+vanished.<br>
+ Then calling something to me which somehow took no hold on
+my<br>
+ mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared
+himself<br>
+ into the area.</p>
+
+<p>I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a
+lamp-post<br>
+ in the lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the
+steps<br>
+ without his can and hurried off clattering down the road. Two
+or<br>
+ three minutes more elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up<br>
+ also, his face pale but yet laughing; a not uncommon<br>
+ contradiction in him, denoting excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"My friend," he said, rubbing his hands, "so much for all
+your<br>
+ scepticism. So much for your philistine ignorance of the<br>
+ possibilities of a romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy,
+is<br>
+ the form in which your prosaic good nature will have to
+express<br>
+ itself."</p>
+
+<p>"What?" I said incredulously, "do you mean to say that you
+really<br>
+ did find anything the matter with the poor milkman?"</p>
+
+<p>His face fell.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the milkman," he said, with a miserable affectation at
+having<br>
+ misunderstood me. "No, I--I--didn't exactly bring anything home
+to<br>
+ the milkman himself, I--"</p>
+
+<p>"What did the milkman say and do?" I said, with inexorable<br>
+ sternness.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to tell the truth," said Rupert, shifting restlessly
+from<br>
+ one foot to another, "the milkman himself, as far as merely<br>
+ physical appearances went, just said, `Milk, Miss,' and handed
+in<br>
+ the can. That is not to say, of course, that he did not make
+some<br>
+ secret sign or some--"</p>
+
+<p>I broke into a violent laugh. "You idiot," I said, "why don't
+you<br>
+ own yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have
+made<br>
+ a secret sign any more than any one else? You own he said
+nothing<br>
+ and did nothing worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>His face grew grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is
+possible<br>
+ that the milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible
+that<br>
+ I was wrong about him."</p>
+
+<p>"Then come along with you," I said, with a certain amicable
+anger,<br>
+ "and remember that you owe me half a crown."</p>
+
+<p>"As to that, I differ from you," said Rupert coolly. "The<br>
+ milkman's remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the
+milkman<br>
+ may have been. But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms
+of<br>
+ the bet were, I think, as follows, as I propounded them,
+that<br>
+ wherever that milkman came to a real stop I should find out<br>
+ something curious."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he answered, "I jolly well have. You just come with
+me,"<br>
+ and before I could speak he had turned tail once more and
+whisked<br>
+ through the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house.
+I<br>
+ followed almost before I made any decision.</p>
+
+<p>When we got down into the area I felt indescribably
+foolish<br>
+ literally, as the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but
+a<br>
+ closed door, shuttered windows, the steps down which we had
+come,<br>
+ the ridiculous well in which I found myself, and the
+ridiculous<br>
+ man who had brought me there, and who stood there with
+dancing<br>
+ eyes. I was just about to turn back when Rupert caught me by
+the<br>
+ elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"Just listen to that," he said, and keeping my coat gripped in
+his<br>
+ right hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the
+shutters<br>
+ of the basement window. His air was so definite that I paused
+and<br>
+ even inclined my head for a moment towards it. From inside
+was<br>
+ coming the murmur of an unmistakable human voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been talking to somebody inside?" I asked
+suddenly,<br>
+ turning to Rupert.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I haven't," he replied, with a grim smile, "but I should
+very<br>
+ much like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, of course not," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I recommend you to listen," said Rupert sharply.</p>
+
+<p>In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I
+stood<br>
+ a moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in
+which<br>
+ there was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and
+moaning<br>
+ sound which took the form of the words: "When shall I get out?
+When<br>
+ shall I get out? Will they ever let me out?" or words to
+that<br>
+ effect.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know anything about this?" I said, turning upon Rupert
+very<br>
+ abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you think I am the criminal," he said
+sardonically,<br>
+ "instead of being in some small sense the detective. I came
+into<br>
+ this area two or three minutes ago, having told you that I
+knew<br>
+ there was something funny going on, and this woman behind
+the<br>
+ shutters (for it evidently is a woman) was moaning like mad.
+No,<br>
+ my dear friend, beyond that I do not know anything about her.
+She<br>
+ is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited daughter, or
+a<br>
+ member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being
+wailing<br>
+ that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman
+and<br>
+ beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two
+or<br>
+ three minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning, that is
+all."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," I said, "I apologize; this is no time
+for<br>
+ arguing. What is to be done?"</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"First of all," he said, "house-breaking." And he forced the
+blade<br>
+ into the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter,<br>
+ leaving a gap and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The
+room<br>
+ within was entirely unlighted, so that for the first few
+seconds<br>
+ the window seemed a dead and opaque surface, as dark as a strip
+of<br>
+ slate. Then came a realization which, though in a sense
+gradual,<br>
+ made us step back and catch our breath. Two large dim human
+eyes<br>
+ were so close to us that the window itself seemed suddenly to be
+a<br>
+ mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass within,
+and<br>
+ with increased distinctness, with the increase of the opening
+came<br>
+ the words:</p>
+
+<p>"When shall I get out?"</p>
+
+<p>"What can all this be?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and
+pointing<br>
+ the ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole
+in<br>
+ it, smaller and more accurate than I should have supposed
+possible.<br>
+ The moment he had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so
+to<br>
+ speak, piercing and querulous and clear, making the same demand
+for<br>
+ liberty.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you get out, madam?" I said, drawing near the hole in
+some<br>
+ perturbation.</p>
+
+<p>"Get out? Of course I can't," moaned the unknown female
+bitterly.<br>
+ "They won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told
+them<br>
+ I'd call the police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody
+comes.<br>
+ They could keep me as long as they liked only--"</p>
+
+<p>I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with
+my<br>
+ stick, incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert
+held<br>
+ my arm hard, held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity
+as<br>
+ if he desired to stop me, but did not desire to be observed to
+do<br>
+ so. I paused a moment, and in the act swung slightly round,
+so<br>
+ that I was facing the supporting wall of the front door steps.
+The<br>
+ act froze me into a sudden stillness like that of Rupert, for
+a<br>
+ figure almost as motionless as the pillars of the portico,
+but<br>
+ unmistakably human, had put his head out from between the<br>
+ doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the
+lighted<br>
+ lamps of the street was just behind his head, throwing it
+into<br>
+ abrupt darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen
+of<br>
+ his face beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring
+at<br>
+ us. I must say I thought Rupert's calmness magnificent. He
+rang<br>
+ the area bell quite idly, and went on talking to me with the
+easy<br>
+ end of a conversation which had never had any beginning. The
+black<br>
+ glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost thought
+it<br>
+ was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was
+golden<br>
+ with gaslight as the basement door was opened suddenly and a
+small<br>
+ and decorous housemaid stood in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Pray excuse me," said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived
+to<br>
+ make somehow or other at once affable and underbred, "but we<br>
+ thought perhaps that you might do something for the Waifs
+and<br>
+ Strays. We don't expect--"</p>
+
+<p>"Not here," said the small servant, with the incomparable
+severity<br>
+ of the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door
+in<br>
+ our faces.</p>
+
+<p>"Very sad, very sad--the indifference of these people," said
+the<br>
+ philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps.
+As<br>
+ we did so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly<br>
+ disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what do you make of that?" asked Rupert, slapping
+his<br>
+ gloves together when we got into the street.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under
+such<br>
+ conditions I had but one thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think," I said a trifle timidly, "that we had
+better<br>
+ tell your brother?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if you like," said Rupert, in a lordly way. "He is
+quite<br>
+ near, as I promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station.
+Shall<br>
+ we take a cab? Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him."</p>
+
+<p>Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat<br>
+ deserted look. After a little looking about we discovered
+Basil<br>
+ Grant with his great head and his great white hat blocking
+the<br>
+ ticket-office window. I thought at first that he was taking
+a<br>
+ ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly long time
+about<br>
+ it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing religion with the<br>
+ booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the
+hole<br>
+ in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time<br>
+ before he would talk of anything but the growth of an
+Oriental<br>
+ fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by
+some<br>
+ of the official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last
+we<br>
+ managed to get him to understand that we had made an
+astounding<br>
+ discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively,
+walking<br>
+ between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we told him in
+a<br>
+ rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington,
+of<br>
+ the equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement,
+and<br>
+ the man staring from the porch. At length he said:</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ "If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must
+be<br>
+ careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go
+twice<br>
+ on the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different<br>
+ pretext would look worse. You may be quite certain that the<br>
+ inquisitive gentleman who looked at you looked thoroughly, and
+will<br>
+ wear, so to speak, your portraits next to his heart. If you want
+to<br>
+ find out if there is anything in this without a police raid I
+fancy<br>
+ you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see them."</p>
+
+<p>His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight
+of<br>
+ the house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last
+pallor<br>
+ of twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently
+it<br>
+ was.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think it's safe, Basil," said his brother, pausing,
+a<br>
+ little pale, under the lamp, "to go into that place alone?
+Of<br>
+ course we shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but
+these<br>
+ devils might do something--something sudden--or odd. I can't
+feel<br>
+ it's safe."</p>
+
+<p>"I know of nothing that is safe," said Basil composedly,
+"except,<br>
+ possibly--death," and he went up the steps and rang at the
+bell.<br>
+ When the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting
+a<br>
+ square of gaslight in the gathering dark, and then closed with
+a<br>
+ bang, burying our friend inside, we could not repress a
+shudder.<br>
+ It had been like the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips
+of<br>
+ some evil leviathan. A freshening night breeze began to blow
+up<br>
+ the street, and we turned up the collars of our coats. At the
+end<br>
+ of twenty minutes, in which we had scarcely moved or spoken,
+we<br>
+ were as cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from
+apprehension<br>
+ than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an abrupt movement<br>
+ towards the house.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't stand this," he began, but almost as he spoke sprang
+back<br>
+ into the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of
+the<br>
+ black house front, and the burly figure of Basil was
+silhouetted<br>
+ against it coming out. He was roaring with laughter and talking
+so<br>
+ loudly that you could have heard every syllable across the
+street.<br>
+ Another voice, or, possibly, two voices, were laughing and
+talking<br>
+ back at him from within.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no," Basil was calling out, with a sort of
+hilarious<br>
+ hostility. "That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy
+of<br>
+ all. It's the soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter
+of<br>
+ cosmic forces. When you see a cosmic force you don't like,
+trick<br>
+ it, my boy. But I must really be off."</p>
+
+<p>"Come and pitch into us again," came the laughing voice from
+out<br>
+ of the house. "We still have some bones unbroken."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks very much, I will--good night," shouted Grant, who had
+by<br>
+ this time reached the street.</p>
+
+<p>"Good night," came the friendly call in reply, before the
+door<br>
+ closed.</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, "what are we
+to<br>
+ do?"</p>
+
+<p>The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>"What is to be done, Basil?" I repeated in uncontrollable<br>
+ excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure," said Basil doubtfully. "What do you say to
+getting<br>
+ some dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight?
+I<br>
+ tried to get those fellows to come, but they couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>We stared blankly.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to the Court Theatre?" repeated Rupert. "What would be the
+good<br>
+ of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good? What do you mean?" answered Basil, staring also. "Have
+you<br>
+ turned Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun,
+of<br>
+ course."</p>
+
+<p>"But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!"
+cried<br>
+ Rupert. "What about the poor woman locked up in that house?
+Shall I<br>
+ go for the police?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he
+laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that," he said. "I'd forgotten that. That's all right.
+Some<br>
+ mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But
+I'm<br>
+ sorry those fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one
+of<br>
+ these green omnibuses? There is a restaurant in Sloane
+Square."</p>
+
+<p>"I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us," I
+said<br>
+ irritably. "How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be
+a<br>
+ mere private affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder,
+for<br>
+ all I know, be private affairs? If you found a corpse in a
+man's<br>
+ drawing-room, would you think it bad taste to talk about it
+just<br>
+ as if it was a confounded dado or an infernal etching?"</p>
+
+<p>Basil laughed heartily.</p>
+
+<p>"That's very forcible," he said. "As a matter of fact, though,
+I<br>
+ know it's all right in this case. And there comes the green<br>
+ omnibus."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know it's all right in this ease?" persisted
+his<br>
+ brother angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear chap, the thing's obvious," answered Basil, holding
+a<br>
+ return ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his
+waistcoat<br>
+ pocket. "Those two fellows never committed a crime in their
+lives.<br>
+ They're not the kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny?
+I<br>
+ want to get a paper before the omnibus comes."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, curse the paper!" cried Rupert, in a fury. "Do you mean
+to<br>
+ tell me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow<br>
+ creature in pitch darkness in a private dungeon, because
+you've<br>
+ had ten minutes' talk with the keepers of it and thought
+them<br>
+ rather good men?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good men do commit crimes sometimes," said Basil, taking
+the<br>
+ ticket out of his mouth. "But this kind of good man doesn't<br>
+ commit that kind of crime. Well, shall we get on this
+omnibus?"</p>
+
+<p>The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering
+along<br>
+ the dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the
+curb,<br>
+ and for an instant it was touch and go whether we should all
+have<br>
+ leaped on to it and been borne away to the restaurant and
+the<br>
+ theatre.</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, "I
+simply<br>
+ won't leave this street and this house."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor will I," said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his
+fingers.<br>
+ "There's some black work going on there. If I left it I
+should<br>
+ never sleep again."</p>
+
+<p>Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course if you feel like that," he said, "we'll
+investigate<br>
+ further. You'll find it's all right, though. They're only
+two<br>
+ young Oxford fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather
+infected<br>
+ with this pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution and
+all<br>
+ that."</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, "that we
+shall<br>
+ enlighten you further about their ethics."</p>
+
+<p>"And may I ask," said Basil gloomily, "what it is that you
+propose<br>
+ to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I propose, first of all," said Rupert, "to get into this
+house;<br>
+ secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men;
+thirdly,<br>
+ to knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the
+house."</p>
+
+<p>Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken
+for<br>
+ an instant with one of his sudden laughs.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor little boys," he said. "But it almost serves them right
+for<br>
+ holding such silly views, after all," and he quaked again
+with<br>
+ amusement "there's something confoundedly Darwinian about
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you mean to help us?" said Rupert.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, I'll be in it," answered Basil, "if it's only to
+prevent<br>
+ your doing the poor chaps any harm."</p>
+
+<p>He was standing in the rear of our little procession,
+looking<br>
+ indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant
+the<br>
+ door opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with
+urbanity.</p>
+
+<p>"So sorry to haunt you like this," he said. "I met two
+friends<br>
+ outside who very much want to know you. May I bring them
+in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Delighted, of course," said a young voice, the unmistakable
+voice<br>
+ of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not
+by<br>
+ the decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in<br>
+ person. He was a short, but shapely young gentleman, with
+curly<br>
+ dark hair and a square, snub-nosed face. He wore slippers and
+a<br>
+ sort of blazer of some incredible college purple.</p>
+
+<p>"This way," he said; "mind the steps by the staircase. This
+house<br>
+ is more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from
+its<br>
+ snobbish exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in
+the<br>
+ place really."</p>
+
+<p>"That," said Rupert, with a savage smile, "I can quite
+believe."</p>
+
+<p>We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by
+the<br>
+ young inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered
+with<br>
+ magazines and books ranging from Dante to detective stories.
+The<br>
+ other youth, who stood with his back to the fire smoking a
+corncob,<br>
+ was big and burly, with dead brown hair brushed forward and
+a<br>
+ Norfolk jacket. He was that particular type of man whose
+every<br>
+ feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet who is, you
+would<br>
+ say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>"Any more arguments?" he said, when introductions had been<br>
+ effected. "I must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon<br>
+ eminent men of science such as we. I've half a mind to chuck<br>
+ my D.Sc. and turn minor poet."</p>
+
+<p>"Bosh," answered Grant. "I never said a word against eminent
+men<br>
+ of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy
+which<br>
+ supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but
+a<br>
+ sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When
+people<br>
+ talked about the fall of man they knew they were talking about
+a<br>
+ mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now that they talk
+about<br>
+ the survival of the fittest they think they do understand
+it,<br>
+ whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an
+elaborately<br>
+ false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian movement
+has<br>
+ made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of
+talking<br>
+ unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk
+unscientifically<br>
+ about science."</p>
+
+<p>"That is all very well," said the big young man, whose
+name<br>
+ appeared to be Burrows. "Of course, in a sense, science,
+like<br>
+ mathematics or the violin, can only be perfectly understood
+by<br>
+ specialists. Still, the rudiments may be of public use.
+Greenwood<br>
+ here," indicating the little man in the blazer, "doesn't know
+one<br>
+ note of music from another. Still, he knows something. He
+knows<br>
+ enough to take off his hat when they play `God save the King'.
+He<br>
+ doesn't take it off by mistake when they play `Oh, dem
+Golden<br>
+ Slippers'. Just in the same way science--"</p>
+
+<p>Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an
+argument<br>
+ uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly<br>
+ legitimate. Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung
+an<br>
+ arm round his throat, and bent the giant backwards.</p>
+
+<p>"Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne," he called out, and
+before<br>
+ I knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in
+the<br>
+ purple blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like
+a<br>
+ whalebone, but I was heavier and had taken him utterly by
+surprise.<br>
+ I twitched one of his feet from under him; he swung for a moment
+on<br>
+ the single foot, and then we fell with a crash amid the litter
+of<br>
+ newspapers, myself on top.</p>
+
+<p>My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear
+Basil's<br>
+ voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard
+the<br>
+ beginning.</p>
+
+<p>". . . wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear
+sir,<br>
+ and I need not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's
+old<br>
+ friends against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me,<br>
+ therefore, in tying you up in this antimacassar, to make it
+as<br>
+ commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be while. . ."</p>
+
+<p>I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling
+in the<br>
+ garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his
+mighty<br>
+ hands. Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so
+was<br>
+ Mr Burrows; how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head
+was<br>
+ held back by Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave went over
+his<br>
+ whole frame. An instant after his head plunged forward like
+a<br>
+ bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung head over heels, a
+catherine<br>
+ wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him. Simultaneously
+the<br>
+ bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him also to
+the<br>
+ ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar,
+leaped<br>
+ at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing
+the<br>
+ waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously
+to<br>
+ his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it
+now.</p>
+
+<p>Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending
+peals<br>
+ through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet,
+and<br>
+ before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few
+moments,<br>
+ could even lift his head from the floor, two footmen were in
+the<br>
+ room. Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were now<br>
+ outnumbered. Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves
+upon<br>
+ me, crushing me back into the corner upon the wreck of the
+paper<br>
+ basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned him against
+the<br>
+ wall. Rupert lifted himself on his elbow, but he was still
+dazed.</p>
+
+<p>In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice
+of<br>
+ Basil come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.</p>
+
+<p>"Now this," he said, "is what I call enjoying oneself."</p>
+
+<p>I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against
+the<br>
+ bookcase, from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his.
+To<br>
+ my astonishment his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure,
+like<br>
+ those of a child heated by a favourite game.</p>
+
+<p>I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was
+on<br>
+ top of me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me
+to<br>
+ him. He turned quickly to come to reinforce the two who were<br>
+ mastering Basil. The latter's head was already sinking lower
+and<br>
+ lower, like a leaking ship, as his enemies pressed him down.
+He<br>
+ flung up one hand just as I thought him falling and hung on to
+a<br>
+ huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards discovered,
+of<br>
+ St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across
+the<br>
+ room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome
+bodily<br>
+ out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the
+air,<br>
+ so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him
+over<br>
+ like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's
+stiffness<br>
+ broke, and he sank, his enemies closing over him.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging
+as<br>
+ best he could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were
+rolling<br>
+ over each other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by
+their<br>
+ falls, but Rupert certainly the more so. I was still
+successfully<br>
+ held down. The floor was a sea of torn and trampled papers
+and<br>
+ magazines, like an immense waste-paper basket. Burrows and
+his<br>
+ companion were almost up to the knees in them, as in a drift
+of<br>
+ dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a
+sheet<br>
+ of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like
+some<br>
+ fantastic trouser frill.</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful
+bodies,<br>
+ might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the
+broad<br>
+ back of Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain
+bend<br>
+ of effort in it as if my friend still needed some holding
+down.<br>
+ Suddenly that broad back swayed hither and thither. It was
+swaying<br>
+ on one leg; Basil, somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows'
+huge<br>
+ fists and those of the footman were battering Basil's sunken
+head<br>
+ like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant's ankle out of
+his<br>
+ sudden and savage grip. While his own head was forced slowly
+down<br>
+ in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor was
+being<br>
+ forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple
+face.<br>
+ Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook<br>
+ together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill
+the<br>
+ floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows
+like<br>
+ battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then
+he<br>
+ sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand
+and<br>
+ another in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before
+he<br>
+ knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil
+sprang<br>
+ at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and
+between<br>
+ them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let go
+and<br>
+ turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released,
+and,<br>
+ to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The
+other<br>
+ footman, bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was
+stumbling<br>
+ out of the room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after
+him,<br>
+ seeing that the battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride
+the<br>
+ pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the pinioned Mr
+Burrows.</p>
+
+<p>To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back,
+spoke<br>
+ in a perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.</p>
+
+<p>"And now, gentlemen," he said, "since you have got your own
+way,<br>
+ perhaps you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this
+is?"</p>
+
+<p>"This," said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at
+his<br>
+ captive, "this is what we call the survival of the fittest."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout
+the<br>
+ latter phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether
+himself<br>
+ again at the end of it. Springing up from the prostrate
+Greenwood,<br>
+ and knotting a handkerchief round his left hand, which was
+bleeding<br>
+ from a blow, he sang out quite coolly:</p>
+
+<p>"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and
+spear<br>
+ and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison<br>
+ downstairs."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in
+a<br>
+ leisured way in an armchair. "Don't hurry for us," he said,<br>
+ glancing round at the litter of the room, "we have all the<br>
+ illustrated papers."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed
+him<br>
+ even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as
+I<br>
+ passed through the room, the passages and the kitchen
+stairs,<br>
+ Basil's voice continuing conversationally:</p>
+
+<p>"And now, Mr Burrows," he said, settling himself sociably in
+the<br>
+ chair, "there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that
+amusing<br>
+ argument. I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on
+your<br>
+ back on the floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more
+notion<br>
+ why you are there than the man in the moon. A
+conversationalist<br>
+ like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped
+by<br>
+ any bodily posture. You were saying, if I remember right, when
+this<br>
+ incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science
+might<br>
+ with advantage be made public."</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely," said the large man on the floor in an easy tone.
+"I<br>
+ hold that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as
+seen<br>
+ by science can be. . ."</p>
+
+<p>And here the voices died away as we descended into the
+basement. I<br>
+ noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable
+controversy.<br>
+ Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our<br>
+ proceedings with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows,<br>
+ however, was all philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I
+say,<br>
+ together, and sank deeper and deeper into the under-world of
+that<br>
+ mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to us somewhat
+more<br>
+ Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its<br>
+ semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.</p>
+
+<p>The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a
+house;<br>
+ doors that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery,
+the<br>
+ pantry, the servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all
+the<br>
+ doors with indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened
+on<br>
+ entirely empty apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke
+the<br>
+ door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness
+of<br>
+ the sealed, unlighted room.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man
+calling<br>
+ into an abyss:</p>
+
+<p>"Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held
+you<br>
+ captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came
+to<br>
+ deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot.
+You<br>
+ are free."</p>
+
+<p>For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there
+was<br>
+ a dead silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering
+and<br>
+ moaning. We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if
+we<br>
+ had not happened to have heard it before. It was unmistakably
+the<br>
+ voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just
+as<br>
+ we had heard her demand it.</p>
+
+<p>"Has anybody got a match?" said Rupert grimly. "I fancy we
+have<br>
+ come pretty near the end of this business."</p>
+
+<p>I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large,
+bare,<br>
+ yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other
+end<br>
+ of it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers
+and<br>
+ dropped, leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed
+something<br>
+ more practical--an iron gas bracket just above my head. I
+struck<br>
+ another match and lit the gas. And we found ourselves suddenly
+and<br>
+ seriously in the presence of the captive.</p>
+
+<p>At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean<br>
+ breakfast-room sat an elderly lady with a singularly high
+colour<br>
+ and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly
+to<br>
+ relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelian black
+eyebrows<br>
+ and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her<br>
+ piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background
+of<br>
+ the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
+place;<br>
+ at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in
+the<br>
+ wood about an hour before.</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, "permit
+me<br>
+ to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free.
+Your<br>
+ complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the<br>
+ street, and we have therefore ventured to come to your
+rescue."</p>
+
+<p>The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked
+at us<br>
+ for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a
+parrot.<br>
+ Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:</p>
+
+<p>"Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you
+say<br>
+ you had rescued me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, madam," said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. "We
+have<br>
+ very satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We
+have<br>
+ settled affairs with them very satisfactorily."</p>
+
+<p>The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards
+us.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?" she
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>"We persuaded them, my dear madam," said Rupert, laughing,
+"by<br>
+ knocking them down and tying them up. But what is the
+matter?"</p>
+
+<p>To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back
+to<br>
+ her seat by the window.</p>
+
+<p>"Do I understand," she said, with the air of a person about
+to<br>
+ begin knitting, "that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and
+tied<br>
+ him up?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have," said Rupert proudly; "we have resisted their
+oppression<br>
+ and conquered it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, thanks," answered the old lady, and sat down by the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>A considerable pause followed.</p>
+
+<p>"The road is quite clear for you, madam," said Rupert
+pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver
+crest<br>
+ at us for an instant.</p>
+
+<p>"But what about Greenwood and Burrows?" she said. "What did
+I<br>
+ understand you to say had become of them?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are lying on the floor upstairs," said Rupert,
+chuckling.<br>
+ "Tied hand and foot."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that settles it," said the old lady, coming with a kind
+of<br>
+ bang into her seat again, "I must stop where I am."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert looked bewildered.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop where you are?" he said. "Why should you stop any
+longer<br>
+ where you are? What power can force you now to stop in this<br>
+ miserable cell?"</p>
+
+<p>"The question rather is," said the old lady, with composure,
+"what<br>
+ power can force me to go anywhere else?"</p>
+
+<p>We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us
+both.</p>
+
+<p>At last I said, "Do you really mean to say that we are to
+leave<br>
+ you here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you don't intend to tie me up," she said, "and
+carry me<br>
+ off? I certainly shall not go otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear madam," cried out Rupert, in a radiant
+exasperation,<br>
+ "we heard you with our own ears crying because you could not
+get<br>
+ out."</p>
+
+<p>"Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things," replied
+the<br>
+ captive grimly. "I suppose I did break down a bit and lose
+my<br>
+ temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for
+all<br>
+ that."</p>
+
+<p>"Some sense of honour?" repeated Rupert, and the last light
+of<br>
+ intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an
+idiot<br>
+ with rolling eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned
+yet<br>
+ once more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. "Can we
+do<br>
+ nothing for you, madam?" I said forlornly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said the lady, "if you are particularly anxious to do
+me a<br>
+ little favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it
+with<br>
+ his vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to
+the<br>
+ door of the sitting-room and scene of battle.</p>
+
+<p>"Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true," Mr Burrows
+was<br>
+ saying, lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; "but
+we<br>
+ must consider the matter as it appears to our sense. The
+origin<br>
+ of morality. . ."</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," cried Rupert, gasping, "she won't come out."</p>
+
+<p>"Who won't come out?" asked Basil, a little cross at being<br>
+ interrupted in an argument.</p>
+
+<p>"The lady downstairs," replied Rupert. "The lady who was
+locked up.<br>
+ She won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us
+to<br>
+ let these fellows loose."</p>
+
+<p>"And a jolly sensible suggestion," cried Basil, and with a
+bound he<br>
+ was on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was
+unknotting<br>
+ his bonds with hands and teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood."</p>
+
+<p>In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman
+in the<br>
+ purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings
+as<br>
+ particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on
+the<br>
+ other hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Basil, in his cheeriest way, "I think we must
+be<br>
+ getting away. We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too
+much<br>
+ regard for you to stand on ceremony. If I may so express
+myself,<br>
+ we've made ourselves at home. Good night. Thanks so much.
+Come<br>
+ along, Rupert."</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," said Rupert desperately, "for God's sake come and see
+what<br>
+ you can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the
+discomfort<br>
+ out of my mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a<br>
+ mistake. But these gentlemen won't mind perhaps. . ."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian
+uproariousness.<br>
+ "No, no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole.
+Make<br>
+ a tour of the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house,
+I<br>
+ assure you."</p>
+
+<p><br>
+ This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect
+from<br>
+ others which I have narrated. I had been through many wild
+days<br>
+ with Basil Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and
+the<br>
+ moon seemed to have gone mad. But it had almost invariably
+happened<br>
+ that towards the end of the day and its adventure things had<br>
+ cleared themselves like the sky after rain, and a luminous
+and<br>
+ quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me. But this day's work
+was<br>
+ destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we left
+that<br>
+ house, ten minutes afterwards, one half-witted touch was
+added<br>
+ which rolled all our minds in cloud. If Rupert's head had
+suddenly<br>
+ fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of<br>
+ Greenwood's shoulders, we could scarcely have been more
+suddenly<br>
+ stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We had to go
+to<br>
+ bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it
+and<br>
+ let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As will be
+seen,<br>
+ it was not until months afterwards that by another accident and
+in<br>
+ another way it was explained. For the present I only state
+what<br>
+ happened.</p>
+
+<p>When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again,
+Rupert<br>
+ leading, the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door
+of<br>
+ the prison again closed. Throwing it open we found the place
+again<br>
+ as black as pitch. The old lady, if she was still there, had
+turned<br>
+ out the gas: she seemed to have a weird preference for sitting
+in<br>
+ the dark.</p>
+
+<p>Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old
+lady<br>
+ turned her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the
+strong<br>
+ gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump,
+she<br>
+ sprang up and swept a sort of old-fashioned curtsey or
+reverence. I<br>
+ looked quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to whom it was natural
+to<br>
+ suppose this subservience had been offered. I felt irritated
+at<br>
+ what was implied in this subservience, and desired to see the
+faces<br>
+ of the tyrants as they received it. To my surprise they did
+not<br>
+ seem to have seen it at all: Burrows was paring his nails with
+a<br>
+ small penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the group and
+had<br>
+ hardly entered the room. And then an amazing fact became
+apparent.<br>
+ It was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the group, the
+golden<br>
+ gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His face wore
+an<br>
+ expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of a
+very<br>
+ grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a restrained bow.
+It<br>
+ was he who had acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was
+he,<br>
+ beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really
+been<br>
+ directed.</p>
+
+<p>"So I hear," he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice,
+"I<br>
+ hear, madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you.
+But<br>
+ without success."</p>
+
+<p>"No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you," answered
+the<br>
+ lady with a high colour. "But you have not found me guilty
+of<br>
+ treachery."</p>
+
+<p>"I willingly attest it, madam," replied Basil, in the same
+level<br>
+ tones, "and the fact is that I am so much gratified with
+your<br>
+ exhibition of loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of<br>
+ exercising some very large discretionary powers. You would
+not<br>
+ leave this room at the request of these gentlemen. But you
+know<br>
+ that you can safely leave it at mine."</p>
+
+<p>The captive made another reverence. "I have never complained
+of<br>
+ your injustice," she said. "I need scarcely say what I think
+of<br>
+ your generosity."</p>
+
+<p>And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of
+the<br>
+ room, Basil holding the door open for her.</p>
+
+<p>He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. "This
+will<br>
+ be a relief to you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it will," replied that immovable young gentleman with a
+face<br>
+ like a sphinx.</p>
+
+<p>We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and
+dazed<br>
+ as if we had fallen into it from some high tower.</p>
+
+<p>"Basil," said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, "I always
+thought<br>
+ you were my brother. But are you a man? I mean--are you only
+a<br>
+ man?"</p>
+
+<p>"At present," replied Basil, "my mere humanity is proved by
+one<br>
+ of the most unmistakable symbols--hunger. We are too late
+for<br>
+ the theatre in Sloane Square. But we are not too late for
+the<br>
+ restaurant. Here comes the green omnibus!" and he had leaped
+on<br>
+ it before we could speak.</p>
+
+<p>
+------------------------------------------------------------------------</p>
+
+<p>As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly
+entered<br>
+ my room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air
+of<br>
+ having jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with
+him<br>
+ upon the latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed
+to<br>
+ himself no less a thing than the discovery of the actual
+origin,<br>
+ whereabouts, and headquarters of the source of all our joys
+and<br>
+ sorrows--the Club of Queer Trades. I should expand this story
+for<br>
+ ever if I explained how ultimately we ran this strange entity
+to<br>
+ its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting things.
+The<br>
+ tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting
+of<br>
+ roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a
+cellar,<br>
+ the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding of the<br>
+ subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer
+Trades.</p>
+
+<p>I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never
+a<br>
+ stranger one than that I felt when I came out of those
+rambling,<br>
+ sightless, and seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden<br>
+ splendour of a sumptuous and hospitable dining-room,
+surrounded<br>
+ upon almost every side by faces that I knew. There was Mr<br>
+ Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated between the two
+brisk<br>
+ young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
+Professional<br>
+ Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
+Adventure<br>
+ and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented
+the<br>
+ dancing Language.</p>
+
+<p>As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into
+their<br>
+ chairs, and with the very action the vacancy of the
+presidential<br>
+ seat gaped at us like a missing tooth.</p>
+
+<p>"The president's not here," said Mr P. G. Northover,
+turning<br>
+ suddenly to Professor Chadd.</p>
+
+<p>"N--no," said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary<br>
+ vagueness. "I can't imagine where he is."</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens," said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, "I really
+feel a<br>
+ little nervous. I'll go and see." And he ran out of the
+room.</p>
+
+<p>An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a
+timid<br>
+ ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>"He's there, gentlemen--he's there all right--he's coming in
+now,"<br>
+ he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling
+the<br>
+ beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be
+who<br>
+ was the first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we
+thought<br>
+ indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of madmen: what<br>
+ fantastic was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with
+so<br>
+ loyal an expectation?</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room
+was<br>
+ filled and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil
+Grant,<br>
+ smiling and in evening dress, took his seat at the head of
+the<br>
+ table.</p>
+
+<p>How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am
+a<br>
+ person particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the
+club<br>
+ dinner. But on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and
+endless<br>
+ string of courses. Hors-d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as<br>
+ herrings, soup seemed a sort of ocean, larks were ducks,
+ducks<br>
+ were ostriches until that dinner was over. The cheese course
+was<br>
+ maddening. I had often heard of the moon being made of green<br>
+ cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of
+the<br>
+ moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and eating
+and<br>
+ drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he
+was<br>
+ there, the king of these capering idiots.</p>
+
+<p>At last came the moment which I knew must in some way
+enlighten us,<br>
+ the time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant
+rose<br>
+ to his feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen," he said, "it is a custom in this society that
+the<br>
+ president for the year opens the proceedings not by any
+general<br>
+ toast of sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a
+brief<br>
+ account of his trade. We then drink to that calling and to all
+who<br>
+ follow it. It is my business, as the senior member, to open
+by<br>
+ stating my claim to membership of this club. Years ago,
+gentlemen,<br>
+ I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to do justice and
+to<br>
+ administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in my
+work,<br>
+ as it was, I was not touching even the fringe of justice. I
+was<br>
+ seated in the seat of the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and<br>
+ ermine; nevertheless, I held a small and lowly and futile post.
+I<br>
+ had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and my red and
+gold<br>
+ was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me taut
+and<br>
+ passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend
+to<br>
+ relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew
+all<br>
+ the time, by the light of my living common sense, that they
+would<br>
+ have been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a
+few<br>
+ words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West
+Highlands.<br>
+ Then, as this grew on me, there grew on me continuously the
+sense<br>
+ of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a
+whisper<br>
+ or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had
+to<br>
+ say. Then came the time when I publicly blasphemed the whole
+bosh,<br>
+ was classed as a madman and melted from public life."</p>
+
+<p>Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only
+Rupert and<br>
+ I who were listening with intensity to this statement.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I
+offered<br>
+ myself privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely
+moral<br>
+ differences. Before very long these unofficial courts of
+honour<br>
+ (kept strictly secret) had spread over the whole of society.
+People<br>
+ were tried before me not for the practical trifles for which
+nobody<br>
+ cares, such as committing a murder, or keeping a dog without
+a<br>
+ licence. My criminals were tried for the faults which really
+make<br>
+ social life impossible. They were tried before me for
+selfishness,<br>
+ or for an impossible vanity, or for scandalmongering, or for<br>
+ stinginess to guests or dependents. Of course these courts had
+no<br>
+ sort of real coercive powers. The fulfilment of their
+punishments<br>
+ rested entirely on the honour of the ladies and gentlemen
+involved,<br>
+ including the honour of the culprits. But you would be amazed
+to<br>
+ know how completely our orders were always obeyed. Only lately
+I<br>
+ had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South Kensington
+whom<br>
+ I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means
+of<br>
+ breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely
+refused<br>
+ to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had
+been<br>
+ inopportune enough to rescue her."</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen
+agape.<br>
+ So, for the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was
+the<br>
+ explanation of the old lady's strange discontent and her
+still<br>
+ stranger content with her lot. She was one of the culprits of
+his<br>
+ Voluntary Criminal Court. She was one of the clients of his
+Queer<br>
+ Trade.</p>
+
+<p>We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses,
+the<br>
+ health of Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense
+of<br>
+ everything having been put right, the sense men will have
+when<br>
+ they come into the presence of God. We dimly heard Basil
+say:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and
+Romance<br>
+ Agency."</p>
+
+<p>And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement
+he<br>
+ had made long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where
+it<br>
+ had begun, like a true cycle.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Club of Queer Trades, by G.K.Chesterton
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES ***
+
+This file should be named tcoqt10h.htm or tcoqt10h.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, tcoqt11h.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, tcoqt10ha.txt
+
+This HTM version was produced by Walter Debeuf
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart [hart@pobox.com]
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/old/tcoqt10h.zip b/old/tcoqt10h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0be325e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/tcoqt10h.zip