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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Manalive
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: April, 1999 [eBook #1718]
+[Most recently updated: April 28, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Jim Henry III, Martin Ward and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANALIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+MANALIVE
+
+By G. K. Chesterton  
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
+1912
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ Part I — THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH
+ Chapter I — How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
+ Chapter II — The Luggage of an Optimist
+ Chapter III — The Banner of Beacon
+ Chapter IV — The Garden of the God
+ Chapter V — The Allegorical Practical Joker
+
+ Part II — THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH
+ Chapter I — The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge
+ Chapter II — The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge
+ Chapter III — The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge
+ Chapter IV — The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge
+ Chapter V — How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
+
+
+A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
+and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of
+forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and
+corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a
+blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke
+like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor’s
+papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the
+candle by which a boy read “Treasure Island” and wrapping him in
+roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and
+carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in
+a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line
+as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five
+children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat
+imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious
+she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves
+still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank
+walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same
+intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the
+Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the
+hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far
+beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode
+heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a
+telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they
+were like the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and
+swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of
+seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired and
+authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the
+good wind that blows nobody harm.
+
+The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern
+heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was
+round about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up
+astonished at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of
+glaciers and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage,
+which it has never been able to shake off. At some stage of those
+heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as
+desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that the
+last building, a boarding establishment called “Beacon House,” offered
+abruptly to the sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like
+the prow of some deserted ship.
+
+The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The proprietor of the
+boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons against
+whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both before and after all
+her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or rather
+under the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a
+clientele, mostly of young but listless folks. And there were actually
+five inmates standing disconsolately about the garden when the great
+gale broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea
+bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.
+
+All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up
+with cold cloud. Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the
+gray and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless
+interior. When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the
+cloudland left and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening
+gold. The burst of light released and the burst of air blowing seemed
+to come almost simultaneously; and the wind especially caught
+everything in a throttling violence. The bright short grass lay all one
+way like brushed hair. Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots
+like a dog at the collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the
+hunting and exterminating element. Now and again a twig would snap and
+fly like a bolt from an arbalist. The three men stood stiffly and
+aslant against the wind, as if leaning against a wall. The two ladies
+disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly, they were blown
+into the house. Their two frocks, blue and white, looked like two big
+broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale. Nor is such a
+poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic
+about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and unlifting
+day. Grass and garden trees seemed glittering with something at once
+good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland. It seemed like a
+strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.
+
+The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a white hat of
+the proportions of a parachute, which might have wafted her away into
+the coloured clouds of evening. She was their one splash of splendour,
+and irradiated wealth in that impecunious place (staying there
+temporarily with a friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund
+Hunt, brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous. On
+top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking; but
+she had not married, perhaps because there was always a crowd of men
+around her. She was not fast (though some might have called her
+vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once
+popular and inaccessible. A man felt as if he had fallen in love with
+Cleopatra, or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage
+door. Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
+she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
+and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a
+girlish melodrama swell again within her. To the crashing orchestration
+of the air the clouds rose like the curtain of some long-expected
+pantomime.
+
+Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this
+apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic and
+practical creatures alive. She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous
+niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay. But as the
+gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they took on the
+monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory stirred in
+her that was almost romance—a memory of a dusty volume of _Punch_ in an
+aunt’s house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops and croquet hoops
+and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part. This
+half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly, and
+Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion.
+Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness. In
+body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once
+long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent
+snake. The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel. It would
+be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so
+impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.
+Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door, before
+dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork, it was done
+already with the silent violence of her slim hands. She was light; but
+there was nothing leaping about her lightness. She spurned the ground,
+and she meant to spurn it. People talk of the pathos and failure of
+plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may
+succeed in everything but womanhood.
+
+“It’s enough to blow your head off,” said the young woman in white,
+going to the looking-glass.
+
+The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening
+gloves, and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an
+afternoon cloth for tea.
+
+“Enough to blow your head off, I say,” said Miss Rosamund Hunt, with
+the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches had always
+been safe for an encore.
+
+“Only your hat, I think,” said Diana Duke, “but I dare say that is
+sometimes more important.”
+
+Rosamund’s face showed for an instant the offence of a spoilt child,
+and then the humour of a very healthy person. She broke into a laugh
+and said, “Well, it would have to be a big wind to blow your head off.”
+
+There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from
+the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the
+dull walls with ruby and gold.
+
+“Somebody once told me,” said Rosamund Hunt, “that it’s easier to keep
+one’s head when one has lost one’s heart.”
+
+“Oh, don’t talk such rubbish,” said Diana with savage sharpness.
+
+Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but the wind was
+still stiffly blowing, and the three men who stood their ground might
+also have considered the problem of hats and heads. And, indeed, their
+position, touching hats, was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of
+the three abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to
+charge as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him. The
+second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles, and
+ultimately held it in his hand. The third had no hat, and, by his
+attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life. Perhaps this wind
+was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women, for there was much of
+the three men in this difference.
+
+The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and
+solidity. He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man,
+with flat fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young
+doctor by the name of Warner. But if his blondness and blandness seemed
+at first a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool. If
+Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money, he was the
+only person who had as yet found any kind of fame. His treatise on “The
+Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms” had been
+universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid and daring.
+In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not his fault
+if they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze with a
+poker.
+
+The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a
+small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness. It
+was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor was
+present; for Warner lived in no such ramshackle lodging-house, but in a
+professional palace in Harley Street. This young man was really the
+youngest and best-looking of the three. But he was one of those
+persons, both male and female, who seem doomed to be good-looking and
+insignificant. Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose
+the delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown and red as he
+stood blushing and blinking against the wind. He was one of those
+obvious unnoticeable people: every one knew that he was Arthur
+Inglewood, unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent, living on a little
+money of his own, and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography
+and cycling. Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there
+in the glare of golden sunset there was something about him indistinct,
+like one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.
+
+The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely sporting
+clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him look all the leaner.
+He had a long ironical face, blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an
+Irishman, and the blue chin of an actor. An Irishman he was, an actor
+he was not, except in the old days of Miss Hunt’s charades, being, as a
+matter of fact, an obscure and flippant journalist named Michael Moon.
+He had once been hazily supposed to be reading for the Bar; but (as
+Warner would say with his rather elephantine wit) it was mostly at
+another kind of bar that his friends found him. Moon, however, did not
+drink, nor even frequently get drunk; he simply was a gentleman who
+liked low company. This was partly because company is quieter than
+society: and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid (as apparently he did),
+it was chiefly because the barmaid did the talking. Moreover he would
+often bring other talent to assist her. He shared that strange trick of
+all men of his type, intellectual and without ambition—the trick of
+going about with his mental inferiors. There was a small resilient Jew
+named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house, a man whose negro
+vitality and vulgarity amused Michael so much that he went round with
+him from bar to bar, like the owner of a performing monkey.
+
+The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew
+clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven.
+One felt one might at last find something lighter than light. In the
+fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their colours
+again: the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One
+bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another, and his
+brown feathers were brushed with fire.
+
+“Inglewood,” said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird, “have
+you any friends?”
+
+Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad beaming
+face, said,—
+
+“Oh yes, I go out a great deal.”
+
+Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant, who
+spoke a moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young, as
+coming out of that brown and even dusty interior.
+
+“Really,” answered Inglewood, “I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with my old
+friends. The greatest friend I ever had was at school, a fellow named
+Smith. It’s odd you should mention it, because I was thinking of him
+to-day, though I haven’t seen him for seven or eight years. He was on
+the science side with me at school— a clever fellow though queer; and
+he went up to Oxford when I went to Germany. The fact is, it’s rather a
+sad story. I often asked him to come and see me, and when I heard
+nothing I made inquiries, you know. I was shocked to learn that poor
+Smith had gone off his head. The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course,
+some saying that he had recovered again; but they always say that.
+About a year ago I got a telegram from him myself. The telegram, I’m
+sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt.”
+
+“Quite so,” assented Dr. Warner stolidly; “insanity is generally
+incurable.”
+
+“So is sanity,” said the Irishman, and studied him with a dreary eye.
+
+“Symptoms?” asked the doctor. “What was this telegram?”
+
+“It’s a shame to joke about such things,” said Inglewood, in his
+honest, embarrassed way; “the telegram was Smith’s illness, not Smith.
+The actual words were, ‘Man found alive with two legs.’”
+
+“Alive with two legs,” repeated Michael, frowning. “Perhaps a version
+of alive and kicking? I don’t know much about people out of their
+senses; but I suppose they ought to be kicking.”
+
+“And people in their senses?” asked Warner, smiling.
+
+“Oh, they ought to be kicked,” said Michael with sudden heartiness.
+
+“The message is clearly insane,” continued the impenetrable Warner.
+“The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type. Even a
+baby does not expect to find a man with three legs.”
+
+“Three legs,” said Michael Moon, “would be very convenient in this
+wind.”
+
+A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them off
+their balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden. Beyond, all
+sorts of accidental objects could be seen scouring the wind-scoured
+sky—straws, sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a disappearing
+hat. Its disappearance, however, was not final; after an interval of
+minutes they saw it again, much larger and closer, like a white panama,
+towering up into the heavens like a balloon, staggering to and fro for
+an instant like a stricken kite, and then settling in the centre of
+their own lawn as falteringly as a fallen leaf.
+
+“Somebody’s lost a good hat,” said Dr. Warner shortly.
+
+Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall, flying
+after the fluttering panama. It was a big green umbrella. After that
+came hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone bag, and after that came a figure
+like a flying wheel of legs, as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
+
+But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs, it alighted
+upon two, like the man in the queer telegram. It took the form of a
+large light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes. He had bright
+blonde hair that the wind brushed back like a German’s, a flushed eager
+face like a cherub’s, and a prominent pointing nose, a little like a
+dog’s. His head, however, was by no means cherubic in the sense of
+being without a body. On the contrary, on his vast shoulders and shape
+generally gigantesque, his head looked oddly and unnaturally small.
+This gave rise to a scientific theory (which his conduct fully
+supported) that he was an idiot.
+
+Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward. His life was
+full of arrested half gestures of assistance. And even this prodigy of
+a big man in green, leaping the wall like a bright green grasshopper,
+did not paralyze that small altruism of his habits in such a matter as
+a lost hat. He was stepping forward to recover the green gentleman’s
+head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar like a bull’s.
+
+“Unsportsmanlike!” bellowed the big man. “Give it fair play, give it
+fair play!” And he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with
+burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in
+ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening
+and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a _pas
+de quatre_. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps
+and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to
+pick up the thread: “Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase
+their crowns... quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red
+hats... old English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at
+bay... mangled hounds... Got him!”
+
+As the wind rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky on
+his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat, missed it,
+and pitched sprawling face foremost on the grass. The hat rose over him
+like a bird in triumph. But its triumph was premature; for the lunatic,
+flung forward on his hands, threw up his boots behind, waved his two
+legs in the air like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought
+again of the telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet. A
+prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end.
+The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible blast, as by a
+strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between them and all
+objects about them. But as the large man fell back in a sitting posture
+and solemnly crowned himself with the hat, Michael found, to his
+incredulous surprise, that he had been holding his breath, like a man
+watching a duel.
+
+While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy, another
+short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending very quick,
+swallowed in abrupt silence. The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner’s
+official hat sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an
+airship, and in almost cresting a garden tree was caught in the topmost
+branches. Another hat was gone. Those in that garden felt themselves
+caught in an unaccustomed eddy of things happening; no one seemed to
+know what would blow away next. Before they could speculate, the
+cheering and hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up the tree,
+swinging himself from fork to fork with his strong, bent, grasshopper
+legs, and still giving forth his gasping, mysterious comments.
+
+“Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls
+nesting in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers...
+gone to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours...
+belongs to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it
+up!”
+
+The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering wind
+like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire. The
+green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold,
+was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck
+did not break with the weight of his big body. He was up there among
+the last tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still
+talking to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in
+little gasps. He might well be out of breath, for his whole
+preposterous raid had gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once
+like a football, swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the
+tree like a rocket. The other three men seemed buried under incident
+piled on incident— a wild world where one thing began before another
+thing left off. All three had the first thought. The tree had been
+there for the five years they had known the boarding-house. Each one of
+them was active and strong. No one of them had even thought of climbing
+it. Beyond that, Inglewood felt first the mere fact of colour. The
+bright brisk leaves, the bleak blue sky, the wild green arms and legs,
+reminded him irrationally of something glowing in his infancy,
+something akin to a gaudy man on a golden tree; perhaps it was only a
+painted monkey on a stick. Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more of a
+humourist, was touched on a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old,
+young theatricals with Rosamund, and was amused to find himself almost
+quoting Shakespeare—
+
+“For valour. Is not love a Hercules,
+Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?”
+
+
+Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation
+that the Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward with
+rather rattling rapidity.
+
+He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next. The man in
+green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky
+broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of
+twigs. It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of
+its passage, a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it
+in every direction, a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it like a
+concertina; nor can it be said that the obliging gentleman with the
+sharp nose showed any adequate tenderness for its structure when he
+finally unhooked it from its place. When he had found it, however, his
+proceedings were by some counted singular. He waved it with a loud
+whoop of triumph, and then immediately appeared to fall backwards off
+the tree, to which, however, he remained attached by his long strong
+legs, like a monkey swung by his tail. Hanging thus head downwards
+above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely proceeded to drop the battered
+silk cylinder upon his brows. “Every man a king,” explained the
+inverted philosopher, “every hat (consequently) a crown. But this is a
+crown out of heaven.”
+
+And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved
+away with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming,
+strangely enough, to wish for his former decoration in its present
+state.
+
+“Wrong, wrong!” cried the obliging person hilariously. “Always wear
+uniform, even if it’s shabby uniform! Ritualists may always be untidy.
+Go to a dance with soot on your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front.
+Huntsman wears old coat, but old pink coat. Wear a topper, even if it’s
+got no top. It’s the symbol that counts, old cock. Take your hat,
+because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all off by the bark,
+dears, and its brim not the least bit curled; but for old sakes’ sake
+it is still, dears, the nobbiest tile in the world.”
+
+Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed the
+shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician, and fell
+on his feet among the other men, still talking, beaming and breathless.
+
+“Why don’t they make more games out of wind?” he asked in some
+excitement. “Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites? Why,
+I thought of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing
+that tree. Here’s one of them: you take a lot of pepper—”
+
+“I think,” interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness, “that your games
+are already sufficiently interesting. Are you, may I ask, a
+professional acrobat on a tour, or a travelling advertisement of Sunny
+Jim? How and why do you display all this energy for clearing walls and
+climbing trees in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?”
+
+The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it, appeared to
+grow confidential.
+
+“Well, it’s a trick of my own,” he confessed candidly. “I do it by
+having two legs.”
+
+Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of
+folly, started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes
+screwed up and his high colour slightly heightened.
+
+“Why, I believe you’re Smith,” he cried with his fresh, almost boyish
+voice; and then after an instant’s stare, “and yet I’m not sure.”
+
+“I have a card, I think,” said the unknown, with baffling solemnity—“a
+card with my real name, my titles, offices, and true purpose on this
+earth.”
+
+He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet card-case,
+and as slowly produced a very large card. Even in the instant of its
+production, they fancied it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of
+ordinary gentlemen. But it was there only for an instant; for as it
+passed from his fingers to Arthur’s, one or another slipped his hold.
+The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away the stranger’s
+card to join the wild waste paper of the universe; and that great
+western wind shook the whole house and passed.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+The Luggage of an Optimist
+
+
+We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
+with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion of
+small ones. If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could (I
+suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight
+trumpeting upon Primrose Hill. If a whale could leap from the sea like
+a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above Yarmouth
+like the winged island of Laputa. Such natural energy, though sublime,
+might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this inconvenience
+attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green. He was too
+large for everything, because he was lively as well as large. By a
+fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures are also
+reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser parts of
+London are not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable as a
+kitten.
+
+When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house, he found
+him talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately) to the
+helpless Mrs. Duke. That fat, faint lady could only goggle up like a
+dying fish at the enormous new gentleman, who politely offered himself
+as a lodger, with vast gestures of the wide white hat in one hand, and
+the yellow Gladstone bag in the other. Fortunately, Mrs. Duke’s more
+efficient niece and partner was there to complete the contract; for,
+indeed, all the people of the house had somehow collected in the room.
+This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode. The visitor
+created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from the time he came into
+the house to the time he left it, he somehow got the company to gather
+and even follow (though in derision) as children gather and follow a
+Punch and Judy. An hour ago, and for four years previously, these
+people had avoided each other, even when they had really liked each
+other. They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in search
+of particular newspapers or private needlework. Even now they all came
+casually, as with varying interests; but they all came. There was the
+embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow; there was the
+unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance. There was Michael
+Moon offering like a riddle the contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
+clothes and the sombre sagacity of his visage. He was now joined by his
+yet more comic crony, Moses Gould. Swaggering on short legs with a
+prosperous purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs; but
+like a dog also in this, that however he danced and wagged with
+delight, the two dark eyes on each side of his protuberant nose
+glistened gloomily like black buttons. There was Miss Rosamund Hunt,
+still with the fine white hat framing her square, good-looking face,
+and still with her native air of being dressed for some party that
+never came off. She also, like Mr. Moon, had a new companion, new so
+far as this narrative goes, but in reality an old friend and a
+protegee. This was a slight young woman in dark gray, and in no way
+notable but for a load of dull red hair, of which the shape somehow
+gave her pale face that triangular, almost peaked, appearance which was
+given by the lowering headdress and deep rich ruff of the Elizabethan
+beauties. Her surname seemed to be Gray, and Miss Hunt called her Mary,
+in that indescribable tone applied to a dependent who has practically
+become a friend. She wore a small silver cross on her very
+business-like gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who
+went to church. Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke,
+studying the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening carefully to
+every idiotic word he said. As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but
+never dreamed of listening to him. She had never really listened to any
+one in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.
+
+Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest’s concentration
+of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously to her any
+more than she listened seriously to any one. And she almost beamed as
+the stranger, with yet wider and almost whirling gestures of
+explanation with his huge hat and bag, apologized for having entered by
+the wall instead of the front door. He was understood to put it down to
+an unfortunate family tradition of neatness and care of his clothes.
+
+“My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,” he said,
+lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke. “She never liked me to lose my cap at
+school. And when a man’s been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to
+him.”
+
+Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good
+mother; but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.
+
+“You’ve got a funny idea of neatness,” she said, “if it’s jumping
+garden walls and clambering up garden trees. A man can’t very well
+climb a tree tidily.”
+
+“He can clear a wall neatly,” said Michael Moon; “I saw him do it.”
+
+Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment. “My
+dear young lady,” he said, “I was tidying the tree. You don’t want last
+year’s hats there, do you, any more than last year’s leaves? The wind
+takes off the leaves, but it couldn’t manage the hat; that wind, I
+suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that
+tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for
+giants. You can’t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look
+at my trousers. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you ever had a spring
+cleaning?”
+
+“Oh yes, sir,” said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly. “You will find
+everything of that sort quite nice.” For the first time she had heard
+two words that she could understand.
+
+Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm
+of calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said
+that he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked:
+and the silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack
+through these cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the
+room. Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his
+head against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that
+the tall house was much shorter than it used to be.
+
+Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend—or his new friend, for he did
+not very clearly know which he was. The face looked very like his old
+schoolfellow’s at one second and very unlike at another. And when
+Inglewood broke through his native politeness so far as to say
+suddenly, “Is your name Smith?” he received only the unenlightening
+reply, “Quite right; quite right. Very good. Excellent!” Which appeared
+to Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe
+accepting a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.
+
+Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood watched the
+other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all the impotent attitudes
+of the male friend. Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling
+accuracy with which he climbed a tree—throwing things out of his bag as
+if they were rubbish, yet managing to distribute quite a regular
+pattern all round him on the floor.
+
+As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner
+(he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his
+style of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were
+still a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.
+
+“Like the day of judgement,” he said, throwing a bottle so that it
+somehow settled, rocking on its right end. “People say vast universe...
+infinity and astronomy; not sure... I think things are too close
+together... packed up; for travelling... stars too close, really...
+why, the sun’s a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth’s a
+star, too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
+ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
+feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag is
+unpacked... may all be put in our right places then.”
+
+Here he stopped, literally for breath—throwing a shirt to the other end
+of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly
+beyond it. Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical
+disorder with an increasing doubt.
+
+In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith’s holiday luggage, the less
+one could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it was that almost
+everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason; what is secondary
+with every one else was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan
+in brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover that the
+pot was valueless or even unnecessary, and that it was the brown paper
+that was truly precious. He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and
+explained with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
+but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork. He also
+exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red, and
+Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent,
+supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages. He was
+therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham claret
+from the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice) do not
+drink. It was only then that he observed that all six bottles had those
+bright metallic seals of various tints, and seemed to have been chosen
+solely because they have the three primary and three secondary colours:
+red, blue, and yellow; green, violet and orange. There grew upon
+Inglewood an almost creepy sense of the real childishness of this
+creature. For Smith was really, so far as human psychology can be,
+innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he loved the stickiness
+of gum, and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake. To
+this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it
+was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window.
+He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not
+asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply
+forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made
+the giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in
+youth when most of us grow old.
+
+As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials I. S. printed
+on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had been called Innocent
+Smith at school, though whether as a formal Christian name or a moral
+description he could not remember. He was just about to venture another
+question, when there was a knock at the door, and the short figure of
+Mr. Gould offered itself, with the melancholy Moon, standing like his
+tall crooked shadow, behind him. They had drifted up the stairs after
+the other two men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.
+
+“Hope there’s no intrusion,” said the beaming Moses with a glow of good
+nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
+
+“The truth is,” said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy, “we
+thought we might see if they had made you comfortable. Miss Duke is
+rather—”
+
+“I know,” cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag;
+“magnificent, isn’t she? Go close to her—hear military music going by,
+like Joan of Arc.”
+
+Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has just heard
+a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains one small and forgotten
+fact. For he remembered how he had himself thought of Jeanne d’Arc
+years ago, when, hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the
+boarding-house. Long since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend
+Dr. Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate
+dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless human
+types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as a timid,
+insufficient, and “weak” type, who would never marry; to regard Diana
+Duke as a materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for
+her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady’s
+daughter. And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly, as
+if he had heard those distant drums.
+
+“She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural,” said Moon,
+glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted
+ceiling, like the conical hood of a dwarf.
+
+“Rather a small box for you, sir,” said the waggish Mr. Gould.
+
+“Splendid room, though,” answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
+head inside his Gladstone bag. “I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
+like Gothic. By the way,” he cried out, pointing in quite a startling
+way, “where does that door lead to?”
+
+“To certain death, I should say,” answered Michael Moon, staring up at
+a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
+“I don’t think there’s a loft there; and I don’t know what else it
+could lead to.” Long before he had finished his sentence the man with
+the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling, swung
+himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after a
+struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two
+symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
+Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
+sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it
+like a whole county upside down.
+
+“Hullo, you fellows!” came the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently
+from some remote pinnacle. “Come up here; and bring some of my things
+to eat and drink. It’s just the spot for a picnic.”
+
+With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small bottles of
+wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood, as if mesmerized,
+groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger. The enormous hand of
+Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture, like a giant’s in a
+fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them off to the eyrie;
+then they both hoisted themselves out of the window. They were both
+athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his concern for
+hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was not quite so
+idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman. Also they both had
+a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when the door was burst in
+the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky, and they could climb
+out on to the very roof of the universe. They were both men who had
+long been unconsciously imprisoned in the commonplace, though one took
+it comically, and the other seriously. They were both men,
+nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died. But Mr. Moses Gould had
+an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics and their subconscious
+transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed at the thing with the
+shameless rationality of another race.
+
+When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould
+was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature forced
+him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade; and Inglewood
+and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green ridge of the slate
+roof, with their feet against gutters and their backs against
+chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other. Their first feeling
+was that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was very
+like topsy-turvydom. One definition occurred to both of them—that he
+had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in
+which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology.
+Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods. The round of the ether
+turned from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit. All
+around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it was a
+sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage; but the whole had
+still the emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk.
+Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were shards and
+shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling towards the
+earth in every kind of colossal perspective. One of them really had the
+character of some many-mitred, many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian
+image, huge head downwards, hurled out of heaven—a sort of false
+Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan. All the other clouds had preposterous
+pinnacled shapes, as if the god’s palaces had been flung after him.
+
+And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the
+height of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a
+tiny trivial noise that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some
+six streets below a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel. They
+could also hear talk out of the garden below; and realized that the
+irrepressible Smith must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager
+and pleading accents could be heard, followed by the half-humourous
+protests of Miss Duke and the full and very youthful laughter of
+Rosamund Hunt. The air had that cold kindness that comes after a storm.
+Michael Moon drank it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the
+little bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost at a
+draught. Inglewood went on eating ginger very slowly and with a
+solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him. There was still enough
+stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to make them almost fancy they
+could smell the garden soil and the last roses of autumn. Suddenly
+there came from the darkening room a silvery ping and pong which told
+them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline. After
+the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like laughter.
+
+“Inglewood,” said Michael Moon, “have you ever heard that I am a
+blackguard?”
+
+“I haven’t heard it, and I don’t believe it,” answered Inglewood, after
+an odd pause. “But I have heard you were—what they call rather wild.”
+
+“If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,” said
+Moon, with an extraordinary calm; “I am tame. I am quite tame; I am
+about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind
+of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same
+amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the
+same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty
+stories— generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends,
+Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has
+thoroughly tamed.”
+
+Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly fall
+off the roof, for indeed the Irishman’s face, always sinister, was now
+almost demoniacal.
+
+“Christ confound it!” cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the empty
+claret bottle, “this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine I ever
+uncorked, and it’s the only drink I have really enjoyed for nine years.
+I was never wild until just ten minutes ago.” And he sent the bottle
+whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond the garden into the road,
+where, in the profound evening silence, they could even hear it break
+and part upon the stones.
+
+“Moon,” said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, “you mustn’t be so
+bitter about it. Everyone has to take the world as he finds it; of
+course one often finds it a bit dull—”
+
+“That fellow doesn’t,” said Michael decisively; “I mean that fellow
+Smith. I have a fancy there’s some method in his madness. It looks as
+if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute by taking one
+step out of the plain road. Who would have thought of that trapdoor?
+Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste
+quite nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of
+fairyland. Perhaps Nosey Gould’s beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought
+only to be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs.
+Duke’s cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a
+tree. Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill
+Whisky—”
+
+“Don’t be so rough on yourself,” said Inglewood, in serious distress.
+“The dullness isn’t your fault or the whisky’s. Fellows who don’t—
+fellows like me I mean—have just the same feeling that it’s all rather
+flat and a failure. But the world’s made like that; it’s all survival.
+Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and some people are made
+to stick quiet, like me. You can’t help your temperament. I know you’re
+much cleverer than I am; but you can’t help having all the loose ways
+of a poor literary chap, and I can’t help having all the doubts and
+helplessness of a small scientific chap, any more than a fish can help
+floating or a fern can help curling up. Humanity, as Warner said so
+well in that lecture, really consists of quite different tribes of
+animals all disguised as men.”
+
+In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken by Miss
+Hunt’s musical instrument banging with the abruptness of artillery into
+a vulgar but spirited tune.
+
+Rosamund’s voice came up rich and strong in the words of some fatuous,
+fashionable coon song:—
+
+“Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
+Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by.”
+
+
+Inglewood’s brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he continued
+his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic tune.
+But the blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a light
+that Inglewood did not understand. Many centuries, and many villages
+and valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood’s
+countrymen had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first
+blink that it was the battle star of Ireland.
+
+“Nothing can ever alter it; it’s in the wheels of the universe,” went
+on Inglewood, in a low voice: “some men are weak and some strong, and
+the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak. I have been in
+love lots of times, but I could not do anything, for I remembered my
+own fickleness. I have formed opinions, but I haven’t the cheek to push
+them, because I’ve so often changed them. That’s the upshot, old
+fellow. We can’t trust ourselves— and we can’t help it.”
+
+Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position
+at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.
+Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly
+topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven. Their gyration made the
+dark figure seem yet dizzier.
+
+“Let us...” he said, and was suddenly silent.
+
+“Let us what?” asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though
+somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty
+in speech.
+
+“Let us go and do some of these things we can’t do,” said Michael.
+
+At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them the
+cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to them that
+they must come down as the “concert” was in full swing, and Mr. Moses
+Gould was about to recite “Young Lochinvar.”
+
+As they dropped into Innocent’s attic they nearly tumbled over its
+entertaining impedimenta again. Inglewood, staring at the littered
+floor, thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery. He was
+therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell on a
+large well-polished American revolver.
+
+“Hullo!” he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step
+back from a serpent; “are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do
+you deal death out of that machine gun?”
+
+“Oh, that!” said Smith, throwing it a single glance; “I deal life out
+of that,” and he went bounding down the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+The Banner of Beacon
+
+
+All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
+everybody’s birthday. It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold
+and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally
+high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must,
+and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall
+into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make
+rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of
+history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most
+unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution
+frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
+Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority,
+because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and
+conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it
+was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling
+construction. Each person with a hobby found it turning into an
+institution. Rosamund’s songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of opera;
+Michael’s jests and paragraphs into a magazine. His pipe and her
+mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of smoking concert. The
+bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his
+own growing importance. He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
+were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana.
+But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and
+offices, for they followed each other in wild succession like the
+topics of a rambling talker.
+
+Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of pleasant
+obstacles. Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag reels of
+exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing could be more shy and impersonal
+than poor Arthur’s photography. Yet the preposterous Smith was seen
+assisting him eagerly through sunny morning hours, and an indefensible
+sequence described as “Moral Photography” began to unroll about the
+boarding-house. It was only a version of the old photographer’s joke
+which produces the same figure twice on one plate, making a man play
+chess with himself, dine with himself, and so on. But these plates were
+more hysterical and ambitious—as, “Miss Hunt forgets Herself,” showing
+that lady answering her own too rapturous recognition with a most
+appalling stare of ignorance; or “Mr. Moon questions Himself,” in which
+Mr. Moon appeared as one driven to madness under his own legal
+cross-examination, which was conducted with a long forefinger and an
+air of ferocious waggery. One highly successful trilogy—representing
+Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before
+Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella—
+Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall, like a
+sort of fresco, with the inscription,—
+
+“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control—
+These three alone will make a man a prig.”
+                    TENNYSON.
+
+
+Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the
+domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow
+blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a
+considerable feminine care for dress—the one feminine thing that had
+never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered
+her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that
+ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw light
+chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again. He set up
+“Smith’s Lightning Dressmaking Company,” with two screens, a cardboard
+placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw
+him an abandoned black overall or working dress on which to exercise
+the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment aflame
+with red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her
+shoulders, and looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours
+afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being
+inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter,
+for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark
+robe was rich with the green and purple of great decorative peacocks,
+like a secret garden in the “Arabian Nights.” A pang too swift to be
+named pain or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
+He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to
+fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering a worship of
+some Babylonian princess in some previous existence. At his next
+glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green
+chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes.
+
+As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
+actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
+But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
+liked it. For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men
+as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species. And it
+is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or inexplicable
+in Smith’s chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers than she had in
+the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches of Moon. Courtesy,
+on the other hand, is a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith’s
+manners were as courteous as they were unconventional. She said he was
+“a real gentleman,” by which she simply meant a kind-hearted man, which
+is a very different thing. She would sit at the head of the table with
+fat, folded hands and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while
+every one else was talking at once. At least, the only other exception
+was Rosamund’s companion, Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more
+eager sort. Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might
+speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.
+Innocent Smith seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into
+the adventure of making her talk. He never succeeded, yet he was never
+snubbed; if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this
+quiet figure, and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a
+mystery. But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a
+fresh and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in
+spring. Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls,
+she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth, which
+Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money, and Diana
+in the mere guarding of it. Smith looked at her again and again. Her
+eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way—which was really the
+right way. She had the knack of saying everything with her face: her
+silence was a sort of steady applause.
+
+But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday (which seemed more
+like a week’s holiday than a day’s) one experiment towers supreme, not
+because it was any sillier or more successful than the others, but
+because out of this particular folly flowed all of the odd events that
+were to follow. All the other practical jokes exploded of themselves,
+and left vacancy; all the other fictions returned upon themselves, and
+were finished like a song. But the string of solid and startling
+events— which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol, and
+a marriage licence—were all made primarily possible by the joke about
+the High Court of Beacon.
+
+It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon. He
+was in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly;
+yet he had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman. He used his old
+useless knowledge as a barrister to talk entertainingly of a tribunal
+that was a parody on the pompous anomalies of English law. The High
+Court of Beacon, he declared, was a splendid example of our free and
+sensible constitution. It had been founded by King John in defiance of
+the Magna Carta, and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and
+spirit licences, ladies traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for
+dog-stealing and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened
+in the town of Market Bosworth. The whole hundred and nine seneschals
+of the High Court of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in
+the intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the
+institution were vested in Mrs. Duke. Tossed about among the rest of
+the company, however, the High Court did not retain its historical and
+legal seriousness, but was used somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of
+domestic detail. If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the
+tablecloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which the sittings
+and findings of the Court would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a
+window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember that none but the
+third son of the lord of the manor of Penge had the right to open it.
+They even went to the length of making arrests and conducting criminal
+inquiries. The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
+above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal; but the
+trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic libel, and his
+triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity, were admitted to be in
+the best tradition of the Court.
+
+But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not
+more and more flippant like Michael Moon. This proposal of a private
+court of justice, which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a
+political humourist, Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of
+an abstract philosopher. It was by far the best thing they could do, he
+declared, to claim sovereign powers even for the individual household.
+
+“You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule for
+homes,” he cried eagerly to Michael. “It would be better if every
+father COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans; it would be better,
+because nobody would be killed. Let’s issue a Declaration of
+Independence from Beacon House. We could grow enough greens in that
+garden to support us, and when the tax-collector comes let’s tell him
+we’re self-supporting, and play on him with the hose.... Well, perhaps,
+as you say, we couldn’t very well have a hose, as that comes from the
+main; but we could sink a well in this chalk, and a lot could be done
+with water-jugs.... Let this really be Beacon House. Let’s light a
+bonfire of independence on the roof, and see house after house
+answering it across the valley of the Thames! Let us begin the League
+of the Free Families! Away with Local Government! A fig for Local
+Patriotism! Let every house be a sovereign state as this is, and judge
+its own children by its own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon. Let
+us cut the painter, and begin to be happy together, as if we were on a
+desert island.”
+
+“I know that desert island,” said Michael Moon; “it only exists in the
+‘Swiss Family Robinson.’ A man feels a strange desire for some sort of
+vegetable milk, and crash comes down some unexpected cocoa-nut from
+some undiscovered monkey. A literary man feels inclined to pen a
+sonnet, and at once an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and
+shoots out one of his quills.”
+
+“Don’t you say a word against the ‘Swiss Family Robinson,’” cried
+Innocent with great warmth. “It mayn’t be exact science, but it’s dead
+accurate philosophy. When you’re really shipwrecked, you do really find
+what you want. When you’re really on a desert island, you never find it
+a desert. If we were really besieged in this garden, we’d find a
+hundred English birds and English berries that we never knew were here.
+If we were snowed up in this room, we’d be the better for reading
+scores of books in that bookcase that we don’t even know are there;
+we’d have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall go
+to the grave without guessing; we’d find materials for everything—
+christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation— if we
+didn’t decide to be a republic.”
+
+“A coronation on ‘Swiss Family’ lines, I suppose,” said Michael,
+laughing. “Oh, I know you would find everything in that atmosphere. If
+we wanted such a simple thing, for instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we
+should walk down beyond the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full
+bloom. If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
+digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under the lawn.
+And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a great storm
+would wash everything on shore, and we should find there was a Whale on
+the premises.”
+
+“And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,” asseverated
+Smith, striking the table with passion. “I bet you’ve never examined
+the premises! I bet you’ve never been round at the back as I was this
+morning— for I found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
+There’s an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin; it’s got
+three holes in the canvas, and a pole’s broken, so it’s not much good
+as a tent, but as a Canopy—” And his voice quite failed him to express
+its shining adequacy; then he went on with controversial eagerness:
+“You see I take every challenge as you make it. I believe every blessed
+thing you say couldn’t be here has been here all the time. You say you
+want a whale washed up for oil. Why, there’s oil in that cruet-stand at
+your elbow; and I don’t believe anybody has touched it or thought of it
+for years. And as for your gold crown, we’re none of us wealthy here,
+but we could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own pockets to
+string round a man’s head for half an hour; or one of Miss Hunt’s gold
+bangles is nearly big enough to—”
+
+The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter. “All is
+not gold that glitters,” she said, “and besides—”
+
+“What a mistake that is!” cried Innocent Smith, leaping up in great
+excitement. “All is gold that glitters— especially now we are a
+Sovereign State. What’s the good of a Sovereign State if you can’t
+define a sovereign? We can make anything a precious metal, as men could
+in the morning of the world. They didn’t choose gold because it was
+rare; your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer.
+They chose gold because it was bright—because it was a hard thing to
+find, but pretty when you’ve found it. You can’t fight with golden
+swords or eat golden biscuits; you can only look at it—and you can look
+at it out here.”
+
+With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open the
+doors into the garden. At the same time also, with one of his gestures
+that never seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were, he
+stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn as
+if for a dance.
+
+The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier
+than that of the day before. The west was swimming with sanguine
+colours, and a sort of sleepy flame lay along the lawn. The twisted
+shadows of the one or two garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray
+or black, as in common daylight, but like arabesques written in vivid
+violet ink on some page of Eastern gold. The sunset was one of those
+festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in which common things by
+their colours remind us of costly or curious things. The slates upon
+the sloping roof burned like the plumes of a vast peacock, in every
+mysterious blend of blue and green. The red-brown bricks of the wall
+glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines. The
+sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame,
+like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent’s hair, which was of a
+rather colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it
+as he strode across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.
+
+“What would be the good of gold,” he was saying, “if it did not
+glitter? Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a
+black sun at noon? A black button would do just as well. Don’t you see
+that everything in this garden looks like a jewel? And will you kindly
+tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like
+a jewel? Leave off buying and selling, and start looking! Open your
+eyes, and you’ll wake up in the New Jerusalem.
+
+“All is gold that glitters—
+    Tree and tower of brass;
+Rolls the golden evening air
+    Down the golden grass.
+Kick the cry to Jericho,
+    How yellow mud is sold;
+All is gold that glitters,
+    For the glitter is the gold.”
+
+
+“And who wrote that?” asked Rosamund, amused.
+
+“No one will ever write it,” answered Smith, and cleared the rockery
+with a flying leap.
+
+“Really,” said Rosamund to Michael Moon, “he ought to be sent to an
+asylum. Don’t you think so?”
+
+“I beg your pardon,” inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long,
+swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or
+mood, he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the
+social extravagance of the garden.
+
+“I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum,” repeated the lady.
+
+The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was
+unmistakably sneering. “No,” he said; “I don’t think it’s at all
+necessary.”
+
+“What do you mean?” asked Rosamund quickly. “Why not?”
+
+“Because he is in one now,” answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly
+voice. “Why, didn’t you know?”
+
+“What?” cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice; for the
+Irishman’s face and voice were really almost creepy. With his dark
+figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine he looked like the devil
+in paradise.
+
+“I’m sorry,” he continued, with a sort of harsh humility. “Of course we
+don’t talk about it much... but I thought we all really knew.”
+
+“Knew what?”
+
+“Well,” answered Moon, “that Beacon House is a certain rather singular
+sort of house—a house with the tiles loose, shall we say? Innocent
+Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn’t you come when he called
+before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be
+extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing
+to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree—that’s his bedside manner.”
+
+“You daren’t say such a thing!” cried Rosamund in a rage. “You daren’t
+suggest that I—”
+
+“Not more than I am,” said Michael soothingly; “not more than the rest
+of us. Haven’t you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still—a
+notorious sign? Haven’t you ever observed that Inglewood is always
+washing his hands— a known mark of mental disease? I, of course, am a
+dipsomaniac.”
+
+“I don’t believe you,” broke out his companion, not without agitation.
+“I’ve heard you had some bad habits—”
+
+“All habits are bad habits,” said Michael, with deadly calm. “Madness
+does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in
+some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed. YOU
+went mad about money, because you’re an heiress.”
+
+“It’s a lie,” cried Rosamund furiously. “I never was mean about money.”
+
+“You were worse,” said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently. “You
+thought that other people were. You thought every man who came near you
+must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
+and now you’re mad and I’m mad, and serve us right.”
+
+“You brute!” said Rosamund, quite white. “And is this true?”
+
+With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his
+abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then
+stepped back with an ironical bow. “Not literally true, of course,” he
+said; “only really true. An allegory, shall we say? a social satire.”
+
+“And I hate and despise your satires,” cried Rosamund Hunt, letting
+loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone, and
+speaking every word to wound. “I despise it as I despise your rank
+tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling, and your
+Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and
+your rotten failure at everything. I don’t care whether you call it
+snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly things to look
+at, and action. You won’t frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer
+Alexander.”
+
+“Victrix causa deæ—” said Michael gloomily; and this angered her more,
+as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it to be witty.
+
+“Oh, I dare say you know Greek,” she said, with cheerful inaccuracy;
+“you haven’t done much with that either.” And she crossed the garden,
+pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.
+
+In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house
+slowly, and with a thought-clouded brow. He was one of those men who
+are quite clever, but quite the reverse of quick. As he came back out
+of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped
+swiftly to her feet and began putting away the tea things. But it was
+not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique that
+he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting camera. For
+Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her chin on
+her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless
+thought.
+
+“You are busy,” said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen,
+and wishing to ignore it.
+
+“There’s no time for dreaming in this world,” answered the young lady
+with her back to him.
+
+“I have been thinking lately,” said Inglewood in a low voice, “that
+there’s no time for waking up.”
+
+She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the
+garden.
+
+“I don’t smoke or drink, you know,” he said irrelevantly, “because I
+think they’re drugs. And yet I fancy all hobbies, like my camera and
+bicycle, are drugs too. Getting under a black hood, getting into a dark
+room—getting into a hole anyhow. Drugging myself with speed, and
+sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine so fast
+that I turn into a machine myself. That’s the matter with all of us.
+We’re too busy to wake up.”
+
+“Well,” said the girl solidly, “what is there to wake up to?”
+
+“There must be!” cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
+excitement—“there must be something to wake up to! All we do is
+preparations—your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner’s
+scientific appliances. We’re always preparing for something—something
+that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house;
+but what is going to HAPPEN in the house?”
+
+She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes, and seemed
+to be searching for some form of words which she could not find.
+
+Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund
+Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in
+the doorway. She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an
+expression of the most infantile astonishment.
+
+“Well, here’s a fine game!” she said, panting. “What am I to do now, I
+wonder? I’ve wired for Dr. Warner; that’s all I can think of doing.”
+
+“What is the matter?” asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving forward
+like one used to be called upon for assistance.
+
+“It’s Mary,” said the heiress, “my companion Mary Gray: that cracked
+friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her in the garden, after
+ten hours’ acquaintance, and he wants to go off with her now for a
+special licence.”
+
+Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked out on
+the garden, still golden with evening light. Nothing moved there but a
+bird or two hopping and twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings,
+in the road outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the
+yellow Gladstone bag on top of it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+The Garden of the God
+
+
+Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance and
+utterance of the other girl.
+
+“Well,” she said shortly, “I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she
+doesn’t want to marry him.”
+
+“But she DOES want to marry him!” cried Rosamund in exasperation.
+“She’s a wild, wicked fool, and I won’t be parted from her.”
+
+“Perhaps,” said Diana icily, “but I really don’t see what we can do.”
+
+“But the man’s balmy, Diana,” reasoned her friend angrily. “I can’t let
+my nice governess marry a man that’s balmy! You or somebody MUST stop
+it!—Mr. Inglewood, you’re a man; go and tell them they simply can’t.”
+
+“Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can,” said Inglewood, with a
+depressed air. “I have far less right of intervention than Miss Duke,
+besides having, of course, far less moral force than she.”
+
+“You haven’t either of you got much,” cried Rosamund, the last stays of
+her formidable temper giving way; “I think I’ll go somewhere else for a
+little sense and pluck. I think I know some one who will help me more
+than you do, at any rate... he’s a cantankerous beast, but he’s a man,
+and has a mind, and knows it...” And she flung out into the garden,
+with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.
+
+She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over the
+hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down
+his long blue chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her,
+after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of
+her other friends.
+
+“I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon,” she said frankly. “I hated you for
+being a cynic; but I’ve been well punished, for I want a cynic just
+now. I’ve had my fill of sentiment—I’m fed up with it. The world’s gone
+mad, Mr. Moon—all except the cynics, I think. That maniac Smith wants
+to marry my old friend Mary, and she— and she—doesn’t seem to mind.”
+
+Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added
+smartly, “I’m not joking; that’s Mr. Smith’s cab outside. He swears
+he’ll take her off now to his aunt’s, and go for a special licence. Do
+give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon.”
+
+Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand for an
+instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side of the
+garden. “My practical advice to you is this,” he said: “Let him go for
+his special licence, and ask him to get another one for you and me.”
+
+“Is that one of your jokes?” asked the young lady. “Do say what you
+really mean.”
+
+“I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,” said Moon with
+ponderous precision—“a plain, practical man: a man of affairs; a man of
+facts and the daylight. He has let down twenty ton of good building
+bricks suddenly on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up.
+We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very
+sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so, but now we’re
+going to be married, Rosamund, and I can’t see why that cab...”
+
+“Really,” said Rosamund stoutly, “I don’t know what you mean.”
+
+“What a lie!” cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes.
+“I’m all for lies in an ordinary way; but don’t you see that to-night
+they won’t do? We’ve wandered into a world of facts, old girl. That
+grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door, are
+facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was after
+your money, and didn’t really love you. But if I stood here now and
+told you I didn’t love you—you wouldn’t believe me: for truth is in
+this garden to-night.”
+
+“Really, Mr. Moon...” said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
+
+He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face. “Is my name
+Moon?” he asked. “Is your name Hunt? On my honour, they sound to me as
+quaint and as distant as Red Indian names. It’s as if your name was
+‘Swim’ and my name was ‘Sunrise.’ But our real names are Husband and
+Wife, as they were when we fell asleep.”
+
+“It is no good,” said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes; “one can
+never go back.”
+
+“I can go where I damn please,” said Michael, “and I can carry you on
+my shoulder.”
+
+“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl
+earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body,
+but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in
+that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they— they do attract women, I
+don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night.
+They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the
+cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and
+disappointment— you’ve got used to your drinks and things—I shan’t be
+pretty much longer—”
+
+“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or
+heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about
+prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough,
+and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You
+never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be
+unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the
+mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I,
+for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this
+minute— a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”
+
+“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid
+face, “and do you really want to marry me?”
+
+“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What
+other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to
+marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not
+liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you
+must marry Man—that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself—
+yourself, yourself, yourself—the only companion that is never
+satisfied— and never satisfactory.”
+
+“Michael,” said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, “if you won’t talk so
+much, I’ll marry you.”
+
+“It’s no time for talking,” cried Michael Moon; “singing is the only
+thing. Can’t you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?”
+
+“Go and fetch it for me,” said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp
+authority.
+
+The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished; then he
+shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered shoes out of
+the Greek fairy tale. He cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a
+leap, out of mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two
+of the open parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old manner
+like lead; he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling. The events
+of that enchanted evening were not at an end.
+
+Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a
+curious thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate
+exit of Rosamund. It was something which, occurring in that obscure
+parlour, seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head
+over heels, the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words
+can express how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when
+it happens. Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it
+only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel. It indicates no
+surrender, far less any sympathy. The most rigid and ruthless woman can
+begin to cry, just as the most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is a
+separate sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about
+force of character. But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur
+Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was like seeing a motor-car
+shedding tears of petrol.
+
+He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had
+permitted it) any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that
+portent. He acted as men do when a theatre catches fire—very
+differently from how they would have conceived themselves as acting,
+whether for better or worse. He had a faint memory of certain
+half-stifled explanations, that the heiress was the one really paying
+guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence) would come;
+but after that he knew nothing of his own conduct except by the
+protests it evoked.
+
+“Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood—leave me alone; that’s not the way to
+help.”
+
+“But I can help you,” said Arthur, with grinding certainty; “I can, I
+can, I can...”
+
+“Why, you said,” cried the girl, “that you were much weaker than me.”
+
+“So I am weaker than you,” said Arthur, in a voice that went vibrating
+through everything, “but not just now.”
+
+“Let go my hands!” cried Diana. “I won’t be bullied.”
+
+In one element he was much stronger than she—the matter of humour. This
+leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying: “Well, you are mean.
+You know quite well you’ll bully me all the rest of my life. You might
+allow a man the one minute of his life when he’s allowed to bully.”
+
+It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry, and for the
+first time since her childhood Diana was entirely off her guard.
+
+“Do you mean you want to marry me?” she said.
+
+“Why, there’s a cab at the door!” cried Inglewood, springing up with an
+unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors that led into the
+garden.
+
+As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time
+that the house and garden were on a steep height over London. And yet,
+though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be
+secret: it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of the
+turrets of heaven.
+
+Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring all sorts of
+details with a senseless delight. He noticed for the first time that
+the railings of the gate beyond the garden bushes were moulded like
+little spearheads and painted blue. He noticed that one of the blue
+spears was loosened in its place, and hung sideways; and this almost
+made him laugh. He thought it somehow exquisitely harmless and funny
+that the railing should be crooked; he thought he should like to know
+how it happened, who did it, and how the man was getting on.
+
+When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realized
+that they were not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon,
+both of whom they had last seen in the blackest temper of detachment,
+were standing together on the lawn. They were standing in quite an
+ordinary manner, and yet they looked somehow like people in a book.
+
+“Oh,” said Diana, “what lovely air!”
+
+“I know,” called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive that it rang
+out like a complaint. “It’s just like that horrid, beastly fizzy stuff
+they gave me that made me feel happy.”
+
+“Oh, it isn’t like anything but itself!” answered Diana, breathing
+deeply. “Why, it’s all cold, and yet it feels like fire.”
+
+“Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,” said Mr. Moon.
+“Balmy—especially on the crumpet.” And he fanned himself quite
+unnecessarily with his straw hat. They were all full of little leaps
+and pulsations of objectless and airy energy. Diana stirred and
+stretched her long arms rigidly, as if crucified, in a sort of
+excruciating restfulness; Michael stood still for long intervals, with
+gathered muscles, then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still
+again; Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip, except when they
+fall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her foot as she
+moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood, leaning quite
+quietly against a tree, had unconsciously clutched a branch and shaken
+it with a creative violence. Those giant gestures of Man, that made the
+high statues and the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their
+limbs. Silently as they strolled and stood they were bursting like
+batteries with an animal magnetism.
+
+“And now,” cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each
+side, “let’s dance round that bush!”
+
+“Why, what bush do you mean?” asked Rosamund, looking round with a sort
+of radiant rudeness.
+
+“The bush that isn’t there,” said Michael—“the Mulberry Bush.”
+
+They had taken each other’s hands, half laughing and quite ritually;
+and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round,
+like a demon spinning the world for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of
+the horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the
+ring of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a
+child; she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines
+on Highgate, or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the
+woods of Box Hill.
+
+The circle broke—as all such perfect circles of levity must break— and
+sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away
+against the blue rails of the gate. When reeling there he suddenly
+raised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
+
+“Why, it’s Warner!” he shouted, waving his arms. “It’s jolly old
+Warner— with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!”
+
+“Is that Dr. Warner?” cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a burst of
+memory, amusement, and distress. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Oh, do tell him
+it’s all right!”
+
+“Let’s take hands and tell him,” said Michael Moon. For indeed, while
+they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind the one
+already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion in the
+cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.
+
+Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by an heiress
+to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when, as you come in through
+the garden to the house, the heiress and her landlady and two of the
+gentlemen boarders join hands and dance round you in a ring, calling
+out, “It’s all right! it’s all right!” you are apt to be flustered and
+even displeased. Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.
+The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained
+to him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure, was
+just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round by a ring of
+laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore— even then he seemed
+to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
+
+“Inglewood!” cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare,
+“are you mad?”
+
+Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered, easily
+and quietly enough, “Not now. The truth is, Warner, I’ve just made a
+rather important medical discovery—quite in your line.”
+
+“What do you mean?” asked the great doctor stiffly—“what discovery?”
+
+“I’ve discovered that health really is catching, like disease,”
+answered Arthur.
+
+“Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading,” said Michael,
+performing a _pas seul_ with a thoughtful expression. “Twenty thousand
+more cases taken to the hospitals; nurses employed night and day.”
+
+Dr. Warner studied Michael’s grave face and lightly moving legs with an
+unfathomed wonder. “And is THIS, may I ask,” he said, “the sanity that
+is spreading?”
+
+“You must forgive me, Dr. Warner,” cried Rosamund Hunt heartily. “I
+know I’ve treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake. I was in
+a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now it all seems like
+a dream—and—and Mr. Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most
+delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may marry any one he
+likes—except me.”
+
+“I should suggest Mrs. Duke,” said Michael.
+
+The gravity of Dr. Warner’s face increased. He took a slip of pink
+paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale blue eyes quietly fixed
+on Rosamund’s face all the time. He spoke with a not inexcusable
+frigidity.
+
+“Really, Miss Hunt,” he said, “you are not yet very reassuring. You
+sent me this wire only half an hour ago: ‘Come at once, if possible,
+with another doctor. Man—Innocent Smith—gone mad on premises, and doing
+dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?’ I went round at once to
+a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a private
+detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he has come round with
+me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmly tell me that this
+criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing, with
+accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of
+sanity. I hardly comprehend the change.”
+
+“Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody’s
+soul?” cried Rosamund, in despair. “Must I confess we had got so morbid
+as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that
+we didn’t even know it was only because we wanted to get married
+ourselves? We’ll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we’re happy
+enough.”
+
+“Where is Mr. Smith?” asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.
+
+Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their
+farce, who had not been visible for an hour or more.
+
+“I—I think he’s on the other side of the house, by the dustbin,” he
+said.
+
+“He may be on the road to Russia,” said Warner, “but he must be found.”
+And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house by the
+sunflowers.
+
+“I hope,” said Rosamund, “he won’t really interfere with Mr. Smith.”
+
+“Interfere with the daisies!” said Michael with a snort. “A man can’t
+be locked up for falling in love—at least I hope not.”
+
+“No; I think even a doctor couldn’t make a disease out of him. He’d
+throw off the doctor like the disease, don’t you know? I believe it’s a
+case of a sort of holy well. I believe Innocent Smith is simply
+innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary.”
+
+It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass with
+the point of her white shoe.
+
+“I think,” said Inglewood, “that Smith is not extraordinary at all.
+He’s comic just because he’s so startlingly commonplace. Don’t you know
+what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a
+schoolboy comes home for the holidays? That bag there on the cab is
+only a schoolboy’s hamper. This tree here in the garden is only the
+sort of tree that any schoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that’s the
+thing that has haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a
+word to. Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my
+old schoolfellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing animal
+that we have all been.”
+
+“That is only you absurd boys,” said Diana. “I don’t believe any girl
+was ever so silly, and I’m sure no girl was ever so happy, except—” and
+she stopped.
+
+“I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith,” said Michael Moon in
+a low voice. “Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain. He is not
+there. Haven’t you noticed that we never saw him since we found
+ourselves? He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only
+our own youth returned. Long before poor old Warner had clambered out
+of his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light
+on this lawn. Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the
+thing, but the man we shall never see. In a spring garden before
+breakfast we shall smell the smell called Smith. In the snapping of
+brisk twigs in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith. Everything
+insatiable and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like
+babies at a bun feast, in the white mornings that split the sky as a
+boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one instant the presence
+of an impetuous purity; but his innocence was too close to the
+unconsciousness of inanimate things not to melt back at a mere touch
+into the mild hedges and heavens; he—”
+
+He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.
+Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,
+leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road. He clutched the blue
+railings of the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction
+of the noise. He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a
+face that seemed made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid
+and resplendent as Warner’s, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder
+part of his head.
+
+“Murder!” he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating
+voice. “Stop that murderer there!”
+
+Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows of the house,
+and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came flying round the
+corner like a leaping rabbit. Yet before he had reached the group a
+third discharge had deafened them, and they saw with their own eyes two
+spots of white sky drilled through the second of the unhappy Herbert’s
+high hats. The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a
+flowerpot, and came down on all fours, staring like a cow. The hat with
+the two shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him, and
+Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway train. He was
+looking twice his proper size—a giant clad in green, the big revolver
+still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine and in shadow, his eyes
+blazing like all stars, and his yellow hair standing out all ways like
+Struwelpeter’s.
+
+Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness, Inglewood
+had time to feel once more what he had felt when he saw the other
+lovers standing on the lawn—the sensation of a certain cut and coloured
+clearness that belongs rather to the things of art than to the things
+of experience. The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the
+green bulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked
+railings behind, clutched by the stranger’s yellow vulture claws and
+peered over by his long vulture neck, the silk hat on the gravel, and
+the little cloudlet of smoke floating across the garden as innocently
+as the puff of a cigarette— all these seemed unnaturally distinct and
+definite. They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation.
+Indeed, every object grew more and more particular and precious because
+the whole picture was breaking up. Things look so bright just before
+they burst.
+
+Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased, Arthur had stepped
+across and taken one of Smith’s arms. Simultaneously the little
+stranger had run up the steps and taken the other. Smith went into
+peals of laughter, and surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness.
+Moon raised the doctor to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly
+on the garden gate. The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women
+mostly are in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that,
+somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the sky. The doctor
+himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits, and dusting
+himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to them in brief
+apology. He was very white with his recent panic, but he spoke with
+perfect self-control.
+
+“You will excuse us, ladies,” he said; “my friend and Mr. Inglewood are
+both scientists in their several ways. I think we had better all take
+Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate with you later.”
+
+And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed
+Smith was led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.
+
+From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant boom of
+mirth could again be heard through the half-open window; but there came
+no echo of the quiet voices of the physicians. The girls walked about
+the garden together, rubbing up each other’s spirits as best they
+might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against the gate. Somewhere
+about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner came out of the house with
+a face less pale but even more stern, and the little man with the
+fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear. And if the face of Warner
+in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge, the face of the little man
+behind was more like a death’s head.
+
+“Miss Hunt,” said Dr. Herbert Warner, “I only wish to offer you my warm
+thanks and admiration. By your prompt courage and wisdom in sending for
+us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put out of
+mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity—
+a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been before
+combined in flesh.”
+
+Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking
+eyes. “What do you mean?” she asked. “You can’t mean Mr. Smith?”
+
+“He has gone by many other names,” said the doctor gravely, “and not
+one he did not leave to be cursed behind him. That man, Miss Hunt, has
+left a track of blood and tears across the world. Whether he is mad as
+well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests of science, to
+discover. In any case, we shall have to take him to a magistrate first,
+even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum. But the lunatic asylum in
+which he is confined will have to be sealed with wall within wall, and
+ringed with guns like a fortress, or he will break out again to bring
+forth carnage and darkness on the earth.”
+
+Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler.
+Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate; but he
+continued to lean on it without moving, with his face turned away
+towards the darkening road.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+The Allegorical Practical Joker
+
+
+The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat
+more urbane and even dapper figure than he had appeared when clutching
+the railings and craning his neck into the garden. He even looked
+comparatively young when he took his hat off, having fair hair parted
+in the middle and carefully curled on each side, and lively movements,
+especially of the hands. He had a dandified monocle slung round his
+neck by a broad black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big American
+moth had alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright enough for
+a boy’s; it was only when you looked at the fish-bone face that you
+beheld something acrid and old. His manners were excellent, though
+hardly English, and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people
+who only met him once remembered him. One was a trick of closing his
+eyes when he wished to be particularly polite; the other was one of
+lifting his joined thumb and forefinger in the air as if holding a
+pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering over a word. But
+those who were longer in his company tended to forget these oddities in
+the stream of his quaint and solemn conversation and really singular
+views.
+
+“Miss Hunt,” said Dr. Warner, “this is Dr. Cyrus Pym.”
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he
+were “playing fair” in some child’s game, and gave a prompt little bow,
+which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United States.
+
+“Dr. Cyrus Pym,” continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes again), “is
+perhaps the first criminological expert of America. We are very
+fortunate to be able to consult with him in this extraordinary case—”
+
+“I can’t make head or tail of anything,” said Rosamund. “How can poor
+Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?”
+
+“Or by your telegram,” said Herbert Warner, smiling.
+
+“Oh, you don’t understand,” cried the girl impatiently. “Why, he’s done
+us all more good than going to church.”
+
+“I think I can explain to the young lady,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym. “This
+criminal or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method of
+his own, a method of the most daring ingenuity. He is popular wherever
+he goes, for he invades every house as an uproarious child. People are
+getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel; so
+he always uses the disguise of—what shall I say—the Bohemian, the
+blameless Bohemian. He always carries people off their feet. People are
+used to the mask of conventional good conduct. He goes in for eccentric
+good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn and solid
+Spanish merchant; but you’re not prepared when he dresses up as Don
+Quixote. You expect a humbug to behave like Sir Charles Grandison;
+because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep, tear-moving
+tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison so often behaved
+like a humbug. But no real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for a
+humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison but on Sir
+Roger de Coverly. Setting up to be a good man a little cracked is a new
+criminal incognito, Miss Hunt. It’s been a great notion, and uncommonly
+successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel. I can forgive
+Dick Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can’t forgive him when he
+impersonates Dr. Johnson. The saint with a tile loose is a bit too
+sacred, I guess, to be parodied.”
+
+“But how do you know,” cried Rosamund desperately, “that Mr. Smith is a
+known criminal?”
+
+“I collated all the documents,” said the American, “when my friend
+Warner knocked me up on receipt of your cable. It is my professional
+affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there’s no more doubt about
+them than about the Bradshaw down at the depot. This man has hitherto
+escaped the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or
+insanity. But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated
+notes of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this
+manner. He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a grand
+popularity. He makes things go. They do go; when he’s gone the things
+are gone. Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man’s life or a man’s spoons, or
+more often a woman. I assure you I have all the memoranda.”
+
+“I have seen them,” said Warner solidly, “I can assure you that all
+this is correct.”
+
+“The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings,” went on the
+American doctor, “is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a
+wild simulation of innocence. From almost every house where this great
+imaginative devil has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him;
+some say he’s got a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and
+that they go like automata. What’s become of all those poor girls
+nobody knows. Murdered, I dare say; for we’ve lots of instances,
+besides this one, of his turning his hand to murder, though none ever
+brought him under the law. Anyhow, our most modern methods of research
+can’t find any trace of the wretched women. It’s when I think of them
+that I am really moved, Miss Hunt. And I’ve really nothing else to say
+just now except what Dr. Warner has said.”
+
+“Quite so,” said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in
+marble—“that we all have to thank you very much for that telegram.”
+
+The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident
+sincerity that one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner— the
+falling eyelids, the rising intonation, and the poised finger and
+thumb—which were at other times a little comic. It was not so much that
+he was cleverer than Warner; perhaps he was not so clever, though he
+was more celebrated. But he had what Warner never had, a fresh and
+unaffected seriousness— the great American virtue of simplicity.
+Rosamund knitted her brows and looked gloomily toward the darkening
+house that contained the dark prodigy.
+
+Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to
+silver, and was changing from silver to gray. The long plumy shadows of
+the one or two trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead
+background of dusk. In the sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the
+entrance to the house by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a
+hurried consultation between Inglewood (who was still left in charge of
+the mysterious captive) and Diana, who had moved to his assistance from
+without. After a few minutes and gestures they went inside, shutting
+the glass doors upon the garden; and the garden seemed to grow grayer
+still.
+
+The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move
+in the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with
+a flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish
+vanity, and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it
+difficult, pedantic as he was, to call him a pedant.
+
+“I’m vurry sorry, Miss Hunt,” he said; “but Dr. Warner and I, as two
+quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith away in that cab,
+and the less said about it the better. Don’t you agitate yourself, Miss
+Hunt. You’ve just got to think that we’re taking away a monstrosity,
+something that oughtn’t to be at all—something like one of those gods
+in your Britannic Museum, all wings, and beards, and legs, and eyes,
+and no shape. That’s what Smith is, and you shall soon be quit of him.”
+
+He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about to
+follow him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke came
+out with more than her usual quickness across the lawn. Her face was
+aquiver with worry and excitement, and her dark earnest eyes fixed only
+on the other girl.
+
+“Rosamund,” she cried in despair, “what shall I do with her?”
+
+“With her?” cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump. “O lord, he isn’t a
+woman too, is he?”
+
+“No, no, no,” said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common fairness. “A
+woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that.”
+
+“I mean your friend Mary Gray,” retorted Diana with equal tartness.
+“What on earth am I to do with her?”
+
+“How can we tell her about Smith, you mean,” answered Rosamund, her
+face at once clouded and softening. “Yes, it will be pretty painful.”
+
+“But I HAVE told her,” exploded Diana, with more than her congenital
+exasperation. “I have told her, and she doesn’t seem to mind. She still
+says she’s going away with Smith in that cab.”
+
+“But it’s impossible!” ejaculated Rosamund. “Why, Mary is really
+religious. She—”
+
+She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively close
+to her on the lawn. Her quiet companion had come down very quietly into
+the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel. She had a neat but
+very ancient blue tam-o’-shanter on her head, and was pulling some
+rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints fitted
+excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair; the more excellently
+for the touch of shabbiness: for a woman’s clothes never suit her so
+well as when they seem to suit her by accident.
+
+But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and
+attractive. In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are
+already sad, it will often happen that one reflection at some
+occasional angle will cause to linger the last of the light. A scrap of
+window, a scrap of water, a scrap of looking-glass, will be full of the
+fire that is lost to all the rest of the earth. The quaint, almost
+triangular face of Mary Gray was like some triangular piece of mirror
+that could still repeat the splendour of hours before. Mary, though she
+was always graceful, could never before have properly been called
+beautiful; and yet her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful
+as to make a man catch his breath.
+
+“O Diana,” cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
+“but how did you tell her?”
+
+“It is quite easy to tell her,” answered Diana sombrely; “it makes no
+impression at all.”
+
+“I’m afraid I’ve kept everything waiting,” said Mary Gray
+apologetically, “and now we must really say good-bye. Innocent is
+taking me to his aunt’s over at Hampstead, and I’m afraid she goes to
+bed early.”
+
+Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort of
+sleepy light in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness; she was
+like one speaking absently with her eye on some very distant object.
+
+“Mary, Mary,” cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, “I’m so sorry about
+it, but the thing can’t be at all. We—we have found out all about Mr.
+Smith.”
+
+“All?” repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation; “why, that
+must be awfully exciting.”
+
+There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that the silent
+Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head, as it might be to
+listen. Then Rosamund remaining speechless, Dr. Pym came to her rescue
+in a definite way.
+
+“To begin with,” he said, “this man Smith is constantly attempting
+murder. The Warden of Brakespeare College—”
+
+“I know,” said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile. “Innocent told
+me.”
+
+“I can’t say what he told you,” replied Pym quickly, “but I’m very much
+afraid it wasn’t true. The plain truth is that the man’s stained with
+every known human crime. I assure you I have all the documents. I have
+evidence of his committing burglary, signed by a most eminent English
+curate. I have—”
+
+“Oh, but there were two curates,” cried Mary, with a certain gentle
+eagerness; “that was what made it so much funnier.”
+
+The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more, and Inglewood
+appeared for an instant, making a sort of signal. The American doctor
+bowed, the English doctor did not, but they both set out stolidly
+towards the house. No one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the
+gate; but the back of his head and shoulders had still an indescribable
+indication that he was listening to every word.
+
+“But don’t you understand, Mary,” cried Rosamund in despair; “don’t you
+know that awful things have happened even before our very eyes. I
+should have thought you would have heard the revolver shots upstairs.”
+
+“Yes, I heard the shots,” said Mary almost brightly; “but I was busy
+packing just then. And Innocent had told me he was going to shoot at
+Dr. Warner; so it wasn’t worth while to come down.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t understand what you mean,” cried Rosamund Hunt, stamping,
+“but you must and shall understand what I mean. I don’t care how
+cruelly I put it, if only I can save you. I mean that your Innocent
+Smith is the most awfully wicked man in the world. He has sent bullets
+at lots of other men and gone off in cabs with lots of other women. And
+he seems to have killed the women too, for nobody can find them.”
+
+“He is really rather naughty sometimes,” said Mary Gray, laughing
+softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.
+
+“Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something,” said Rosamund, and burst
+into tears.
+
+At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out of the house
+with their great green-clad captive between them. He made no
+resistance, but was still laughing in a groggy and half-witted style.
+Arthur Inglewood followed in the rear, a dark and red study in the last
+shades of distress and shame. In this black, funereal, and painfully
+realistic style the exit from Beacon House was made by a man whose
+entrance a day before had been effected by the happy leaping of a wall
+and the hilarious climbing of a tree. No one moved of the groups in the
+garden except Mary Gray, who stepped forward quite naturally, calling
+out, “Are you ready, Innocent? Our cab’s been waiting such a long
+time.”
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dr. Warner firmly, “I must insist on
+asking this lady to stand aside. We shall have trouble enough as it is,
+with the three of us in a cab.”
+
+“But it IS our cab,” persisted Mary. “Why, there’s Innocent’s yellow
+bag on the top of it.”
+
+“Stand aside,” repeated Warner roughly. “And you, Mr. Moon, please be
+so obliging as to move a moment. Come, come! the sooner this ugly
+business is over the better—and how can we open the gate if you will
+keep leaning on it?”
+
+Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed to consider
+and reconsider this argument. “Yes,” he said at last; “but how can I
+lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?”
+
+“Oh, get out of the way!” cried Warner, almost good-humouredly. “You
+can lean on the gate any time.”
+
+“No,” said Moon reflectively. “Seldom the time and the place and the
+blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you come of an old
+country family. My ancestors leaned on gates before any one had
+discovered how to open them.”
+
+“Michael!” cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, “are you going to
+get out of the way?”
+
+“Why, no; I think not,” said Michael, after some meditation, and swung
+himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company, while still,
+in a lounging attitude, occupying the path.
+
+“Hullo!” he called out suddenly; “what are you doing to Mr. Smith?”
+
+“Taking him away,” answered Warner shortly, “to be examined.”
+
+“Matriculation?” asked Moon brightly.
+
+“By a magistrate,” said the other curtly.
+
+“And what other magistrate,” cried Michael, raising his voice, “dares
+to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient and
+independent Dukes of Beacon? What other court dares to try one of our
+company, save only the High Court of Beacon? Have you forgotten that
+only this afternoon we flew the flag of independence and severed
+ourselves from all the nations of the earth?”
+
+“Michael,” cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, “how can you stand there
+talking nonsense? Why, you saw the dreadful thing yourself. You were
+there when he went mad. It was you that helped the doctor up when he
+fell over the flower-pot.”
+
+“And the High Court of Beacon,” replied Moon with hauteur, “has special
+powers in all cases concerning lunatics, flower-pots, and doctors who
+fall down in gardens. It’s in our very first charter from Edward I: ‘Si
+medicus quisquam in horto prostratus—’”
+
+“Out of the way!” cried Warner with sudden fury, “or we will force you
+out of it.”
+
+“What!” cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious fierceness. “Shall
+I die in defence of this sacred pale? Will you paint these blue
+railings red with my gore?” and he laid hold of one of the blue spikes
+behind him. As Inglewood had noticed earlier in the evening, the
+railing was loose and crooked at this place, and the painted iron staff
+and spearhead came away in Michael’s hand as he shook it.
+
+“See!” he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air, “the very
+lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend it. Ah, in
+such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!” And in a voice
+like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard—
+
+“Ou pour l’honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince,
+Navré, poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province.”
+
+
+“Sakes alive!” said the American gentleman, almost in an awed tone.
+Then he added, “Are there two maniacs here?”
+
+“No; there are five,” thundered Moon. “Smith and I are the only sane
+people left.”
+
+“Michael!” cried Rosamund; “Michael, what does it mean?”
+
+“It means bosh!” roared Michael, and slung his painted spear hurtling
+to the other end of the garden. “It means that doctors are bosh, and
+criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh— much more bosh than our
+Court of Beacon. It means, you fatheads, that Innocent Smith is no more
+mad or bad than the bird on that tree.”
+
+“But, my dear Moon,” began Inglewood in his modest manner, “these
+gentlemen—”
+
+“On the word of two doctors,” exploded Moon again, without listening to
+anybody else, “shut up in a private hell on the word of two doctors!
+And such doctors! Oh, my hat! Look at ’em!—do just look at ’em! Would
+you read a book, or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty
+such? My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics. What would you
+say if I called a man wicked on the word of two priests?”
+
+“But it isn’t only their word, Michael,” reasoned Rosamund; “they’ve
+got evidence too.”
+
+“Have you looked at it?” asked Moon.
+
+“No,” said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; “these gentlemen
+are in charge of it.”
+
+“And of everything else, it seems to me,” said Michael. “Why, you
+haven’t even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke.”
+
+“Oh, that’s no use,” said Diana in an undertone to Rosamund; “Auntie
+can’t say ‘Bo!’ to a goose.”
+
+“I am glad to hear it,” answered Michael, “for with such a flock of
+geese to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on her
+lips. For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light
+and airy style. I appeal to Mrs. Duke—it’s her house.”
+
+“Mrs. Duke?” repeated Inglewood doubtfully.
+
+“Yes, Mrs. Duke,” said Michael firmly, “commonly called the Iron Duke.”
+
+“If you ask Auntie,” said Diana quietly, “she’ll only be for doing
+nothing at all. Her only idea is to hush things up or to let things
+slide. That just suits her.”
+
+“Yes,” replied Michael Moon; “and, as it happens, it just suits all of
+us. You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke; but when you are as
+old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew— that half one’s letters
+answer themselves if you can only refrain from the fleshly appetite of
+answering them.”
+
+He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow on
+the grate, but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time; just
+as it had changed from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant, it now
+changed to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer giving good legal advice.
+
+“It isn’t only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if she can,” he
+said; “we all want to keep it quiet if we can. Look at the large
+facts—the big bones of the case. I believe those scientific gentlemen
+have made a highly scientific mistake. I believe Smith is as blameless
+as a buttercup. I admit buttercups don’t often let off loaded pistols
+in private houses; I admit there is something demanding explanation.
+But I am morally certain there’s some blunder, or some joke, or some
+allegory, or some accident behind all this. Well, suppose I’m wrong.
+We’ve disarmed him; we’re five men to hold him; he may as well go to a
+lock-up later on as now. But suppose there’s even a chance of my being
+right. Is it anybody’s interest here to wash this linen in public?
+
+“Come, I’ll take each of you in order. Once take Smith outside that
+gate, and you take him into the front page of the evening papers. I
+know; I’ve written the front page myself. Miss Duke, do you or your
+aunt want a sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house—‘Doctors
+shot here.’? No, no—doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you don’t want
+the rubbish shot here. Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I am
+wrong. Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours. Mark my
+words, if he’s proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you
+introduced him. If he’s proved innocent, they will say you helped to
+collar him. Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong. If he’s
+proved guilty, they’ll say you engaged your companion to him. If he’s
+proved innocent, they’ll print that telegram. I know the Organs, damn
+them.”
+
+He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more
+breathless than had either his theatrical or his real denunciation. But
+he was plainly in earnest, as well as positive and lucid; as was proved
+by his proceeding quickly the moment he had found his breath.
+
+“It is just the same,” he cried, “with our medical friends. You will
+say that Dr. Warner has a grievance. I agree. But does he want
+specially to be snapshotted by all the journalists _prostratus in
+horto?_ It was no fault of his, but the scene was not very dignified
+even for him. He must have justice; but does he want to ask for
+justice, not only on his knees, but on his hands and knees? Does he
+want to enter the court of justice on all fours? Doctors are not
+allowed to advertise; and I’m sure no doctor wants to advertise himself
+as looking like that. And even for our American guest the interest is
+the same. Let us suppose that he has conclusive documents. Let us
+assume that he has revelations really worth reading. Well, in a legal
+inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that matter) ten to one he won’t be
+allowed to read them. He’ll be tripped up every two or three minutes
+with some tangle of old rules. A man can’t tell the truth in public
+nowadays. But he can still tell it in private; he can tell it inside
+that house.”
+
+“It is quite true,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened throughout the
+speech with a seriousness which only an American could have retained
+through such a scene. “It is true that I have been per-ceptibly less
+hampered in private inquiries.”
+
+“Dr. Pym!” cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger. “Dr. Pym! you aren’t
+really going to admit—”
+
+“Smith may be mad,” went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue that
+seemed as heavy as a hatchet, “but there was something after all in
+what he said about Home Rule for every home. Yes, there is something,
+when all’s said and done, in the High Court of Beacon. It is really
+true that human beings might often get some sort of domestic justice
+where just now they can only get legal injustice—oh, I am a lawyer too,
+and I know that as well. It is true that there’s too much official and
+indirect power. Often and often the thing a whole nation can’t settle
+is just the thing a family could settle. Scores of young criminals have
+been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and
+sent to bed. Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell
+when they only wanted a week at Brighton. There IS something in Smith’s
+notion of domestic self-government; and I propose that we put it into
+practice. You have the prisoner; you have the documents. Come, we are a
+company of free, white, Christian people, such as might be besieged in
+a town or cast up on a desert island. Let us do this thing ourselves.
+Let us go into that house there and sit down and find out with our own
+eyes and ears whether this thing is true or not; whether this Smith is
+a man or a monster. If we can’t do a little thing like that, what right
+have we to put crosses on ballot papers?”
+
+Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool, saw
+in that glance that Moon was gaining ground. The motives that led
+Arthur to think of surrender were indeed very different from those
+which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym. All Arthur’s instincts were on the side
+of privacy and polite settlement; he was very English and would often
+endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric. To
+play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend,
+would have been absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official
+part he had played that afternoon was very painful. He was not likely
+to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
+sleeping dogs lie.
+
+On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
+possible that seem crazy to the English. Regulations and authorities
+exactly like one of Innocent’s pranks or one of Michael’s satires
+really exist, propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling
+business men. Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and
+fanciful; each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village,
+and as unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States where no man may have a
+cigarette, States where any man may have ten wives, very strict
+prohibition States, very lax divorce States—all these large local
+vagaries had prepared Cyrus Pym’s mind for small local vagaries in a
+smaller country. Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian
+or Italian, utterly incapable of even conceiving what English
+conventions are, he could not see the social impossibility of the Court
+of Beacon. It is firmly believed by those who shared the experiment,
+that to the very end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed
+it to be some Britannic institution.
+
+Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached
+through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk
+apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.
+Something at once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this being
+moved Michael to even heartier outbursts of a healthy and humane
+flippancy.
+
+“Why, here’s little Nosey Gould,” he exclaimed. “Isn’t the mere sight
+of him enough to banish all your morbid reflections?”
+
+“Really,” replied Dr. Warner, “I really fail to see how Mr. Gould
+affects the question; and I once more demand—”
+
+“Hello! what’s the funeral, gents?” inquired the newcomer with the air
+of an uproarious umpire. “Doctor demandin’ something? Always the way at
+a boarding-house, you know. Always lots of demand. No supply.”
+
+As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his
+position, and indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain
+dangerous and dubious acts, and that there had even arisen an
+allegation that he was insane.
+
+“Well, of course he is,” said Moses Gould equably; “it don’t need old
+’Olmes to see that. The ’awk-like face of ’Olmes,” he added with
+abstract relish, “showed a shide of disappointment, the sleuth-like
+Gould ’avin’ got there before ’im.”
+
+“If he is mad,” began Inglewood.
+
+“Well,” said Moses, “when a cove gets out on the tile the first night
+there’s generally a tile loose.”
+
+“You never objected before,” said Diana Duke rather stiffly, “and
+you’re generally pretty free with your complaints.”
+
+“I don’t compline of him,” said Moses magnanimously, “the poor chap’s
+’armless enough; you might tie ’im up in the garden here and ’e’d make
+noises at the burglars.”
+
+“Moses,” said Moon with solemn fervour, “you are the incarnation of
+Common Sense. You think Mr. Innocent is mad. Let me introduce you to
+the incarnation of Scientific Theory. He also thinks Mr. Innocent is
+mad.—Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.—Moses, this is the celebrated
+Dr. Pym.” The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and bowed. He
+also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice, which sounded like
+“Pleased to meet you.”
+
+“Now you two people,” said Michael cheerfully, “who both think our poor
+friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there and prove
+him mad. What could be more powerful than the combination of Scientific
+Theory with Common Sense? United you stand; divided you fall. I will
+not be so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I
+confine myself to recording the chronological accident that he has not
+shown us any so far. I take the freedom of an old friend in staking my
+shirt that Moses has no scientific theory. Yet against this strong
+coalition I am ready to appear, armed with nothing but an
+intuition—which is American for a guess.”
+
+“Distinguished by Mr. Gould’s assistance,” said Pym, opening his eyes
+suddenly. “I gather that though he and I are identical in primary
+di-agnosis there is yet between us something that cannot be called a
+disagreement, something which we may perhaps call a—” He put the points
+of thumb and forefinger together, spreading the other fingers
+exquisitely in the air, and seemed to be waiting for somebody else to
+tell him what to say.
+
+“Catchin’ flies?” inquired the affable Moses.
+
+“A divergence,” said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief; “a
+divergence. Granted that the man in question is deranged, he would not
+necessarily be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac—”
+
+“Has it occurred to you,” observed Moon, who was leaning on the gate
+again, and did not turn round, “that if he were a homicidal maniac he
+might have killed us all here while we were talking.”
+
+Something exploded silently underneath all their minds, like sealed
+dynamite in some forgotten cellars. They all remembered for the first
+time for some hour or two that the monster of whom they were talking
+was standing quietly among them. They had left him in the garden like a
+garden statue; there might have been a dolphin coiling round his legs,
+or a fountain pouring out of his mouth, for all the notice they had
+taken of Innocent Smith. He stood with his crest of blonde, blown hair
+thrust somewhat forward, his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted face
+looking patiently downwards at nothing in particular, his huge
+shoulders humped, and his hands in his trousers pockets. So far as they
+could guess he had not moved at all. His green coat might have been cut
+out of the green turf on which he stood. In his shadow Pym had
+expounded and Rosamund expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had
+ragged. He had remained like a thing graven; the god of the garden. A
+sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and then, after
+correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.
+
+“Why,” cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, “the Court of Beacon
+has opened—and shut up again too. You all know now I am right. Your
+buried common sense has told you what my buried common sense has told
+me. Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol,
+and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is harmless. Back
+we all go to the house and clear a room for discussion. For the High
+Court of Beacon, which has already arrived at its decision, is just
+about to begin its inquiry.”
+
+“Just a goin’ to begin!” cried little Mr. Moses in an extraordinary
+sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal during music
+or a thunderstorm. “Follow on to the ’Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon; ’ave
+a kipper from the old firm! ’Is Lordship complimented Mr. Gould on the
+’igh professional delicacy ’e had shown, and which was worthy of the
+best traditions of the Saloon Bar— and three of Scotch hot, miss! Oh,
+chase me, girls!”
+
+The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a sort
+of waddling dance of pure excitement; and had made a circuit of the
+garden before he reappeared, breathless but still beaming. Moon had
+known his man when he realized that no people presented to Moses Gould
+could be quite serious, even if they were quite furious. The glass
+doors stood open on the side nearest to Mr. Moses Gould; and as the
+feet of that festive idiot were evidently turned in the same direction,
+everybody else went that way with the unanimity of some uproarious
+procession. Only Diana Duke retained enough rigidity to say the thing
+that had been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few
+hours. Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as
+unsympathetic. “In that case,” she said sharply, “these cabs can be
+sent away.”
+
+“Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know,” said Mary with a smile.
+“I dare say the cabman would get it down for us.”
+
+“I’ll get the bag,” said Smith, speaking for the first time in hours;
+his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.
+
+Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility were
+left breathless by his precipitance. With a run and spring he was out
+of the garden into the street; with a spring and one quivering kick he
+was actually on the roof of the cab. The cabman happened to be standing
+by the horse’s head, having just removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith
+seemed for an instant to be rolling about on the cab’s back in the
+embraces of his Gladstone bag. The next instant, however, he had
+rolled, as if by a royal luck, into the high seat behind, and with a
+shriek of piercing and appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying
+and scampering down the street.
+
+His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it was all the
+other people who were turned into garden statues. Mr. Moses Gould,
+however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally for the purposes
+of permanent sculpture, came to life some time before the rest, and,
+turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily with a stranger
+on an omnibus, “Tile loose, eh? Cab loose anyhow.” There followed a
+fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer like a club of
+stone,—
+
+“This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon. You have let
+loose a maniac on the whole metropolis.”
+
+Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent of
+continuous houses. The little garden that shut it in ran out into a
+sharp point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets.
+Smith and his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly most
+of those standing inside of it never expected to see him again. At the
+apex, however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal
+violence up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the
+group. With a common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if
+to stop him, but they soon had reason to duck and recoil. Even as he
+vanished up street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly
+from his hand, so that it fell in the centre of the garden, scattering
+the company like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner’s hat for the
+third time. Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot
+away with a shriek that went into a whisper.
+
+“Well,” said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice; “you may as
+well all go inside anyhow. We’ve got two relics of Mr. Smith at least;
+his fiancee and his trunk.”
+
+“Why do you want us to go inside?” asked Arthur Inglewood, in whose red
+brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed to have reached its limit.
+
+“I want the rest to go in,” said Michael in a clear voice, “because I
+want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you.”
+
+There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting
+colder, and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the
+twilight. Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.
+
+“I refuse to listen to any such proposal,” he said; “you have lost this
+ruffian, and I must find him.”
+
+“I don’t ask you to listen to any proposal,” answered Moon quietly; “I
+only ask you to listen.”
+
+He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately the
+whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side of
+the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
+Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
+rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had
+swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
+Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness, and
+coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine attitude as
+before.
+
+“Get inside! get inside!” cried Moon hilariously, with the air of one
+shooing a company of cats. “Come, come, be quick about it! Didn’t I
+tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?”
+
+How they were all really driven into the house again it would have been
+difficult afterwards to say. They had reached the point of being
+exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce are ill with
+laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among the trees seemed like
+a final gesture of things in general. Inglewood lingered behind them,
+saying with a certain amicable exasperation, “I say, do you really want
+to speak to me?”
+
+“I do,” said Michael, “very much.”
+
+Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had
+seemed to promise. While the human eye still felt the sky as light
+gray, a very large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of
+roofs and trees, proved by contrast that the sky was already a very
+dark gray indeed. A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of
+riven clouds across the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and
+yet laborious wind.
+
+“Arthur,” said Michael, “I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
+You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed
+Court of Beacon, and to clear him too—clear him of both crime and
+lunacy. Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit.” They walked
+up and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
+
+“Can you,” asked Michael, “shut your eyes and see some of those queer
+old hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot
+countries. How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
+Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and
+red, or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould’s
+ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it up at
+all.”
+
+Inglewood’s first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend had
+really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless a flight of
+irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to
+the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he
+was actually kicking his heels. How he could be more happy in one by
+imagining the other he could not conceive. Both (in themselves) were
+unpleasant.
+
+“Why does everybody repeat riddles,” went on Moon abruptly, “even if
+they’ve forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to remember because
+they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols in black, red,
+or green easy to remember because they had been hard to guess. Their
+colours were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was plain
+except the meaning.”
+
+Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon
+went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and
+smoking faster and faster. “Dances, too,” he said; “dances were not
+frivolous. Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and
+texts. The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but
+silent. Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?”
+
+“Well, really,” cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour,
+“have I noticed anything else?”
+
+“Have you noticed this about him,” asked Moon, with unshaken
+persistency, “that he has done so much and said so little? When first
+he came he talked, but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he
+wasn’t used to it. All he really did was actions—painting red flowers
+on black gowns or throwing yellow bags on to the grass. I tell you that
+big green figure is figurative— like any green figure capering on some
+white Eastern wall.”
+
+“My dear Michael,” cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation which
+increased with the rising wind, “you are getting absurdly fanciful.”
+
+“I think of what has just happened,” said Michael steadily. “The man
+has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking all the time. He
+fired three shots from a six-shooter and then gave it up to us, when he
+might have shot us dead in our boots. How could he express his trust in
+us better than that? He wanted to be tried by us. How could he have
+shown it better than by standing quite still and letting us discuss it?
+He wanted to show that he stood there willingly, and could escape if he
+liked. How could he have shown it better than by escaping in the cab
+and coming back again? Innocent Smith is not a madman—he is a
+ritualist. He wants to express himself, not with his tongue, but with
+his arms and legs— with my body I thee worship, as it says in the
+marriage service. I begin to understand the old plays and pageants. I
+see why the mutes at a funeral were mute. I see why the mummers were
+mum. They MEANT something; and Smith means something too. All other
+jokes have to be noisy—like little Nosey Gould’s jokes, for instance.
+The only silent jokes are the practical jokes. Poor Smith, properly
+considered, is an allegorical practical joker. What he has really done
+in this house has been as frantic as a war-dance, but as silent as a
+picture.”
+
+“I suppose you mean,” said the other dubiously, “that we have got to
+find out what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many coloured
+picture-puzzles. But even supposing that they do mean something—why,
+Lord bless my soul!—”
+
+Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted his eyes
+to the moon, by this time risen big and luminous, and had seen a huge,
+half-human figure sitting on the garden wall. It was outlined so
+sharply against the moon that for the first flash it was hard to be
+certain even that it was human: the hunched shoulders and outstanding
+hair had rather the air of a colossal cat. It resembled a cat also in
+the fact that when first startled it sprang up and ran with easy
+activity along the top of the wall. As it ran, however, its heavy
+shoulders and small stooping head rather suggested a baboon. The
+instant it came within reach of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was
+lost in the branches. The gale, which by this time was shaking every
+shrub in the garden, made the identification yet more difficult, since
+it melted the moving limbs of the fugitive in the multitudinous moving
+limbs of the tree.
+
+“Who is there?” shouted Arthur. “Who are you? Are you Innocent?”
+
+“Not quite,” answered an obscure voice among the leaves. “I cheated you
+once about a penknife.”
+
+The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
+backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it had
+on the gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.
+
+“But are you Smith?” asked Inglewood as in an agony.
+
+“Very nearly,” said the voice out of the tossing tree.
+
+“But you must have some real names,” shrieked Inglewood in despair.
+“You must call yourself something.”
+
+“Call myself something,” thundered the obscure voice, shaking the tree
+so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once. “I
+call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer
+Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare—”
+
+“But, manalive!” began Inglewood in exasperation.
+
+“That’s right! that’s right!” came with a roar out of the rocking tree;
+“that’s my real name.” And he broke a branch, and one or two autumn
+leaves fluttered away across the moon.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge
+
+
+The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court of Beacon
+with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow to increase its
+cosiness. The big room was, as it were, cut up into small rooms, with
+walls only waist high—the sort of separation that children make when
+they are playing at shops. This had been done by Moses Gould and
+Michael Moon (the two most active members of this remarkable inquiry)
+with the ordinary furniture of the place. At one end of the long
+mahogany table was set the one enormous garden chair, which was
+surmounted by the old torn tent or umbrella which Smith himself had
+suggested as a coronation canopy. Inside this erection could be
+perceived the dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions and a form of
+countenance that already threatened slumber. At the other end sat the
+accused Smith, in a kind of dock; for he was carefully fenced in with a
+quadrilateral of light bedroom chairs, any of which he could have
+tossed out the window with his big toe. He had been provided with pens
+and paper, out of the latter of which he made paper boats, paper darts,
+and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings. He never
+spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious as a child on the
+floor of an empty nursery.
+
+On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat the
+three young ladies with their backs up against the window, and Mary
+Gray in the middle; it was something between a jury box and the stall
+of the Queen of Beauty at a tournament. Down the centre of the long
+table Moon had built a low barrier out of eight bound volumes of “Good
+Words” to express the moral wall that divided the conflicting parties.
+On the right side sat the two advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and
+Mr. Gould; behind a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the
+case of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology. On the other side, Moon
+and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified with books and
+papers; but as these included several old yellow volumes by Ouida and
+Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon seemed to have been somewhat
+careless and comprehensive. As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr.
+Warner, Moon wanted at first to have him kept entirely behind a high
+screen in the corner, urging the indelicacy of his appearance in court,
+but privately assuring him of an unofficial permission to peep over the
+top now and then. Dr. Warner, however, failed to rise to the chivalry
+of such a course, and after some little disturbance and discussion he
+was accommodated with a seat on the right side of the table in a line
+with his legal advisers.
+
+It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym,
+after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear,
+rose to open the case. His statement was clear and even restrained, and
+such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention by a
+certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of
+American speech.
+
+He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany, closed
+his eyes, and opened his mouth. “The time has gone by,” he said, “when
+murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act, important
+perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered. Science has
+profoundly...” here he paused, poising his compressed finger and thumb
+in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its
+tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said “modified,” and let it
+go—“has profoundly Modified our view of death. In superstitious ages it
+was regarded as the termination of life, catastrophic, and even tragic,
+and was often surrounded by solemnity. Brighter days, however, have
+dawned, and we now see death as universal and inevitable, as part of
+that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding average which we call for
+convenience the order of nature. In the same way we have come to
+consider murder SOCIALLY. Rising above the mere private feelings of a
+man while being forcibly deprived of life, we are privileged to behold
+murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich rotation of the cosmos,
+bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the golden-bearded
+harvesters, the return for ever of the slayers and the slain.”
+
+He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed
+slightly, putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent
+manners of Boston, and continued: “There is but one result of this
+happier and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us.
+It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great
+secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work, ‘The Destructive
+Type.’ We do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a
+murderous man. The type is such that its very life— I might say its
+very health—is in killing. Some hold that it is not properly an
+aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature. My dear old friend
+Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets—” (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud
+“hurrah!” but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that
+Mrs. Duke looked everywhere else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued
+somewhat sternly—“who, in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets,
+felt that the creature’s ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an
+end in itself. However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so
+with the prisoner. In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of
+the maniac; but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity.
+But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements—a cruel, an evil
+sanity. As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin West as
+stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay. No environment,
+however scientific, could have softened him. Place that man in the
+silver-silent purity of the palest cloister, and there will be some
+deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb. Rear him in a happy
+nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he will find
+some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or brain with the brick.
+Circumstances may be favourable, training may be admirable, hopes may
+be high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will
+in its appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb.”
+
+Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature
+at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked
+hat, and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter
+tone.
+
+“It only remains for us,” he said, “to bring forward actual evidence of
+his previous attempts. By an agreement already made with the Court and
+the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence
+authentic letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is
+free to examine. Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided
+to select one— the clearest and most scandalous. I will therefore,
+without further delay, call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two
+letters—one from the Sub-Warden and the other from the porter of
+Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University.”
+
+Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking
+paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face. He began in a
+loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt as a cock-crow:—
+
+“Sir,—Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge—”
+
+“Lord have mercy on us,” muttered Moon, making a backward movement as
+men do when a gun goes off.
+
+“Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,” proclaimed
+the uncompromising Moses, “and I can endorse the description you gave
+of the un’appy Smith. It was not alone my unfortunate duty to rebuke
+many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period, but I was
+actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated that period.
+Hi happened to passing under the house of my friend the Warden of
+Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College and connected with
+it by two or three very ancient arches or props, like bridges, across a
+small strip of water connected with the river. To my grive astonishment
+I be’eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air and clinging to one of
+these pieces of masonry, his appearance and attitude indicatin’ that he
+suffered from the grivest apprehensions. After a short time I heard two
+very loud shots, and distinctly perceived the unfortunate undergraduate
+Smith leaning far out of the Warden’s window and aiming at the Warden
+repeatedly with a revolver. Upon seeing me, Smith burst into a loud
+laugh (in which impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared
+to desist. I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he succeeded in
+detaching the Warden from his painful position. Smith was sent down.
+The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle Club
+prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.— Hi am,
+your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.
+
+“The other letter,” continued Gould in a glow of triumph, “is from the
+porter, and won’t take long to read.
+
+“Dear Sir,—It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare
+College, and that I ’elped the Warden down when the young man was
+shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter. The young man
+who was shooting at him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the
+photograph Mr. Boulter sends.— Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker.”
+
+Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them. But for
+the vocal divergences in the matter of h’s and a’s, the Sub-Warden’s
+letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it; and both that and the
+porter’s letter were plainly genuine. Moon handed them to Inglewood,
+who handed them back in silence to Moses Gould.
+
+“So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is
+concerned,” said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, “that is my
+case.”
+
+Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave
+little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner. He did
+not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into the abstract questions.
+“I do not know enough to be an agnostic,” he said, rather wearily, “and
+I can only master the known and admitted elements in such
+controversies. As for science and religion, the known and admitted
+facts are plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that
+the doctors say is disproved. That’s the only difference between
+science and religion there’s ever been, or will be. Yet these new
+discoveries touch me, somehow,” he said, looking down sorrowfully at
+his boots. “They remind me of a dear old great-aunt of mine who used to
+enjoy them in her youth. It brings tears to my eyes. I can see the old
+bucket by the garden fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind—”
+
+“Hi! here, stop the ’bus a bit,” cried Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a
+sort of perspiration. “We want to give the defence a fair run—like
+gents, you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering
+poplars.”
+
+“Well, hang it all,” said Moon, in an injured manner, “if Dr. Pym may
+have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn’t I have an old aunt with
+poplars?”
+
+“I am sure,” said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost like a
+shaky authority, “Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes.”
+
+“Why, as to liking her,” began Moon, “I—but perhaps, as you say, she is
+scarcely the core of the question. I repeat that I do not mean to
+follow the abstract speculations. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is
+simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the
+psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a kind of man who has
+a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true”—here he lowered
+his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness—“is it not
+equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to
+get murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding the field that
+Dr. Warner is such a man? I do not speak without the book, any more
+than my learned friend. The whole matter is expounded in Dr.
+Moonenschein’s monumental work, ‘The Destructible Doctor,’ with
+diagrams, showing the various ways in which such a person as Dr. Warner
+may be resolved into his elements. In the light of these facts—”
+
+“Hi, stop the ’bus! stop the ’bus!” cried Moses, jumping up and down
+and gesticulating in great excitement. “My principal’s got something to
+say! My principal wants to do a bit of talkin’.”
+
+Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious. “I
+have strictly CON-fined myself,” he said nasally, “to books to which
+immediate reference can be made. I have Sonnenschein’s ‘Destructive
+Type’ here on the table, if the defence wish to see it. Where is this
+wonderful work on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about? Does it
+exist? Can he produce it?”
+
+“Produce it!” cried the Irishman with a rich scorn. “I’ll produce it in
+a week if you’ll pay for the ink and paper.”
+
+“Would it have much authority?” asked Pym, sitting down.
+
+“Oh, authority!” said Moon lightly; “that depends on a fellow’s
+religion.”
+
+Dr. Pym jumped up again. “Our authority is based on masses of accurate
+detail,” he said. “It deals with a region in which things can be
+handled and tested. My opponent will at least admit that death is a
+fact of experience.”
+
+“Not of mine,” said Moon mournfully, shaking his head. “I’ve never
+experienced such a thing in all my life.”
+
+“Well, really,” said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a crackle of
+papers.
+
+“So we see,” resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice, “that a man
+like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution, doomed to
+such attacks. My client’s onslaught, even if it occurred, was not
+unique. I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance of
+Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way.
+Following the example of my learned friends I will read only two of
+them. The first is from an honest and laborious matron living off the
+Harrow Road.
+
+“Mr. Moon, Sir,—Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him. Wot then? It was
+all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned, and if your
+Docter Warner doesn’t like having sorsepans thrown at him, don’t let
+him wear his hat in a respectable woman’s parler, and tell him to leave
+orf smiling or tell us the joke.—Yours respectfully, Hannah Miles.
+
+“The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin, with whom
+Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation. He writes as follows:—
+
+“Dear Sir,—The incident to which you refer is one which I regret, and
+which, moreover, I have never been able to explain. My own branch of
+medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have the view of a
+mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed almost automatic
+action. To say that I ‘pulled Dr. Warner’s nose,’ is, however,
+inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important. That I punched
+his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with what regret); but
+pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective with which I
+cannot reproach myself. In comparison with this, the act of punching
+was an outward, instantaneous, and even natural gesture.— Believe me,
+yours faithfully, Burton Lestrange.
+
+“I have numberless other letters,” continued Moon, “all bearing witness
+to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I therefore
+think that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the question in
+his survey. We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a
+natural force. As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as
+stay the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
+Place that man in a Quakers’ meeting, among the most peaceful of
+Christians, and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of
+chocolate. Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will
+be stoned to death with precious stones. Circumstances may be beautiful
+and wonderful, the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be
+golden-bearded, the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be
+iris-leapt, the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and
+above all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to
+get murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and
+triumphantly succeeds at last.”
+
+He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion. But
+even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other side of
+the table. Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across the little
+figure of Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers to Dr. Pym.
+That expert nodded a great many times and finally started to his feet
+with a sincere expression of sternness.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried indignantly, “as my colleague has
+said, we should be delighted to give any latitude to the defence—if
+there were a defence. But Mr. Moon seems to think he is there to make
+jokes— very good jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to assist his
+client. He picks holes in science. He picks holes in my client’s social
+popularity. He picks holes in my literary style, which doesn’t seem to
+suit his high-toned European taste. But how does this picking of holes
+affect the issue? This Smith has picked two holes in my client’s hat,
+and with an inch better aim would have picked two holes in his head.
+All the jokes in the world won’t unpick those holes or be any use for
+the defence.”
+
+Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the
+evident fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a
+dreamy way. “The defence?” he said vaguely—“oh, I haven’t begun that
+yet.”
+
+“You certainly have not,” said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of applause
+from his side, which the other side found it impossible to answer.
+“Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful from the
+very beginning—”
+
+“While you’re standing up,” said Moon, in the same almost sleepy style,
+“perhaps I might ask you a question.”
+
+“A question? Certainly,” said Pym stiffly. “It was distinctly arranged
+between us that as we could not cross-examine the witnesses, we might
+vicariously cross-examine each other. We are in a position to invite
+all such inquiry.”
+
+“I think you said,” observed Moon absently, “that none of the
+prisoner’s shots really hit the doctor.”
+
+“For the cause of science,” cried the complacent Pym, “fortunately
+not.”
+
+“Yet they were fired from a few feet away.”
+
+“Yes; about four feet.”
+
+“And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close to him
+too?” asked Moon.
+
+“That is so,” said the witness gravely.
+
+“I think,” said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, “that your Sub-Warden
+mentioned that Smith was one of the University’s record men for
+shooting.”
+
+“Why, as to that—” began Pym, after an instant of stillness.
+
+“A second question,” continued Moon, comparatively curtly. “You said
+there were other cases of the accused trying to kill people. Why have
+you not got evidence of them?”
+
+The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again. “In
+those cases,” he said precisely, “there was no evidence from outsiders,
+as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual victims.”
+
+“Why didn’t you get their evidence?”
+
+“In the case of the actual victims,” said Pym, “there was some
+difficulty and reluctance, and—”
+
+“Do you mean,” asked Moon, “that none of the actual victims would
+appear against the prisoner?”
+
+“That would be exaggerative,” began the other.
+
+“A third question,” said Moon, so sharply that every one jumped.
+“You’ve got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard some shots;
+where’s the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot at? The Warden
+of Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman.”
+
+“We did ask for a statement from him,” said Pym a little nervously;
+“but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it out of
+deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science have been
+great.”
+
+Moon leaned forward. “You mean, I suppose,” he said, “that his
+statement was favourable to the prisoner.”
+
+“It might be understood so,” replied the American doctor; “but, really,
+it was difficult to understand at all. In fact, we sent it back to
+him.”
+
+“You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of
+Brakespeare.”
+
+“No.”
+
+“I only ask,” said Michael quietly, “because we have. To conclude my
+case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood, to read a statement of the
+true story—a statement attested as true by the signature of the Warden
+himself.”
+
+Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though he
+looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did, the
+spectators were surprised to feel that his presence was, upon the
+whole, more efficient and sufficing than his leader’s. He was, in
+truth, one of those modest men who cannot speak until they are told to
+speak; and then can speak well. Moon was entirely the opposite. His own
+impudences amused him in private, but they slightly embarrassed him in
+public; he felt a fool while he was speaking, whereas Inglewood felt a
+fool only because he could not speak. The moment he had anything to say
+he could speak; and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite
+natural. Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.
+
+“As my colleague has just explained,” said Inglewood, “there are two
+enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence. The first is a
+plain physical fact. By the admission of everybody, by the very
+evidence adduced by the prosecution, it is clear that the accused was
+celebrated as a specially good shot. Yet on both the occasions
+complained of he shot from a distance of four or five feet, and shot at
+him four or five times, and never hit him once. That is the first
+startling circumstance on which we base our argument. The second, as my
+colleague has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot find a single
+victim of these alleged outrages to speak for himself. Subordinates
+speak for him. Porters climb up ladders to him. But he himself is
+silent. Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain on the spot both the
+riddle of the shots and the riddle of the silence. I will first of all
+read the covering letter in which the true account of the Cambridge
+incident is contained, and then that document itself. When you have
+heard both, there will be no doubt about your decision. The covering
+letter runs as follows:—
+
+“Dear Sir,—The following is a very exact and even vivid account of the
+incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College. We, the
+undersigned, do not see any particular reason why we should refer it to
+any isolated authorship. The truth is, it has been a composite
+production; and we have even had some difference of opinion about the
+adjectives. But every word of it is true.—We are, yours faithfully,
+
+“Wilfred Emerson Eames,
+“Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+“Innocent Smith.
+
+
+“The enclosed statement,” continued Inglewood, “runs as follows:—
+
+“A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river, that
+it has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched with all sorts of
+bridges and semi-detached buildings. The river splits itself into
+several small streams and canals, so that in one or two corners the
+place has almost the look of Venice. It was so especially in the case
+with which we are concerned, in which a few flying buttresses or airy
+ribs of stone sprang across a strip of water to connect Brakespeare
+College with the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.
+
+“The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not seem flat
+when one is thus in the midst of the colleges. For in these flat fens
+there are always wandering lakes and lingering rivers of water. And
+these always change what might have been a scheme of horizontal lines
+into a scheme of vertical lines. Wherever there is water the height of
+high buildings is doubled, and a British brick house becomes a
+Babylonian tower. In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head
+downwards exactly to their highest or lowest chimney. The
+coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far below the world as
+its original appears above it. Every scrap of water is not only a
+window but a skylight. Earth splits under men’s feet into precipitous
+aerial perspectives, into which a bird could as easily wing its way
+as—”
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest. The documents he had put in evidence had
+been confined to cold affirmation of fact. The defence, in a general
+way, had an indubitable right to put their case in their own way, but
+all this landscape gardening seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up
+to the business. “Will the leader of the defence tell me,” he asked,
+“how it can possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor’l-coloured,
+or that a bird could have winged itself anywhere?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” said Michael, lifting himself lazily; “you see, you
+don’t know yet what our defence is. Till you know that, don’t you see,
+anything may be relevant. Why, suppose,” he said suddenly, as if an
+idea had struck him, “suppose we wanted to prove the old Warden
+colour-blind. Suppose he was shot by a black man with white hair, when
+he thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair! To
+ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-coloured might be of
+the most massive importance.”
+
+He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared, and
+continued with the same fluency: “Or suppose we wanted to maintain that
+the Warden committed suicide—that he just got Smith to hold the pistol
+as Brutus’s slave held the sword. Why, it would make all the difference
+whether the Warden could see himself plain in still water. Still water
+has made hundreds of suicides: one sees oneself so very—well, so very
+plain.”
+
+“Do you, perhaps,” inquired Pym with austere irony, “maintain that your
+client was a bird of some sort—say, a flamingo?”
+
+“In the matter of his being a flamingo,” said Moon with sudden
+severity, “my client reserves his defence.”
+
+No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat
+and Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:—
+
+“There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors. For
+a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one. In the
+highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.
+
+“This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best.
+Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own
+thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to
+see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This
+duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost
+thing of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth,
+in the statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought
+both to grow on the same body.”
+
+“I know it’s a little transcendental at first,” interposed Inglewood,
+beaming round with a broad apology, “but you see this document was
+written in collaboration by a don and a—”
+
+“Drunkard, eh?” suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy himself.
+
+“I rather think,” proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled and critical
+air, “that this part was written by the don. I merely warn the Court
+that the statement, though indubitably accurate, bears here and there
+the trace of coming from two authors.”
+
+“In that case,” said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing, “I cannot
+agree with them that two heads are better than one.”
+
+“The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred
+problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform: the
+question of whether dons see double because they are drunk, or get
+drunk because they see double. It is enough for them (the undersigned
+persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar and profitable
+theme—which is puddles. What (the undersigned persons ask themselves)
+is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light;
+nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty
+water spread very thin on mud. The two great historic universities of
+England have all this large and level and reflective brilliance.
+Nevertheless, or, rather, on the other hand, they are puddles—puddles,
+puddles, puddles, puddles. The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an
+emphasis inseparable from strong conviction.”
+
+Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some
+present, and continued with eminent cheerfulness:—
+
+“Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of the
+undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes of canal and
+the glittering rainy gutters into which the water broke up round the
+back of Brakespeare College. Had these thoughts crossed his mind he
+would have been much happier than he was. Unfortunately he did not know
+that his puzzles were puddles. He did not know that the academic mind
+reflects infinity and is full of light by the simple process of being
+shallow and standing still. In his case, therefore, there was something
+solemn, and even evil about the infinity implied. It was half-way
+through a starry night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above
+and below. To young Smith’s sullen fancy the skies below seemed even
+hollower than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he
+counted the stars he would find one too many in the pool.
+
+“In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping on
+the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower. For to him, and
+nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel
+things. Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an
+enormous and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they
+were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For
+the young men of that sad time thought that the god always comes from
+the machine. They did not know that in reality the machine only comes
+from the god. In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was
+atrocious to them— atrocious because it was true. All their universe
+was black with white spots.
+
+“Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the
+glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college. The only
+light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the
+upper part of the building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always
+worked till morning and received his friends and favourite pupils at
+any hour of the night. Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy
+Smith was bound. Smith had been at Dr. Eames’s lecture for the first
+half of the morning, and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for
+the second half. He had been sculling madly for the first half of the
+afternoon and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
+He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating
+club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was
+melancholy still. Then, as he was going home to his diggings he
+remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master, the Warden of
+Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn in to that gentleman’s
+private house.
+
+“Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in
+philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the
+university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don
+has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a
+part of the British Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were
+to sit up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer. Personally, he
+was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so
+very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but
+older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a European
+reputation and a bald head.
+
+“‘I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,’ said Smith, who
+was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself
+small, ‘because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really
+too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think
+otherwise—bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing
+you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers—’
+
+“‘All thinkers,’ said Eames, ‘are pessimist thinkers.’
+
+“After a patch of pause, not the first—for this depressing conversation
+had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence—
+the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: ‘It’s all a
+question of wrong calculation. The moth flies into the candle because
+he doesn’t happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The
+wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam
+into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as
+they want to enjoy gin—because they are too stupid to see that they are
+paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness—that they
+don’t even know how to look for it—is proved by the paralyzing
+clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours
+are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this
+side of the river. There’s one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go
+and look at it!’
+
+“‘Of course,’ he went on dreamily, ‘one or two men see the sober fact a
+long way off—they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs mostly try either
+to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to destroy
+themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man that
+wanders about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the wrong
+door and come into the right place. He sees things at the right angle.
+But the common world—’
+
+“‘Oh, hang the common world!’ said the sullen Smith, letting his fist
+fall on the table in an idle despair.
+
+“‘Let’s give it a bad name first,’ said the Professor calmly, ‘and then
+hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life
+while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it. So an
+omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.’
+
+“‘Why doesn’t he strike us dead?’ asked the undergraduate abstractedly,
+plunging his hands into his pockets.
+
+“‘He is dead himself,’ said the philosopher; ‘that is where he is
+really enviable.’
+
+“‘To any one who thinks,’ proceeded Eames, ‘the pleasures of life,
+trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a torture
+chamber. We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the...
+What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.’
+
+“Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his
+shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole,
+rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing
+up on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal
+instants during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what
+it was. Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of
+a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith,
+apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.
+
+“‘I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,’ said Smith, with rough
+tenderness. ‘I’ll put the puppy out of his pain.’
+
+“Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. ‘Do you mean to kill me?’
+he cried.
+
+“‘It’s not a thing I’d do for every one,’ said Smith with emotion; ‘but
+you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow. I know all
+your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.’
+
+“‘Put that thing down,’ shouted the Warden.
+
+“‘It’ll soon be over, you know,’ said Smith with the air of a
+sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and
+balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a
+compassionate expression.
+
+“Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of
+early daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions
+calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the
+few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr.
+Eames’s balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress,
+still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with
+mosses and washed out with rains. With an ungainly and most courageous
+leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible
+mode of escape from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still in his
+academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further
+chances of flight. The whitening daylight opened under as well as over
+him that impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the
+little lakes round Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and
+chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space. They felt as
+if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the
+South Pole below.
+
+“‘Hang the world, we said,’ observed Smith, ‘and the world is hanged.
+“He has hanged the world upon nothing,” says the Bible. Do you like
+being hanged upon nothing? I’m going to be hanged upon something
+myself. I’m going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,’ he
+murmured; ‘never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you.
+For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express desire.’
+
+“‘Help!’ cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; ‘help!’
+
+“‘The puppy struggles,’ said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity,
+‘the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and
+kinder than he,’ and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the
+upper part of Eames’s bald head.
+
+“‘Smith,’ said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort of
+ghastly lucidity, ‘I shall go mad.’
+
+“‘And so look at things from the right angle,’ observed Smith, sighing
+gently. ‘Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The only
+cure is an operation—an operation that is always successful: death.’
+
+“As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything,
+with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds
+sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink. All over the
+little academic town the tops of different buildings took on different
+tints: here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle,
+there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some
+artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep
+church roof. All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly
+individual and significant about them, like crests of famous knights
+pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye,
+especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the
+morning and accepted it as his last. Through a narrow chink between a
+black timber tavern and a big gray college he could see a clock with
+gilt hands which the sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as though
+hypnotized; and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal
+reply. As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry: all the
+churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The birds were already noisy
+in the trees behind the college. The sun rose, gathering glory that
+seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the shallow waters
+beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for the thirst
+of the gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his
+crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the
+villa with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night. He
+wondered for the first time what people lived in them.
+
+“Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might have
+called to a student to shut a door.
+
+“‘Let me come off this place,’ he cried; ‘I can’t bear it.’
+
+“‘I rather doubt if it will bear you,’ said Smith critically; ‘but
+before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you back
+into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the
+metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get
+back to life?’
+
+“‘I’d give anything to get back,’ replied the unhappy professor.
+
+“‘Give anything!’ cried Smith; ‘then, blast your impudence, give us a
+song!’
+
+“‘What song do you mean?’ demanded the exasperated Eames; ‘what song?’
+
+“‘A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,’ answered the other
+gravely. ‘I’ll let you off if you’ll repeat after me the words—
+
+“‘I thank the goodness and the grace
+    That on my birth have smiled.
+And perched me on this curious place,
+    A happy English child.’
+
+
+“Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly
+told him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this
+proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr.
+Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird
+alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic
+statue.
+
+“‘You are now engaged in public worship,’ remarked Smith severely, ‘and
+before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks on
+the pond.’
+
+“The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
+readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.
+
+“‘Not forgetting the drakes,’ said Smith sternly. (Eames weakly
+conceded the drakes.) ‘Not forgetting anything, please. You shall thank
+heaven for churches and chapels and villas and vulgar people and
+puddles and pots and pans and sticks and rags and bones and spotted
+blinds.’
+
+“‘All right, all right,’ repeated the victim in despair; ‘sticks and
+rags and bones and blinds.’
+
+“‘Spotted blinds, I think we said,’ remarked Smith with a rogueish
+ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a long metallic
+finger.
+
+“‘Spotted blinds,’ said Emerson Eames faintly.
+
+“‘You can’t say fairer than that,’ admitted the younger man, ‘and now
+I’ll just tell you this to wind up with. If you really were what you
+profess to be, I don’t see that it would matter to snail or seraph if
+you broke your impious stiff neck and dashed out all your drivelling
+devil-worshipping brains. But in strict biographical fact you are a
+very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you
+like a brother. I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your
+head so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear),
+and then we will go in and have some breakfast.’
+
+“He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor endured
+with singular firmness, and then said, ‘But don’t fire them all off.’
+
+“‘Why not’ asked the other buoyantly.
+
+“‘Keep them,’ asked his companion, ‘for the next man you meet who talks
+as we were talking.’
+
+“It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic
+terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek
+with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.
+
+“It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from the
+ladder, and some little time longer to disentangle himself from the
+Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively, he rejoined
+his companion in the late extraordinary scene. He was astonished to
+find the gigantic Smith heavily shaken, and sitting with his shaggy
+head on his hands. When addressed, he lifted a very pale face.
+
+“‘Why, what is the matter?’ asked Eames, whose own nerves had by this
+time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.
+
+“‘I must ask your indulgence,’ said Smith, rather brokenly. ‘I must ask
+you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.’
+
+“‘YOU have had an escape from death?’ repeated the Professor in not
+unpardonable irritation. ‘Well, of all the cheek—’
+
+“‘Oh, don’t you understand, don’t you understand?’ cried the pale young
+man impatiently. ‘I had to do it, Eames; I had to prove you wrong or
+die. When a man’s young, he nearly always has some one whom he thinks
+the top-water mark of the mind of man— some one who knows all about it,
+if anybody knows.
+
+“‘Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority, and not as the
+scribes. Nobody could comfort me if YOU said there was no comfort. If
+you really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had
+been there to see. Don’t you see that I HAD to prove you didn’t really
+mean it?— or else drown myself in the canal.’
+
+“‘Well,’ said Eames hesitatingly, ‘I think perhaps you confuse—’
+
+“‘Oh, don’t tell me that!’ cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance of
+mental pain; ‘don’t tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence with the
+Will to Live! That’s German, and German is High Dutch, and High Dutch
+is Double Dutch. The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you dangled
+on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not “the Will to Live.” What
+you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the world, when
+all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know it,
+because I knew it at the same minute. I saw the gray clouds turn pink,
+and the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses. It was THOSE
+things you hated leaving, not Life, whatever that is. Eames, we’ve been
+to the brink of death together; won’t you admit I’m right?’
+
+“‘Yes,’ said Eames very slowly, ‘I think you are right. You shall have
+a First!’
+
+“‘Right!’ cried Smith, springing up reanimated. ‘I’ve passed with
+honours, and now let me go and see about being sent down.’
+
+“‘You needn’t be sent down,’ said Eames with the quiet confidence of
+twelve years of intrigue. ‘Everything with us comes from the man on top
+to the people just round him: I am the man on top, and I shall tell the
+people round me the truth.’
+
+“The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window, but he spoke
+with equal firmness. ‘I must be sent down,’ he said, ‘and the people
+must not be told the truth.’
+
+“‘And why not’ asked the other.
+
+“‘Because I mean to follow your advice,’ answered the massive youth, ‘I
+mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state you
+and I were in last night—I wish we could even plead drunkenness. I mean
+to keep those bullets for pessimists—pills for pale people. And in this
+way I want to walk the world like a wonderful surprise— to float as
+idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as the sunrise; not to be
+expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be recalled any more
+than the dying breeze. I don’t want people to anticipate me as a
+well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come virgin and
+violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a
+pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill
+him—only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being
+the skeleton at the feast.’
+
+“‘You can scarcely be called a skeleton,’ said Dr. Eames, smiling.
+
+“‘That comes of being so much at the feast,’ answered the massive
+youth. ‘No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out. But
+that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a kind of
+glimpse of the meaning of death and all that—the skull and cross-bones,
+the _memento mori_. It isn’t only meant to remind us of a future life,
+but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak spirits we should
+grow old in eternity if we were not kept young by death. Providence has
+to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and
+butter into fingers.’
+
+“Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality, ‘But I know
+something now, Eames. I knew it when I saw the clouds turn pink.’
+
+“‘What do you mean?’ asked Eames. ‘What did you know?’
+
+“‘I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.’
+
+“He gripped Dr. Eames’s hand and groped his way somewhat unsteadily to
+the door. Before he had vanished through it he had added, ‘It’s very
+dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second that he
+understands death.’
+
+“Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his late
+assailant had left. Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella, and went
+for a brisk if rotatory walk. Several times, however, he stood outside
+the villa with the spotted blinds, studying them intently with his head
+slightly on one side. Some took him for a lunatic and some for an
+intending purchaser. He is not yet sure that the two characters would
+be widely different.
+
+“The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is, in
+the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters. Each
+of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other. But the
+undersigned persons absolutely guarantee the exactitude of the story;
+and if their version of the thing be questioned, they, the undersigned
+persons, would deucedly well like to know who does know about it if
+they don’t.
+
+“The undersigned persons will now adjourn to ‘The Spotted Dog’ for
+beer. Farewell.
+
+“(Signed) James Emerson Eames, “Warden of Brakespeare College,
+Cambridge.
+
+“Innocent Smith.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge
+
+
+Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders of
+the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together. Both the
+Jew and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks, and they
+revealed by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the yellow
+that nothing could be done in the way of denial of the document. The
+letter from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
+Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and social tone.
+
+“Very few words,” said Inglewood, “are required to conclude our case in
+this matter. Surely it is now plain that our client carried his pistol
+about with the eccentric but innocent purpose of giving a wholesome
+scare to those whom he regarded as blasphemers. In each case the scare
+was so wholesome that the victim himself has dated from it as from a
+new birth. Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor—
+he walks the world curing frenzies and not distributing them. That is
+the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I put to the
+prosecutors. That is why they dared not produce a line by any one who
+had actually confronted the pistol. All who had actually confronted the
+pistol confessed that they had profited by it. That was why Smith,
+though a good shot, never hit anybody. He never hit anybody because he
+was a good shot. His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of
+blood. This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts and
+of all the other facts. No one can possibly explain the Warden’s
+conduct except by believing the Warden’s story. Even Dr. Pym, who is a
+very factory of ingenious theories, could find no other theory to cover
+the case.”
+
+“There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual personality,”
+said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; “the science of criminology is in its
+infancy, and—”
+
+“Infancy!” cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a gesture
+of enlightenment; “why, that explains it!”
+
+“I repeat,” proceeded Inglewood, “that neither Dr. Pym nor any one else
+can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden’s signature,
+for the shots missed and the witnesses missing.”
+
+The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return of a
+cock-fighting coolness. “The defence,” he said, “omits a coldly
+colossal fact. They say we produce none of the actual victims. Wal,
+here is one victim—England’s celebrated and stricken Warner. I reckon
+he is pretty well produced. And they suggest that all the outrages were
+followed by reconciliation. Wal, there’s no flies on England’s Warner;
+and he isn’t reconciliated much.”
+
+“My learned friend,” said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet, “must
+remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy. Dr.
+Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially difficult to
+startle into any recognition of the glory of God. We admit that our
+client, in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not
+successful. But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a
+proposal for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest
+convenience, and without further fees.”
+
+“’Ang it all, Michael,” cried Gould, quite serious for the first time
+in his life, “you might give us a bit of bally sense for a chinge.”
+
+“What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?” asked
+Moon sharply.
+
+“The creature,” said Dr. Warner superciliously, “asked me, with
+characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday.”
+
+“And you answered, with characteristic swank,” cried Moon, shooting out
+a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith,
+“that you didn’t keep your birthday.”
+
+“Something like that,” assented the doctor.
+
+“Then,” continued Moon, “he asked you why not, and you said it was
+because you didn’t see that birth was anything to rejoice over. Agreed?
+Now is there any one who doubts that our tale is true?”
+
+There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, “Pax
+populi vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of
+God. Or in Dr. Pym’s more civilized language, it is up to him to open
+the next charge. On this we claim an acquittal.”
+
+It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an
+unprecedented time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the
+air. It almost seemed as if he had been “struck so,” as the nurses say;
+and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the
+strain with some remark. For the last half-hour or so the eminent
+criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view of
+offences against property as it did of offences against life. “Most
+murder,” he had said, “is a variation of homicidal mania, and in the
+same way most theft is a version of kleptomania. I cannot entertain any
+doubt that my learned friends opposite adequately con-ceive how this
+must involve a scheme of punishment more tol’rant and humane than the
+cruel methods of ancient codes. They will doubtless exhibit
+consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning, so thought-arresting,
+so—” It was here that he paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to
+which allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it no longer.
+
+“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “we admit the chasm. The old cruel
+codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten years. The
+tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him to
+prison for ever. We pass the chasm.”
+
+It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances of
+verbal fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only of his
+opponent’s interruption, but even of his own pause.
+
+“So stock-improving,” continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, “so fraught with real
+high hopes of the future. Science therefore regards thieves, in the
+abstract, just as it regards murderers. It regards them not as sinners
+to be punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to be detained
+and cared for,” (his first two digits closed again as he hesitated)—“in
+short, for the required period. But there is something special in the
+case we investigate here. Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself—”
+
+“I beg pardon,” said Michael; “I did not ask just now because, to tell
+the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical, was
+enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers of scentless
+and delicate dust. But now that things are moving a little more, there
+is something I should really like to know. I have hung on Dr. Pym’s
+lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call rapture,
+but I have so far been unable to form any conjecture about what the
+accused, in the present instance, is supposed to have been and gone and
+done.”
+
+“If Mr. Moon will have patience,” said Pym with dignity, “he will find
+that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.
+Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction to
+certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man than
+Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict specialism
+and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals. One will have
+an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl sleeve-links, while he
+passes over the most elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links,
+placed about in the most conspicuous locations. Another will impede his
+flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while
+elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic. The specialism
+of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than of any
+brightness of business habits; but there is one kind of depredator to
+whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply. I allude to our
+fellow-citizen the housebreaker.
+
+“It has been maintained by some of our boldest young truth-seekers,
+that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden wall could hardly be
+caught and hypnotized by a fork that is insulated in a locked box under
+the butler’s bed. They have thrown down the gauntlet to American
+science on this point. They declare that diamond links are not left
+about in conspicuous locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as
+they were in the great test experiment of Calypso College. We hope this
+experiment here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge, and
+will bring the burglar once more into line and union with his fellow
+criminals.”
+
+Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment for
+five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in
+explosive enlightenment.
+
+“Oh, I see!” he cried; “you mean that Smith is a burglar.”
+
+“I thought I made it quite ad’quately lucid,” said Mr. Pym, folding up
+his eyelids. It was typical of this topsy-turvy private trial that all
+the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression on either side, was
+exasperating and unintelligible to the other. Moon could not make head
+or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could not make head
+or tail of the gaiety of an old one.
+
+“All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,”
+continued the American doctor, “are cases of burglary. Pursuing the
+same course as in the previous case, we select the indubitable instance
+from the rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron evidence. I will
+now call on my colleague, Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received
+from the earnest, unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins.”
+
+Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter
+from the earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moses Gould could imitate a
+farmyard well, Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of
+excellence, and the new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the
+platform of great artists. But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was
+not convincing; indeed, the sense of the letter was so much obscured by
+the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his pronunciation that it is
+perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when, a little later,
+it was handed across the table.
+
+“Dear Sir,—I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident you mention,
+private as it was, should have filtered through our omnivorous journals
+to the mere populace; for the position I have since attained makes me,
+I conceive, a public character, and this was certainly the most
+extraordinary incident in a not uneventful and perhaps not an
+unimportant career. I am by no means without experience in scenes of
+civil tumult. I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose
+League days at Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set, have
+spent many a night at the Christian Social Union. But this other
+experience was quite inconceivable. I can only describe it as the
+letting loose of a place which it is not for me, as a clergyman, to
+mention.
+
+“It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period, a curate at
+Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague, induced me to attend a
+meeting which he described, I must say profanely described, as
+calculated to promote the kingdom of God. I found, on the contrary,
+that it consisted entirely of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose
+manners were coarse and their opinions extreme.
+
+“Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest respect
+and friendliness, and I will therefore say little. No one can be more
+convinced than I of the evil of politics in the pulpit; and I never
+offer my congregation any advice about voting except in cases in which
+I feel strongly that they are likely to make an erroneous selection.
+But, while I do not mean to touch at all upon political or social
+problems, I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest,
+such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism or
+Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal of a sacred trust.
+Far be it from me to say a word against the Reverend Raymond Percy, the
+colleague in question. He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some
+apparently fascinating; but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist,
+wears his hair like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person,
+will never rise in his profession, or even obtain the admiration of the
+good and wise. Nor is it for me to utter my personal judgements of the
+appearance of the people in the hall. Yet a glance round the room,
+revealing ranks of debased and envious faces—”
+
+“Adopting,” said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive—“adopting
+the reverend gentleman’s favourite figure of logic, may I say that
+while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect, he
+is a blasted old jackass.”
+
+“Really!” said Dr. Pym; “I protest.”
+
+“You must keep quiet, Michael,” said Inglewood; “they have a right to
+read their story.”
+
+“Chair! Chair! Chair!” cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in his
+own; and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all
+the authority of the Court of Beacon.
+
+“Oh, don’t wake the old lady,” said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody
+good-humour. “I apologize. I won’t interrupt again.”
+
+Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading of the
+clergyman’s letter was already continuing.
+
+“The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
+will say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the audience were Irish,
+and showed the weakness of that impetuous people. When gathered
+together into gangs and conspiracies they seem to lose altogether that
+lovable good-nature and readiness to accept anything one tells them
+which distinguishes them as individuals.”
+
+With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly, and sat
+down again.
+
+“These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the
+speech of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level with witticisms about
+rent and a reserve of labour. Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration,
+and such words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly.
+Some hours afterward the storm broke. I had been addressing the meeting
+for some time, pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes,
+their insufficient attendance at evening service, their neglect of the
+Harvest Festival, and of many other things that might materially help
+them to improve their lot. It was, I think, about this time that an
+extraordinary interruption occurred. An enormous, powerful man, partly
+concealed with white plaster, arose in the middle of the hall, and
+offered (in a loud, roaring voice, like a bull’s) some observations
+which seemed to be in a foreign language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my
+colleague, descended to his level by entering into a duel of repartee,
+in which he appeared to be the victor. The meeting began to behave more
+respectfully for a little; yet before I had said twelve sentences more
+the rush was made for the platform. The enormous plasterer, in
+particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like an elephant; and
+I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally large,
+but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
+This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was
+shoving them back. I don’t know what he said, but, what with shouting
+and shoving and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the
+wretched people went roaring down another passage.
+
+“Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story. When he had got
+us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
+with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as
+follows: ‘You’re well out of that, sir; now you’d better come along
+with me. I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as
+we’ve all been talking about. Come along!’ And turning his big back
+abruptly, he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old
+lamp-post, we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him. He had
+certainly helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman,
+I could not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave
+grounds. Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with
+all his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also. In fact, he
+comes of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house and has
+the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family. I cannot
+but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal advantages
+with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation, and
+certainly—but I digress.
+
+“A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post faded
+behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind. The large man in
+front of us looked larger and larger in the haze. He did not turn
+round, but he said with his huge back to us, ‘All that talking’s no
+good; we want a little practical Socialism.’
+
+“‘I quite agree,’ said Percy; ‘but I always like to understand things
+in theory before I put them into practice.’
+
+“‘Oh, you just leave that to me,’ said the practical Socialist, or
+whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness. ‘I have a way with
+me. I’m a Permeator.’
+
+“I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed, so I was
+sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey for the
+present. It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane, where
+we were already rather cramped, into a paved passage, at the end of
+which we passed through a wooden gate left open. We then found
+ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour, crossing what
+appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden. I called out to
+the enormous person going on in front, but he answered obscurely that
+it was a short cut.
+
+“I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
+when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading to a
+higher level of road. My thoughtless colleague ran up it so quickly
+that I could not do otherwise than follow as best I could. The path on
+which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow. I had
+never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous. Along one side of
+it grew what, in the dark and density of air, I first took to be some
+short, strong thicket of shrubs. Then I saw that they were not short
+shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees. I, an English gentleman and
+clergyman of the Church of England—I was walking along the top of a
+garden wall like a tom cat.
+
+“I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps, and let
+loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I could all the
+time.
+
+“‘It’s a right-of-way,’ declared my indefensible informant. ‘It’s
+closed to traffic once in a hundred years.’
+
+“‘Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!’ I called out; ‘you are not going on with this
+blackguard?’
+
+“‘Why, I think so,’ answered my unhappy colleague flippantly. ‘I think
+you and I are bigger blackguards than he is, whatever he is.’
+
+“‘I am a burglar,’ explained the big creature quite calmly. ‘I am a
+member of the Fabian Society. I take back the wealth stolen by the
+capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform
+fitted to the special occasion—here a little and there a little. Do you
+see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof? I’m
+permeating that one to-night.’
+
+“‘Whether this is a crime or a joke,’ I cried, ‘I desire to be quit of
+it.’
+
+“‘The ladder is just behind you,’ answered the creature with horrible
+courtesy; ‘and, before you go, do let me give you my card.’
+
+“If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I should
+have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind would have
+gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall. As it was, in the
+wildness of the moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking
+my way back by wall and ladder, landed in the respectable streets once
+more. Not before, however, I had seen with my own eyes the two awful
+and lamentable facts— that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof
+towards the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and, what
+was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him. I have never seen
+either of them since that day.
+
+“In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my
+connection with the wild set. I am far from saying that every member of
+the Christian Social Union must necessarily be a burglar. I have no
+right to bring any such charge. But it gave me a hint of what such
+courses may lead to in many cases; and I saw them no more.
+
+“I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a Mr.
+Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question. When I got
+home that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed there under
+the name of Innocent Smith.—Yours faithfully,
+
+“John Clement Hawkins.”
+
+
+Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper. He knew
+that the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that
+Moses Gould (for one) could no more write like a canon than he could
+read like one. After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the
+burglary charge.
+
+“We wish,” said Michael, “to give all reasonable facilities to the
+prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court.
+The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all those
+points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they are
+made. Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing
+instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer’s cramp, forcing a man
+to write his uncle’s name instead of his own. Piracy on the high seas
+is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to
+inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny. Innocent Smith never
+did commit burglary at all.
+
+“I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous
+arrangement, and ask the prosecution two or three questions.”
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.
+
+“In the first place,” continued Moon, “have you the date of Canon
+Hawkins’s last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and
+roofs?”
+
+“Ho, yus!” called out Gould smartly. “November thirteen, eighteen
+ninety-one.”
+
+“Have you,” continued Moon, “identified the houses in Hoxton up which
+they climbed?”
+
+“Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,” answered Gould
+with the same clockwork readiness.
+
+“Well,” said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, “was there any
+burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that out.”
+
+“There may well have been,” said the doctor primly, after a pause, “an
+unsuccessful one that led to no legalities.”
+
+“Another question,” proceeded Michael. “Canon Hawkins, in his
+blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment. Why
+don’t you produce the evidence of the other clergyman, who actually
+followed the burglar and presumably was present at the crime?”
+
+Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table, as he
+did when he was specially confident of the clearness of his reply.
+
+“We have entirely failed,” he said, “to track the other clergyman, who
+seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had seen him
+as-cending the gutters and the leads. I am fully aware that this may
+strike many as sing’lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will appear
+pretty natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy is
+admittedly, by the canon’s evidence, a minister of eccentric ways. His
+con-nection with England’s proudest and fairest does not seemingly
+prevent a taste for the society of the real low-down. On the other
+hand, the prisoner Smith is, by general agreement, a man of
+irr’sistible fascination. I entertain no doubt that Smith led the
+Revered Percy into the crime and forced him to hide his head in the
+real crim’nal class. That would fully account for his non-appearance,
+and the failure of all attempts to trace him.”
+
+“It is impossible, then, to trace him?” asked Moon.
+
+“Impossible,” repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
+
+“You are sure it’s impossible?”
+
+“Oh dry up, Michael,” cried Gould, irritably. “We’d ’ave found ’im if
+we could, for you bet ’e saw the burglary. Don’t YOU start looking for
+’im. Look for your own ’ead in the dustbin. You’ll find that—after a
+bit,” and his voice died away in grumbling.
+
+“Arthur,” directed Michael Moon, sitting down, “kindly read Mr. Raymond
+Percy’s letter to the court.”
+
+“Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much as
+possible,” began Inglewood, “I will not read the first part of the
+letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution to admit the
+account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as facts
+are concerned, that given by the first clergyman. We concede, then, the
+canon’s story so far as it goes. This must necessarily be valuable to
+the prosecutor and also convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy’s
+letter, then, at the point when all three men were standing on the
+garden wall:—
+
+“As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind not
+to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud of copper
+fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was violent and
+simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so complicated and
+contradictory that I could not retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a
+kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have given ten pounds for the
+pleasure of kicking him down the road. That God should allow good
+people to be as bestially stupid as that— rose against me like a
+towering blasphemy.
+
+“At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and
+artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
+discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time;
+I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was
+made for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had
+fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because they
+could not get meat—and fish-bones when they could not get fish. As too
+many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the
+Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that.
+Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had
+not been a pageant, but a riot—and a suppressed riot. There, still
+living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous
+promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a
+revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one
+cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist— and a
+pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.
+
+“On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton
+men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I
+should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned
+in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
+good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But
+there is no priestcraft about Hawkins—nor any other kind of craft. He
+is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a
+carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect
+gentleman; that is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but
+simply his class. He never said a word of religion in the whole of his
+damnable address. He simply said all the things his brother, the major,
+would have said. A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother,
+and that this brother is a major.
+
+“When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body and
+convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body and soul
+together, the stampede against our platform began. I took part in his
+undeserved rescue, I followed his obscure deliverer, until (as I have
+said) we stood together on the wall above the dim gardens, already
+clouding with fog. Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and
+decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man
+of the two. The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate
+was— and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.
+I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to it
+myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class, for I had
+lived with it a long time. Many old texts about the despised and
+persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought that the saints might
+well be hidden in the criminal class. About the time Hawkins let
+himself down the ladder I was crawling up a low, sloping, blue-slate
+roof after the large man, who went leaping in front of me like a
+gorilla.
+
+“This upward scramble was short, and we soon found ourselves tramping
+along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big thoroughfares,
+with chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as
+small forts. The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the
+somewhat swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body
+laboured. The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed
+overpowered by sinister spirits. Tall spectres with turbans of vapour
+seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both. I thought
+dimly of illustrations to the ‘Arabian Nights’ on brown paper with rich
+but sombre tints, showing genii gathering round the Seal of Solomon. By
+the way, what was the Seal of Solomon? Nothing to do with sealing-wax
+really, I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
+of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour, poured
+out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
+
+“The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
+look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak. But
+the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of
+the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in
+great cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a
+forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it
+were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour. The
+colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from
+firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish
+heaps. And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed
+unnatural, like fumes from a witch’s pot. It was as if the shameful and
+ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate
+spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed. Here,
+aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from
+dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
+like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another
+place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might be
+the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images. But right
+across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as clear
+and crooked as Arabic—”
+
+Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the ’bus. He was
+understood to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by
+leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed
+that she was sure it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted
+down by Moses with a blue, and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood
+then resumed the reading of the document.
+
+“Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern city
+that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked
+and vain.
+
+“Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all colours,
+but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our
+strength that put a rich refuse in the sky. These were the rivers of
+our vanity pouring into the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the
+whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then
+we had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own
+mind. Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals
+could still ascend like angels.
+
+“As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one of
+the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals like
+lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway. He put his heavy
+hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was merely leaning on it,
+tired with his steep scramble along the terrace. So far as I could
+guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side, and the veiled
+lights of red brown and old gold glowing through them now and again, we
+were on the top of one of those long, consecutive, and genteel rows of
+houses which are still to be found lifting their heads above poorer
+districts, the remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative
+builders. Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
+only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old emptied
+palaces of Italy. Indeed, some little time later, when the fog had
+lifted a little, I discovered that we were walking round a semi-circle
+of crescent which fell away below us into one flat square or wide
+street below another, like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in
+the eccentric building of London, and looking like the last ledges of
+the land. But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.
+
+“My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
+by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky. Instead of
+my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney he leaned on, he leaned on
+it a little more heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over like
+the opening top of an inkstand. I remembered the short ladder leaning
+against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged his criminal
+approach long before.
+
+“The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
+of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden
+sense of comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what connected
+this abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly
+fancies. Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of
+roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly
+and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the
+scene, as if the houses were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were
+only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The
+law-breaking of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but
+even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous
+people with their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots
+and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from
+getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was
+a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that
+mountainous and vapourous visions, the heaven of a higher levity.
+
+“My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the
+displaced chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably
+lower, for, tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head
+remained visible. Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me
+about this way of invading the houses of men. I thought of little
+chimney-sweeps, and ‘The Water Babies;’ but I decided that it was not
+that. Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such
+topsy-turvy trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.
+Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
+
+“Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black
+hole; but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two
+afterwards, the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more
+fiery part of the fog, and nothing could be spelt of its expression,
+but its voice called on me to follow with that enthusiastic impatience
+proper only among old friends. I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly
+as Curtius, for I was still thinking of Santa Claus and the traditional
+virtue of such vertical entrance.
+
+“In every well-appointed gentleman’s house, I reflected, there was the
+front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen; but
+there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is, so to speak,
+the underground passage between earth and heaven. By this starry tunnel
+Santa Claus manages—like the skylark— to be true to the kindred points
+of heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely
+distributed lack of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps,
+little used. But Santa Claus’s door was really the front door: it was
+the door fronting the universe.
+
+“I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft
+below the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down
+into a yet larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was half-way down
+the ladder that I suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of
+retracing all my steps, as my companion had retraced them from the
+beginning of the garden wall. The name of Santa Claus had suddenly
+brought me back to my senses. I remembered why Santa Claus came, and
+why he was welcome.
+
+“I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all their horror
+of offences against property. I had heard all the regular denunciations
+of robbery, both right and wrong; I had read the Ten Commandments in
+church a thousand times. And then and there, at the age of thirty-four,
+half-way down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar, I
+saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all, is really wrong.
+
+“It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strangely
+soft footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft,
+till he knelt down on a part of the bare flooring and, after a few
+fumbling efforts, lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a light from
+below, and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting
+room, of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom,
+and is an adjunct to it. Light thus breaking from beneath our feet like
+a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged
+with dust and rust, and had doubtless been long disused until the
+advent of my enterprising friend. But I did not look at this long, for
+the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost unnatural
+attractiveness. To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle, by
+so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one’s psychology. It was like
+having found a fourth dimension.
+
+“My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly and
+soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him; though, for lack
+of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless. Before the echo of
+my boots had died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door,
+half opened it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening.
+Then, leaving the door still half open, he came back into the middle of
+the room, and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.
+The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human way
+that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full, but slovenly,
+bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of
+reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that look like red
+goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed
+doors in its lower part. There were three windows, high but narrow.
+After another glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors
+open and rummaged inside. He found nothing there, apparently, except an
+extremely handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like
+port. Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous
+little luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation
+and revulsion I had felt above.
+
+“‘Don’t do it!’ I cried quite incoherently, ‘Santa Claus—’
+
+“‘Ah,’ said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table and stood
+looking at me, ‘you’ve thought about that, too.’
+
+“‘I can’t express a millionth part of what I’ve thought of,’ I cried,
+‘but it’s something like this... oh, can’t you see it? Why are children
+not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?
+He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treachery—because there are
+more toys where he has been. What should we feel if there were less?
+Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take away
+the children’s balls and dolls while they slept? Could a Greek tragedy
+be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening? Dog-stealer,
+horse-stealer, man-stealer—can you think of anything so base as a
+toy-stealer?’
+
+“The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and
+laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue
+reflective eyes fixed on my face.
+
+“‘Man!’ I said, ‘all stealing is toy-stealing. That’s why it’s really
+wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really
+respected because of their worthlessness. I know Naboth’s vineyard is
+as painted as Noah’s Ark. I know Nathan’s ewe-lamb is really a woolly
+baa-lamb on a wooden stand. That is why I could not take them away. I
+did not mind so much, as long as I thought of men’s things as their
+valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.’
+
+“After a moment I added abruptly, ‘Only saints and sages ought to be
+robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little
+worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride.’
+
+“He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both, and
+lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.
+
+“‘Don’t do it!’ I cried. ‘It might be the last bottle of some rotten
+vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it.
+Don’t you see there’s something sacred in the silliness of such
+things?’
+
+“‘It’s not the last bottle,’ answered my criminal calmly; ‘there’s
+plenty more in the cellar.’
+
+“‘You know the house, then?’ I said.
+
+“‘Too well,’ he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have
+something eerie about it. ‘I am always trying to forget what I know—
+and to find what I don’t know.’ He drained his glass. ‘Besides,’ he
+added, ‘it will do him good.’
+
+“‘What will do him good?’
+
+“‘The wine I’m drinking,’ said the strange person.
+
+“‘Does he drink too much, then?’ I inquired.
+
+“‘No,’ he answered, ‘not unless I do.’
+
+“‘Do you mean,’ I demanded, ‘that the owner of this house approves of
+all you do?’
+
+“‘God forbid,’ he answered; ‘but he has to do the same.’
+
+“The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows unreasonably
+increased a sense of riddle, and even terror, about this tall, narrow
+house we had entered out of the sky. I had once more the notion about
+the gigantic genii— I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead
+reds and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our little
+lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes. My companion went
+on playing with the pistol in front of him, and talking with the same
+rather creepy confidentialness.
+
+“‘I am always trying to find him—to catch him unawares. I come in
+through skylights and trapdoors to find him; but whenever I find him—he
+is doing what I am doing.’
+
+“I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. ‘There is some one coming,’
+I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it. Not from the
+stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber (which
+seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were coming nearer.
+I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster, or double, I
+expected to see when the door was pushed open from within. I am only
+quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.
+
+“Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity, a
+rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic— her
+dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves, with a face
+which, though still comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as
+intelligence. All she said was, ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
+
+“‘I came in another way,’ said the Permeator, somewhat vaguely. ‘I’d
+left my latchkey at home.’
+
+“I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania. ‘I’m really
+very sorry,’ I cried. ‘I know my position is irregular. Would you be so
+obliging as to tell me whose house this is?’
+
+“‘Mine,’ said the burglar, ‘May I present you to my wife?’
+
+“I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat; and I did not get
+out of it till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith (such was the prosaic name of
+this far from prosaic household) lingered a little, talking slightly
+and pleasantly. She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd
+mixture of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well, but
+was still a little harmlessly afraid of it. Perhaps the possession of
+so jumpy and incalculable a husband had left her a little nervous.
+Anyhow, when she had retired to the inner chamber once more, that
+extraordinary man poured forth his apologia and autobiography over the
+dwindling wine.
+
+“He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and
+scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless
+nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a
+war between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members
+were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body
+rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible
+things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it,
+unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a
+loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him
+to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it
+solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for
+non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been
+sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that
+had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the
+joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men.
+He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical jokes were more in
+earnest than verbal ones. Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of
+maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to
+maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it. ‘What
+is more immortal,’ he would cry, ‘than love and war? Type of all desire
+and joy—beer. Type of all battle and conquest—skittles.’
+
+“There was something in him of what the old world called the solemnity
+of revels—when they spoke of ‘solemnizing’ a mere masquerade or wedding
+banquet. Nevertheless he was not a mere pagan any more than he was a
+mere practical joker. His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of
+faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.
+
+“‘I don’t deny,’ he said, ‘that there should be priests to remind men
+that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs
+it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually
+to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom
+I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t enough
+blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under
+their very noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages
+looking up an eternal perspective it might be true that life is a
+learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as true
+that death was their only chance of learning to live.’
+
+“His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt
+it continually slipping from himself as much as from others. He had the
+same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually
+ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong speed to keep
+alive the mere conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial
+and yet insane details that had once reminded him of the awful
+subconscious reality. When the don had hung on the stone gutter, the
+sight of his long dangling legs, vibrating in the void like wings,
+somehow awoke the naked satire of the old definition of man as a
+two-legged animal without feathers. The wretched professor had been
+brought into peril by his head, which he had so elaborately cultivated,
+and only saved by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and
+neglect. Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording
+this, except to send a telegram to an old friend (by this time a total
+stranger) to say that he had just seen a man with two legs; and that
+the man was alive.
+
+“The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket
+when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and
+very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was
+alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the
+continuance of the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally
+jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had
+provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation. He apologized
+in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring her to the
+shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to
+her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had
+nearly murdered her, he completely married her; and she was the lady in
+green to whom I had recently said ‘good-night.’
+
+“They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury.
+Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that
+Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only
+did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for
+any place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had
+settled down. ‘I am a very domestic fellow,’ he explained with gravity,
+‘and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for
+tea.’
+
+“He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He lost
+his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a
+total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a
+man he was. The London general servant is not used to the master
+indulging in such transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible
+to explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same interest in
+his own affairs that he always felt in other people’s.
+
+“‘I know there’s a fellow called Smith,’ he said in his rather weird
+way, ‘living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I know he is
+really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.’
+
+“Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of
+paralyzed politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first
+sight. Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very
+furniture; would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb
+the staircase as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the
+sense of their skeleton of reality. Every stair is a ladder and every
+stool a leg, he said. And at other times he would play the stranger
+exactly in the opposite sense, and would enter by another way, so as to
+feel like a thief and a robber. He would break and violate his own
+home, as he had done with me that night. It was near morning before I
+could tear myself from this queer confidence of the Man Who Would Not
+Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep the last load of fog
+was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway of irregular
+street levels that looked like the end of the world.
+
+“It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a
+maniac. What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a
+being? A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not
+to be married! A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his
+neighbor’s! On this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my
+honour to say it, though no one understands. I believe the maniac was
+one of those who do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great
+gale upon ships by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a
+flaming fire. This, at least, I know for certain. Whether such men have
+laughed or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their
+weeping. Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never
+fitted it. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great
+satirist as if from the sting of an adder. But it is equally true that
+men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a
+bear. Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction. For the
+goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things, is a prodigy
+past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken. We shall have
+gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest
+angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the
+everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and
+loves the world.—I am, yours faithfully, “Raymond Percy.”
+
+“Oh, ’oly, ’oly, ’oly!” said Mr. Moses Gould.
+
+The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been in an almost
+religious state of submission and assent. Something had bound them
+together; something in the sacred tradition of the last two words of
+the letter; something also in the touching and boyish embarrassment
+with which Inglewood had read them— for he had all the thin-skinned
+reverence of the agnostic. Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way
+as ever lived; far kinder to his family than more refined men of
+pleasure, simple and steadfast in his admiration, a thoroughly
+wholesome animal and a thoroughly genuine character. But wherever there
+is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial,
+unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces.
+English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism, looked up and
+saw on the face of Moses a certain smile. It was that smile of the
+Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in
+Russian villages or mediaeval towns.
+
+“Oh, ’oly, ’oly, ’oly!” said Moses Gould.
+
+Finding that this was not well received, he explained further,
+exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant features.
+
+“Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when ’e’s corfin’ up a fly,”
+he said pleasantly. “Don’t you see you’ve bunged up old Smith anyhow.
+If this parson’s tale’s O.K.—why, Smith is ’ot. ’E’s pretty ’ot. We
+find him elopin’ with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab. Well, what
+abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her blarsted
+shyness—transmigogrified into a blighted sharpness? Miss Gray ain’t
+been very sharp, but I reckon she’ll be pretty shy.”
+
+“Don’t be a brute,” growled Michael Moon.
+
+None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance
+along the table at Innocent Smith. He was still bowed above his paper
+toys, and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or
+shame. He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and
+tucked it in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked
+relieved.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge
+
+
+Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American, and his
+respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.
+
+“Ignoring,” he said, “the delicate and considerable knightly protests
+that have been called forth by my colleague’s native sense of oration,
+and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems
+unsuitable to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my
+colleague’s question by no means devoid of rel’vancy. The last charge
+against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge on the paper
+is of bigamy and desertion. It does without question appear that the
+defence, in aspiring to rebut this last charge, have really admitted
+the next. Either Innocent Smith is still under a charge of attempted
+burglary, or else that is exploded; but he is pretty well fixed for
+attempted bigamy. It all depends on what view we take of the alleged
+letter from Curate Percy. Under these conditions I feel justified in
+claiming my right to questions. May I ask how the defence got hold of
+the letter from Curate Percy? Did it come direct from the prisoner?”
+
+“We have had nothing direct from the prisoner,” said Moon quietly. “The
+few documents which the defence guarantees came to us from another
+quarter.”
+
+“From what quarter?” asked Dr. Pym.
+
+“If you insist,” answered Moon, “we had them from Miss Gray.”
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead, opened
+them very wide.
+
+“Do you really mean to say,” he said, “that Miss Gray was in possession
+of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?”
+
+“Quite so,” said Inglewood, and sat down.
+
+The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice,
+and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.
+
+“Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy’s narrative is
+only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents in our
+own possession. Of these the principal and most certain is the
+testimony of Innocent Smith’s gardener, who was present at the most
+dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr.
+Gould, the gardener, please.”
+
+Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the
+gardener. That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs.
+Innocent Smith when they had a little house on the edge of Croydon.
+From the gardener’s tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew
+certain he had seen the place. It was one of those corners of town or
+country that one does not forget, for it looked like a frontier. The
+garden hung very high above the lane, and its end was steep and sharp,
+like a fortress. Beyond was a roll of real country, with a white path
+sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and branches of great gray
+trees writhing and twisting against the sky. But as if to assert that
+the lane itself was suburban, were sharply relieved against that gray
+and tossing upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-green and a
+red pillar-box that stood exactly at the corner. Inglewood was sure of
+the place; he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the
+bicycle; he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might
+occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his
+frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared over
+the garden bushes above. The gardener’s account, unlike the curate’s,
+was quite free from decorative adjectives, however many he may have
+uttered privately when writing it. He simply said that on a particular
+morning Mr. Smith came out and began to play about with a rake, as he
+often did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he
+had two children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of
+a tree, and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those
+of a giant frog in its final agony. Never, apparently, did he think of
+putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener, in
+consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity. But the
+gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he (the
+gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying the hose, had
+seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped red and white jacket
+(which might have been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part
+of his pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his wife,
+who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the garden, these
+decisive and very loud expressions—
+
+“I won’t stay here any longer. I’ve got another wife and much better
+children a long way from here. My other wife’s got redder hair than
+yours, and my other garden’s got a much finer situation; and I’m going
+off to them.”
+
+With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the
+sky, higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again.
+Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down in
+the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat. Much of the
+picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood’s accidental memory of the
+place. He could see with his mind’s eye that big bare-headed figure
+with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked woodland road, and
+leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind. But the gardener, on his own
+account, was quite prepared to swear to the public confession of
+bigamy, to the temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky, and the
+final disappearance of the man up the road. Moreover, being a local
+man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumours that Smith had
+embarked on the south-eastern coast, nothing was known of him again.
+
+This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the
+few but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third
+charge. So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and
+disappeared on the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on
+his own account. “I hope you are not so insular,” he said, “that you
+will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an
+English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood’s favour we will hear the French
+innkeeper.”
+
+Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
+reading the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them to
+run something like this:—
+
+“Sir,—Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin’s Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
+rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I know of the
+stranger out of the sea.
+
+“I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks for
+beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim
+flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit beauty to pervade
+one’s whole life, just as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or
+cover all the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the
+onions!
+
+“But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether
+there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science
+cannot as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that
+particular evening I felt like a poet—like any little rascal of a poet
+who drinks absinthe in the mad Montmartre.
+
+“Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter and
+poisonous. I had never known it look so unfamiliar before. In the sky
+was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind,
+and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where
+they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore. There
+I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from the
+sea. It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man of
+monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up to
+his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men. He leaned
+on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him look
+like a Triton. Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging to
+him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside,
+asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom
+demanded. Then the monster, with great politeness, invited me to
+partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation.
+He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private
+bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an
+easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats. He
+was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house. When I
+naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not
+know; it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he
+expressed it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, ‘over there.’
+
+“I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when
+he saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly
+minute. He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an
+auctioneer. I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last
+two, which were that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there
+was a red pillar-box at the corner.
+
+“‘A red pillar-box!’ I cried in astonishment. ‘Why, the place must be
+in England!’
+
+“‘I had forgotten,’ he said, nodding heavily. ‘That is the island’s
+name.’
+
+“‘But, _nom du nom_,’ I cried testily, ‘you’ve just come from England,
+my boy.’
+
+“‘They SAID it was England,’ said my imbecile, conspiratorially. ‘They
+said it was Kent. But Kentish men are such liars one can’t believe
+anything they say.’
+
+“‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘you must pardon me. I am elderly, and the
+_fumisteries_ of the young men are beyond me. I go by common sense, or,
+at the largest, by that extension of applied common sense called
+science.’
+
+“‘Science!’ cried the stranger. ‘There is only one good thing science
+ever discovered—a good thing, good tidings of great joy— that the world
+is round.’
+
+“I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my
+intelligence. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that going right round the world is
+the shortest way to where you are already.’
+
+“‘Is it not even shorter,’ I asked, ‘to stop where you are?’
+
+“‘No, no, no!’ he cried emphatically. ‘That way is long and very weary.
+At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find the wife
+I really married and the house that is really mine. And that house will
+have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,’ he asked
+with a sudden intensity, ‘do you never want to rush out of your house
+in order to find it?’
+
+“‘No, I think not,’ I replied; ‘reason tells a man from the first to
+adapt his desires to the probable supply of life. I remain here,
+content to fulfil the life of man. All my interests are here, and most
+of my friends, and—’
+
+“‘And yet,’ he cried, starting to his almost terrific height, ‘you made
+the French Revolution!’
+
+“‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘I am not quite so elderly. A relative perhaps.’
+
+“‘I mean your sort did!’ exclaimed this personage. ‘Yes, your damned
+smug, settled, sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh! I know
+some say it was no good, and you’re just back where you were before.
+Why, blast it all, that’s just where we all want to be—back where we
+were before! That is revolution—going right round! Every revolution,
+like a repentance, is a return.’
+
+“He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again, and
+then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck the tiny
+table with his colossal fist and went on.
+
+“‘I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
+English Revolution. God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny.
+The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the
+Englishman marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone. But I am
+going to turn the world upside down, too. I’m going to turn myself
+upside down. I’m going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland
+of the Antipodes, where trees and men hang head downward in the sky.
+But my revolution, like yours, like the earth’s, will end up in the
+holy, happy place— the celestial, incredible place—the place where we
+were before.’
+
+“With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason, he
+leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight, swinging his
+pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment, which also pointed to
+some loss of mental balance. This is all I know of the episode of the
+man landed from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests
+of justice.— Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high
+consideration, with which I have the honour to be your obedient
+servant, “Jules Durobin.”
+
+“The next document in our dossier,” continued Inglewood, “comes from
+the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia, and runs as
+follows:—
+
+“Sir,—My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the stationmaster at the
+station near Crazok. The great trains go by across the plains taking
+people to China, but very few people get down at the platform where I
+have to watch. This makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back
+much upon the books I have. But I cannot discuss these very much with
+my neighbours, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of
+Russia so much as in other parts. Many of the peasants round here have
+never heard of Bernard Shaw.
+
+“I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since the
+failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult. The
+revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles of
+humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books,
+they were ill acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts, though
+provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there is a tendency
+to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them. This is very
+unfortunate for Intelligents.
+
+“It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains came
+through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching a train that
+had come in. Only one person got out of the train, far away up at the
+other end of it, for it was a very long train. It was evening, with a
+cold, greenish sky. A little snow had fallen, but not enough to whiten
+the plain, which stretched away a sort of sad purple in all directions,
+save where the flat tops of some distant tablelands caught the evening
+light like lakes. As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin
+snow by the train he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen
+so large a man. But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because
+his shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little. From the
+big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty
+white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole
+such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.
+
+“Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled
+in one of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct
+revolution, though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government
+side. I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake
+and laid out right and left with such energy that he came through them
+without scathe and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and
+really astonished.
+
+“Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim, he
+could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.
+
+“‘There are not many houses to be had round here,’ I answered in the
+same language, ‘the district has been very disturbed. A revolution, as
+you know, has recently been suppressed. Any further building—’
+
+“‘Oh! I don’t mean that,’ he cried; ‘I mean a real house—a live house.
+It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.’
+
+“‘I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture moved me
+profoundly. We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere of folk-lore,
+and its unfortunate effects can still be seen in the bright colours of
+the children’s dolls and of the ikons. For an instant the idea of a
+house running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the enlightenment
+of man moves slowly.
+
+“‘Have you no other house of your own?’ I asked.
+
+“‘I have left it,’ he said very sadly. ‘It was not the house that grew
+dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women,
+and yet I could not feel it.’
+
+“‘And so,’ I said with sympathy, ‘you walked straight out of the front
+door, like a masculine Nora.’
+
+“‘Nora?’ he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian
+word.
+
+“‘I mean Nora in “The Doll’s House,”’ I replied.
+
+“At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an
+Englishman; for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but
+‘ukases.’
+
+“‘The Doll’s House!’ he cried vehemently; ‘why, that is just where
+Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll’s
+house. Don’t you remember, when you were a child, how those little
+windows WERE windows, while the big windows weren’t. A child has a
+doll’s house, and shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A banker has
+a real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the
+faintest shriek when their real front doors open inwards.’
+
+“Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly
+silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and
+was saying in a sort of loud whisper, ‘I have found out how to make a
+big thing small. I have found out how to turn a house into a doll’s
+house. Get a long way off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by
+his great gift of distance. Once let me see my old brick house standing
+up quite little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it
+again. I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against
+the gate, and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the
+window. For the windows really open in my doll’s house.’
+
+“‘But why?’ I asked, ‘should you wish to return to that particular
+doll’s house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against
+convention, having made yourself in the conventional sense
+disreputable, having dared to be free, why should you not take
+advantage of your freedom? As the greatest modern writers have pointed
+out, what you called your marriage was only your mood. You have a right
+to leave it all behind, like the clippings of your hair or the parings
+of your nails. Having once escaped, you have the world before you.
+Though the words may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.’
+
+“He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains, where
+the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke out of
+the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot
+and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.
+
+“‘Yes,’ he said with a huge sigh, ‘I am free in Russia. You are right.
+I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over
+again, and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and
+nobody could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of
+something.’
+
+“His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask him
+what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.
+
+“‘You have convinced me,’ he said with the same dreamy eye, ‘why it is
+really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his wife.’
+
+“‘And why is it dangerous?’ I inquired.
+
+“‘Why, because nobody can find him,’ answered this odd person, ‘and we
+all want to be found.’
+
+“‘The most original modern thinkers,’ I remarked, ‘Ibsen, Gorki,
+Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we want most is to be
+lost: to find ourselves in untrodden paths, and to do unprecedented
+things: to break with the past and belong to the future.’
+
+“He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
+what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene—the dark purple plains,
+the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents. ‘I shall
+not find the house here,’ he said. ‘It is still eastward— further and
+further eastward.’
+
+“Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot
+of his pole upon the frozen earth.
+
+“‘And if I do go back to my country,’ he cried, ‘I may be locked up in
+a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit
+unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in
+the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the
+suburbs; but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road
+I am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out; I am
+a revolutionist. But don’t you see that all these real leaps and
+destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden— to
+something we have had, to something we at least have heard of? Don’t
+you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get
+HOME?’
+
+“‘No,’ I answered after due reflection, ‘I don’t think I should accept
+that.’
+
+“‘Ah,’ he said with a sort of a sigh, ‘then you have explained a second
+thing to me.’
+
+“‘What do you mean?’ I asked; ‘what thing?’
+
+“‘Why your revolution has failed,’ he said; and walking across quite
+suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at
+last. And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the
+darkening flats.
+
+“I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse to the best
+advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person: I should like
+to find out if he has produced any literary works.—Yours, etc., “Paul
+Nickolaiovitch.”
+
+There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives
+which kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and
+it was again without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper
+upon his pile. “The Court will be indulgent,” he said, “if the next
+note lacks the special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is
+ceremonious enough in its own way:—
+
+“The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting.—I am Wong-Hi, and I
+tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest of Fu.
+The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it must be
+very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought. I am indeed
+in one place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy, and
+in this I shall doubtless die. But if a man remain in one place he
+shall see that the place changes. The pagoda of my temple stands up
+silently out of all the trees, like a yellow pagoda above many green
+pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes
+green like jade, and sometimes red like garnet. But the night is always
+ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
+
+“The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly seen
+any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look as over a
+sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning. And yet when he
+came, it was as if an elephant had strayed from the armies of the great
+kings of India. For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came
+forth in the sunshine before the temple one taller than the sons of
+men.
+
+“Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival, and
+he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon.
+His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the
+foreigners, so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he
+spoke our speech brokenly.
+
+“He said to me, ‘This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.’
+And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his
+house was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
+
+“‘I have not seen your house nor any houses,’ I answered. ‘I dwell in
+this temple and serve the gods.’
+
+“‘Do you believe in the gods?’ he asked with hunger in his eyes, like
+the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a strange question to ask,
+for what should a man do except what men have done?
+
+“‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘it must be good for men to hold up their hands
+even if the skies are empty. For if there are gods, they will be
+pleased, and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
+Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes
+ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all. So the
+great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things with our
+hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our heads we
+may think many things: yes, my Lord, and doubt many things. So long as
+men offer rice at the right season, and kindle lanterns at the right
+hour, it matters little whether there be gods or no. For these things
+are not to appease gods, but to appease men.’
+
+“He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous; yet his look was
+very gentle.
+
+“‘Break your temple,’ he said, ‘and your gods will be freed.’
+
+“And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered: ‘And so, if there be no
+gods, I shall have nothing but a broken temple.’
+
+“And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was withheld
+threw out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him. And when I asked
+him for what he should be forgiven he answered: ‘For being right.’
+
+“‘Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying,’ he
+cried, ‘it is a shame that they should be wrong. We are so vulgar and
+violent, we have done you so many iniquities— it is a shame we should
+be right after all.’
+
+“And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought that
+he and his people were right.
+
+“And he answered: ‘We are right because we are bound where men should
+be bound, and free where men should be free. We are right because we
+doubt and destroy laws and customs— but we do not doubt our own right
+to destroy them. For you live by customs, but we live by creeds. Behold
+me! In my country I am called Smip. My country is abandoned, my name is
+defiled, because I pursue around the world what really belongs to me.
+You are steadfast as the trees because you do not believe. I am as
+fickle as the tempest because I do believe. I do believe in my own
+house, which I shall find again. And at the last remaineth the green
+lantern and the red post.’
+
+“I said to him: ‘At the last remaineth only wisdom.’
+
+“But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout, and rushing
+forward disappeared among the trees. I have not seen this man again nor
+any other man. The virtues of the wise are of fine brass. “Wong-Hi.”
+
+“The next letter I have to read,” proceeded Arthur Inglewood, “will
+probably make clear the nature of our client’s curious but innocent
+experiment. It is dated from a mountain village in California, and runs
+as follows:—
+
+“Sir,—A person answering to the rather extraordinary description
+required certainly went, some time ago, over the high pass of the
+Sierras on which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationary
+inhabitant. I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on
+the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is
+Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my nationality.
+Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one has been for fifteen years
+without society it is hard to have patriotism; and where there is not
+even a hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father was an
+Irishman of the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian
+kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old Spanish
+families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that of some
+admixture of Red Indian blood. I was well educated and fond of music
+and books. But, like many other hybrids, I was too good or too bad for
+the world; and after attempting many things I was glad enough to get a
+sufficient though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the
+mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage.
+Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore in
+hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a great straw
+hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I had a bowie knife
+at my belt and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a
+pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that could climb
+up to my place. But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man
+did. Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.
+
+“I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
+effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as
+peaks coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven
+itself. Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles;
+cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as
+sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and
+towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the
+world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge
+foundations. We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us
+like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a
+candelabrum. For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far,
+so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The
+spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than
+planets circling placidly about it.
+
+“All this may have driven me mad; I am not sure. I know there is one
+angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and
+on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks—
+yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the
+night. It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the
+pass. Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass. But
+I had never seen one like this one before.
+
+“He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake,
+all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the
+ensign of some old barbarian tribe. His hair, which was as long and
+rank as the grass, hung down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes
+as clung about him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he
+had the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn
+leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes as
+an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I do not know why he
+should have used it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me,
+an excellent six-shooter in his pocket. ‘But THAT,’ he said, ‘I use
+only for peaceful purposes.’ I have no notion what he meant.
+
+“He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from
+the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had
+travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last something
+that he knew. Then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern
+of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door. It is old, but of
+no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago: she was devout, and it
+happens that the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and
+the Wise Men and the Star. He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent
+glow of Our Lady’s blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led
+me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for fourteen years.
+
+“Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward
+where the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich
+velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark
+mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out
+of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we
+call Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over
+with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian
+pillar or needle.
+
+“The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and before
+he spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond the great green rock in the
+purple sky hung a single star.
+
+“‘A star in the east,’ he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of
+our ancient eagles’. ‘The wise men followed the star and found the
+house. But if I followed the star, should I find the house?’
+
+“‘It depends perhaps,’ I said, smiling, ‘on whether you are a wise
+man.’ I refrained from adding that he certainly didn’t look it.
+
+“‘You may judge for yourself,’ he answered. ‘I am a man who left his
+own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.’
+
+“‘It certainly sounds paradoxical,’ I said.
+
+“‘I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the
+room,’ he continued, ‘and all the time I knew they were walking and
+talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of
+different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a
+devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
+Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed
+like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a
+testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that
+it swung full circle like a treadmill.’
+
+“‘Do you really mean,’ I cried, ‘that you have come right round the
+world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.’
+
+“‘My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,’ he replied sadly. ‘I have
+become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.’
+
+“Something in the word ‘pilgrim’ awoke down in the roots of my ruinous
+experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world, and of
+something from whence I came. I looked again at the little pictured
+lantern at which I had not looked for fourteen years.
+
+“‘My grandmother,’ I said in a low tone, ‘would have said that we were
+all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
+home-sickness that forbids us rest.’
+
+“He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift out
+beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
+
+“Then he said, ‘I think your grandmother was right,’ and stood up
+leaning on his grassy pole. ‘I think that must be the reason,’ he
+said—‘the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
+But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us the love
+of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good
+reason.’
+
+“‘I dare say,’ I said. ‘What reason?’
+
+“‘Because otherwise,’ he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the
+abyss, ‘we might worship that.’
+
+“‘What do you mean?’ I demanded.
+
+“‘Eternity,’ he said in his harsh voice, ‘the largest of the idols— the
+mightiest of the rivals of God.’
+
+“‘You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,’ I suggested.
+
+“‘I mean,’ he said with increasing vehemence, ‘that if there be a house
+for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or
+something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a
+hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all
+things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a
+witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise
+is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I
+would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real
+green lamp-post after all.’
+
+“With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the perilous
+paths below, and left me alone with the eagles. But since he went a
+fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy
+meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether
+America will endure.— Yours faithfully, Louis Hara.”
+
+After a short silence Inglewood said: “And, finally, we desire to put
+in as evidence the following document:—
+
+“This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to Mrs.
+I. Smith at ‘The Laurels’ in Croydon for the last six months. When I
+came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow, but
+her husband was away. She was left with plenty of money and did not
+seem disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon.
+She said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good. One
+evening last week I was bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn when
+I nearly dropped them. The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck over
+the hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge, just
+like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all hairy and
+ragged like Robinson Crusoe. I screamed out, but my mistress didn’t
+even get out of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted shaving. Then
+he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup of tea, and
+then I realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself. He has stopped
+here ever since and does not really give much trouble, though I
+sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head. “Ruth Davis.
+
+“P.S.—I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and said, very
+loud and strong: ‘Oh, what a lovely place you’ve got;’ just as if he’d
+never seen it before.”
+
+The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one
+heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible
+solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women had
+left the court before the more recent of the investigations. Mrs. Duke
+was still asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a large hunchback in
+the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper toys. But the
+five men really engaged in the controversy, and concerned not to
+convince the tribunal but to convince each other, still sat round the
+table like the Committee of Public Safety.
+
+Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another,
+cocked his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair backwards
+so far as to be in direct danger of falling over, emitted a startling
+and prolonged whistle like a steam engine, and asserted that it was all
+his eye.
+
+When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind the
+books again and answered with considerable excitement, throwing his
+papers about. “All those fairy-tales you’ve been reading out,” he said.
+“Oh! don’t talk to me! I ain’t littery and that, but I know fairy-tales
+when I hear ’em. I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical bits
+and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we’re living in West
+’Ampstead and not in ’Ell; and the long and the short of it is that
+some things ’appen and some things don’t ’appen. Those are the things
+that don’t ’appen.”
+
+“I thought,” said Moon gravely, “that we quite clearly explained—”
+
+“Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained,” assented Mr. Gould
+with extraordinary volubility. “You’d explain an elephant off the
+doorstep, you would. I ain’t a clever chap like you; but I ain’t a born
+natural, Michael Moon, and when there’s an elephant on my doorstep I
+don’t listen to no explanations. ‘It’s got a trunk,’ I says.—‘My
+trunk,’ you says: ‘I’m fond of travellin’, and a change does me
+good.’—‘But the blasted thing’s got tusks,’ I says.—‘Don’t look a gift
+’orse in the mouth,’ you says, ‘but thank the goodness and the graice
+that on your birth ’as smiled.’—‘But it’s nearly as big as the ’ouse,’
+I says.—‘That’s the bloomin’ perspective,’ you says, ‘and the sacred
+magic of distance.’—‘Why, the elephant’s trumpetin’ like the Day of
+Judgement,’ I says.—‘That’s your own conscience a-talking to you, Moses
+Gould,’ you says in a grive and tender voice. Well, I ’ave got a
+conscience as much as you. I don’t believe most of the things they tell
+you in church on Sundays; and I don’t believe these ’ere things any
+more because you goes on about ’em as if you was in church. I believe
+an elephant’s a great big ugly dingerous beast— and I believe Smith’s
+another.”
+
+“Do you mean to say,” asked Inglewood, “that you still doubt the
+evidence of exculpation we have brought forward?”
+
+“Yes, I do still doubt it,” said Gould warmly. “It’s all a bit too
+far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off. ’Ow can we test all
+those tales? ’Ow can we drop in and buy the ‘Pink ’Un’ at the railway
+station at Kosky Wosky or whatever it was? ’Ow can we go and do a
+gargle at the saloon-bar on top of the Sierra Mountains? But anybody
+can go and see Bunting’s boarding-house at Worthing.”
+
+Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.
+
+“Any one,” continued Gould, “can call on Mr. Trip.”
+
+“It is a comforting thought,” replied Michael with restraint; “but why
+should any one call on Mr. Trip?”
+
+“For just exactly the sime reason,” cried the excited Moses, hammering
+on the table with both hands, “for just exactly the sime reason that he
+should communicate with Messrs. ’Anbury and Bootle of Paternoster Row
+and with Miss Gridley’s ’igh class Academy at ’Endon, and with old Lady
+Bullingdon who lives at Penge.”
+
+“Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life,” said Michael, “why
+is it among the duties of man to communicate with old Lady Bullingdon
+who lives at Penge?”
+
+“It ain’t one of the duties of man,” said Gould, “nor one of his
+pleasures, either, I can tell you. She takes the crumpet, does Lady
+Bullingdon at Penge. But it’s one of the duties of a prosecutor
+pursuin’ the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend Smith,
+and it’s the sime with all the others I mentioned.”
+
+“But why do you bring in these people here?” asked Inglewood.
+
+“Why! Because we’ve got proof enough to sink a steamboat,” roared
+Moses; “because I’ve got the papers in my very ’and; because your
+precious Innocent is a blackguard and ’ome smasher, and these are the
+’omes he’s smashed. I don’t set up for a ’oly man; but I wouldn’t ’ave
+all those poor girls on my conscience for something. And I think a chap
+that’s capable of deserting and perhaps killing ’em all is about
+capable of cracking a crib or shootin’ an old schoolmaster—so I don’t
+care much about the other yarns one way or another.”
+
+“I think,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough, “that we are
+approaching this matter rather irregularly. This is really the fourth
+charge on the charge sheet, and perhaps I had better put it before you
+in an ordered and scientific manner.”
+
+Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence of the
+darkening room.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge
+
+
+“A modern man,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym, “must, if he be thoughtful,
+approach the problem of marriage with some caution. Marriage is a
+stage—doubtless a suitable stage—in the long advance of mankind towards
+a goal which we cannot as yet conceive; which we are not, perhaps, as
+yet fitted even to desire. What, gentlemen, is the ethical position of
+marriage? Have we outlived it?”
+
+“Outlived it?” broke out Moon; “why, nobody’s ever survived it! Look at
+all the people married since Adam and Eve—and all as dead as mutton.”
+
+“This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc’lar in its character,” said
+Dr. Pym frigidly. “I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon’s matured and
+ethical view of marriage—”
+
+“I can tell,” said Michael savagely, out of the gloom. “Marriage is a
+duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.”
+
+“Michael,” said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, “you MUST keep quiet.”
+
+“Mr. Moon,” said Pym with exquisite good temper, “probably regards the
+institution in a more antiquated manner. Probably he would make it
+stringent and uniform. He would treat divorce in some great soul of
+steel—the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson—
+exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who scoots
+from his wife. Science has views broader and more humane. Just as
+murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction, just as
+theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so
+polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct
+for variety. A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy. Doubtless
+there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower— as
+there is, doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears to
+afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment. Our own world-scorning
+Winterbottom has even dared to say, ‘For a certain rare and fine
+physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of
+females, as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.’ In
+any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all
+authoritative inquirers. Such a type, if the widower of a negress, does
+in many ascertained cases espouse _en seconde noces_ an albino; such a
+type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian,
+will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the consoling
+figure of an Eskimo. To such a type there can be no doubt that the
+prisoner belongs. If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute
+any slight excuse for a man, there is no doubt that he has these
+excuses.
+
+“Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric ideality in
+admitting half of our story without further dispute. We should like to
+acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted a style by conceding
+also that the story told by Curate Percy about the canoe, the weir, and
+the young wife seems to be substantially true. Apparently Smith did
+marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat; it only remains
+to be considered whether it would not have been kinder of him to have
+murdered her instead of marrying her. In confirmation of this fact I
+can now con-cede to the defence an unquestionable record of such a
+marriage.”
+
+So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the “Maidenhead
+Gazette” which distinctly recorded the marriage of the daughter of a
+“coach,” a tutor well known in the place, to Mr. Innocent Smith, late
+of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown at once
+both tragic and triumphant.
+
+“I pause upon this pre-liminary fact,” he said seriously, “because this
+fact alone would give us the victory, were we aspiring after victory
+and not after truth. As far as the personal and domestic problem holds
+us, that problem is solved. Dr. Warner and I entered this house at an
+instant of highly emotional diff’culty. England’s Warner has entered
+many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time he entered to
+save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence. Smith was just about
+to carry away a young girl from this house; his cab and bag were at the
+very door. He had told her she was going to await the marriage license
+at the house of his aunt. That aunt,” continued Cyrus Pym, his face
+darkening grandly—“that visionary aunt had been the dancing
+will-o’-the-wisp who had led many a high-souled maiden to her doom.
+Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word? When he
+said ‘aunt’ there glowed about her all the merriment and high morality
+of the Anglo-Saxon home. Kettles began to hum, pussy cats to purr, in
+that very wild cab that was being driven to destruction.”
+
+Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another
+denizen of the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was not
+only perfectly serious, but was really eloquent and affecting— when the
+difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.
+
+“It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at least
+represented himself to one innocent female of this house as an eligible
+bachelor, being, in fact, a married man. I agree with my colleague, Mr.
+Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this. As to whether
+what our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical value indeed,
+science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation. But what hesitation
+can there be about the baseness of a citizen who ventures, by brutal
+experiments upon living females, to anticipate the verdict of science
+on such a point?
+
+“The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith in Highbury
+may or may not be the same as the lady he married in Maidenhead. If one
+short sweet spell of constancy and heart repose interrupted the
+plunging torrent of his profligate life, we will not deprive him of
+that long past possibility. After that conjectural date, alas, he seems
+to have plunged deeper and deeper into the shaking quagmires of
+infidelity and shame.”
+
+Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no
+more light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral
+effect. After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer,
+he continued.
+
+“The first instance of the accused’s repeated and irregular nuptials,”
+he exclaimed, “comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses herself with
+the high haughtiness which must be excused in those who look out upon
+all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep. The
+communication she has sent to us runs as follows:—
+
+“Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference is
+made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail. The girl Polly Green
+was a perfectly adequate dressmaker, and lived in the village for about
+two years. Her unattached condition was bad for her as well as for the
+general morality of the village. Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it
+to be understood that she favoured the marriage of the young woman. The
+villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon, came forward in
+several cases; and all would have been well had it not been for the
+deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl Green herself. Lady
+Bullingdon supposes that where there is a village there must be a
+village idiot, and in her village, it seems, there was one of these
+wretched creatures. Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite
+aware that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual idiots
+and the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes. She noticed,
+however, the startling smallness of his head in comparison to the rest
+of his body; and, indeed, the fact of his having appeared upon election
+day wearing the rosette of both the two opposing parties appears to
+Lady Bullingdon to put the matter quite beyond doubt. Lady Bullingdon
+was astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself
+forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question. Lady
+Bullingdon’s nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point, telling him
+that he was a ‘donkey’ to dream of such a thing, and actually received,
+along with an imbecile grin, the answer that donkeys generally go after
+carrots. But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy
+girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she was
+actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man in a far
+superior position to her own. Lady Bullingdon could not, of course,
+countenance such an arrangement for a moment, and the two unhappy
+persons escaped for a clandestine marriage. Lady Bullingdon cannot
+exactly recall the man’s name, but thinks it was Smith. He was always
+called in the village the Innocent. Later, Lady Bullingdon believes he
+murdered Green in a mental outbreak.”
+
+“The next communication,” proceeded Pym, “is more conspicuous for
+brevity, but I am of the opinion that it will adequately convey the
+upshot. It is dated from the offices of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle,
+publishers, and is as follows:—
+
+“Sir,—Yrs. rcd. and conts. noted. Rumour re typewriter possibly refers
+to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago to marry an
+organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police
+attention. Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when
+apparently went mad. Record was written at the time, part of which I
+enclose.— Yrs., etc., W. Trip.
+
+“The fuller statement runs as follows:—
+
+“On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs. Bernard
+and Juke, bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found to contain the
+following: ‘Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3, as we wish to know
+whether it is really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.’ To this Mr. Juke, a
+person of a playful mind, returned the answer: ‘Sir, I am in a position
+to give it as my most decided opinion that it is not really decided
+that 00000073bb!!!!!xy. Yrs., etc., ‘J. Juke.’
+
+“On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the
+original letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed
+substituted these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really
+dictated to her. Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she
+was in an unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely
+remarked that she always went like that when she heard the barrel
+organ. Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series
+of most improbable statements—as, that she was engaged to the
+barrel-organ man, that he was in the habit of serenading her on that
+instrument, that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the
+typewriter (in the style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the
+organ man’s musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself
+so ardent that he could detect the note of the different letters on the
+machine, and was enraptured by them as by a melody. To all these
+statements of course our Mr. Trip and the rest of us only paid that
+sort of assent that is paid to persons who must as quickly as possible
+be put in the charge of their relations. But on our conducting the lady
+downstairs, her story received the most startling and even exasperating
+confirmation; for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with a small head
+and manifestly a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the
+office doors like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding his
+alleged _fiancée_. When I myself came on the scene he was flinging his
+great, ape-like arms about and reciting a poem to her. But we were used
+to lunatics coming and reciting poems in our office, and we were not
+quite prepared for what followed. The actual verse he uttered began, I
+think,
+
+‘O vivid, inviolate head,
+Ringed—’
+
+
+but he never got any further. Mr. Trip made a sharp movement towards
+him, and the next moment the giant picked up the poor lady typewriter
+like a doll, sat her on top of the organ, ran it with a crash out of
+the office doors, and raced away down the street like a flying
+wheelbarrow. I put the police upon the matter; but no trace of the
+amazing pair could be found. I was sorry myself; for the lady was not
+only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position. As I am
+leaving the service of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, I put these things
+in a record and leave it with them. (Signed) Aubrey Clarke, Publishers’
+Reader.
+
+“And the last document,” said Dr. Pym complacently, “is from one of
+those high-souled women who have in this age introduced your English
+girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics, and every form of ideality.
+
+“Dear Sir (she writes),—I have no objection to telling you the facts
+about the absurd incident you mention; though I would ask you to
+communicate them with some caution, for such things, however
+entertaining in the abstract, are not always auxiliary to the success
+of a girls’ school. The truth is this: I wanted some one to deliver a
+lecture on a philological or historical question—a lecture which, while
+containing solid educational matter, should be a little more popular
+and entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term. I
+remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere or other
+an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name— an essay which
+showed considerable knowledge of genealogy and topography. I wrote to
+him, asking if he would come and give us a bright address upon English
+surnames; and he did. It was very bright, almost too bright. To put the
+matter otherwise, by the time that he was halfway through it became
+apparent to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally
+and entirely off his head. He began rationally enough by dealing with
+the two departments of place names and trade names, and he said (quite
+rightly, I dare say) that the loss of all significance in names was an
+instance of the deadening of civilization. But then he went on calmly
+to maintain that every man who had a place name ought to go to live in
+that place, and that every man who had a trade name ought instantly to
+adopt that trade; that people named after colours should always dress
+in those colours, and that people named after trees or plants (such as
+Beech or Rose) ought to surround and decorate themselves with these
+vegetables. In a slight discussion that arose afterwards among the
+elder girls the difficulties of the proposal were clearly, and even
+eagerly, pointed out. It was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband
+that it was substantially impossible for her to play the part assigned
+to her; Miss Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which no modern views
+on the sexes could apparently extricate her; and some young ladies,
+whose surnames happened to be Low, Coward, and Craven, were quite
+enthusiastic against the idea. But all this happened afterwards. What
+happened at the crucial moment was that the lecturer produced several
+horseshoes and a large iron hammer from his bag, announced his
+immediate intention of setting up a smithy in the neighbourhood, and
+called on every one to rise in the same cause as for a heroic
+revolution. The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched
+man, but I must confess that by an accident this very intercession
+produced the worst explosion of his insanity. He was waving the hammer,
+and wildly demanding the names of everybody; and it so happened that
+Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers, was wearing a brown dress—a
+reddish-brown dress that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of
+her hair, as well she knew. She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know
+about those things. But when our maniac discovered that we really had a
+Miss Brown who WAS brown, his _idée fixe_ blew up like a powder
+magazine, and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls,
+he publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress. You can
+imagine the effect of such a scene at a girls’ school. At least, if you
+fail to imagine it, I certainly fail to describe it.
+
+“Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can think of
+it now as a joke. There was only one curious detail, which I will tell
+you, as you say your inquiry is vital; but I should desire you to
+consider it a little more confidential than the rest. Miss Brown, who
+was an excellent girl in every way, did quite suddenly and
+surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards. I should never
+have thought that her head would be the one to be really turned by so
+absurd an excitement.—Believe me, yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.
+
+“I think,” said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and
+seriousness, “that these letters speak for themselves.”
+
+Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint of
+whether his native gravity was mixed with his native irony.
+
+“Throughout this inquiry,” he said, “but especially in this its closing
+phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument; I mean
+the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy women
+apparently seduced by Smith. There is no sort of proof that they were
+murdered, but that implication is perpetually made when the question is
+asked as to how they died. Now I am not interested in how they died, or
+when they died, or whether they died. But I am interested in another
+analogous question—that of how they were born, and when they were born,
+and whether they were born. Do not misunderstand me. I do not dispute
+the existence of these women, or the veracity of those who have
+witnessed to them. I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of
+these victims, the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or
+parents. All the rest are boarders or birds of passage—a guest, a
+solitary dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting. Lady
+Bullingdon, looking from her turrets, which she bought from the
+Whartons with the old soap-boiler’s money when she jumped at marrying
+an unsuccessful gentleman from Ulster—Lady Bullingdon, looking out from
+those turrets, did really see an object which she describes as Green.
+Mr. Trip, of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed
+to Smith. Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest. She
+did house, feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded in
+decoying away. We admit that all these women really lived. But we still
+ask whether they were ever born?”
+
+“Oh, crikey!” said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.
+
+“There could hardly,” interposed Pym with a quiet smile, “be a better
+instance of the neglect of true scientific process. The scientist, when
+once convinced of the fact of vitality and consciousness, would infer
+from these the previous process of generation.”
+
+“If these gals,” said Gould impatiently—“if these gals were all alive
+(all alive O!) I’d chance a fiver they were all born.”
+
+“You’d lose your fiver,” said Michael, speaking gravely out of the
+gloom. “All those admirable ladies were alive. They were more alive for
+having come into contact with Smith. They were all quite definitely
+alive, but only one of them was ever born.”
+
+“Are you asking us to believe—” began Dr. Pym.
+
+“I am asking you a second question,” said Moon sternly. “Can the court
+now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance? Dr. Pym,
+in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe, the relations
+of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave of a lust for variety which
+would lead a man first to a negress and then to an albino, first to a
+Patagonian giantess and then to a tiny Eskimo. But is there any
+evidence of such variety here? Is there any trace of a gigantic
+Patagonian in the story? Was the typewriter an Eskimo? So picturesque a
+circumstance would not surely have escaped remark. Was Lady
+Bullingdon’s dressmaker a negress? A voice in my bosom answers, ‘No!’
+Lady Bullingdon, I am sure, would think a negress so conspicuous as to
+be almost Socialistic, and would feel something a little rakish even
+about an albino.
+
+“But was there in Smith’s taste any such variety as the learned doctor
+describes? So far as our slight materials go, the very opposite seems
+to be the case. We have only one actual description of any of the
+prisoner’s wives— the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic
+curate. ‘Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn
+leaves.’ Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours, some of
+which would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance); but I
+think such an expression would be most naturally used of the shades
+from red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their coppery-coloured
+hair do frequently wear light artistic greens. Now when we come to the
+next wife, we find the eccentric lover, when told he is a donkey,
+answering that donkeys always go after carrots; a remark which Lady
+Bullingdon evidently regarded as pointless and part of the natural
+table-talk of a village idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we
+suppose that Polly’s hair was red. Passing to the next wife, the one he
+took from the girls’ school, we find Miss Gridley noticing that the
+schoolgirl in question wore ‘a reddish-brown dress, that went quietly
+enough with the warmer colour of her hair.’ In other words, the colour
+of the girl’s hair was something redder than red-brown. Lastly, the
+romantic organ-grinder declaimed in the office some poetry that only
+got as far as the words,—
+
+‘O vivid, inviolate head,
+Ringed—’
+
+
+But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets will enable us
+to guess that ‘ringed with a glory of red,’ or ‘ringed with its
+passionate red,’ was the line that rhymed to ‘head.’ In this case once
+more, therefore, there is good reason to suppose that Smith fell in
+love with a girl with some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair—rather,”
+he said, looking down at the table, “rather like Miss Gray’s hair.”
+
+Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready with one of
+his more pedantic interpellations; but Moses Gould suddenly struck his
+forefinger on his nose, with an expression of extreme astonishment and
+intelligence in his brilliant eyes.
+
+“Mr. Moon’s contention at present,” interposed Pym, “is not, even if
+veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view of I. Smith,
+which we have nailed to the mast. Science has long anticipated such a
+complication. An incurable attraction to a particular type of physical
+woman is one of the commonest of criminal per-versities, and when not
+considered narrowly, but in the light of induction and evolution—”
+
+“At this late stage,” said Michael Moon very quietly, “I may perhaps
+relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me throughout
+the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution may go and boil
+themselves. The Missing Link and all that is well enough for kids, but
+I’m talking about things we know here. All we know of the Missing Link
+is that he is missing—and he won’t be missed either. I know all about
+his human head and his horrid tail; they belong to a very old game
+called ‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’ If you do find a fellow’s bones,
+it proves he lived a long while ago; if you don’t find his bones, it
+proves how long ago he lived. That is the game you’ve been playing with
+this Smith affair. Because Smith’s head is small for his shoulders you
+call him microcephalous; if it had been large, you’d have called it
+water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith’s seraglio seemed pretty
+various, variety was the sign of madness: now, because it’s turning out
+to be a bit monochrome—now monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer
+from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person, and I’m jolly
+well going to get some of the advantages too; and with all politeness I
+propose not to be bullied with long words instead of short reasons, or
+consider your business a triumphant progress merely because you’re
+always finding out that you were wrong. Having relieved myself of these
+feelings, I have merely to add that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to
+the world far more beautiful than the Parthenon, or the monument on
+Bunker’s Hill, and that I propose to resume and conclude my remarks on
+the many marriages of Mr. Innocent Smith.
+
+“Besides this red hair, there is another unifying thread that runs
+through these scattered incidents. There is something very peculiar and
+suggestive about the names of these women. Mr. Trip, you will remember,
+said he thought the typewriter’s name was Blake, but could not remember
+exactly. I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that case we
+have a curious series: Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon’s village; Miss
+Brown at the Hendon School; Miss Black at the publishers. A chord of
+colours, as it were, which ends up with Miss Gray at Beacon House, West
+Hampstead.”
+
+Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition. “What is the meaning
+of this queer coincidence about colours? Personally I cannot doubt for
+a moment that these names are purely arbitrary names, assumed as part
+of some general scheme or joke. I think it very probable that they were
+taken from a series of costumes— that Polly Green only meant Polly (or
+Mary) when in green, and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when
+in gray. This would explain—”
+
+Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid. “Do you actually
+mean to suggest—” he cried.
+
+“Yes,” said Michael; “I do mean to suggest that. Innocent Smith has had
+many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one
+wife. She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to
+Miss Duke in the garden.
+
+“Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of other
+occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle. It is odd
+and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
+principle plainly applied in the modern world would be. His principle
+can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive.
+He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
+that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For
+this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he
+arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
+for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to
+his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking
+the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about
+(so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so
+that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic
+elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to
+keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should
+be run for her sake.
+
+“So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are
+not quite so clear. I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom of
+all this. I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
+quite sure that it is worth a man’s uttering and defending.
+
+“The idea that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an entangled
+civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not
+wrong at all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging
+and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not
+merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked
+about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not mean
+to hit him and know you won’t. It is no more wrong than throwing a
+pebble at the sea—less, for you do occasionally hit the sea. There is
+nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking through a
+roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or property of other
+men. It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from the top than
+to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom. There is nothing
+wicked about walking round the world and coming back to your own house;
+it is no more wicked than walking round the garden and coming back to
+your own house. And there is nothing wicked about picking up your wife
+here, there, and everywhere, if, forsaking all others, you keep only to
+her so long as you both shall live. It is as innocent as playing a game
+of hide-and-seek in the garden. You associate such acts with
+blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as you think there is
+something vaguely vile about going (or being seen going) into a
+pawnbroker’s or a public-house. You think there is something squalid
+and commonplace about such a connection. You are mistaken.
+
+“This man’s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has
+distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions,
+but he has kept the commandments. It is as if a man were found gambling
+wildly in a gambling hell, and you found that he only played for
+trouser buttons. It is as if you found a man making a clandestine
+appointment with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it
+was his grandmother. Everything is ugly and discreditable, except the
+facts; everything is wrong about him, except that he has done no wrong.
+
+“It will then be asked, ‘Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his
+middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false
+charges?’ To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is
+happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and
+alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly
+practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all. And if
+you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such
+inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it
+is one that will not be approved.
+
+“There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don’t like it. If
+Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent. If he can defy the
+conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is
+just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a
+pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just
+because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his
+neighbour’s goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long
+for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he
+does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex;
+it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
+If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he
+would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a
+song— at least, not a comic song.”
+
+“Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or
+appeals in any particular way to my sympathies. I am an Irishman, and a
+certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my
+creed, or of my creed itself. Speaking singly, I feel as if man was
+tied to tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and
+doubt. But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick, this
+is the way out. If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it
+would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.
+Barely and brutally to be good—that may be the road, and he may have
+found it. Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face of
+my old friend Moses. Mr. Gould does not believe that being perfectly
+good in all respects would make a man merry.”
+
+“No,” said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; “I do not
+believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man
+merry.”
+
+“Well,” said Michael quietly, “will you tell me one thing? Which of us
+has ever tried it?”
+
+A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological epoch
+which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type; for there rose at
+last in the stillness a massive figure that the other men had almost
+completely forgotten.
+
+“Well, gentlemen,” said Dr. Warner cheerfully, “I’ve been pretty well
+entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery for a
+couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin, and I’m engaged
+for a city dinner. Among the hundred flowers of futility on both sides
+I was unable to detect any sort of reason why a lunatic should be
+allowed to shoot me in the back garden.”
+
+He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly
+to the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still
+followed him: “But really the bullet missed you by several feet.” And
+another voice added: “The bullet missed him by several years.”
+
+There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then Moon said
+suddenly, “We have been sitting with a ghost. Dr. Herbert Warner died
+years ago.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House
+
+
+Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the
+garden; they were silent, and the sun had set. Such spaces of daylight
+as remained open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be
+compared to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud
+that ran across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet
+smoke. All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like
+gray, and seemed to melt and mount into Mary’s dark-gray figure until
+she seemed clothed with the garden and the skies. There was something
+in these last quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy;
+and the twilight, which concealed Diana’s statelier figure and
+Rosamund’s braver array, exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the
+lady of the garden, and alone.
+
+When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long fallen
+silent was being revived.
+
+“But where is your husband taking you?” asked Diana in her practical
+voice.
+
+“To an aunt,” said Mary; “that’s just the joke. There really is an
+aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged to be turned
+out of the other boarding-house down the road. We never take more than
+a week of this kind of holiday, but sometimes we take two of them
+together.”
+
+“Does the aunt mind much?” asked Rosamund innocently. “Of course, I
+dare say it’s very narrow-minded and—what’s that other word?— you know,
+what Goliath was—but I’ve known many aunts who would think it—well,
+silly.”
+
+“Silly?” cried Mary with great heartiness. “Oh, my Sunday hat! I should
+think it was silly! But what do you expect? He really is a good man,
+and it might have been snakes or something.”
+
+“Snakes?” inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.
+
+“Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him,” replied Mary with
+perfect simplicity. “Auntie let him have them in his pockets, but not
+in the bedroom.”
+
+“And you—” began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.
+
+“Oh, I do as auntie did,” said Mary; “as long as we’re not away from
+the children more than a fortnight together I play the game. He calls
+me ‘Manalive;’ and you must write it all one word, or he’s quite
+flustered.”
+
+“But if men want things like that,” began Diana.
+
+“Oh, what’s the good of talking about men?” cried Mary impatiently;
+“why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing. There
+aren’t any men. There are no such people. There’s a man; and whoever he
+is he’s quite different.”
+
+“So there is no safety,” said Diana in a low voice.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Mary, lightly enough; “there’s only two
+things generally true of them. At certain curious times they’re just
+fit to take care of us, and they’re never fit to take care of
+themselves.”
+
+“There is a gale getting up,” said Rosamund suddenly. “Look at those
+trees over there, a long way off, and the clouds going quicker.”
+
+“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Mary; “and don’t you be silly
+fools. Don’t you listen to the lady novelists. You go down the king’s
+highway; for God’s truth, it is God’s. Yes, my dear Michael will often
+be extremely untidy. Arthur Inglewood will be worse—he’ll be untidy.
+But what else are all the trees and clouds for, you silly kittens?”
+
+“The clouds and trees are all waving about,” said Rosamund. “There is a
+storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow. Michael is
+really rather like a storm: he frightens me and makes me happy.”
+
+“Don’t you be frightened,” said Mary. “All over, these men have one
+advantage; they are the sort that go out.”
+
+A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves
+along the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.
+
+“I mean,” said Mary, “they are the kind that look outwards and get
+interested in the world. It doesn’t matter a bit whether it’s arguing,
+or bicycling, or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old
+Innocent does. Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries
+to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the
+window and tries to understand you. When poor old Adam had gone out
+gardening (Arthur will go out gardening), the other sort came along and
+wormed himself in, nasty old snake.”
+
+“You agree with your aunt,” said Rosamund, smiling: “no snakes in the
+bedroom.”
+
+“I didn’t agree with my aunt very much,” replied Mary simply, “but I
+think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons and griffins, so
+long as it got him out of the house.”
+
+Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
+turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold.
+The golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had sat
+like a clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
+cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, “Acquitted! acquitted!” Echoing
+the cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and wildly swung
+her into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz. But the
+company knew Innocent and Michael by this time, and their extravagances
+were gaily taken for granted; it was far more extraordinary that Arthur
+Inglewood walked straight up to Diana and kissed her as if it had been
+his sister’s birthday. Even Dr. Pym, though he refrained from dancing,
+looked on with real benevolence; for indeed the whole of the absurd
+revelation had disturbed him less than the others; he half supposed
+that such irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions were part of
+the mediaeval mummeries of the Old Land.
+
+While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window
+was lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with
+laughter and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the
+house again, they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had
+clambered out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again,
+“Beacon House!” whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the
+wood fire below, of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke
+drove out on the deafening air.
+
+He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties; but when
+the wind died down, and the party, at the top of their evening’s
+merriment, looked again for Mary and for him, they were not to be
+found.
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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 <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Manalive</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: G. K. Chesterton</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April, 1999 [eBook #1718]<br />
+[Most recently updated: April 28, 2023]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Jim Henry III, Martin Ward and David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANALIVE ***</div>
+
+<h1>MANALIVE</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">By G. K. Chesterton  </h2>
+
+<h4><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>
+THOMAS NELSON AND SONS<br/>
+1912</h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_PART"><b>Part I</b> &mdash; THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0001">Chapter I &mdash; How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0002">Chapter II &mdash; The Luggage of an Optimist</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0003">Chapter III &mdash; The Banner of Beacon</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0004">Chapter IV &mdash; The Garden of the God</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0005">Chapter V &mdash; The Allegorical Practical Joker</a><br /><br /></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2H_PART2"><b>Part II</b> &mdash; THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0006">Chapter I &mdash; The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0007">Chapter II &mdash; The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0008">Chapter III &mdash; The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0009">Chapter IV &mdash; The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#link2HCH0010">Chapter V &mdash; How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="link2H_PART" id="link2H_PART"></a>
+PART I<br/>
+THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"></a>
+Chapter I<br/>
+How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House</h3>
+
+<p>
+A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore
+eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the
+cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man
+like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the inmost chambers of
+intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the
+floor with some professor&rsquo;s papers till they seemed as precious as
+fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read &ldquo;Treasure
+Island&rdquo; and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama
+into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a
+harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the
+clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her
+five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat
+imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she
+half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt
+in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed
+herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might
+have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of
+woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint
+clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode
+heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic
+road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes
+of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round
+his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in it
+something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of the
+proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
+terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round about this
+place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets
+gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped mountaineers) gave
+it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has never been able to shake off. At
+some stage of those heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and
+almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that
+the last building, a boarding establishment called &ldquo;Beacon House,&rdquo;
+offered abruptly to the sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like
+the prow of some deserted ship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The proprietor of the
+boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons against whom
+fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both before and after all her calamities;
+she was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a
+strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young but
+listless folks. And there were actually five inmates standing disconsolately
+about the garden when the great gale broke at the base of the terminal tower
+behind them, as the sea bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with cold
+cloud. Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray and chilly
+garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior. When the wind came
+it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left and right, unbarring great
+clear furnaces of evening gold. The burst of light released and the burst of
+air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously; and the wind especially
+caught everything in a throttling violence. The bright short grass lay all one
+way like brushed hair. Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog
+at the collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and
+exterminating element. Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from
+an arbalist. The three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if
+leaning against a wall. The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to
+speak truly, they were blown into the house. Their two frocks, blue and white,
+looked like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale. Nor is
+such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic about
+this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and unlifting day. Grass and
+garden trees seemed glittering with something at once good and unnatural, like
+a fire from fairyland. It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the
+day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a white hat of the
+proportions of a parachute, which might have wafted her away into the coloured
+clouds of evening. She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
+in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a friend), an heiress
+in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt, brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute
+and rather boisterous. On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather
+good-looking; but she had not married, perhaps because there was always a crowd
+of men around her. She was not fast (though some might have called her vulgar),
+but she gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once popular and
+inaccessible. A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra, or as if
+he were asking for a great actress at the stage door. Indeed, some theatrical
+spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt; she played the guitar and the
+mandoline; she always wanted charades; and with that great rending of the sky
+by sun and storm, she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her. To the
+crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose like the curtain of some
+long-expected pantomime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this apocalypse in a
+private garden; though she was one of most prosaic and practical creatures
+alive. She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous niece whose strength alone
+upheld that mansion of decay. But as the gale swung and swelled the blue and
+white skirts till they took on the monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines,
+a sunken memory stirred in her that was almost romance&mdash;a memory of a
+dusty volume of <i>Punch</i> in an aunt&rsquo;s house in infancy: pictures of
+crinoline hoops and croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they
+were a part. This half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost
+instantly, and Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her
+companion. Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.
+In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once long
+and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake. The whole
+house revolved on her as on a rod of steel. It would be wrong to say that she
+commanded; for her own efficiency was so impatient that she obeyed herself
+before any one else obeyed her. Before electricians could mend a bell or
+locksmiths open a door, before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a
+tight cork, it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands. She
+was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness. She spurned the
+ground, and she meant to spurn it. People talk of the pathos and failure of
+plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed
+in everything but womanhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s enough to blow your head off,&rdquo; said the young woman in
+white, going to the looking-glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening gloves, and
+then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon cloth for tea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Enough to blow your head off, I say,&rdquo; said Miss Rosamund Hunt,
+with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches had always been
+safe for an encore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only your hat, I think,&rdquo; said Diana Duke, &ldquo;but I dare say
+that is sometimes more important.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rosamund&rsquo;s face showed for an instant the offence of a spoilt child, and
+then the humour of a very healthy person. She broke into a laugh and said,
+&ldquo;Well, it would have to be a big wind to blow your head off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from the
+sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull walls
+with ruby and gold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Somebody once told me,&rdquo; said Rosamund Hunt, &ldquo;that it&rsquo;s
+easier to keep one&rsquo;s head when one has lost one&rsquo;s heart.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t talk such rubbish,&rdquo; said Diana with savage
+sharpness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but the wind was still
+stiffly blowing, and the three men who stood their ground might also have
+considered the problem of hats and heads. And, indeed, their position, touching
+hats, was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of the three abode the blast in
+a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge as vainly as that other sullen
+tower, the house behind him. The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat
+at all angles, and ultimately held it in his hand. The third had no hat, and,
+by his attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life. Perhaps this wind
+was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women, for there was much of the three
+men in this difference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and solidity. He
+was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man, with flat fair hair and
+handsome heavy features; a prosperous young doctor by the name of Warner. But
+if his blondness and blandness seemed at first a little fatuous, it is certain
+that he was no fool. If Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much
+money, he was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame. His
+treatise on &ldquo;The Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest
+Organisms&rdquo; had been universally hailed by the scientific world as at once
+solid and daring. In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not
+his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze with
+a poker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a small
+way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness. It was, in fact,
+at his invitation that the distinguished doctor was present; for Warner lived
+in no such ramshackle lodging-house, but in a professional palace in Harley
+Street. This young man was really the youngest and best-looking of the three.
+But he was one of those persons, both male and female, who seem doomed to be
+good-looking and insignificant. Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed
+to lose the delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown and red as he
+stood blushing and blinking against the wind. He was one of those obvious
+unnoticeable people: every one knew that he was Arthur Inglewood, unmarried,
+moral, decidedly intelligent, living on a little money of his own, and hiding
+himself in the two hobbies of photography and cycling. Everybody knew him and
+forgot him; even as he stood there in the glare of golden sunset there was
+something about him indistinct, like one of his own red-brown amateur
+photographs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely sporting clothes, and
+the large pipe in his mouth made him look all the leaner. He had a long
+ironical face, blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the blue chin
+of an actor. An Irishman he was, an actor he was not, except in the old days of
+Miss Hunt&rsquo;s charades, being, as a matter of fact, an obscure and flippant
+journalist named Michael Moon. He had once been hazily supposed to be reading
+for the Bar; but (as Warner would say with his rather elephantine wit) it was
+mostly at another kind of bar that his friends found him. Moon, however, did
+not drink, nor even frequently get drunk; he simply was a gentleman who liked
+low company. This was partly because company is quieter than society: and if he
+enjoyed talking to a barmaid (as apparently he did), it was chiefly because the
+barmaid did the talking. Moreover he would often bring other talent to assist
+her. He shared that strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and
+without ambition&mdash;the trick of going about with his mental inferiors.
+There was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house, a
+man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused Michael so much that he went
+round with him from bar to bar, like the owner of a performing monkey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew clearer
+and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven. One felt one
+might at last find something lighter than light. In the fullness of this silent
+effulgence all things collected their colours again: the gray trunks turned
+silver, and the drab gravel gold. One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from
+one tree to another, and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Inglewood,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird,
+&ldquo;have you any friends?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad beaming face,
+said,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes, I go out a great deal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant, who spoke a
+moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young, as coming out of that
+brown and even dusty interior.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really,&rdquo; answered Inglewood, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve
+lost touch with my old friends. The greatest friend I ever had was at school, a
+fellow named Smith. It&rsquo;s odd you should mention it, because I was
+thinking of him to-day, though I haven&rsquo;t seen him for seven or eight
+years. He was on the science side with me at school&mdash; a clever fellow
+though queer; and he went up to Oxford when I went to Germany. The fact is,
+it&rsquo;s rather a sad story. I often asked him to come and see me, and when I
+heard nothing I made inquiries, you know. I was shocked to learn that poor
+Smith had gone off his head. The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course, some
+saying that he had recovered again; but they always say that. About a year ago
+I got a telegram from him myself. The telegram, I&rsquo;m sorry to say, put the
+matter beyond a doubt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; assented Dr. Warner stolidly; &ldquo;insanity is
+generally incurable.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So is sanity,&rdquo; said the Irishman, and studied him with a dreary
+eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Symptoms?&rdquo; asked the doctor. &ldquo;What was this telegram?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a shame to joke about such things,&rdquo; said Inglewood, in
+his honest, embarrassed way; &ldquo;the telegram was Smith&rsquo;s illness, not
+Smith. The actual words were, &lsquo;Man found alive with two
+legs.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alive with two legs,&rdquo; repeated Michael, frowning. &ldquo;Perhaps a
+version of alive and kicking? I don&rsquo;t know much about people out of their
+senses; but I suppose they ought to be kicking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And people in their senses?&rdquo; asked Warner, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, they ought to be kicked,&rdquo; said Michael with sudden heartiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The message is clearly insane,&rdquo; continued the impenetrable Warner.
+&ldquo;The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type. Even a baby
+does not expect to find a man with three legs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three legs,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, &ldquo;would be very convenient in
+this wind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them off their
+balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden. Beyond, all sorts of
+accidental objects could be seen scouring the wind-scoured sky&mdash;straws,
+sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a disappearing hat. Its
+disappearance, however, was not final; after an interval of minutes they saw it
+again, much larger and closer, like a white panama, towering up into the
+heavens like a balloon, staggering to and fro for an instant like a stricken
+kite, and then settling in the centre of their own lawn as falteringly as a
+fallen leaf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Somebody&rsquo;s lost a good hat,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner shortly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall, flying after the
+fluttering panama. It was a big green umbrella. After that came hurtling a huge
+yellow Gladstone bag, and after that came a figure like a flying wheel of legs,
+as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs, it alighted upon
+two, like the man in the queer telegram. It took the form of a large
+light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes. He had bright blonde hair that
+the wind brushed back like a German&rsquo;s, a flushed eager face like a
+cherub&rsquo;s, and a prominent pointing nose, a little like a dog&rsquo;s. His
+head, however, was by no means cherubic in the sense of being without a body.
+On the contrary, on his vast shoulders and shape generally gigantesque, his
+head looked oddly and unnaturally small. This gave rise to a scientific theory
+(which his conduct fully supported) that he was an idiot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward. His life was full of
+arrested half gestures of assistance. And even this prodigy of a big man in
+green, leaping the wall like a bright green grasshopper, did not paralyze that
+small altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost hat. He was stepping
+forward to recover the green gentleman&rsquo;s head-gear, when he was struck
+rigid with a roar like a bull&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Unsportsmanlike!&rdquo; bellowed the big man. &ldquo;Give it fair play,
+give it fair play!&rdquo; And he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously,
+with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in
+ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and
+rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a <i>pas de
+quatre</i>. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts
+of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread:
+&ldquo;Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns... quite
+humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats... old English hunting...
+started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at bay... mangled hounds... Got
+him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the wind rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky on his
+strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat, missed it, and pitched
+sprawling face foremost on the grass. The hat rose over him like a bird in
+triumph. But its triumph was premature; for the lunatic, flung forward on his
+hands, threw up his boots behind, waved his two legs in the air like symbolic
+ensigns (so that they actually thought again of the telegram), and actually
+caught the hat with his feet. A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the
+welkin from end to end. The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible
+blast, as by a strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between them and
+all objects about them. But as the large man fell back in a sitting posture and
+solemnly crowned himself with the hat, Michael found, to his incredulous
+surprise, that he had been holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy, another short
+cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending very quick, swallowed in
+abrupt silence. The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner&rsquo;s official hat
+sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost
+cresting a garden tree was caught in the topmost branches. Another hat was
+gone. Those in that garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy of
+things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away next. Before they
+could speculate, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up
+the tree, swinging himself from fork to fork with his strong, bent, grasshopper
+legs, and still giving forth his gasping, mysterious comments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls nesting
+in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers... gone to
+heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs to
+depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering wind like a
+thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire. The green, fantastic
+human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold, was already among its
+highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did not break with the weight
+of his big body. He was up there among the last tossing leaves and the first
+twinkling stars of evening, still talking to himself cheerfully, reasoningly,
+half apologetically, in little gasps. He might well be out of breath, for his
+whole preposterous raid had gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once
+like a football, swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the tree like
+a rocket. The other three men seemed buried under incident piled on
+incident&mdash; a wild world where one thing began before another thing left
+off. All three had the first thought. The tree had been there for the five
+years they had known the boarding-house. Each one of them was active and
+strong. No one of them had even thought of climbing it. Beyond that, Inglewood
+felt first the mere fact of colour. The bright brisk leaves, the bleak blue
+sky, the wild green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally of something
+glowing in his infancy, something akin to a gaudy man on a golden tree; perhaps
+it was only a painted monkey on a stick. Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though
+more of a humourist, was touched on a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old,
+young theatricals with Rosamund, and was amused to find himself almost quoting
+Shakespeare&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;For valour. Is not love a Hercules,<br/>
+Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation that the
+Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward with rather rattling
+rapidity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next. The man in green,
+riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky broomstick, reached
+up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs. It had been broken
+across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage, a tangle of branches in
+torn and scored and scratched it in every direction, a clap of wind and foliage
+had flattened it like a concertina; nor can it be said that the obliging
+gentleman with the sharp nose showed any adequate tenderness for its structure
+when he finally unhooked it from its place. When he had found it, however, his
+proceedings were by some counted singular. He waved it with a loud whoop of
+triumph, and then immediately appeared to fall backwards off the tree, to
+which, however, he remained attached by his long strong legs, like a monkey
+swung by his tail. Hanging thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he
+gravely proceeded to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his brows.
+&ldquo;Every man a king,&rdquo; explained the inverted philosopher,
+&ldquo;every hat (consequently) a crown. But this is a crown out of
+heaven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved away with
+great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming, strangely enough, to
+wish for his former decoration in its present state.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wrong, wrong!&rdquo; cried the obliging person hilariously.
+&ldquo;Always wear uniform, even if it&rsquo;s shabby uniform! Ritualists may
+always be untidy. Go to a dance with soot on your shirt-front; but go with a
+shirt-front. Huntsman wears old coat, but old pink coat. Wear a topper, even if
+it&rsquo;s got no top. It&rsquo;s the symbol that counts, old cock. Take your
+hat, because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all off by the bark,
+dears, and its brim not the least bit curled; but for old sakes&rsquo; sake it
+is still, dears, the nobbiest tile in the world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed the shapeless
+silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician, and fell on his feet among
+the other men, still talking, beaming and breathless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t they make more games out of wind?&rdquo; he asked in
+some excitement. &ldquo;Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites?
+Why, I thought of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing that
+tree. Here&rsquo;s one of them: you take a lot of pepper&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness, &ldquo;that
+your games are already sufficiently interesting. Are you, may I ask, a
+professional acrobat on a tour, or a travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim? How
+and why do you display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing trees in
+our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it, appeared to grow
+confidential.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s a trick of my own,&rdquo; he confessed candidly.
+&ldquo;I do it by having two legs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of folly,
+started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes screwed up and
+his high colour slightly heightened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, I believe you&rsquo;re Smith,&rdquo; he cried with his fresh,
+almost boyish voice; and then after an instant&rsquo;s stare, &ldquo;and yet
+I&rsquo;m not sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have a card, I think,&rdquo; said the unknown, with baffling
+solemnity&mdash;&ldquo;a card with my real name, my titles, offices, and true
+purpose on this earth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet card-case, and as
+slowly produced a very large card. Even in the instant of its production, they
+fancied it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary gentlemen. But it
+was there only for an instant; for as it passed from his fingers to
+Arthur&rsquo;s, one or another slipped his hold. The strident, tearing gale in
+that garden carried away the stranger&rsquo;s card to join the wild waste paper
+of the universe; and that great western wind shook the whole house and passed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"></a>
+Chapter II<br/>
+The Luggage of an Optimist</h3>
+
+<p>
+We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played with
+the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion of small ones.
+If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could (I suppose) spring
+clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight trumpeting upon Primrose Hill.
+If a whale could leap from the sea like a trout, perhaps men might look up and
+see one soaring above Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa. Such natural
+energy, though sublime, might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this
+inconvenience attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green. He
+was too large for everything, because he was lively as well as large. By a
+fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures are also
+reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser parts of London are
+not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable as a kitten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house, he found him
+talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately) to the helpless Mrs. Duke.
+That fat, faint lady could only goggle up like a dying fish at the enormous new
+gentleman, who politely offered himself as a lodger, with vast gestures of the
+wide white hat in one hand, and the yellow Gladstone bag in the other.
+Fortunately, Mrs. Duke&rsquo;s more efficient niece and partner was there to
+complete the contract; for, indeed, all the people of the house had somehow
+collected in the room. This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode.
+The visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from the time he came
+into the house to the time he left it, he somehow got the company to gather and
+even follow (though in derision) as children gather and follow a Punch and
+Judy. An hour ago, and for four years previously, these people had avoided each
+other, even when they had really liked each other. They had slid in and out of
+dismal and deserted rooms in search of particular newspapers or private
+needlework. Even now they all came casually, as with varying interests; but
+they all came. There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow;
+there was the unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance. There was
+Michael Moon offering like a riddle the contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
+clothes and the sombre sagacity of his visage. He was now joined by his yet
+more comic crony, Moses Gould. Swaggering on short legs with a prosperous
+purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs; but like a dog also in
+this, that however he danced and wagged with delight, the two dark eyes on each
+side of his protuberant nose glistened gloomily like black buttons. There was
+Miss Rosamund Hunt, still with the fine white hat framing her square,
+good-looking face, and still with her native air of being dressed for some
+party that never came off. She also, like Mr. Moon, had a new companion, new so
+far as this narrative goes, but in reality an old friend and a protegee. This
+was a slight young woman in dark gray, and in no way notable but for a load of
+dull red hair, of which the shape somehow gave her pale face that triangular,
+almost peaked, appearance which was given by the lowering headdress and deep
+rich ruff of the Elizabethan beauties. Her surname seemed to be Gray, and Miss
+Hunt called her Mary, in that indescribable tone applied to a dependent who has
+practically become a friend. She wore a small silver cross on her very
+business-like gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who went to
+church. Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke, studying the
+newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening carefully to every idiotic word he
+said. As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but never dreamed of listening to
+him. She had never really listened to any one in her life; which, some said,
+was why she had survived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest&rsquo;s concentration of
+courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously to her any more than she
+listened seriously to any one. And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet
+wider and almost whirling gestures of explanation with his huge hat and bag,
+apologized for having entered by the wall instead of the front door. He was
+understood to put it down to an unfortunate family tradition of neatness and
+care of his clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,&rdquo; he said,
+lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke. &ldquo;She never liked me to lose my cap at
+school. And when a man&rsquo;s been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to
+him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good mother; but
+her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got a funny idea of neatness,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if
+it&rsquo;s jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees. A man
+can&rsquo;t very well climb a tree tidily.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He can clear a wall neatly,&rdquo; said Michael Moon; &ldquo;I saw him
+do it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment. &ldquo;My dear
+young lady,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I was tidying the tree. You don&rsquo;t want
+last year&rsquo;s hats there, do you, any more than last year&rsquo;s leaves?
+The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn&rsquo;t manage the hat; that wind,
+I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that tidiness is
+a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants. You
+can&rsquo;t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.
+Don&rsquo;t you know that? Haven&rsquo;t you ever had a spring cleaning?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes, sir,&rdquo; said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly. &ldquo;You will find
+everything of that sort quite nice.&rdquo; For the first time she had heard two
+words that she could understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm of
+calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said that he
+could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked: and the silent
+and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through these cross-purposes,
+eagerly offered to show him up to the room. Smith went up the stairs four at a
+time, and when he bumped his head against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had
+an odd sensation that the tall house was much shorter than it used to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend&mdash;or his new friend, for he did
+not very clearly know which he was. The face looked very like his old
+schoolfellow&rsquo;s at one second and very unlike at another. And when
+Inglewood broke through his native politeness so far as to say suddenly,
+&ldquo;Is your name Smith?&rdquo; he received only the unenlightening reply,
+&ldquo;Quite right; quite right. Very good. Excellent!&rdquo; Which appeared to
+Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe accepting a name
+than of a grown-up man admitting one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood watched the other
+unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all the impotent attitudes of the male
+friend. Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling accuracy with which
+he climbed a tree&mdash;throwing things out of his bag as if they were rubbish,
+yet managing to distribute quite a regular pattern all round him on the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner (he had
+come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style of speech
+was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still a string of more or
+less significant but often separate pictures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Like the day of judgement,&rdquo; he said, throwing a bottle so that it
+somehow settled, rocking on its right end. &ldquo;People say vast universe...
+infinity and astronomy; not sure... I think things are too close together...
+packed up; for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun&rsquo;s a
+star, too close to be seen properly; the earth&rsquo;s a star, too close to be
+seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach; ought all to be put in rings; too
+many blades of grass to study... feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait
+till the big bag is unpacked... may all be put in our right places then.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here he stopped, literally for breath&mdash;throwing a shirt to the other end
+of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly beyond it.
+Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with an
+increasing doubt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith&rsquo;s holiday luggage, the less one
+could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it was that almost everything
+seemed to be there for the wrong reason; what is secondary with every one else
+was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the
+unthinking assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even
+unnecessary, and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious. He
+produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained with plain and perplexing
+sincerity that he was no smoker, but that cigar-box wood was by far the best
+for fretwork. He also exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
+and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent,
+supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages. He was
+therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham claret from
+the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice) do not drink. It was
+only then that he observed that all six bottles had those bright metallic seals
+of various tints, and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the
+three primary and three secondary colours: red, blue, and yellow; green, violet
+and orange. There grew upon Inglewood an almost creepy sense of the real
+childishness of this creature. For Smith was really, so far as human psychology
+can be, innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he loved the stickiness
+of gum, and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake. To this
+man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it was a
+quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window. He talked
+dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not asserting himself,
+like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself, like a
+little boy at a party. He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to
+manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials I. S. printed on one
+side of it, and remembered that Smith had been called Innocent Smith at school,
+though whether as a formal Christian name or a moral description he could not
+remember. He was just about to venture another question, when there was a knock
+at the door, and the short figure of Mr. Gould offered itself, with the
+melancholy Moon, standing like his tall crooked shadow, behind him. They had
+drifted up the stairs after the other two men with the wandering gregariousness
+of the male.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hope there&rsquo;s no intrusion,&rdquo; said the beaming Moses with a
+glow of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The truth is,&rdquo; said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy,
+&ldquo;we thought we might see if they had made you comfortable. Miss Duke is
+rather&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag;
+&ldquo;magnificent, isn&rsquo;t she? Go close to her&mdash;hear military music
+going by, like Joan of Arc.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has just heard a wild
+fairy tale, which nevertheless contains one small and forgotten fact. For he
+remembered how he had himself thought of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc years ago, when,
+hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the boarding-house. Long
+since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr. Warner had crushed such
+youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism
+and science of hopeless human types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself
+as a timid, insufficient, and &ldquo;weak&rdquo; type, who would never marry;
+to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first
+fancy for her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his
+landlady&rsquo;s daughter. And yet the phrase about military music moved him
+queerly, as if he had heard those distant drums.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural,&rdquo; said
+Moon, glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted
+ceiling, like the conical hood of a dwarf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rather a small box for you, sir,&rdquo; said the waggish Mr. Gould.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Splendid room, though,&rdquo; answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with
+his head inside his Gladstone bag. &ldquo;I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
+like Gothic. By the way,&rdquo; he cried out, pointing in quite a startling
+way, &ldquo;where does that door lead to?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To certain death, I should say,&rdquo; answered Michael Moon, staring up
+at a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think there&rsquo;s a loft there; and I don&rsquo;t know
+what else it could lead to.&rdquo; Long before he had finished his sentence the
+man with the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling, swung
+himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after a struggle,
+and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two symbolic legs standing
+like a truncated statue; then they vanished. Through the hole thus burst in the
+roof appeared the empty and lucid sky of evening, with one great many-coloured
+cloud sailing across it like a whole county upside down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hullo, you fellows!&rdquo; came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
+apparently from some remote pinnacle. &ldquo;Come up here; and bring some of my
+things to eat and drink. It&rsquo;s just the spot for a picnic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small bottles of wine, one in
+each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood, as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit
+tin and a big jar of ginger. The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing
+through the aperture, like a giant&rsquo;s in a fairy tale, received these
+tributes and bore them off to the eyrie; then they both hoisted themselves out
+of the window. They were both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through
+his concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was not
+quite so idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman. Also they both had
+a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when the door was burst in the
+roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky, and they could climb out on to
+the very roof of the universe. They were both men who had long been
+unconsciously imprisoned in the commonplace, though one took it comically, and
+the other seriously. They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had
+never died. But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal
+athletics and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed at
+the thing with the shameless rationality of another race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould was not
+following, his infantile officiousness and good nature forced him to dive back
+into the attic to comfort or persuade; and Inglewood and Moon were left alone
+on the long gray-green ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters
+and their backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other. Their
+first feeling was that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was
+very like topsy-turvydom. One definition occurred to both of them&mdash;that he
+had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all
+beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep
+enough to hold all the gods. The round of the ether turned from green to yellow
+gradually like a great unripe fruit. All around the sunken sun it was like a
+lemon; round all the east it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a
+greengage; but the whole had still the emptiness of daylight and none of the
+secrecy of dusk. Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were
+shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling towards
+the earth in every kind of colossal perspective. One of them really had the
+character of some many-mitred, many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian image, huge
+head downwards, hurled out of heaven&mdash;a sort of false Jehovah, who was
+perhaps Satan. All the other clouds had preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if
+the god&rsquo;s palaces had been flung after him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the height of
+human buildings above which they sat held here and there a tiny trivial noise
+that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below a newsboy
+calling, and a bell bidding to chapel. They could also hear talk out of the
+garden below; and realized that the irrepressible Smith must have followed
+Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents could be heard, followed
+by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke and the full and very youthful
+laughter of Rosamund Hunt. The air had that cold kindness that comes after a
+storm. Michael Moon drank it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the
+little bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost at a draught.
+Inglewood went on eating ginger very slowly and with a solemnity unfathomable
+as the sky above him. There was still enough stir in the freshness of the
+atmosphere to make them almost fancy they could smell the garden soil and the
+last roses of autumn. Suddenly there came from the darkening room a silvery
+ping and pong which told them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected
+mandoline. After the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like
+laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Inglewood,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, &ldquo;have you ever heard that I
+am a blackguard?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t heard it, and I don&rsquo;t believe it,&rdquo; answered
+Inglewood, after an odd pause. &ldquo;But I have heard you were&mdash;what they
+call rather wild.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,&rdquo;
+said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; &ldquo;I am tame. I am quite tame; I am
+about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky
+at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount too much. I go
+to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve
+faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories&mdash; generally the same dirty
+stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person
+whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly fall off the
+roof, for indeed the Irishman&rsquo;s face, always sinister, was now almost
+demoniacal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Christ confound it!&rdquo; cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the empty
+claret bottle, &ldquo;this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine I ever
+uncorked, and it&rsquo;s the only drink I have really enjoyed for nine years. I
+was never wild until just ten minutes ago.&rdquo; And he sent the bottle
+whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond the garden into the road, where, in
+the profound evening silence, they could even hear it break and part upon the
+stones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Moon,&rdquo; said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, &ldquo;you
+mustn&rsquo;t be so bitter about it. Everyone has to take the world as he finds
+it; of course one often finds it a bit dull&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That fellow doesn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Michael decisively; &ldquo;I mean
+that fellow Smith. I have a fancy there&rsquo;s some method in his madness. It
+looks as if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute by taking one
+step out of the plain road. Who would have thought of that trapdoor? Who would
+have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste quite nice among the
+chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of fairyland. Perhaps Nosey
+Gould&rsquo;s beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought only to be smoked on
+stilts, or something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs. Duke&rsquo;s cold leg of mutton
+would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree. Perhaps even my damned,
+dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill Whisky&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be so rough on yourself,&rdquo; said Inglewood, in serious
+distress. &ldquo;The dullness isn&rsquo;t your fault or the whisky&rsquo;s.
+Fellows who don&rsquo;t&mdash; fellows like me I mean&mdash;have just the same
+feeling that it&rsquo;s all rather flat and a failure. But the world&rsquo;s
+made like that; it&rsquo;s all survival. Some people are made to get on, like
+Warner; and some people are made to stick quiet, like me. You can&rsquo;t help
+your temperament. I know you&rsquo;re much cleverer than I am; but you
+can&rsquo;t help having all the loose ways of a poor literary chap, and I
+can&rsquo;t help having all the doubts and helplessness of a small scientific
+chap, any more than a fish can help floating or a fern can help curling up.
+Humanity, as Warner said so well in that lecture, really consists of quite
+different tribes of animals all disguised as men.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken by Miss
+Hunt&rsquo;s musical instrument banging with the abruptness of artillery into a
+vulgar but spirited tune.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rosamund&rsquo;s voice came up rich and strong in the words of some fatuous,
+fashionable coon song:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,<br/>
+Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood&rsquo;s brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he continued
+his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic tune. But the
+blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a light that Inglewood
+did not understand. Many centuries, and many villages and valleys, would have
+been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood&rsquo;s countrymen had ever understood
+that light, or guessed at the first blink that it was the battle star of
+Ireland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing can ever alter it; it&rsquo;s in the wheels of the
+universe,&rdquo; went on Inglewood, in a low voice: &ldquo;some men are weak
+and some strong, and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak. I
+have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything, for I remembered
+my own fickleness. I have formed opinions, but I haven&rsquo;t the cheek to
+push them, because I&rsquo;ve so often changed them. That&rsquo;s the upshot,
+old fellow. We can&rsquo;t trust ourselves&mdash; and we can&rsquo;t help
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position at the
+end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable. Behind him, huge
+clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly topsy-turvy in the silent
+anarchy of heaven. Their gyration made the dark figure seem yet dizzier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let us...&rdquo; he said, and was suddenly silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let us what?&rdquo; asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though
+somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in
+speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let us go and do some of these things we can&rsquo;t do,&rdquo; said
+Michael.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them the cockatoo hair
+and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to them that they must come down as
+the &ldquo;concert&rdquo; was in full swing, and Mr. Moses Gould was about to
+recite &ldquo;Young Lochinvar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they dropped into Innocent&rsquo;s attic they nearly tumbled over its
+entertaining impedimenta again. Inglewood, staring at the littered floor,
+thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery. He was therefore the
+more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell on a large well-polished
+American revolver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hullo!&rdquo; he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men
+step back from a serpent; &ldquo;are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do
+you deal death out of that machine gun?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, that!&rdquo; said Smith, throwing it a single glance; &ldquo;I deal
+life out of that,&rdquo; and he went bounding down the stairs.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"></a>
+Chapter III<br/>
+The Banner of Beacon</h3>
+
+<p>
+All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
+everybody&rsquo;s birthday. It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold
+and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high
+spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they
+always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but
+while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true
+of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial
+parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until
+some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by
+authority. Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority,
+because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He
+filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in
+destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction. Each person with
+a hobby found it turning into an institution. Rosamund&rsquo;s songs seemed to
+coalesce into a kind of opera; Michael&rsquo;s jests and paragraphs into a
+magazine. His pipe and her mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of
+smoking concert. The bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled
+against his own growing importance. He felt as if, in spite of him, his
+photographs were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a
+gymkhana. But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and
+offices, for they followed each other in wild succession like the topics of a
+rambling talker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of pleasant obstacles.
+Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag reels of exaggeration, like
+a conjurer. Nothing could be more shy and impersonal than poor Arthur&rsquo;s
+photography. Yet the preposterous Smith was seen assisting him eagerly through
+sunny morning hours, and an indefensible sequence described as &ldquo;Moral
+Photography&rdquo; began to unroll about the boarding-house. It was only a
+version of the old photographer&rsquo;s joke which produces the same figure
+twice on one plate, making a man play chess with himself, dine with himself,
+and so on. But these plates were more hysterical and ambitious&mdash;as,
+&ldquo;Miss Hunt forgets Herself,&rdquo; showing that lady answering her own
+too rapturous recognition with a most appalling stare of ignorance; or
+&ldquo;Mr. Moon questions Himself,&rdquo; in which Mr. Moon appeared as one
+driven to madness under his own legal cross-examination, which was conducted
+with a long forefinger and an air of ferocious waggery. One highly successful
+trilogy&mdash;representing Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood
+prostrating himself before Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood
+with an umbrella&mdash; Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in
+the hall, like a sort of fresco, with the inscription,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control&mdash;<br/>
+These three alone will make a man a prig.&rdquo;<br/>
+                    T<small>ENNYSON</small>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic
+energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the
+discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care
+for dress&mdash;the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary
+self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a theory (which he really
+seemed to take seriously) that ladies might combine economy with magnificence
+if they would draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off
+again. He set up &ldquo;Smith&rsquo;s Lightning Dressmaking Company,&rdquo;
+with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss
+Diana actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on which
+to exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment
+aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her
+shoulders, and looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours
+afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being inextricably
+hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood
+laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the
+green and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in the
+&ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo; A pang too swift to be named pain or pleasure
+went through his heart like an old-world rapier. He remembered how pretty he
+thought her years ago, when he was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it
+was like remembering a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous
+existence. At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it) the
+purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working
+clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as actively
+resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down. But among the
+most exact observers it was seriously believed that she liked it. For she was
+one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of
+some utterly separate species. And it is doubtful if she really saw anything
+more eccentric or inexplicable in Smith&rsquo;s chimney-pot picnics or crimson
+sunflowers than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches
+of Moon. Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody can understand,
+and Smith&rsquo;s manners were as courteous as they were unconventional. She
+said he was &ldquo;a real gentleman,&rdquo; by which she simply meant a
+kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing. She would sit at the head of
+the table with fat, folded hands and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours,
+while every one else was talking at once. At least, the only other exception
+was Rosamund&rsquo;s companion, Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more
+eager sort. Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any
+minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion. Innocent Smith
+seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure of making
+her talk. He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed; if he achieved
+anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure, and to turn her,
+by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery. But if she was a riddle, every
+one recognized that she was a fresh and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the
+sky and the woods in spring. Indeed, though she was rather older than the other
+two girls, she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth, which
+Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money, and Diana in the
+mere guarding of it. Smith looked at her again and again. Her eyes and mouth
+were set in her face the wrong way&mdash;which was really the right way. She
+had the knack of saying everything with her face: her silence was a sort of
+steady applause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday (which seemed more like a
+week&rsquo;s holiday than a day&rsquo;s) one experiment towers supreme, not
+because it was any sillier or more successful than the others, but because out
+of this particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to follow. All
+the other practical jokes exploded of themselves, and left vacancy; all the
+other fictions returned upon themselves, and were finished like a song. But the
+string of solid and startling events&mdash; which were to include a hansom cab,
+a detective, a pistol, and a marriage licence&mdash;were all made primarily
+possible by the joke about the High Court of Beacon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon. He was in a
+strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly; yet he had never
+been more sarcastic, and even inhuman. He used his old useless knowledge as a
+barrister to talk entertainingly of a tribunal that was a parody on the pompous
+anomalies of English law. The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a splendid
+example of our free and sensible constitution. It had been founded by King John
+in defiance of the Magna Carta, and now held absolute power over windmills,
+wine and spirit licences, ladies traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for
+dog-stealing and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened in the
+town of Market Bosworth. The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High
+Court of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in the intervals (as Mr.
+Moon explained) the whole powers of the institution were vested in Mrs. Duke.
+Tossed about among the rest of the company, however, the High Court did not
+retain its historical and legal seriousness, but was used somewhat
+unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail. If somebody spilt the Worcester
+Sauce on the tablecloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which the
+sittings and findings of the Court would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a
+window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember that none but the third son
+of the lord of the manor of Penge had the right to open it. They even went to
+the length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries. The proposed
+trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather above the heads of the company,
+especially of the criminal; but the trial of Inglewood on a charge of
+photographic libel, and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity, were
+admitted to be in the best tradition of the Court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not more and
+more flippant like Michael Moon. This proposal of a private court of justice,
+which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a political humourist, Smith
+really caught hold of with the eagerness of an abstract philosopher. It was by
+far the best thing they could do, he declared, to claim sovereign powers even
+for the individual household.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule for
+homes,&rdquo; he cried eagerly to Michael. &ldquo;It would be better if every
+father COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans; it would be better, because
+nobody would be killed. Let&rsquo;s issue a Declaration of Independence from
+Beacon House. We could grow enough greens in that garden to support us, and
+when the tax-collector comes let&rsquo;s tell him we&rsquo;re self-supporting,
+and play on him with the hose.... Well, perhaps, as you say, we couldn&rsquo;t
+very well have a hose, as that comes from the main; but we could sink a well in
+this chalk, and a lot could be done with water-jugs.... Let this really be
+Beacon House. Let&rsquo;s light a bonfire of independence on the roof, and see
+house after house answering it across the valley of the Thames! Let us begin
+the League of the Free Families! Away with Local Government! A fig for Local
+Patriotism! Let every house be a sovereign state as this is, and judge its own
+children by its own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon. Let us cut the
+painter, and begin to be happy together, as if we were on a desert
+island.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know that desert island,&rdquo; said Michael Moon; &ldquo;it only
+exists in the &lsquo;Swiss Family Robinson.&rsquo; A man feels a strange desire
+for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash comes down some unexpected cocoa-nut
+from some undiscovered monkey. A literary man feels inclined to pen a sonnet,
+and at once an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and shoots out one
+of his quills.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you say a word against the &lsquo;Swiss Family
+Robinson,&rsquo;&rdquo; cried Innocent with great warmth. &ldquo;It
+mayn&rsquo;t be exact science, but it&rsquo;s dead accurate philosophy. When
+you&rsquo;re really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want. When
+you&rsquo;re really on a desert island, you never find it a desert. If we were
+really besieged in this garden, we&rsquo;d find a hundred English birds and
+English berries that we never knew were here. If we were snowed up in this
+room, we&rsquo;d be the better for reading scores of books in that bookcase
+that we don&rsquo;t even know are there; we&rsquo;d have talks with each other,
+good, terrible talks, that we shall go to the grave without guessing;
+we&rsquo;d find materials for everything&mdash; christening, marriage, or
+funeral; yes, even for a coronation&mdash; if we didn&rsquo;t decide to be a
+republic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A coronation on &lsquo;Swiss Family&rsquo; lines, I suppose,&rdquo; said
+Michael, laughing. &ldquo;Oh, I know you would find everything in that
+atmosphere. If we wanted such a simple thing, for instance, as a Coronation
+Canopy, we should walk down beyond the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in
+full bloom. If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
+digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under the lawn. And when
+we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a great storm would wash
+everything on shore, and we should find there was a Whale on the
+premises.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,&rdquo;
+asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion. &ldquo;I bet you&rsquo;ve
+never examined the premises! I bet you&rsquo;ve never been round at the back as
+I was this morning&mdash; for I found the very thing you say could only grow on
+a tree. There&rsquo;s an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin;
+it&rsquo;s got three holes in the canvas, and a pole&rsquo;s broken, so
+it&rsquo;s not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy&mdash;&rdquo; And his voice
+quite failed him to express its shining adequacy; then he went on with
+controversial eagerness: &ldquo;You see I take every challenge as you make it.
+I believe every blessed thing you say couldn&rsquo;t be here has been here all
+the time. You say you want a whale washed up for oil. Why, there&rsquo;s oil in
+that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don&rsquo;t believe anybody has touched
+it or thought of it for years. And as for your gold crown, we&rsquo;re none of
+us wealthy here, but we could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own
+pockets to string round a man&rsquo;s head for half an hour; or one of Miss
+Hunt&rsquo;s gold bangles is nearly big enough to&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter. &ldquo;All is not
+gold that glitters,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and besides&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a mistake that is!&rdquo; cried Innocent Smith, leaping up in great
+excitement. &ldquo;All is gold that glitters&mdash; especially now we are a
+Sovereign State. What&rsquo;s the good of a Sovereign State if you can&rsquo;t
+define a sovereign? We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the
+morning of the world. They didn&rsquo;t choose gold because it was rare; your
+scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer. They chose gold
+because it was bright&mdash;because it was a hard thing to find, but pretty
+when you&rsquo;ve found it. You can&rsquo;t fight with golden swords or eat
+golden biscuits; you can only look at it&mdash;and you can look at it out
+here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open the doors
+into the garden. At the same time also, with one of his gestures that never
+seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were, he stretched out his hand
+to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn as if for a dance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier than that
+of the day before. The west was swimming with sanguine colours, and a sort of
+sleepy flame lay along the lawn. The twisted shadows of the one or two garden
+trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as in common daylight, but
+like arabesques written in vivid violet ink on some page of Eastern gold. The
+sunset was one of those festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in which
+common things by their colours remind us of costly or curious things. The
+slates upon the sloping roof burned like the plumes of a vast peacock, in every
+mysterious blend of blue and green. The red-brown bricks of the wall glowed
+with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines. The sun seemed to
+set each object alight with a different coloured flame, like a man lighting
+fireworks; and even Innocent&rsquo;s hair, which was of a rather colourless
+fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode across the
+lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What would be the good of gold,&rdquo; he was saying, &ldquo;if it did
+not glitter? Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a black
+sun at noon? A black button would do just as well. Don&rsquo;t you see that
+everything in this garden looks like a jewel? And will you kindly tell me what
+the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like a jewel? Leave off
+buying and selling, and start looking! Open your eyes, and you&rsquo;ll wake up
+in the New Jerusalem.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;All is gold that glitters&mdash;<br/>
+    Tree and tower of brass;<br/>
+Rolls the golden evening air<br/>
+    Down the golden grass.<br/>
+Kick the cry to Jericho,<br/>
+    How yellow mud is sold;<br/>
+All is gold that glitters,<br/>
+    For the glitter is the gold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And who wrote that?&rdquo; asked Rosamund, amused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No one will ever write it,&rdquo; answered Smith, and cleared the
+rockery with a flying leap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really,&rdquo; said Rosamund to Michael Moon, &ldquo;he ought to be sent
+to an asylum. Don&rsquo;t you think so?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long,
+swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or mood, he
+had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the social
+extravagance of the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum,&rdquo; repeated the
+lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was unmistakably
+sneering. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s at
+all necessary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; asked Rosamund quickly. &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because he is in one now,&rdquo; answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but
+ugly voice. &ldquo;Why, didn&rsquo;t you know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo; cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice; for the
+Irishman&rsquo;s face and voice were really almost creepy. With his dark figure
+and dark sayings in all that sunshine he looked like the devil in paradise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry,&rdquo; he continued, with a sort of harsh humility.
+&ldquo;Of course we don&rsquo;t talk about it much... but I thought we all
+really knew.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Knew what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; answered Moon, &ldquo;that Beacon House is a certain rather
+singular sort of house&mdash;a house with the tiles loose, shall we say?
+Innocent Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn&rsquo;t you come when he
+called before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be
+extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us.
+Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree&mdash;that&rsquo;s his bedside
+manner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You daren&rsquo;t say such a thing!&rdquo; cried Rosamund in a rage.
+&ldquo;You daren&rsquo;t suggest that I&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not more than I am,&rdquo; said Michael soothingly; &ldquo;not more than
+the rest of us. Haven&rsquo;t you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits
+still&mdash;a notorious sign? Haven&rsquo;t you ever observed that Inglewood is
+always washing his hands&mdash; a known mark of mental disease? I, of course,
+am a dipsomaniac.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you,&rdquo; broke out his companion, not without
+agitation. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve heard you had some bad habits&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All habits are bad habits,&rdquo; said Michael, with deadly calm.
+&ldquo;Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling
+down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed. YOU
+went mad about money, because you&rsquo;re an heiress.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lie,&rdquo; cried Rosamund furiously. &ldquo;I never was
+mean about money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were worse,&rdquo; said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently.
+&ldquo;You thought that other people were. You thought every man who came near
+you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane; and
+now you&rsquo;re mad and I&rsquo;m mad, and serve us right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You brute!&rdquo; said Rosamund, quite white. &ldquo;And is this
+true?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his abysses are
+in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then stepped back with an
+ironical bow. &ldquo;Not literally true, of course,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;only
+really true. An allegory, shall we say? a social satire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I hate and despise your satires,&rdquo; cried Rosamund Hunt, letting
+loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone, and speaking every
+word to wound. &ldquo;I despise it as I despise your rank tobacco, and your
+nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling, and your Radicalism, and your old
+clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and your rotten failure at
+everything. I don&rsquo;t care whether you call it snobbishness or not, I like
+life and success, and jolly things to look at, and action. You won&rsquo;t
+frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Victrix causa deæ&mdash;&rdquo; said Michael gloomily; and this angered
+her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it to be witty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I dare say you know Greek,&rdquo; she said, with cheerful
+inaccuracy; &ldquo;you haven&rsquo;t done much with that either.&rdquo; And she
+crossed the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house slowly, and
+with a thought-clouded brow. He was one of those men who are quite clever, but
+quite the reverse of quick. As he came back out of the sunset garden into the
+twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped swiftly to her feet and began putting away
+the tea things. But it was not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous
+picture so unique that he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting
+camera. For Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her
+chin on her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless
+thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are busy,&rdquo; said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had
+seen, and wishing to ignore it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no time for dreaming in this world,&rdquo; answered the
+young lady with her back to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have been thinking lately,&rdquo; said Inglewood in a low voice,
+&ldquo;that there&rsquo;s no time for waking up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t smoke or drink, you know,&rdquo; he said irrelevantly,
+&ldquo;because I think they&rsquo;re drugs. And yet I fancy all hobbies, like
+my camera and bicycle, are drugs too. Getting under a black hood, getting into
+a dark room&mdash;getting into a hole anyhow. Drugging myself with speed, and
+sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn
+into a machine myself. That&rsquo;s the matter with all of us. We&rsquo;re too
+busy to wake up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the girl solidly, &ldquo;what is there to wake up
+to?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There must be!&rdquo; cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
+excitement&mdash;&ldquo;there must be something to wake up to! All we do is
+preparations&mdash;your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner&rsquo;s
+scientific appliances. We&rsquo;re always preparing for
+something&mdash;something that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you
+sweep the house; but what is going to HAPPEN in the house?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes, and seemed to be
+searching for some form of words which she could not find.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt,
+in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the doorway. She
+was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of the most
+infantile astonishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, here&rsquo;s a fine game!&rdquo; she said, panting. &ldquo;What am
+I to do now, I wonder? I&rsquo;ve wired for Dr. Warner; that&rsquo;s all I can
+think of doing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving
+forward like one used to be called upon for assistance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s Mary,&rdquo; said the heiress, &ldquo;my companion Mary Gray:
+that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her in the garden,
+after ten hours&rsquo; acquaintance, and he wants to go off with her now for a
+special licence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked out on the
+garden, still golden with evening light. Nothing moved there but a bird or two
+hopping and twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road outside
+the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow Gladstone bag on top
+of it.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"></a>
+Chapter IV<br/>
+The Garden of the God</h3>
+
+<p>
+Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance and utterance
+of the other girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said shortly, &ldquo;I suppose Miss Gray can decline
+him if she doesn&rsquo;t want to marry him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But she DOES want to marry him!&rdquo; cried Rosamund in exasperation.
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a wild, wicked fool, and I won&rsquo;t be parted from
+her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; said Diana icily, &ldquo;but I really don&rsquo;t see
+what we can do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the man&rsquo;s balmy, Diana,&rdquo; reasoned her friend angrily.
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t let my nice governess marry a man that&rsquo;s balmy! You
+or somebody MUST stop it!&mdash;Mr. Inglewood, you&rsquo;re a man; go and tell
+them they simply can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can,&rdquo; said Inglewood,
+with a depressed air. &ldquo;I have far less right of intervention than Miss
+Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral force than she.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t either of you got much,&rdquo; cried Rosamund, the
+last stays of her formidable temper giving way; &ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll go
+somewhere else for a little sense and pluck. I think I know some one who will
+help me more than you do, at any rate... he&rsquo;s a cantankerous beast, but
+he&rsquo;s a man, and has a mind, and knows it...&rdquo; And she flung out into
+the garden, with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine
+wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over the hedge;
+hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down his long blue
+chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her, after the nonsense of
+the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of her other friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon,&rdquo; she said frankly. &ldquo;I
+hated you for being a cynic; but I&rsquo;ve been well punished, for I want a
+cynic just now. I&rsquo;ve had my fill of sentiment&mdash;I&rsquo;m fed up with
+it. The world&rsquo;s gone mad, Mr. Moon&mdash;all except the cynics, I think.
+That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she&mdash; and
+she&mdash;doesn&rsquo;t seem to mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not joking; that&rsquo;s Mr. Smith&rsquo;s cab outside. He
+swears he&rsquo;ll take her off now to his aunt&rsquo;s, and go for a special
+licence. Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand for an instant
+reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side of the garden. &ldquo;My
+practical advice to you is this,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;Let him go for his
+special licence, and ask him to get another one for you and me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that one of your jokes?&rdquo; asked the young lady. &ldquo;Do say
+what you really mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,&rdquo; said Moon with
+ponderous precision&mdash;&ldquo;a plain, practical man: a man of affairs; a
+man of facts and the daylight. He has let down twenty ton of good building
+bricks suddenly on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up. We went
+to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very sunlight. We have
+had a little nap for five years or so, but now we&rsquo;re going to be married,
+Rosamund, and I can&rsquo;t see why that cab...&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really,&rdquo; said Rosamund stoutly, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you
+mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a lie!&rdquo; cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening
+eyes. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m all for lies in an ordinary way; but don&rsquo;t you see
+that to-night they won&rsquo;t do? We&rsquo;ve wandered into a world of facts,
+old girl. That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the
+door, are facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was after
+your money, and didn&rsquo;t really love you. But if I stood here now and told
+you I didn&rsquo;t love you&mdash;you wouldn&rsquo;t believe me: for truth is
+in this garden to-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really, Mr. Moon...&rdquo; said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face. &ldquo;Is my name
+Moon?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Is your name Hunt? On my honour, they sound to me
+as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names. It&rsquo;s as if your name was
+&lsquo;Swim&rsquo; and my name was &lsquo;Sunrise.&rsquo; But our real names
+are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is no good,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes;
+&ldquo;one can never go back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can go where I damn please,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;and I can
+carry you on my shoulder.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!&rdquo; cried the
+girl earnestly. &ldquo;You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and
+body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that
+romantic rush, like Mr. Smith&rsquo;s, they&mdash; they do attract women, I
+don&rsquo;t deny it. As you say, we&rsquo;re all telling the truth to-night.
+They&rsquo;ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the
+cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and
+disappointment&mdash; you&rsquo;ve got used to your drinks and things&mdash;I
+shan&rsquo;t be pretty much longer&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Imprudent marriages!&rdquo; roared Michael. &ldquo;And pray where in
+earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about
+prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are
+we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a
+husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you&rsquo;ll be unhappy. Who the
+devil are you that you shouldn&rsquo;t be unhappy, like the mother that bore
+you? Disappointed! of course we&rsquo;ll be disappointed. I, for one,
+don&rsquo;t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute&mdash;
+a tower with all the trumpets shouting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see all this,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her
+solid face, &ldquo;and do you really want to marry me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My darling, what else is there to do?&rdquo; reasoned the Irishman.
+&ldquo;What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except
+to marry you? What&rsquo;s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep?
+It&rsquo;s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in
+Ireland, you must marry Man&mdash;that is Me. The only third thing is to marry
+yourself&mdash; yourself, yourself, yourself&mdash;the only companion that is
+never satisfied&mdash; and never satisfactory.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Michael,&rdquo; said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, &ldquo;if you
+won&rsquo;t talk so much, I&rsquo;ll marry you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s no time for talking,&rdquo; cried Michael Moon;
+&ldquo;singing is the only thing. Can&rsquo;t you find that mandoline of yours,
+Rosamund?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go and fetch it for me,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp
+authority.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished; then he shot away
+across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered shoes out of the Greek fairy
+tale. He cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily
+levity; but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows, his
+flying feet fell in their old manner like lead; he twisted round and came back
+slowly, whistling. The events of that enchanted evening were not at an end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious thing
+had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit of Rosamund. It was
+something which, occurring in that obscure parlour, seemed to Arthur Inglewood
+like heaven and earth turning head over heels, the sea being the ceiling and
+the stars the floor. No words can express how it astonished him, as it
+astonishes all simple men when it happens. Yet the stiffest female stoicism
+seems separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel. It
+indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy. The most rigid and ruthless
+woman can begin to cry, just as the most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is
+a separate sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about force of
+character. But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see
+Diana Duke crying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it)
+any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent. He acted as men do
+when a theatre catches fire&mdash;very differently from how they would have
+conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse. He had a faint
+memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress was the one
+really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence) would
+come; but after that he knew nothing of his own conduct except by the protests
+it evoked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood&mdash;leave me alone; that&rsquo;s not the
+way to help.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I can help you,&rdquo; said Arthur, with grinding certainty;
+&ldquo;I can, I can, I can...&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, you said,&rdquo; cried the girl, &ldquo;that you were much weaker
+than me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So I am weaker than you,&rdquo; said Arthur, in a voice that went
+vibrating through everything, &ldquo;but not just now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let go my hands!&rdquo; cried Diana. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t be
+bullied.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In one element he was much stronger than she&mdash;the matter of humour. This
+leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying: &ldquo;Well, you are mean.
+You know quite well you&rsquo;ll bully me all the rest of my life. You might
+allow a man the one minute of his life when he&rsquo;s allowed to bully.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry, and for the first
+time since her childhood Diana was entirely off her guard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean you want to marry me?&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, there&rsquo;s a cab at the door!&rdquo; cried Inglewood, springing
+up with an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors that led into
+the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time that the
+house and garden were on a steep height over London. And yet, though they felt
+the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret: it was like some
+round walled garden on the top of one of the turrets of heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring all sorts of details
+with a senseless delight. He noticed for the first time that the railings of
+the gate beyond the garden bushes were moulded like little spearheads and
+painted blue. He noticed that one of the blue spears was loosened in its place,
+and hung sideways; and this almost made him laugh. He thought it somehow
+exquisitely harmless and funny that the railing should be crooked; he thought
+he should like to know how it happened, who did it, and how the man was getting
+on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realized that they
+were not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon, both of whom they had
+last seen in the blackest temper of detachment, were standing together on the
+lawn. They were standing in quite an ordinary manner, and yet they looked
+somehow like people in a book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said Diana, &ldquo;what lovely air!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive that it
+rang out like a complaint. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just like that horrid, beastly
+fizzy stuff they gave me that made me feel happy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, it isn&rsquo;t like anything but itself!&rdquo; answered Diana,
+breathing deeply. &ldquo;Why, it&rsquo;s all cold, and yet it feels like
+fire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,&rdquo; said Mr. Moon.
+&ldquo;Balmy&mdash;especially on the crumpet.&rdquo; And he fanned himself
+quite unnecessarily with his straw hat. They were all full of little leaps and
+pulsations of objectless and airy energy. Diana stirred and stretched her long
+arms rigidly, as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating restfulness; Michael
+stood still for long intervals, with gathered muscles, then spun round like a
+teetotum, and stood still again; Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip,
+except when they fall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her foot
+as she moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood, leaning quite
+quietly against a tree, had unconsciously clutched a branch and shaken it with
+a creative violence. Those giant gestures of Man, that made the high statues
+and the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their limbs. Silently as they
+strolled and stood they were bursting like batteries with an animal magnetism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now,&rdquo; cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each
+side, &ldquo;let&rsquo;s dance round that bush!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, what bush do you mean?&rdquo; asked Rosamund, looking round with a
+sort of radiant rudeness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The bush that isn&rsquo;t there,&rdquo; said Michael&mdash;&ldquo;the
+Mulberry Bush.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had taken each other&rsquo;s hands, half laughing and quite ritually; and
+before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round, like a demon
+spinning the world for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of the horizon flew
+instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring of heights beyond
+London and corners where she had climbed as a child; she seemed almost to hear
+the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate, or to see the glowworms
+gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The circle broke&mdash;as all such perfect circles of levity must break&mdash;
+and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away against
+the blue rails of the gate. When reeling there he suddenly raised shout after
+shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, it&rsquo;s Warner!&rdquo; he shouted, waving his arms.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s jolly old Warner&mdash; with a new silk hat and the old silk
+moustache!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that Dr. Warner?&rdquo; cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a burst
+of memory, amusement, and distress. &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m so sorry! Oh, do tell
+him it&rsquo;s all right!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s take hands and tell him,&rdquo; said Michael Moon. For
+indeed, while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind the
+one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion in the cab,
+had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by an heiress to come
+to a case of dangerous mania, and when, as you come in through the garden to
+the house, the heiress and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders join
+hands and dance round you in a ring, calling out, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right!
+it&rsquo;s all right!&rdquo; you are apt to be flustered and even displeased.
+Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person. The two things are by no
+means the same; and even when Moon explained to him that he, Warner, with his
+high hat and tall, solid figure, was just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be
+danced round by a ring of laughing maidens on some old golden Greek
+seashore&mdash; even then he seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Inglewood!&rdquo; cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a
+stare, &ldquo;are you mad?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered, easily and
+quietly enough, &ldquo;Not now. The truth is, Warner, I&rsquo;ve just made a
+rather important medical discovery&mdash;quite in your line.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; asked the great doctor
+stiffly&mdash;&ldquo;what discovery?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve discovered that health really is catching, like
+disease,&rdquo; answered Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading,&rdquo; said Michael,
+performing a <i>pas seul</i> with a thoughtful expression. &ldquo;Twenty
+thousand more cases taken to the hospitals; nurses employed night and
+day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Warner studied Michael&rsquo;s grave face and lightly moving legs with an
+unfathomed wonder. &ldquo;And is THIS, may I ask,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the
+sanity that is spreading?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must forgive me, Dr. Warner,&rdquo; cried Rosamund Hunt heartily.
+&ldquo;I know I&rsquo;ve treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake. I
+was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now it all seems like
+a dream&mdash;and&mdash;and Mr. Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most
+delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may marry any one he
+likes&mdash;except me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should suggest Mrs. Duke,&rdquo; said Michael.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gravity of Dr. Warner&rsquo;s face increased. He took a slip of pink paper
+from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale blue eyes quietly fixed on
+Rosamund&rsquo;s face all the time. He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really, Miss Hunt,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are not yet very
+reassuring. You sent me this wire only half an hour ago: &lsquo;Come at once,
+if possible, with another doctor. Man&mdash;Innocent Smith&mdash;gone mad on
+premises, and doing dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?&rsquo; I went
+round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a
+private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he has come round with
+me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmly tell me that this criminal madman
+is a highly sweet and sane old thing, with accompaniments that set me
+speculating on your own definition of sanity. I hardly comprehend the
+change.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody&rsquo;s
+soul?&rdquo; cried Rosamund, in despair. &ldquo;Must I confess we had got so
+morbid as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that we
+didn&rsquo;t even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves?
+We&rsquo;ll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we&rsquo;re happy
+enough.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where is Mr. Smith?&rdquo; asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their farce,
+who had not been visible for an hour or more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I think he&rsquo;s on the other side of the house, by the
+dustbin,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He may be on the road to Russia,&rdquo; said Warner, &ldquo;but he must
+be found.&rdquo; And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house
+by the sunflowers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope,&rdquo; said Rosamund, &ldquo;he won&rsquo;t really interfere
+with Mr. Smith.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Interfere with the daisies!&rdquo; said Michael with a snort. &ldquo;A
+man can&rsquo;t be locked up for falling in love&mdash;at least I hope
+not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; I think even a doctor couldn&rsquo;t make a disease out of him.
+He&rsquo;d throw off the doctor like the disease, don&rsquo;t you know? I
+believe it&rsquo;s a case of a sort of holy well. I believe Innocent Smith is
+simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass with the
+point of her white shoe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Inglewood, &ldquo;that Smith is not extraordinary
+at all. He&rsquo;s comic just because he&rsquo;s so startlingly commonplace.
+Don&rsquo;t you know what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts and
+uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays? That bag there on the cab
+is only a schoolboy&rsquo;s hamper. This tree here in the garden is only the
+sort of tree that any schoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that&rsquo;s the thing
+that has haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.
+Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old
+schoolfellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing animal that we have
+all been.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is only you absurd boys,&rdquo; said Diana. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+believe any girl was ever so silly, and I&rsquo;m sure no girl was ever so
+happy, except&mdash;&rdquo; and she stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith,&rdquo; said Michael Moon
+in a low voice. &ldquo;Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain. He is not
+there. Haven&rsquo;t you noticed that we never saw him since we found
+ourselves? He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only our own
+youth returned. Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab, the
+thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn. Once or
+twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing, but the man we shall
+never see. In a spring garden before breakfast we shall smell the smell called
+Smith. In the snapping of brisk twigs in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named
+Smith. Everything insatiable and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the
+earth like babies at a bun feast, in the white mornings that split the sky as a
+boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one instant the presence of an
+impetuous purity; but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of
+inanimate things not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and
+heavens; he&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb. Almost
+at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it, leaving it
+rocking upon the stones of the road. He clutched the blue railings of the
+garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise. He was a
+small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face that seemed made out of
+fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and resplendent as Warner&rsquo;s,
+but thrust back recklessly on the hinder part of his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Murder!&rdquo; he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating
+voice. &ldquo;Stop that murderer there!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows of the house, and
+with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came flying round the corner like a
+leaping rabbit. Yet before he had reached the group a third discharge had
+deafened them, and they saw with their own eyes two spots of white sky drilled
+through the second of the unhappy Herbert&rsquo;s high hats. The next moment
+the fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot, and came down on all fours,
+staring like a cow. The hat with the two shot-holes in it rolled upon the
+gravel path before him, and Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway
+train. He was looking twice his proper size&mdash;a giant clad in green, the
+big revolver still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine and in shadow, his
+eyes blazing like all stars, and his yellow hair standing out all ways like
+Struwelpeter&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness, Inglewood had
+time to feel once more what he had felt when he saw the other lovers standing
+on the lawn&mdash;the sensation of a certain cut and coloured clearness that
+belongs rather to the things of art than to the things of experience. The
+broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the green bulk of Smith and the
+black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked railings behind, clutched by the
+stranger&rsquo;s yellow vulture claws and peered over by his long vulture neck,
+the silk hat on the gravel, and the little cloudlet of smoke floating across
+the garden as innocently as the puff of a cigarette&mdash; all these seemed
+unnaturally distinct and definite. They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of
+separation. Indeed, every object grew more and more particular and precious
+because the whole picture was breaking up. Things look so bright just before
+they burst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased, Arthur had stepped across
+and taken one of Smith&rsquo;s arms. Simultaneously the little stranger had run
+up the steps and taken the other. Smith went into peals of laughter, and
+surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness. Moon raised the doctor to his
+feet, and then went and leaned sullenly on the garden gate. The girls were
+quiet and vigilant, as good women mostly are in instants of catastrophe, but
+their faces showed that, somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the
+sky. The doctor himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits, and
+dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to them in brief
+apology. He was very white with his recent panic, but he spoke with perfect
+self-control.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will excuse us, ladies,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;my friend and Mr.
+Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways. I think we had better all
+take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate with you later.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed Smith was
+led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant boom of mirth
+could again be heard through the half-open window; but there came no echo of
+the quiet voices of the physicians. The girls walked about the garden together,
+rubbing up each other&rsquo;s spirits as best they might; Michael Moon still
+hung heavily against the gate. Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr.
+Warner came out of the house with a face less pale but even more stern, and the
+little man with the fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear. And if the
+face of Warner in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge, the face of the
+little man behind was more like a death&rsquo;s head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Hunt,&rdquo; said Dr. Herbert Warner, &ldquo;I only wish to offer
+you my warm thanks and admiration. By your prompt courage and wisdom in sending
+for us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put out of
+mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity&mdash; a
+criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been before combined in
+flesh.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking eyes.
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t mean Mr.
+Smith?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He has gone by many other names,&rdquo; said the doctor gravely,
+&ldquo;and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind him. That man, Miss
+Hunt, has left a track of blood and tears across the world. Whether he is mad
+as well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests of science, to discover. In
+any case, we shall have to take him to a magistrate first, even if only on the
+road to a lunatic asylum. But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will
+have to be sealed with wall within wall, and ringed with guns like a fortress,
+or he will break out again to bring forth carnage and darkness on the
+earth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler. Then her
+eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate; but he continued to lean
+on it without moving, with his face turned away towards the darkening road.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"></a>
+Chapter V<br/>
+The Allegorical Practical Joker</h3>
+
+<p>
+The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat more urbane
+and even dapper figure than he had appeared when clutching the railings and
+craning his neck into the garden. He even looked comparatively young when he
+took his hat off, having fair hair parted in the middle and carefully curled on
+each side, and lively movements, especially of the hands. He had a dandified
+monocle slung round his neck by a broad black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if
+a big American moth had alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright
+enough for a boy&rsquo;s; it was only when you looked at the fish-bone face
+that you beheld something acrid and old. His manners were excellent, though
+hardly English, and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people who only
+met him once remembered him. One was a trick of closing his eyes when he wished
+to be particularly polite; the other was one of lifting his joined thumb and
+forefinger in the air as if holding a pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or
+hovering over a word. But those who were longer in his company tended to forget
+these oddities in the stream of his quaint and solemn conversation and really
+singular views.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Miss Hunt,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner, &ldquo;this is Dr. Cyrus Pym.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he were
+&ldquo;playing fair&rdquo; in some child&rsquo;s game, and gave a prompt little
+bow, which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United States.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Cyrus Pym,&rdquo; continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes again),
+&ldquo;is perhaps the first criminological expert of America. We are very
+fortunate to be able to consult with him in this extraordinary
+case&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t make head or tail of anything,&rdquo; said Rosamund.
+&ldquo;How can poor Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or by your telegram,&rdquo; said Herbert Warner, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; cried the girl impatiently.
+&ldquo;Why, he&rsquo;s done us all more good than going to church.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think I can explain to the young lady,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym.
+&ldquo;This criminal or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method
+of his own, a method of the most daring ingenuity. He is popular wherever he
+goes, for he invades every house as an uproarious child. People are getting
+suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel; so he always uses
+the disguise of&mdash;what shall I say&mdash;the Bohemian, the blameless
+Bohemian. He always carries people off their feet. People are used to the mask
+of conventional good conduct. He goes in for eccentric good-nature. You expect
+a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant; but you&rsquo;re
+not prepared when he dresses up as Don Quixote. You expect a humbug to behave
+like Sir Charles Grandison; because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep,
+tear-moving tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison so often
+behaved like a humbug. But no real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for a
+humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison but on Sir Roger de
+Coverly. Setting up to be a good man a little cracked is a new criminal
+incognito, Miss Hunt. It&rsquo;s been a great notion, and uncommonly
+successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel. I can forgive Dick
+Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can&rsquo;t forgive him when he
+impersonates Dr. Johnson. The saint with a tile loose is a bit too sacred, I
+guess, to be parodied.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how do you know,&rdquo; cried Rosamund desperately, &ldquo;that Mr.
+Smith is a known criminal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I collated all the documents,&rdquo; said the American, &ldquo;when my
+friend Warner knocked me up on receipt of your cable. It is my professional
+affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there&rsquo;s no more doubt about
+them than about the Bradshaw down at the depot. This man has hitherto escaped
+the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or insanity. But I
+myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated notes of some eighteen or
+twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this manner. He comes to houses as he
+has to this, and gets a grand popularity. He makes things go. They do go; when
+he&rsquo;s gone the things are gone. Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man&rsquo;s life
+or a man&rsquo;s spoons, or more often a woman. I assure you I have all the
+memoranda.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have seen them,&rdquo; said Warner solidly, &ldquo;I can assure you
+that all this is correct.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings,&rdquo; went on the
+American doctor, &ldquo;is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a wild
+simulation of innocence. From almost every house where this great imaginative
+devil has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him; some say he&rsquo;s
+got a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and that they go like
+automata. What&rsquo;s become of all those poor girls nobody knows. Murdered, I
+dare say; for we&rsquo;ve lots of instances, besides this one, of his turning
+his hand to murder, though none ever brought him under the law. Anyhow, our
+most modern methods of research can&rsquo;t find any trace of the wretched
+women. It&rsquo;s when I think of them that I am really moved, Miss Hunt. And
+I&rsquo;ve really nothing else to say just now except what Dr. Warner has
+said.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in
+marble&mdash;&ldquo;that we all have to thank you very much for that
+telegram.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident sincerity that
+one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner&mdash; the falling eyelids, the
+rising intonation, and the poised finger and thumb&mdash;which were at other
+times a little comic. It was not so much that he was cleverer than Warner;
+perhaps he was not so clever, though he was more celebrated. But he had what
+Warner never had, a fresh and unaffected seriousness&mdash; the great American
+virtue of simplicity. Rosamund knitted her brows and looked gloomily toward the
+darkening house that contained the dark prodigy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to silver,
+and was changing from silver to gray. The long plumy shadows of the one or two
+trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead background of dusk. In the
+sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the entrance to the house by the big
+French windows, Rosamund could watch a hurried consultation between Inglewood
+(who was still left in charge of the mysterious captive) and Diana, who had
+moved to his assistance from without. After a few minutes and gestures they
+went inside, shutting the glass doors upon the garden; and the garden seemed to
+grow grayer still.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move in the
+same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a flash of that
+guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity, and with something
+of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult, pedantic as he was, to call
+him a pedant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m vurry sorry, Miss Hunt,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but Dr. Warner
+and I, as two quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith away in that
+cab, and the less said about it the better. Don&rsquo;t you agitate yourself,
+Miss Hunt. You&rsquo;ve just got to think that we&rsquo;re taking away a
+monstrosity, something that oughtn&rsquo;t to be at all&mdash;something like
+one of those gods in your Britannic Museum, all wings, and beards, and legs,
+and eyes, and no shape. That&rsquo;s what Smith is, and you shall soon be quit
+of him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about to follow
+him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke came out with more
+than her usual quickness across the lawn. Her face was aquiver with worry and
+excitement, and her dark earnest eyes fixed only on the other girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rosamund,&rdquo; she cried in despair, &ldquo;what shall I do with
+her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With her?&rdquo; cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump. &ldquo;O lord, he
+isn&rsquo;t a woman too, is he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no, no,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common fairness.
+&ldquo;A woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean your friend Mary Gray,&rdquo; retorted Diana with equal tartness.
+&ldquo;What on earth am I to do with her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How can we tell her about Smith, you mean,&rdquo; answered Rosamund, her
+face at once clouded and softening. &ldquo;Yes, it will be pretty
+painful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I HAVE told her,&rdquo; exploded Diana, with more than her
+congenital exasperation. &ldquo;I have told her, and she doesn&rsquo;t seem to
+mind. She still says she&rsquo;s going away with Smith in that cab.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it&rsquo;s impossible!&rdquo; ejaculated Rosamund. &ldquo;Why, Mary
+is really religious. She&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively close to her on
+the lawn. Her quiet companion had come down very quietly into the garden, but
+dressed very decisively for travel. She had a neat but very ancient blue
+tam-o&rsquo;-shanter on her head, and was pulling some rather threadbare gray
+gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints fitted excellently with her heavy
+copper-coloured hair; the more excellently for the touch of shabbiness: for a
+woman&rsquo;s clothes never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her by
+accident.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and attractive. In
+such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are already sad, it will
+often happen that one reflection at some occasional angle will cause to linger
+the last of the light. A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a scrap of
+looking-glass, will be full of the fire that is lost to all the rest of the
+earth. The quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray was like some triangular
+piece of mirror that could still repeat the splendour of hours before. Mary,
+though she was always graceful, could never before have properly been called
+beautiful; and yet her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful as to
+make a man catch his breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;O Diana,&rdquo; cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
+&ldquo;but how did you tell her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is quite easy to tell her,&rdquo; answered Diana sombrely; &ldquo;it
+makes no impression at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve kept everything waiting,&rdquo; said Mary
+Gray apologetically, &ldquo;and now we must really say good-bye. Innocent is
+taking me to his aunt&rsquo;s over at Hampstead, and I&rsquo;m afraid she goes
+to bed early.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort of sleepy light
+in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness; she was like one speaking
+absently with her eye on some very distant object.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mary, Mary,&rdquo; cried Rosamund, almost breaking down,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m so sorry about it, but the thing can&rsquo;t be at all.
+We&mdash;we have found out all about Mr. Smith.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All?&rdquo; repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation;
+&ldquo;why, that must be awfully exciting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that the silent Michael
+Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head, as it might be to listen. Then
+Rosamund remaining speechless, Dr. Pym came to her rescue in a definite way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To begin with,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this man Smith is constantly
+attempting murder. The Warden of Brakespeare College&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile.
+&ldquo;Innocent told me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t say what he told you,&rdquo; replied Pym quickly,
+&ldquo;but I&rsquo;m very much afraid it wasn&rsquo;t true. The plain truth is
+that the man&rsquo;s stained with every known human crime. I assure you I have
+all the documents. I have evidence of his committing burglary, signed by a most
+eminent English curate. I have&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, but there were two curates,&rdquo; cried Mary, with a certain gentle
+eagerness; &ldquo;that was what made it so much funnier.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more, and Inglewood appeared
+for an instant, making a sort of signal. The American doctor bowed, the English
+doctor did not, but they both set out stolidly towards the house. No one else
+moved, not even Michael hanging on the gate; but the back of his head and
+shoulders had still an indescribable indication that he was listening to every
+word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you understand, Mary,&rdquo; cried Rosamund in despair;
+&ldquo;don&rsquo;t you know that awful things have happened even before our
+very eyes. I should have thought you would have heard the revolver shots
+upstairs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I heard the shots,&rdquo; said Mary almost brightly; &ldquo;but I
+was busy packing just then. And Innocent had told me he was going to shoot at
+Dr. Warner; so it wasn&rsquo;t worth while to come down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t understand what you mean,&rdquo; cried Rosamund Hunt,
+stamping, &ldquo;but you must and shall understand what I mean. I don&rsquo;t
+care how cruelly I put it, if only I can save you. I mean that your Innocent
+Smith is the most awfully wicked man in the world. He has sent bullets at lots
+of other men and gone off in cabs with lots of other women. And he seems to
+have killed the women too, for nobody can find them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is really rather naughty sometimes,&rdquo; said Mary Gray, laughing
+softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something,&rdquo; said Rosamund, and
+burst into tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out of the house with
+their great green-clad captive between them. He made no resistance, but was
+still laughing in a groggy and half-witted style. Arthur Inglewood followed in
+the rear, a dark and red study in the last shades of distress and shame. In
+this black, funereal, and painfully realistic style the exit from Beacon House
+was made by a man whose entrance a day before had been effected by the happy
+leaping of a wall and the hilarious climbing of a tree. No one moved of the
+groups in the garden except Mary Gray, who stepped forward quite naturally,
+calling out, &ldquo;Are you ready, Innocent? Our cab&rsquo;s been waiting such
+a long time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner firmly, &ldquo;I must
+insist on asking this lady to stand aside. We shall have trouble enough as it
+is, with the three of us in a cab.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it IS our cab,&rdquo; persisted Mary. &ldquo;Why, there&rsquo;s
+Innocent&rsquo;s yellow bag on the top of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stand aside,&rdquo; repeated Warner roughly. &ldquo;And you, Mr. Moon,
+please be so obliging as to move a moment. Come, come! the sooner this ugly
+business is over the better&mdash;and how can we open the gate if you will keep
+leaning on it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed to consider and
+reconsider this argument. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said at last; &ldquo;but how
+can I lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, get out of the way!&rdquo; cried Warner, almost good-humouredly.
+&ldquo;You can lean on the gate any time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Moon reflectively. &ldquo;Seldom the time and the place
+and the blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you come of an old
+country family. My ancestors leaned on gates before any one had discovered how
+to open them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Michael!&rdquo; cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, &ldquo;are
+you going to get out of the way?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, no; I think not,&rdquo; said Michael, after some meditation, and
+swung himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company, while still, in
+a lounging attitude, occupying the path.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hullo!&rdquo; he called out suddenly; &ldquo;what are you doing to Mr.
+Smith?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Taking him away,&rdquo; answered Warner shortly, &ldquo;to be
+examined.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Matriculation?&rdquo; asked Moon brightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By a magistrate,&rdquo; said the other curtly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what other magistrate,&rdquo; cried Michael, raising his voice,
+&ldquo;dares to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient and
+independent Dukes of Beacon? What other court dares to try one of our company,
+save only the High Court of Beacon? Have you forgotten that only this afternoon
+we flew the flag of independence and severed ourselves from all the nations of
+the earth?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Michael,&rdquo; cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, &ldquo;how can you
+stand there talking nonsense? Why, you saw the dreadful thing yourself. You
+were there when he went mad. It was you that helped the doctor up when he fell
+over the flower-pot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the High Court of Beacon,&rdquo; replied Moon with hauteur,
+&ldquo;has special powers in all cases concerning lunatics, flower-pots, and
+doctors who fall down in gardens. It&rsquo;s in our very first charter from
+Edward I: &lsquo;Si medicus quisquam in horto prostratus&mdash;’&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Out of the way!&rdquo; cried Warner with sudden fury, &ldquo;or we will
+force you out of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What!&rdquo; cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious fierceness.
+&ldquo;Shall I die in defence of this sacred pale? Will you paint these blue
+railings red with my gore?&rdquo; and he laid hold of one of the blue spikes
+behind him. As Inglewood had noticed earlier in the evening, the railing was
+loose and crooked at this place, and the painted iron staff and spearhead came
+away in Michael&rsquo;s hand as he shook it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See!&rdquo; he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air,
+&ldquo;the very lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend it.
+Ah, in such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!&rdquo; And in a
+voice like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Ou pour l&rsquo;honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince,<br/>
+Navré, poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sakes alive!&rdquo; said the American gentleman, almost in an awed tone.
+Then he added, &ldquo;Are there two maniacs here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; there are five,&rdquo; thundered Moon. &ldquo;Smith and I are the
+only sane people left.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Michael!&rdquo; cried Rosamund; &ldquo;Michael, what does it
+mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It means bosh!&rdquo; roared Michael, and slung his painted spear
+hurtling to the other end of the garden. &ldquo;It means that doctors are bosh,
+and criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh&mdash; much more bosh than our
+Court of Beacon. It means, you fatheads, that Innocent Smith is no more mad or
+bad than the bird on that tree.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, my dear Moon,&rdquo; began Inglewood in his modest manner,
+&ldquo;these gentlemen&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the word of two doctors,&rdquo; exploded Moon again, without
+listening to anybody else, &ldquo;shut up in a private hell on the word of two
+doctors! And such doctors! Oh, my hat! Look at &rsquo;em!&mdash;do just look at
+&rsquo;em! Would you read a book, or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice
+of twenty such? My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics. What would you
+say if I called a man wicked on the word of two priests?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t only their word, Michael,&rdquo; reasoned Rosamund;
+&ldquo;they&rsquo;ve got evidence too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you looked at it?&rdquo; asked Moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; &ldquo;these
+gentlemen are in charge of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And of everything else, it seems to me,&rdquo; said Michael. &ldquo;Why,
+you haven&rsquo;t even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s no use,&rdquo; said Diana in an undertone to Rosamund;
+&ldquo;Auntie can&rsquo;t say &lsquo;Bo!&rsquo; to a goose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad to hear it,&rdquo; answered Michael, &ldquo;for with such a
+flock of geese to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on her
+lips. For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light and airy
+style. I appeal to Mrs. Duke&mdash;it&rsquo;s her house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mrs. Duke?&rdquo; repeated Inglewood doubtfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, Mrs. Duke,&rdquo; said Michael firmly, &ldquo;commonly called the
+Iron Duke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you ask Auntie,&rdquo; said Diana quietly, &ldquo;she&rsquo;ll only
+be for doing nothing at all. Her only idea is to hush things up or to let
+things slide. That just suits her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Michael Moon; &ldquo;and, as it happens, it just
+suits all of us. You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke; but when you
+are as old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew&mdash; that half
+one&rsquo;s letters answer themselves if you can only refrain from the fleshly
+appetite of answering them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow on the grate,
+but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time; just as it had changed
+from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant, it now changed to the airy
+incisiveness of a lawyer giving good legal advice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if she
+can,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we all want to keep it quiet if we can. Look at the
+large facts&mdash;the big bones of the case. I believe those scientific
+gentlemen have made a highly scientific mistake. I believe Smith is as
+blameless as a buttercup. I admit buttercups don&rsquo;t often let off loaded
+pistols in private houses; I admit there is something demanding explanation.
+But I am morally certain there&rsquo;s some blunder, or some joke, or some
+allegory, or some accident behind all this. Well, suppose I&rsquo;m wrong.
+We&rsquo;ve disarmed him; we&rsquo;re five men to hold him; he may as well go
+to a lock-up later on as now. But suppose there&rsquo;s even a chance of my
+being right. Is it anybody&rsquo;s interest here to wash this linen in public?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come, I&rsquo;ll take each of you in order. Once take Smith outside that
+gate, and you take him into the front page of the evening papers. I know;
+I&rsquo;ve written the front page myself. Miss Duke, do you or your aunt want a
+sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house&mdash;&lsquo;Doctors shot
+here.&rsquo;? No, no&mdash;doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you don&rsquo;t
+want the rubbish shot here. Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I am wrong.
+Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours. Mark my words, if
+he&rsquo;s proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you introduced
+him. If he&rsquo;s proved innocent, they will say you helped to collar him.
+Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong. If he&rsquo;s proved guilty,
+they&rsquo;ll say you engaged your companion to him. If he&rsquo;s proved
+innocent, they&rsquo;ll print that telegram. I know the Organs, damn
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more breathless than
+had either his theatrical or his real denunciation. But he was plainly in
+earnest, as well as positive and lucid; as was proved by his proceeding quickly
+the moment he had found his breath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is just the same,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;with our medical friends.
+You will say that Dr. Warner has a grievance. I agree. But does he want
+specially to be snapshotted by all the journalists <i>prostratus in horto?</i>
+It was no fault of his, but the scene was not very dignified even for him. He
+must have justice; but does he want to ask for justice, not only on his knees,
+but on his hands and knees? Does he want to enter the court of justice on all
+fours? Doctors are not allowed to advertise; and I&rsquo;m sure no doctor wants
+to advertise himself as looking like that. And even for our American guest the
+interest is the same. Let us suppose that he has conclusive documents. Let us
+assume that he has revelations really worth reading. Well, in a legal inquiry
+(or a medical inquiry, for that matter) ten to one he won&rsquo;t be allowed to
+read them. He&rsquo;ll be tripped up every two or three minutes with some
+tangle of old rules. A man can&rsquo;t tell the truth in public nowadays. But
+he can still tell it in private; he can tell it inside that house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is quite true,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened throughout
+the speech with a seriousness which only an American could have retained
+through such a scene. &ldquo;It is true that I have been per-ceptibly less
+hampered in private inquiries.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Pym!&rdquo; cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger. &ldquo;Dr. Pym!
+you aren&rsquo;t really going to admit&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smith may be mad,&rdquo; went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue that
+seemed as heavy as a hatchet, &ldquo;but there was something after all in what
+he said about Home Rule for every home. Yes, there is something, when
+all&rsquo;s said and done, in the High Court of Beacon. It is really true that
+human beings might often get some sort of domestic justice where just now they
+can only get legal injustice&mdash;oh, I am a lawyer too, and I know that as
+well. It is true that there&rsquo;s too much official and indirect power. Often
+and often the thing a whole nation can&rsquo;t settle is just the thing a
+family could settle. Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail
+when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed. Scores of men, I am
+sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they only wanted a week at Brighton.
+There IS something in Smith&rsquo;s notion of domestic self-government; and I
+propose that we put it into practice. You have the prisoner; you have the
+documents. Come, we are a company of free, white, Christian people, such as
+might be besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island. Let us do this thing
+ourselves. Let us go into that house there and sit down and find out with our
+own eyes and ears whether this thing is true or not; whether this Smith is a
+man or a monster. If we can&rsquo;t do a little thing like that, what right
+have we to put crosses on ballot papers?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool, saw in that
+glance that Moon was gaining ground. The motives that led Arthur to think of
+surrender were indeed very different from those which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym.
+All Arthur&rsquo;s instincts were on the side of privacy and polite settlement;
+he was very English and would often endure wrongs rather than right them by
+scenes and serious rhetoric. To play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant,
+like his Irish friend, would have been absolute torture to him; but even the
+semi-official part he had played that afternoon was very painful. He was not
+likely to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
+sleeping dogs lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are possible
+that seem crazy to the English. Regulations and authorities exactly like one of
+Innocent&rsquo;s pranks or one of Michael&rsquo;s satires really exist, propped
+by placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men. Pym knew whole States
+which are vast and yet secret and fanciful; each is as big as a nation yet as
+private as a lost village, and as unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States where
+no man may have a cigarette, States where any man may have ten wives, very
+strict prohibition States, very lax divorce States&mdash;all these large local
+vagaries had prepared Cyrus Pym&rsquo;s mind for small local vagaries in a
+smaller country. Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or
+Italian, utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions are, he
+could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon. It is firmly
+believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very end Pym believed
+in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be some Britannic institution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached through the
+growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk apparently founded on
+the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown. Something at once in the
+familiarity and the incongruity of this being moved Michael to even heartier
+outbursts of a healthy and humane flippancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, here&rsquo;s little Nosey Gould,&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t the mere sight of him enough to banish all your morbid
+reflections?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really,&rdquo; replied Dr. Warner, &ldquo;I really fail to see how Mr.
+Gould affects the question; and I once more demand&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello! what&rsquo;s the funeral, gents?&rdquo; inquired the newcomer
+with the air of an uproarious umpire. &ldquo;Doctor demandin&rsquo; something?
+Always the way at a boarding-house, you know. Always lots of demand. No
+supply.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his position, and
+indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain dangerous and dubious
+acts, and that there had even arisen an allegation that he was insane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, of course he is,&rdquo; said Moses Gould equably; &ldquo;it
+don&rsquo;t need old &rsquo;Olmes to see that. The &rsquo;awk-like face of
+&rsquo;Olmes,&rdquo; he added with abstract relish, &ldquo;showed a shide of
+disappointment, the sleuth-like Gould &rsquo;avin&rsquo; got there before
+&rsquo;im.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If he is mad,&rdquo; began Inglewood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Moses, &ldquo;when a cove gets out on the tile the
+first night there&rsquo;s generally a tile loose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You never objected before,&rdquo; said Diana Duke rather stiffly,
+&ldquo;and you&rsquo;re generally pretty free with your complaints.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t compline of him,&rdquo; said Moses magnanimously,
+&ldquo;the poor chap&rsquo;s &rsquo;armless enough; you might tie &rsquo;im up
+in the garden here and &rsquo;e&rsquo;d make noises at the burglars.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Moses,&rdquo; said Moon with solemn fervour, &ldquo;you are the
+incarnation of Common Sense. You think Mr. Innocent is mad. Let me introduce
+you to the incarnation of Scientific Theory. He also thinks Mr. Innocent is
+mad.&mdash;Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.&mdash;Moses, this is the
+celebrated Dr. Pym.&rdquo; The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and
+bowed. He also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice, which sounded like
+&ldquo;Pleased to meet you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you two people,&rdquo; said Michael cheerfully, &ldquo;who both
+think our poor friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there and
+prove him mad. What could be more powerful than the combination of Scientific
+Theory with Common Sense? United you stand; divided you fall. I will not be so
+uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I confine myself to
+recording the chronological accident that he has not shown us any so far. I
+take the freedom of an old friend in staking my shirt that Moses has no
+scientific theory. Yet against this strong coalition I am ready to appear,
+armed with nothing but an intuition&mdash;which is American for a guess.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Distinguished by Mr. Gould&rsquo;s assistance,&rdquo; said Pym, opening
+his eyes suddenly. &ldquo;I gather that though he and I are identical in
+primary di-agnosis there is yet between us something that cannot be called a
+disagreement, something which we may perhaps call a&mdash;&rdquo; He put the
+points of thumb and forefinger together, spreading the other fingers
+exquisitely in the air, and seemed to be waiting for somebody else to tell him
+what to say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Catchin&rsquo; flies?&rdquo; inquired the affable Moses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A divergence,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief;
+&ldquo;a divergence. Granted that the man in question is deranged, he would not
+necessarily be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has it occurred to you,&rdquo; observed Moon, who was leaning on the
+gate again, and did not turn round, &ldquo;that if he were a homicidal maniac
+he might have killed us all here while we were talking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something exploded silently underneath all their minds, like sealed dynamite in
+some forgotten cellars. They all remembered for the first time for some hour or
+two that the monster of whom they were talking was standing quietly among them.
+They had left him in the garden like a garden statue; there might have been a
+dolphin coiling round his legs, or a fountain pouring out of his mouth, for all
+the notice they had taken of Innocent Smith. He stood with his crest of blonde,
+blown hair thrust somewhat forward, his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted
+face looking patiently downwards at nothing in particular, his huge shoulders
+humped, and his hands in his trousers pockets. So far as they could guess he
+had not moved at all. His green coat might have been cut out of the green turf
+on which he stood. In his shadow Pym had expounded and Rosamund expostulated,
+Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged. He had remained like a thing graven;
+the god of the garden. A sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and
+then, after correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, &ldquo;the Court of
+Beacon has opened&mdash;and shut up again too. You all know now I am right.
+Your buried common sense has told you what my buried common sense has told me.
+Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol, and you would
+still know he was harmless as I know he is harmless. Back we all go to the
+house and clear a room for discussion. For the High Court of Beacon, which has
+already arrived at its decision, is just about to begin its inquiry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just a goin&rsquo; to begin!&rdquo; cried little Mr. Moses in an
+extraordinary sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal during
+music or a thunderstorm. &ldquo;Follow on to the &rsquo;Igh Court of Eggs and
+Bacon; &rsquo;ave a kipper from the old firm! &rsquo;Is Lordship complimented
+Mr. Gould on the &rsquo;igh professional delicacy &rsquo;e had shown, and which
+was worthy of the best traditions of the Saloon Bar&mdash; and three of Scotch
+hot, miss! Oh, chase me, girls!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a sort of
+waddling dance of pure excitement; and had made a circuit of the garden before
+he reappeared, breathless but still beaming. Moon had known his man when he
+realized that no people presented to Moses Gould could be quite serious, even
+if they were quite furious. The glass doors stood open on the side nearest to
+Mr. Moses Gould; and as the feet of that festive idiot were evidently turned in
+the same direction, everybody else went that way with the unanimity of some
+uproarious procession. Only Diana Duke retained enough rigidity to say the
+thing that had been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few hours.
+Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as unsympathetic. &ldquo;In
+that case,&rdquo; she said sharply, &ldquo;these cabs can be sent away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know,&rdquo; said Mary with a
+smile. &ldquo;I dare say the cabman would get it down for us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get the bag,&rdquo; said Smith, speaking for the first time
+in hours; his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility were left
+breathless by his precipitance. With a run and spring he was out of the garden
+into the street; with a spring and one quivering kick he was actually on the
+roof of the cab. The cabman happened to be standing by the horse&rsquo;s head,
+having just removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith seemed for an instant to be
+rolling about on the cab&rsquo;s back in the embraces of his Gladstone bag. The
+next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a royal luck, into the high seat
+behind, and with a shriek of piercing and appalling suddenness had sent the
+horse flying and scampering down the street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it was all the other
+people who were turned into garden statues. Mr. Moses Gould, however, being
+ill-adapted both physically and morally for the purposes of permanent
+sculpture, came to life some time before the rest, and, turning to Moon,
+remarked, like a man starting chattily with a stranger on an omnibus,
+&ldquo;Tile loose, eh? Cab loose anyhow.&rdquo; There followed a fatal silence;
+and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer like a club of stone,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon. You have let loose
+a maniac on the whole metropolis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent of
+continuous houses. The little garden that shut it in ran out into a sharp point
+like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets. Smith and his cab
+shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly most of those standing inside
+of it never expected to see him again. At the apex, however, he turned the
+horse sharply round and drove with equal violence up the other side of the
+garden, visible to all those in the group. With a common impulse the little
+crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him, but they soon had reason to duck
+and recoil. Even as he vanished up street for the second time, he let the big
+yellow bag fly from his hand, so that it fell in the centre of the garden,
+scattering the company like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner&rsquo;s hat
+for the third time. Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot
+away with a shriek that went into a whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice;
+&ldquo;you may as well all go inside anyhow. We&rsquo;ve got two relics of Mr.
+Smith at least; his fiancee and his trunk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do you want us to go inside?&rdquo; asked Arthur Inglewood, in whose
+red brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed to have reached its limit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want the rest to go in,&rdquo; said Michael in a clear voice,
+&ldquo;because I want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting colder, and
+a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the twilight. Dr.
+Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I refuse to listen to any such proposal,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you have
+lost this ruffian, and I must find him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t ask you to listen to any proposal,&rdquo; answered Moon
+quietly; &ldquo;I only ask you to listen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately the whistling noise
+that had been lost in the dark streets on one side of the house could be heard
+from quite a new quarter on the other side. Through the night-maze of streets
+the noise increased with incredible rapidity, and the next moment the flying
+hoofs and flashing wheels had swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they
+had originally stood. Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of
+absent-mindedness, and coming back into the garden stood in the same
+elephantine attitude as before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get inside! get inside!&rdquo; cried Moon hilariously, with the air of
+one shooing a company of cats. &ldquo;Come, come, be quick about it!
+Didn&rsquo;t I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How they were all really driven into the house again it would have been
+difficult afterwards to say. They had reached the point of being exhausted with
+incongruities, as people at a farce are ill with laughing, and the brisk growth
+of the storm among the trees seemed like a final gesture of things in general.
+Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain amicable exasperation,
+&ldquo;I say, do you really want to speak to me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;very much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed to
+promise. While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very large and
+lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees, proved by
+contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray indeed. A drift of barren
+leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds across the sky, seemed to be
+lifted on the same strong and yet laborious wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Arthur,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;I began with an intuition; but now I
+am sure. You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed
+Court of Beacon, and to clear him too&mdash;clear him of both crime and lunacy.
+Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit.&rdquo; They walked up and
+down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can you,&rdquo; asked Michael, &ldquo;shut your eyes and see some of
+those queer old hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot
+countries. How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour. Think of
+some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red, or white and
+green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould&rsquo;s ancestors staring at
+it, and try to think why the people put it up at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood&rsquo;s first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend had
+really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless a flight of
+irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to the gray,
+wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he was actually
+kicking his heels. How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he
+could not conceive. Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why does everybody repeat riddles,&rdquo; went on Moon abruptly,
+&ldquo;even if they&rsquo;ve forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to
+remember because they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols in
+black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard to guess.
+Their colours were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was plain except
+the meaning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon went on,
+plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking faster and
+faster. &ldquo;Dances, too,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;dances were not frivolous.
+Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts. The old dances
+were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent. Have you noticed anything
+odd about Smith?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of
+humour, &ldquo;have I noticed anything else?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you noticed this about him,&rdquo; asked Moon, with unshaken
+persistency, &ldquo;that he has done so much and said so little? When first he
+came he talked, but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he wasn&rsquo;t
+used to it. All he really did was actions&mdash;painting red flowers on black
+gowns or throwing yellow bags on to the grass. I tell you that big green figure
+is figurative&mdash; like any green figure capering on some white Eastern
+wall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear Michael,&rdquo; cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation which
+increased with the rising wind, &ldquo;you are getting absurdly
+fanciful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think of what has just happened,&rdquo; said Michael steadily.
+&ldquo;The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking all the
+time. He fired three shots from a six-shooter and then gave it up to us, when
+he might have shot us dead in our boots. How could he express his trust in us
+better than that? He wanted to be tried by us. How could he have shown it
+better than by standing quite still and letting us discuss it? He wanted to
+show that he stood there willingly, and could escape if he liked. How could he
+have shown it better than by escaping in the cab and coming back again?
+Innocent Smith is not a madman&mdash;he is a ritualist. He wants to express
+himself, not with his tongue, but with his arms and legs&mdash; with my body I
+thee worship, as it says in the marriage service. I begin to understand the old
+plays and pageants. I see why the mutes at a funeral were mute. I see why the
+mummers were mum. They MEANT something; and Smith means something too. All
+other jokes have to be noisy&mdash;like little Nosey Gould&rsquo;s jokes, for
+instance. The only silent jokes are the practical jokes. Poor Smith, properly
+considered, is an allegorical practical joker. What he has really done in this
+house has been as frantic as a war-dance, but as silent as a picture.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I suppose you mean,&rdquo; said the other dubiously, &ldquo;that we have
+got to find out what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many coloured
+picture-puzzles. But even supposing that they do mean something&mdash;why, Lord
+bless my soul!&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted his eyes to the
+moon, by this time risen big and luminous, and had seen a huge, half-human
+figure sitting on the garden wall. It was outlined so sharply against the moon
+that for the first flash it was hard to be certain even that it was human: the
+hunched shoulders and outstanding hair had rather the air of a colossal cat. It
+resembled a cat also in the fact that when first startled it sprang up and ran
+with easy activity along the top of the wall. As it ran, however, its heavy
+shoulders and small stooping head rather suggested a baboon. The instant it
+came within reach of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was lost in the
+branches. The gale, which by this time was shaking every shrub in the garden,
+made the identification yet more difficult, since it melted the moving limbs of
+the fugitive in the multitudinous moving limbs of the tree.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is there?&rdquo; shouted Arthur. &ldquo;Who are you? Are you
+Innocent?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not quite,&rdquo; answered an obscure voice among the leaves. &ldquo;I
+cheated you once about a penknife.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
+backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it had on the
+gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But are you Smith?&rdquo; asked Inglewood as in an agony.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very nearly,&rdquo; said the voice out of the tossing tree.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you must have some real names,&rdquo; shrieked Inglewood in despair.
+&ldquo;You must call yourself something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Call myself something,&rdquo; thundered the obscure voice, shaking the
+tree so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once. &ldquo;I
+call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer Danton
+Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, manalive!&rdquo; began Inglewood in exasperation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s right! that&rsquo;s right!&rdquo; came with a roar out of
+the rocking tree; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s my real name.&rdquo; And he broke a
+branch, and one or two autumn leaves fluttered away across the moon.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2"></a>
+PART II<br/>
+THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"></a>
+Chapter I<br/>
+The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge</h3>
+
+<p>
+The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court of Beacon with a
+certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow to increase its cosiness. The
+big room was, as it were, cut up into small rooms, with walls only waist
+high&mdash;the sort of separation that children make when they are playing at
+shops. This had been done by Moses Gould and Michael Moon (the two most active
+members of this remarkable inquiry) with the ordinary furniture of the place.
+At one end of the long mahogany table was set the one enormous garden chair,
+which was surmounted by the old torn tent or umbrella which Smith himself had
+suggested as a coronation canopy. Inside this erection could be perceived the
+dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions and a form of countenance that already
+threatened slumber. At the other end sat the accused Smith, in a kind of dock;
+for he was carefully fenced in with a quadrilateral of light bedroom chairs,
+any of which he could have tossed out the window with his big toe. He had been
+provided with pens and paper, out of the latter of which he made paper boats,
+paper darts, and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings. He
+never spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious as a child on the
+floor of an empty nursery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat the three young
+ladies with their backs up against the window, and Mary Gray in the middle; it
+was something between a jury box and the stall of the Queen of Beauty at a
+tournament. Down the centre of the long table Moon had built a low barrier out
+of eight bound volumes of &ldquo;Good Words&rdquo; to express the moral wall
+that divided the conflicting parties. On the right side sat the two advocates
+of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould; behind a barricade of books and
+documents, chiefly (in the case of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology. On
+the other side, Moon and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified with
+books and papers; but as these included several old yellow volumes by Ouida and
+Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon seemed to have been somewhat careless and
+comprehensive. As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr. Warner, Moon wanted at
+first to have him kept entirely behind a high screen in the corner, urging the
+indelicacy of his appearance in court, but privately assuring him of an
+unofficial permission to peep over the top now and then. Dr. Warner, however,
+failed to rise to the chivalry of such a course, and after some little
+disturbance and discussion he was accommodated with a seat on the right side of
+the table in a line with his legal advisers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym, after
+passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear, rose to open the
+case. His statement was clear and even restrained, and such flights of imagery
+as occurred in it only attracted attention by a certain indescribable
+abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of American speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany, closed his
+eyes, and opened his mouth. &ldquo;The time has gone by,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act, important
+perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered. Science has
+profoundly...&rdquo; here he paused, poising his compressed finger and thumb in
+the air as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its tail, then he
+screwed up his eyes and said &ldquo;modified,&rdquo; and let it
+go&mdash;&ldquo;has profoundly Modified our view of death. In superstitious
+ages it was regarded as the termination of life, catastrophic, and even tragic,
+and was often surrounded by solemnity. Brighter days, however, have dawned, and
+we now see death as universal and inevitable, as part of that great
+soul-stirring and heart-upholding average which we call for convenience the
+order of nature. In the same way we have come to consider murder SOCIALLY.
+Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly deprived
+of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich
+rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the
+golden-bearded harvesters, the return for ever of the slayers and the
+slain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed slightly,
+putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent manners of Boston,
+and continued: &ldquo;There is but one result of this happier and humaner
+outlook which concerns the wretched man before us. It is that thoroughly
+elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in
+his great work, &lsquo;The Destructive Type.&rsquo; We do not denounce Smith as
+a murderer, but rather as a murderous man. The type is such that its very
+life&mdash; I might say its very health&mdash;is in killing. Some hold that it
+is not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature. My dear
+old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets&mdash;&rdquo; (here Moon suddenly
+ejaculated a loud &ldquo;hurrah!&rdquo; but so instantaneously resumed his
+tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere else for the sound); Dr. Pym
+continued somewhat sternly&mdash;&ldquo;who, in the interests of knowledge,
+kept ferrets, felt that the creature&rsquo;s ferocity is not utilitarian, but
+absolutely an end in itself. However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly
+so with the prisoner. In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of the
+maniac; but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity. But it is
+the awful sanity of the sun and the elements&mdash;a cruel, an evil sanity. As
+soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin West as stay the natural force
+that sends him forth to slay. No environment, however scientific, could have
+softened him. Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest
+cloister, and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or the
+alb. Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy,
+and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or brain with the
+brick. Circumstances may be favourable, training may be admirable, hopes may be
+high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its
+appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature at the
+foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat, and then
+looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It only remains for us,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to bring forward actual
+evidence of his previous attempts. By an agreement already made with the Court
+and the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence authentic
+letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is free to examine.
+Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided to select one&mdash; the
+clearest and most scandalous. I will therefore, without further delay, call on
+my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two letters&mdash;one from the Sub-Warden and the
+other from the porter of Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking paper
+in his hand and a fever of importance on his face. He began in a loud, high,
+cockney voice that was as abrupt as a cock-crow:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&mdash;Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College,
+Cambridge&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lord have mercy on us,&rdquo; muttered Moon, making a backward movement
+as men do when a gun goes off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,&rdquo;
+proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, &ldquo;and I can endorse the description
+you gave of the un&rsquo;appy Smith. It was not alone my unfortunate duty to
+rebuke many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period, but I was
+actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated that period. Hi
+happened to passing under the house of my friend the Warden of Brikespeare,
+which is semi-detached from the College and connected with it by two or three
+very ancient arches or props, like bridges, across a small strip of water
+connected with the river. To my grive astonishment I be&rsquo;eld my eminent
+friend suspended in mid-air and clinging to one of these pieces of masonry, his
+appearance and attitude indicatin&rsquo; that he suffered from the grivest
+apprehensions. After a short time I heard two very loud shots, and distinctly
+perceived the unfortunate undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the
+Warden&rsquo;s window and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver. Upon
+seeing me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which impertinence was mingled
+with insanity), and appeared to desist. I sent the college porter for a ladder,
+and he succeeded in detaching the Warden from his painful position. Smith was
+sent down. The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle
+Club prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.&mdash; Hi am,
+your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The other letter,&rdquo; continued Gould in a glow of triumph, &ldquo;is
+from the porter, and won&rsquo;t take long to read.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare
+College, and that I &rsquo;elped the Warden down when the young man was
+shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter. The young man who was
+shooting at him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the photograph Mr. Boulter
+sends.&mdash; Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them. But for the
+vocal divergences in the matter of h&rsquo;s and a&rsquo;s, the
+Sub-Warden&rsquo;s letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it; and both that
+and the porter&rsquo;s letter were plainly genuine. Moon handed them to
+Inglewood, who handed them back in silence to Moses Gould.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is
+concerned,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, &ldquo;that is
+my case.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave little
+hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner. He did not, he said,
+propose to follow the doctor into the abstract questions. &ldquo;I do not know
+enough to be an agnostic,&rdquo; he said, rather wearily, &ldquo;and I can only
+master the known and admitted elements in such controversies. As for science
+and religion, the known and admitted facts are plain enough. All that the
+parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That&rsquo;s
+the only difference between science and religion there&rsquo;s ever been, or
+will be. Yet these new discoveries touch me, somehow,&rdquo; he said, looking
+down sorrowfully at his boots. &ldquo;They remind me of a dear old great-aunt
+of mine who used to enjoy them in her youth. It brings tears to my eyes. I can
+see the old bucket by the garden fence and the line of shimmering poplars
+behind&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hi! here, stop the &rsquo;bus a bit,&rdquo; cried Mr. Moses Gould,
+rising in a sort of perspiration. &ldquo;We want to give the defence a fair
+run&mdash;like gents, you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering
+poplars.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, hang it all,&rdquo; said Moon, in an injured manner, &ldquo;if Dr.
+Pym may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn&rsquo;t I have an old aunt
+with poplars?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am sure,&rdquo; said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost like a
+shaky authority, &ldquo;Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, as to liking her,&rdquo; began Moon, &ldquo;I&mdash;but perhaps, as
+you say, she is scarcely the core of the question. I repeat that I do not mean
+to follow the abstract speculations. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is
+simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the
+psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a
+natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true&rdquo;&mdash;here he lowered
+his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness&mdash;&ldquo;is it
+not equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to get
+murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding the field that Dr. Warner is
+such a man? I do not speak without the book, any more than my learned friend.
+The whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein&rsquo;s monumental work,
+&lsquo;The Destructible Doctor,&rsquo; with diagrams, showing the various ways
+in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be resolved into his elements. In the
+light of these facts&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hi, stop the &rsquo;bus! stop the &rsquo;bus!&rdquo; cried Moses,
+jumping up and down and gesticulating in great excitement. &ldquo;My
+principal&rsquo;s got something to say! My principal wants to do a bit of
+talkin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious. &ldquo;I
+have strictly CON-fined myself,&rdquo; he said nasally, &ldquo;to books to
+which immediate reference can be made. I have Sonnenschein&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Destructive Type&rsquo; here on the table, if the defence wish to see
+it. Where is this wonderful work on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about?
+Does it exist? Can he produce it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Produce it!&rdquo; cried the Irishman with a rich scorn.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll produce it in a week if you&rsquo;ll pay for the ink and
+paper.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would it have much authority?&rdquo; asked Pym, sitting down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, authority!&rdquo; said Moon lightly; &ldquo;that depends on a
+fellow&rsquo;s religion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Pym jumped up again. &ldquo;Our authority is based on masses of accurate
+detail,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It deals with a region in which things can be
+handled and tested. My opponent will at least admit that death is a fact of
+experience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not of mine,&rdquo; said Moon mournfully, shaking his head.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never experienced such a thing in all my life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a crackle
+of papers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So we see,&rdquo; resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice,
+&ldquo;that a man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution,
+doomed to such attacks. My client&rsquo;s onslaught, even if it occurred, was
+not unique. I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance of Dr.
+Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way. Following the
+example of my learned friends I will read only two of them. The first is from
+an honest and laborious matron living off the Harrow Road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Moon, Sir,&mdash;Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him. Wot then? It
+was all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned, and if your Docter
+Warner doesn&rsquo;t like having sorsepans thrown at him, don&rsquo;t let him
+wear his hat in a respectable woman&rsquo;s parler, and tell him to leave orf
+smiling or tell us the joke.&mdash;Yours respectfully, Hannah Miles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin, with whom
+Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation. He writes as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;The incident to which you refer is one which I regret,
+and which, moreover, I have never been able to explain. My own branch of
+medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have the view of a mental
+specialist on my singular momentary and indeed almost automatic action. To say
+that I &lsquo;pulled Dr. Warner&rsquo;s nose,&rsquo; is, however, inaccurate in
+a respect that strikes me as important. That I punched his nose I must
+cheerfully admit (I need not say with what regret); but pulling seems to me to
+imply a precision of objective with which I cannot reproach myself. In
+comparison with this, the act of punching was an outward, instantaneous, and
+even natural gesture.&mdash; Believe me, yours faithfully, Burton Lestrange.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have numberless other letters,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;all
+bearing witness to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I
+therefore think that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the question in
+his survey. We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a natural
+force. As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as stay the great
+tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody. Place that man in a
+Quakers&rsquo; meeting, among the most peaceful of Christians, and he will
+immediately be beaten to death with sticks of chocolate. Place him among the
+angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be stoned to death with precious
+stones. Circumstances may be beautiful and wonderful, the average may be
+heart-upholding, the harvester may be golden-bearded, the doctor may be
+secret-guessing, the cataract may be iris-leapt, the Anglo-Saxon infant may be
+brave-browed, but against and above all these prodigies the grand simple
+tendency of Dr. Warner to get murdered will still pursue its way until it
+happily and triumphantly succeeds at last.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion. But even
+stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other side of the table.
+Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across the little figure of Moses
+Gould and was talking in excited whispers to Dr. Pym. That expert nodded a
+great many times and finally started to his feet with a sincere expression of
+sternness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen,&rdquo; he cried indignantly, &ldquo;as my
+colleague has said, we should be delighted to give any latitude to the
+defence&mdash;if there were a defence. But Mr. Moon seems to think he is there
+to make jokes&mdash; very good jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to
+assist his client. He picks holes in science. He picks holes in my
+client&rsquo;s social popularity. He picks holes in my literary style, which
+doesn&rsquo;t seem to suit his high-toned European taste. But how does this
+picking of holes affect the issue? This Smith has picked two holes in my
+client&rsquo;s hat, and with an inch better aim would have picked two holes in
+his head. All the jokes in the world won&rsquo;t unpick those holes or be any
+use for the defence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the evident
+fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a dreamy way.
+&ldquo;The defence?&rdquo; he said vaguely&mdash;&ldquo;oh, I haven&rsquo;t
+begun that yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You certainly have not,&rdquo; said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of
+applause from his side, which the other side found it impossible to answer.
+&ldquo;Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful from the very
+beginning&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;While you&rsquo;re standing up,&rdquo; said Moon, in the same almost
+sleepy style, &ldquo;perhaps I might ask you a question.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A question? Certainly,&rdquo; said Pym stiffly. &ldquo;It was distinctly
+arranged between us that as we could not cross-examine the witnesses, we might
+vicariously cross-examine each other. We are in a position to invite all such
+inquiry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think you said,&rdquo; observed Moon absently, &ldquo;that none of the
+prisoner&rsquo;s shots really hit the doctor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For the cause of science,&rdquo; cried the complacent Pym,
+&ldquo;fortunately not.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet they were fired from a few feet away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; about four feet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close to him
+too?&rdquo; asked Moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is so,&rdquo; said the witness gravely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, &ldquo;that your
+Sub-Warden mentioned that Smith was one of the University&rsquo;s record men
+for shooting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, as to that&mdash;&rdquo; began Pym, after an instant of stillness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A second question,&rdquo; continued Moon, comparatively curtly.
+&ldquo;You said there were other cases of the accused trying to kill people.
+Why have you not got evidence of them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again. &ldquo;In
+those cases,&rdquo; he said precisely, &ldquo;there was no evidence from
+outsiders, as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual
+victims.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you get their evidence?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the case of the actual victims,&rdquo; said Pym, &ldquo;there was
+some difficulty and reluctance, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean,&rdquo; asked Moon, &ldquo;that none of the actual victims
+would appear against the prisoner?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That would be exaggerative,&rdquo; began the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A third question,&rdquo; said Moon, so sharply that every one jumped.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard some shots;
+where&rsquo;s the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot at? The Warden of
+Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We did ask for a statement from him,&rdquo; said Pym a little nervously;
+&ldquo;but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it out of
+deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science have been
+great.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moon leaned forward. &ldquo;You mean, I suppose,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that
+his statement was favourable to the prisoner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It might be understood so,&rdquo; replied the American doctor;
+&ldquo;but, really, it was difficult to understand at all. In fact, we sent it
+back to him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of
+Brakespeare.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I only ask,&rdquo; said Michael quietly, &ldquo;because we have. To
+conclude my case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood, to read a statement of
+the true story&mdash;a statement attested as true by the signature of the
+Warden himself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though he looked
+somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did, the spectators were
+surprised to feel that his presence was, upon the whole, more efficient and
+sufficing than his leader&rsquo;s. He was, in truth, one of those modest men
+who cannot speak until they are told to speak; and then can speak well. Moon
+was entirely the opposite. His own impudences amused him in private, but they
+slightly embarrassed him in public; he felt a fool while he was speaking,
+whereas Inglewood felt a fool only because he could not speak. The moment he
+had anything to say he could speak; and the moment he could speak, speaking
+seemed quite natural. Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael
+Moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As my colleague has just explained,&rdquo; said Inglewood, &ldquo;there
+are two enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence. The first is a
+plain physical fact. By the admission of everybody, by the very evidence
+adduced by the prosecution, it is clear that the accused was celebrated as a
+specially good shot. Yet on both the occasions complained of he shot from a
+distance of four or five feet, and shot at him four or five times, and never
+hit him once. That is the first startling circumstance on which we base our
+argument. The second, as my colleague has urged, is the curious fact that we
+cannot find a single victim of these alleged outrages to speak for himself.
+Subordinates speak for him. Porters climb up ladders to him. But he himself is
+silent. Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain on the spot both the riddle
+of the shots and the riddle of the silence. I will first of all read the
+covering letter in which the true account of the Cambridge incident is
+contained, and then that document itself. When you have heard both, there will
+be no doubt about your decision. The covering letter runs as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;The following is a very exact and even vivid account of
+the incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College. We, the undersigned,
+do not see any particular reason why we should refer it to any isolated
+authorship. The truth is, it has been a composite production; and we have even
+had some difference of opinion about the adjectives. But every word of it is
+true.&mdash;We are, yours faithfully,
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+&ldquo;Wilfred Emerson Eames,<br/>
+&ldquo;Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.<br/>
+&ldquo;Innocent Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The enclosed statement,&rdquo; continued Inglewood, &ldquo;runs as
+follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river, that it
+has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched with all sorts of bridges and
+semi-detached buildings. The river splits itself into several small streams and
+canals, so that in one or two corners the place has almost the look of Venice.
+It was so especially in the case with which we are concerned, in which a few
+flying buttresses or airy ribs of stone sprang across a strip of water to
+connect Brakespeare College with the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not seem flat
+when one is thus in the midst of the colleges. For in these flat fens there are
+always wandering lakes and lingering rivers of water. And these always change
+what might have been a scheme of horizontal lines into a scheme of vertical
+lines. Wherever there is water the height of high buildings is doubled, and a
+British brick house becomes a Babylonian tower. In that shining unshaken
+surface the houses hang head downwards exactly to their highest or lowest
+chimney. The coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far below the world
+as its original appears above it. Every scrap of water is not only a window but
+a skylight. Earth splits under men&rsquo;s feet into precipitous aerial
+perspectives, into which a bird could as easily wing its way as&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest. The documents he had put in evidence had been
+confined to cold affirmation of fact. The defence, in a general way, had an
+indubitable right to put their case in their own way, but all this landscape
+gardening seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the business.
+&ldquo;Will the leader of the defence tell me,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;how it
+can possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor&rsquo;l-coloured, or that a
+bird could have winged itself anywhere?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Michael, lifting himself lazily;
+&ldquo;you see, you don&rsquo;t know yet what our defence is. Till you know
+that, don&rsquo;t you see, anything may be relevant. Why, suppose,&rdquo; he
+said suddenly, as if an idea had struck him, &ldquo;suppose we wanted to prove
+the old Warden colour-blind. Suppose he was shot by a black man with white
+hair, when he thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair! To
+ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-coloured might be of the
+most massive importance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared, and continued
+with the same fluency: &ldquo;Or suppose we wanted to maintain that the Warden
+committed suicide&mdash;that he just got Smith to hold the pistol as
+Brutus&rsquo;s slave held the sword. Why, it would make all the difference
+whether the Warden could see himself plain in still water. Still water has made
+hundreds of suicides: one sees oneself so very&mdash;well, so very
+plain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you, perhaps,&rdquo; inquired Pym with austere irony, &ldquo;maintain
+that your client was a bird of some sort&mdash;say, a flamingo?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the matter of his being a flamingo,&rdquo; said Moon with sudden
+severity, &ldquo;my client reserves his defence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat and
+Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors. For a
+mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one. In the highest
+sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best.
+Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own thought
+double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to see his own
+thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This duplication of
+mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing of human philosophy.
+There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads
+are better than one. But they ought both to grow on the same body.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know it&rsquo;s a little transcendental at first,&rdquo; interposed
+Inglewood, beaming round with a broad apology, &ldquo;but you see this document
+was written in collaboration by a don and a&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drunkard, eh?&rdquo; suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I rather think,&rdquo; proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled and
+critical air, &ldquo;that this part was written by the don. I merely warn the
+Court that the statement, though indubitably accurate, bears here and there the
+trace of coming from two authors.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In that case,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing, &ldquo;I
+cannot agree with them that two heads are better than one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred problem
+so often discussed at committees for University Reform: the question of whether
+dons see double because they are drunk, or get drunk because they see double.
+It is enough for them (the undersigned persons) if they are able to pursue
+their own peculiar and profitable theme&mdash;which is puddles. What (the
+undersigned persons ask themselves) is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and
+is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of
+dirty water spread very thin on mud. The two great historic universities of
+England have all this large and level and reflective brilliance. Nevertheless,
+or, rather, on the other hand, they are puddles&mdash;puddles, puddles,
+puddles, puddles. The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis
+inseparable from strong conviction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some present, and
+continued with eminent cheerfulness:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of the
+undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes of canal and the
+glittering rainy gutters into which the water broke up round the back of
+Brakespeare College. Had these thoughts crossed his mind he would have been
+much happier than he was. Unfortunately he did not know that his puzzles were
+puddles. He did not know that the academic mind reflects infinity and is full
+of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still. In his
+case, therefore, there was something solemn, and even evil about the infinity
+implied. It was half-way through a starry night of bewildering brilliancy;
+stars were both above and below. To young Smith&rsquo;s sullen fancy the skies
+below seemed even hollower than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if
+he counted the stars he would find one too many in the pool.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping on
+the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower. For to him, and nearly
+all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things. Though they
+glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous and ugly secret;
+they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse of the iron wheels
+and pulleys behind the scenes. For the young men of that sad time thought that
+the god always comes from the machine. They did not know that in reality the
+machine only comes from the god. In short, they were all pessimists, and
+starlight was atrocious to them&mdash; atrocious because it was true. All their
+universe was black with white spots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the
+glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college. The only light other
+than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the upper part of the
+building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and
+received his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night. Indeed, it
+was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound. Smith had been at Dr.
+Eames&rsquo;s lecture for the first half of the morning, and at pistol practice
+and fencing in a saloon for the second half. He had been sculling madly for the
+first half of the afternoon and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the
+second half. He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a
+debating club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was
+melancholy still. Then, as he was going home to his diggings he remembered the
+eccentricity of his friend and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved
+desperately to turn in to that gentleman&rsquo;s private house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in
+philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could
+hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any
+of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British Constitution.
+The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student of
+Schopenhauer. Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond
+pointed beard, not so very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of
+mere years, but older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a
+European reputation and a bald head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,&rsquo; said
+Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself
+small, &lsquo;because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really
+too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think
+otherwise&mdash;bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing
+you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;All thinkers,&rsquo; said Eames, &lsquo;are pessimist
+thinkers.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After a patch of pause, not the first&mdash;for this depressing
+conversation had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and
+silence&mdash; the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy:
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s all a question of wrong calculation. The moth flies into the
+candle because he doesn&rsquo;t happen to know that the game is not worth the
+candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam
+into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they
+want to enjoy gin&mdash;because they are too stupid to see that they are paying
+too big a price for it. That they never find happiness&mdash;that they
+don&rsquo;t even know how to look for it&mdash;is proved by the paralyzing
+clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours are
+cries of pain. Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the
+river. There&rsquo;s one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at
+it!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Of course,&rsquo; he went on dreamily, &lsquo;one or two men see
+the sober fact a long way off&mdash;they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs
+mostly try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to
+destroy themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man that
+wanders about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the wrong door and
+come into the right place. He sees things at the right angle. But the common
+world&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, hang the common world!&rsquo; said the sullen Smith, letting
+his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Let&rsquo;s give it a bad name first,&rsquo; said the Professor
+calmly, &lsquo;and then hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably
+struggle for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it. So
+an omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why doesn&rsquo;t he strike us dead?&rsquo; asked the
+undergraduate abstractedly, plunging his hands into his pockets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;He is dead himself,&rsquo; said the philosopher; &lsquo;that is
+where he is really enviable.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;To any one who thinks,&rsquo; proceeded Eames, &lsquo;the
+pleasures of life, trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a
+torture chamber. We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the...
+What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his
+shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed
+by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top.
+It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants during which the
+reason is stunned he did not even know what it was. Then he saw behind it the
+chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a revolver, and behind that the flushed
+and rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild
+than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I&rsquo;ll help you out of your hole, old man,&rsquo; said Smith,
+with rough tenderness. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll put the puppy out of his pain.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. &lsquo;Do you mean to kill
+me?&rsquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s not a thing I&rsquo;d do for every one,&rsquo; said
+Smith with emotion; &lsquo;but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night,
+somehow. I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Put that thing down,&rsquo; shouted the Warden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;ll soon be over, you know,&rsquo; said Smith with the
+air of a sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and
+balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a compassionate
+expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of early
+daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions calculated to
+swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real
+traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames&rsquo;s balcony there ran
+out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray
+beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains. With an
+ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as
+the only possible mode of escape from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still
+in his academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further
+chances of flight. The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that
+impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little lakes round
+Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and chimneys pendent in the
+pools, they felt alone in space. They felt as if they were looking over the
+edge from the North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Hang the world, we said,&rsquo; observed Smith, &lsquo;and the
+world is hanged. &ldquo;He has hanged the world upon nothing,&rdquo; says the
+Bible. Do you like being hanged upon nothing? I&rsquo;m going to be hanged upon
+something myself. I&rsquo;m going to swing for you... Dear, tender old
+phrase,&rsquo; he murmured; &lsquo;never true till this moment. I am going to
+swing for you. For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express
+desire.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Help!&rsquo; cried the Warden of Brakespeare College;
+&lsquo;help!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The puppy struggles,&rsquo; said the undergraduate, with an eye
+of pity, &lsquo;the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser
+and kinder than he,&rsquo; and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the
+upper part of Eames&rsquo;s bald head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Smith,&rsquo; said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort
+of ghastly lucidity, &lsquo;I shall go mad.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And so look at things from the right angle,&rsquo; observed
+Smith, sighing gently. &lsquo;Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a
+drug. The only cure is an operation&mdash;an operation that is always
+successful: death.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything, with
+the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds sailing across the
+sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink. All over the little academic town the
+tops of different buildings took on different tints: here the sun would pick
+out the green enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here
+the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of
+some old and steep church roof. All these coloured crests seemed to have
+something oddly individual and significant about them, like crests of famous
+knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye,
+especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning
+and accepted it as his last. Through a narrow chink between a black timber
+tavern and a big gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the
+sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as though hypnotized; and suddenly the
+clock began to strike, as if in personal reply. As if at a signal, clock after
+clock took up the cry: all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The
+birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college. The sun rose,
+gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the
+shallow waters beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for the
+thirst of the gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his
+crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa with
+the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night. He wondered for the
+first time what people lived in them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might have
+called to a student to shut a door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Let me come off this place,&rsquo; he cried; &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t
+bear it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I rather doubt if it will bear you,&rsquo; said Smith critically;
+&lsquo;but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you
+back into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the
+metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get back to
+life?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I&rsquo;d give anything to get back,&rsquo; replied the unhappy
+professor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Give anything!&rsquo; cried Smith; &lsquo;then, blast your
+impudence, give us a song!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;What song do you mean?&rsquo; demanded the exasperated Eames;
+&lsquo;what song?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,&rsquo; answered the
+other gravely. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll let you off if you&rsquo;ll repeat after me
+the words&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I thank the goodness and the grace<br/>
+    That on my birth have smiled.<br/>
+And perched me on this curious place,<br/>
+    A happy English child.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly told
+him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this proceeding with
+the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr. Eames held them up, very
+stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird alighting on his stone seat took
+no more notice of him than of a comic statue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You are now engaged in public worship,&rsquo; remarked Smith
+severely, &lsquo;and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the
+very ducks on the pond.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
+readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Not forgetting the drakes,&rsquo; said Smith sternly. (Eames
+weakly conceded the drakes.) &lsquo;Not forgetting anything, please. You shall
+thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas and vulgar people and puddles
+and pots and pans and sticks and rags and bones and spotted blinds.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;All right, all right,&rsquo; repeated the victim in despair;
+&lsquo;sticks and rags and bones and blinds.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Spotted blinds, I think we said,&rsquo; remarked Smith with a
+rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a long
+metallic finger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Spotted blinds,&rsquo; said Emerson Eames faintly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You can&rsquo;t say fairer than that,&rsquo; admitted the younger
+man, &lsquo;and now I&rsquo;ll just tell you this to wind up with. If you
+really were what you profess to be, I don&rsquo;t see that it would matter to
+snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff neck and dashed out all your
+drivelling devil-worshipping brains. But in strict biographical fact you are a
+very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you like a
+brother. I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your head so as not
+to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear), and then we will go in
+and have some breakfast.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor endured with
+singular firmness, and then said, &lsquo;But don&rsquo;t fire them all
+off.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why not&rsquo; asked the other buoyantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Keep them,&rsquo; asked his companion, &lsquo;for the next man
+you meet who talks as we were talking.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic
+terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek with which
+he summoned the porter and the ladder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from the
+ladder, and some little time longer to disentangle himself from the Sub-Warden.
+But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively, he rejoined his companion in the
+late extraordinary scene. He was astonished to find the gigantic Smith heavily
+shaken, and sitting with his shaggy head on his hands. When addressed, he
+lifted a very pale face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why, what is the matter?&rsquo; asked Eames, whose own nerves had
+by this time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I must ask your indulgence,&rsquo; said Smith, rather brokenly.
+&lsquo;I must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from
+death.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;YOU have had an escape from death?&rsquo; repeated the Professor
+in not unpardonable irritation. &lsquo;Well, of all the cheek&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t you understand, don&rsquo;t you
+understand?&rsquo; cried the pale young man impatiently. &lsquo;I had to do it,
+Eames; I had to prove you wrong or die. When a man&rsquo;s young, he nearly
+always has some one whom he thinks the top-water mark of the mind of man&mdash;
+some one who knows all about it, if anybody knows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority, and not as
+the scribes. Nobody could comfort me if YOU said there was no comfort. If you
+really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to
+see. Don&rsquo;t you see that I HAD to prove you didn&rsquo;t really mean
+it?&mdash; or else drown myself in the canal.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; said Eames hesitatingly, &lsquo;I think perhaps you
+confuse&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t tell me that!&rsquo; cried Smith with the sudden
+clairvoyance of mental pain; &lsquo;don&rsquo;t tell me I confuse enjoyment of
+existence with the Will to Live! That&rsquo;s German, and German is High Dutch,
+and High Dutch is Double Dutch. The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you
+dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not &ldquo;the Will to
+Live.&rdquo; What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the
+world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know
+it, because I knew it at the same minute. I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and
+the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses. It was THOSE things you
+hated leaving, not Life, whatever that is. Eames, we&rsquo;ve been to the brink
+of death together; won&rsquo;t you admit I&rsquo;m right?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said Eames very slowly, &lsquo;I think you are right.
+You shall have a First!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Right!&rsquo; cried Smith, springing up reanimated.
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ve passed with honours, and now let me go and see about being
+sent down.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You needn&rsquo;t be sent down,&rsquo; said Eames with the quiet
+confidence of twelve years of intrigue. &lsquo;Everything with us comes from
+the man on top to the people just round him: I am the man on top, and I shall
+tell the people round me the truth.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window, but he spoke
+with equal firmness. &lsquo;I must be sent down,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;and the
+people must not be told the truth.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And why not&rsquo; asked the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Because I mean to follow your advice,&rsquo; answered the massive
+youth, &lsquo;I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful
+state you and I were in last night&mdash;I wish we could even plead
+drunkenness. I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists&mdash;pills for pale
+people. And in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful
+surprise&mdash; to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as
+the sunrise; not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be
+recalled any more than the dying breeze. I don&rsquo;t want people to
+anticipate me as a well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come
+virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a
+pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill
+him&mdash;only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the
+skeleton at the feast.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You can scarcely be called a skeleton,&rsquo; said Dr. Eames,
+smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;That comes of being so much at the feast,&rsquo; answered the
+massive youth. &lsquo;No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining
+out. But that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a kind of
+glimpse of the meaning of death and all that&mdash;the skull and cross-bones,
+the <i>memento mori</i>. It isn&rsquo;t only meant to remind us of a future
+life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak spirits we should
+grow old in eternity if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut
+immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into
+fingers.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality, &lsquo;But I
+know something now, Eames. I knew it when I saw the clouds turn pink.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;What do you mean?&rsquo; asked Eames. &lsquo;What did you
+know?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He gripped Dr. Eames&rsquo;s hand and groped his way somewhat unsteadily
+to the door. Before he had vanished through it he had added, &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+very dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second that he
+understands death.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his late
+assailant had left. Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella, and went for a
+brisk if rotatory walk. Several times, however, he stood outside the villa with
+the spotted blinds, studying them intently with his head slightly on one side.
+Some took him for a lunatic and some for an intending purchaser. He is not yet
+sure that the two characters would be widely different.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is, in the
+opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters. Each of the two
+actors is described as he appeared to the other. But the undersigned persons
+absolutely guarantee the exactitude of the story; and if their version of the
+thing be questioned, they, the undersigned persons, would deucedly well like to
+know who does know about it if they don&rsquo;t.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The undersigned persons will now adjourn to &lsquo;The Spotted
+Dog&rsquo; for beer. Farewell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;(Signed) James Emerson Eames, &ldquo;Warden of Brakespeare College,
+Cambridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Innocent Smith.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"></a>
+Chapter II<br/>
+The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge</h3>
+
+<p>
+Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders of the
+prosecution, who examined it with their heads together. Both the Jew and the
+American were of sensitive and excitable stocks, and they revealed by the
+jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the yellow that nothing could be
+done in the way of denial of the document. The letter from the Warden was as
+authentic as the letter from the Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in
+dignity and social tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very few words,&rdquo; said Inglewood, &ldquo;are required to conclude
+our case in this matter. Surely it is now plain that our client carried his
+pistol about with the eccentric but innocent purpose of giving a wholesome
+scare to those whom he regarded as blasphemers. In each case the scare was so
+wholesome that the victim himself has dated from it as from a new birth. Smith,
+so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor&mdash; he walks the world
+curing frenzies and not distributing them. That is the answer to the two
+unanswerable questions which I put to the prosecutors. That is why they dared
+not produce a line by any one who had actually confronted the pistol. All who
+had actually confronted the pistol confessed that they had profited by it. That
+was why Smith, though a good shot, never hit anybody. He never hit anybody
+because he was a good shot. His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of
+blood. This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts and of all
+the other facts. No one can possibly explain the Warden&rsquo;s conduct except
+by believing the Warden&rsquo;s story. Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of
+ingenious theories, could find no other theory to cover the case.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual
+personality,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; &ldquo;the science of
+criminology is in its infancy, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Infancy!&rdquo; cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a
+gesture of enlightenment; &ldquo;why, that explains it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I repeat,&rdquo; proceeded Inglewood, &ldquo;that neither Dr. Pym nor
+any one else can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden&rsquo;s
+signature, for the shots missed and the witnesses missing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return of a cock-fighting
+coolness. &ldquo;The defence,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;omits a coldly colossal
+fact. They say we produce none of the actual victims. Wal, here is one
+victim&mdash;England&rsquo;s celebrated and stricken Warner. I reckon he is
+pretty well produced. And they suggest that all the outrages were followed by
+reconciliation. Wal, there&rsquo;s no flies on England&rsquo;s Warner; and he
+isn&rsquo;t reconciliated much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My learned friend,&rdquo; said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet,
+&ldquo;must remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy.
+Dr. Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially difficult to startle
+into any recognition of the glory of God. We admit that our client, in this one
+instance, failed, and that the operation was not successful. But I am empowered
+to offer, on behalf of my client, a proposal for operating on Dr. Warner again,
+at his earliest convenience, and without further fees.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Ang it all, Michael,&rdquo; cried Gould, quite serious for the
+first time in his life, &ldquo;you might give us a bit of bally sense for a
+chinge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?&rdquo;
+asked Moon sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The creature,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner superciliously, &ldquo;asked me,
+with characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you answered, with characteristic swank,&rdquo; cried Moon, shooting
+out a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith,
+&ldquo;that you didn&rsquo;t keep your birthday.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something like that,&rdquo; assented the doctor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;he asked you why not, and you said
+it was because you didn&rsquo;t see that birth was anything to rejoice over.
+Agreed? Now is there any one who doubts that our tale is true?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, &ldquo;Pax
+populi vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of God. Or in
+Dr. Pym&rsquo;s more civilized language, it is up to him to open the next
+charge. On this we claim an acquittal.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an unprecedented
+time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the air. It almost seemed
+as if he had been &ldquo;struck so,&rdquo; as the nurses say; and in the
+deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the strain with some
+remark. For the last half-hour or so the eminent criminologist had been
+explaining that science took the same view of offences against property as it
+did of offences against life. &ldquo;Most murder,&rdquo; he had said, &ldquo;is
+a variation of homicidal mania, and in the same way most theft is a version of
+kleptomania. I cannot entertain any doubt that my learned friends opposite
+adequately con-ceive how this must involve a scheme of punishment more
+tol&rsquo;rant and humane than the cruel methods of ancient codes. They will
+doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning, so
+thought-arresting, so&mdash;&rdquo; It was here that he paused and indulged in
+the delicate gesture to which allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it
+no longer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he said impatiently, &ldquo;we admit the chasm. The old
+cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten years. The
+tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for
+ever. We pass the chasm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances of verbal
+fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only of his opponent&rsquo;s
+interruption, but even of his own pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So stock-improving,&rdquo; continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, &ldquo;so fraught
+with real high hopes of the future. Science therefore regards thieves, in the
+abstract, just as it regards murderers. It regards them not as sinners to be
+punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to be detained and cared
+for,&rdquo; (his first two digits closed again as he hesitated)&mdash;&ldquo;in
+short, for the required period. But there is something special in the case we
+investigate here. Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg pardon,&rdquo; said Michael; &ldquo;I did not ask just now
+because, to tell the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly
+vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers of
+scentless and delicate dust. But now that things are moving a little more,
+there is something I should really like to know. I have hung on Dr. Pym&rsquo;s
+lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call rapture, but I have
+so far been unable to form any conjecture about what the accused, in the
+present instance, is supposed to have been and gone and done.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If Mr. Moon will have patience,&rdquo; said Pym with dignity, &ldquo;he
+will find that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.
+Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction to certain
+defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man than Harris) that
+this is the ultimate explanation of the strict specialism and vurry narrow
+professional outlook of most criminals. One will have an irresistible physical
+impulsion towards pearl sleeve-links, while he passes over the most elegant and
+celebrated diamond sleeve-links, placed about in the most conspicuous
+locations. Another will impede his flight with no less than forty-seven
+buttoned boots, while elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic.
+The specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than of
+any brightness of business habits; but there is one kind of depredator to whom
+this principle is at first sight hard to apply. I allude to our fellow-citizen
+the housebreaker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It has been maintained by some of our boldest young truth-seekers, that
+the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden wall could hardly be caught and
+hypnotized by a fork that is insulated in a locked box under the butler&rsquo;s
+bed. They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science on this point. They
+declare that diamond links are not left about in conspicuous locations in the
+haunts of the lower classes, as they were in the great test experiment of
+Calypso College. We hope this experiment here will be an answer to that young
+ringing challenge, and will bring the burglar once more into line and union
+with his fellow criminals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment for five
+minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in explosive
+enlightenment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I see!&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;you mean that Smith is a
+burglar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought I made it quite ad&rsquo;quately lucid,&rdquo; said Mr. Pym,
+folding up his eyelids. It was typical of this topsy-turvy private trial that
+all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression on either side, was
+exasperating and unintelligible to the other. Moon could not make head or tail
+of the solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could not make head or tail of the
+gaiety of an old one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,&rdquo;
+continued the American doctor, &ldquo;are cases of burglary. Pursuing the same
+course as in the previous case, we select the indubitable instance from the
+rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron evidence. I will now call on my
+colleague, Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from the earnest,
+unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from the
+earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard well, Sir
+Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the new
+motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists. But
+his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing; indeed, the sense of the
+letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his
+pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when,
+a little later, it was handed across the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident you
+mention, private as it was, should have filtered through our omnivorous
+journals to the mere populace; for the position I have since attained makes me,
+I conceive, a public character, and this was certainly the most extraordinary
+incident in a not uneventful and perhaps not an unimportant career. I am by no
+means without experience in scenes of civil tumult. I have faced many a
+political crisis in the old Primrose League days at Herne Bay, and, before I
+broke with the wilder set, have spent many a night at the Christian Social
+Union. But this other experience was quite inconceivable. I can only describe
+it as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me, as a clergyman, to
+mention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period, a curate at
+Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague, induced me to attend a meeting
+which he described, I must say profanely described, as calculated to promote
+the kingdom of God. I found, on the contrary, that it consisted entirely of men
+in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse and their opinions
+extreme.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest respect and
+friendliness, and I will therefore say little. No one can be more convinced
+than I of the evil of politics in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation
+any advice about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly that they are
+likely to make an erroneous selection. But, while I do not mean to touch at all
+upon political or social problems, I must say that for a clergyman to
+countenance, even in jest, such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues
+as Socialism or Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal of a
+sacred trust. Far be it from me to say a word against the Reverend Raymond
+Percy, the colleague in question. He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some
+apparently fascinating; but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist, wears his
+hair like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person, will never rise in
+his profession, or even obtain the admiration of the good and wise. Nor is it
+for me to utter my personal judgements of the appearance of the people in the
+hall. Yet a glance round the room, revealing ranks of debased and envious
+faces&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Adopting,&rdquo; said Moon explosively, for he was getting
+restive&mdash;&ldquo;adopting the reverend gentleman&rsquo;s favourite figure
+of logic, may I say that while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about
+his intellect, he is a blasted old jackass.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Really!&rdquo; said Dr. Pym; &ldquo;I protest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must keep quiet, Michael,&rdquo; said Inglewood; &ldquo;they have a
+right to read their story.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Chair! Chair! Chair!&rdquo; cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in
+his own; and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all the
+authority of the Court of Beacon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t wake the old lady,&rdquo; said Moon, lowering his voice
+in a moody good-humour. &ldquo;I apologize. I won&rsquo;t interrupt
+again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading of the
+clergyman&rsquo;s letter was already continuing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I will
+say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the audience were Irish, and showed the
+weakness of that impetuous people. When gathered together into gangs and
+conspiracies they seem to lose altogether that lovable good-nature and
+readiness to accept anything one tells them which distinguishes them as
+individuals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly, and sat down
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the speech
+of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level with witticisms about rent and a
+reserve of labour. Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such words
+with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly. Some hours afterward the
+storm broke. I had been addressing the meeting for some time, pointing out the
+lack of thrift in the working classes, their insufficient attendance at evening
+service, their neglect of the Harvest Festival, and of many other things that
+might materially help them to improve their lot. It was, I think, about this
+time that an extraordinary interruption occurred. An enormous, powerful man,
+partly concealed with white plaster, arose in the middle of the hall, and
+offered (in a loud, roaring voice, like a bull&rsquo;s) some observations which
+seemed to be in a foreign language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, descended
+to his level by entering into a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be
+the victor. The meeting began to behave more respectfully for a little; yet
+before I had said twelve sentences more the rush was made for the platform. The
+enormous plasterer, in particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like
+an elephant; and I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally
+large, but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
+This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was shoving them
+back. I don&rsquo;t know what he said, but, what with shouting and shoving and
+such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the wretched people went
+roaring down another passage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story. When he had got
+us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane with a
+very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as follows:
+&lsquo;You&rsquo;re well out of that, sir; now you&rsquo;d better come along
+with me. I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we&rsquo;ve
+all been talking about. Come along!&rsquo; And turning his big back abruptly,
+he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old lamp-post, we scarcely
+knowing what to do but to follow him. He had certainly helped us in a most
+difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I could not treat such a benefactor
+with suspicion without grave grounds. Such also was the view of my Socialistic
+colleague, who (with all his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also.
+In fact, he comes of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house and
+has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family. I cannot but
+refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal advantages with black
+velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation, and certainly&mdash;but I
+digress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post faded
+behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind. The large man in front of
+us looked larger and larger in the haze. He did not turn round, but he said
+with his huge back to us, &lsquo;All that talking&rsquo;s no good; we want a
+little practical Socialism.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I quite agree,&rsquo; said Percy; &lsquo;but I always like to
+understand things in theory before I put them into practice.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, you just leave that to me,&rsquo; said the practical
+Socialist, or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness. &lsquo;I
+have a way with me. I&rsquo;m a Permeator.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed, so I was
+sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey for the present.
+It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane, where we were already
+rather cramped, into a paved passage, at the end of which we passed through a
+wooden gate left open. We then found ourselves, in the increasing darkness and
+vapour, crossing what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden. I
+called out to the enormous person going on in front, but he answered obscurely
+that it was a short cut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion when
+I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading to a higher level
+of road. My thoughtless colleague ran up it so quickly that I could not do
+otherwise than follow as best I could. The path on which I then planted my feet
+was quite unprecedentedly narrow. I had never had to walk along a thoroughfare
+so exiguous. Along one side of it grew what, in the dark and density of air, I
+first took to be some short, strong thicket of shrubs. Then I saw that they
+were not short shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees. I, an English
+gentleman and clergyman of the Church of England&mdash;I was walking along the
+top of a garden wall like a tom cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps, and let
+loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I could all the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s a right-of-way,&rsquo; declared my indefensible
+informant. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s closed to traffic once in a hundred years.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!&rsquo; I called out; &lsquo;you are not
+going on with this blackguard?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why, I think so,&rsquo; answered my unhappy colleague flippantly.
+&lsquo;I think you and I are bigger blackguards than he is, whatever he
+is.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I am a burglar,&rsquo; explained the big creature quite calmly.
+&lsquo;I am a member of the Fabian Society. I take back the wealth stolen by
+the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform fitted
+to the special occasion&mdash;here a little and there a little. Do you see that
+fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof? I&rsquo;m permeating that one
+to-night.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Whether this is a crime or a joke,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;I
+desire to be quit of it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The ladder is just behind you,&rsquo; answered the creature with
+horrible courtesy; &lsquo;and, before you go, do let me give you my
+card.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I should
+have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind would have gravely
+affected my equilibrium upon the wall. As it was, in the wildness of the
+moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and
+ladder, landed in the respectable streets once more. Not before, however, I had
+seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts&mdash; that the
+burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards the chimneys, and that Raymond
+Percy (a priest of God and, what was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after
+him. I have never seen either of them since that day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my connection
+with the wild set. I am far from saying that every member of the Christian
+Social Union must necessarily be a burglar. I have no right to bring any such
+charge. But it gave me a hint of what such courses may lead to in many cases;
+and I saw them no more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a Mr.
+Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question. When I got home that
+night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed there under the name of
+Innocent Smith.&mdash;Yours faithfully,
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+&ldquo;John Clement Hawkins.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper. He knew that the
+prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that Moses Gould (for
+one) could no more write like a canon than he could read like one. After
+handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary charge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We wish,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;to give all reasonable facilities
+to the prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court. The
+latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all those points of
+theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they are made. Perjury is a
+variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing instead of another. Forgery
+is a kind of writer&rsquo;s cramp, forcing a man to write his uncle&rsquo;s
+name instead of his own. Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of
+sea-sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact
+which we deny. Innocent Smith never did commit burglary at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement,
+and ask the prosecution two or three questions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the first place,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;have you the date of
+Canon Hawkins&rsquo;s last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and
+roofs?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ho, yus!&rdquo; called out Gould smartly. &ldquo;November thirteen,
+eighteen ninety-one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;identified the houses in Hoxton
+up which they climbed?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,&rdquo; answered
+Gould with the same clockwork readiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, &ldquo;was there
+any burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There may well have been,&rdquo; said the doctor primly, after a pause,
+&ldquo;an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Another question,&rdquo; proceeded Michael. &ldquo;Canon Hawkins, in his
+blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment. Why don&rsquo;t
+you produce the evidence of the other clergyman, who actually followed the
+burglar and presumably was present at the crime?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table, as he did when
+he was specially confident of the clearness of his reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We have entirely failed,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to track the other
+clergyman, who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had seen
+him as-cending the gutters and the leads. I am fully aware that this may strike
+many as sing&rsquo;lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will appear pretty
+natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the
+canon&rsquo;s evidence, a minister of eccentric ways. His con-nection with
+England&rsquo;s proudest and fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the
+society of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith is, by
+general agreement, a man of irr&rsquo;sistible fascination. I entertain no
+doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into the crime and forced him to hide
+his head in the real crim&rsquo;nal class. That would fully account for his
+non-appearance, and the failure of all attempts to trace him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is impossible, then, to trace him?&rdquo; asked Moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Impossible,&rdquo; repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are sure it&rsquo;s impossible?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh dry up, Michael,&rdquo; cried Gould, irritably. &ldquo;We&rsquo;d
+&rsquo;ave found &rsquo;im if we could, for you bet &rsquo;e saw the burglary.
+Don&rsquo;t YOU start looking for &rsquo;im. Look for your own &rsquo;ead in
+the dustbin. You&rsquo;ll find that&mdash;after a bit,&rdquo; and his voice
+died away in grumbling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Arthur,&rdquo; directed Michael Moon, sitting down, &ldquo;kindly read
+Mr. Raymond Percy&rsquo;s letter to the court.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much as
+possible,&rdquo; began Inglewood, &ldquo;I will not read the first part of the
+letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution to admit the account
+given by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as facts are concerned,
+that given by the first clergyman. We concede, then, the canon&rsquo;s story so
+far as it goes. This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also
+convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy&rsquo;s letter, then, at the point
+when all three men were standing on the garden wall:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind not to
+waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud of copper fog on the
+houses and gardens round. My decision was violent and simple; yet the thoughts
+that led up to it were so complicated and contradictory that I could not
+retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would
+have given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road. That God
+should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that&mdash; rose against
+me like a towering blasphemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and
+artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern; discipline
+was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time; I liked eating fish
+on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was made for men who like meat.
+Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had fasted for five hundred years; men
+who had to gnaw fish because they could not get meat&mdash;and fish-bones when
+they could not get fish. As too many British officers treat the army as a
+review, so I had treated the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant.
+Hoxton cures that. Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church
+Militant had not been a pageant, but a riot&mdash;and a suppressed riot. There,
+still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous
+promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if
+I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative
+without being also an atheist&mdash; and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil
+could want to conserve Hoxton.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton
+men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should have
+rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned in the
+market-place, I should still have had that patience that all good Christians
+have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there is no priestcraft
+about Hawkins&mdash;nor any other kind of craft. He is as perfectly incapable
+of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a
+plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman; that is his complaint. He does not impose
+his creed, but simply his class. He never said a word of religion in the whole
+of his damnable address. He simply said all the things his brother, the major,
+would have said. A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that
+this brother is a major.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body and
+convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body and soul together,
+the stampede against our platform began. I took part in his undeserved rescue,
+I followed his obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we stood together on
+the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog. Then I looked at the
+curate and at the burglar, and decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the
+burglar was the better man of the two. The burglar seemed quite as kind and
+human as the curate was&mdash; and he was also brave and self-reliant, which
+the curate was not. I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong
+to it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class, for I had
+lived with it a long time. Many old texts about the despised and persecuted
+came back to my mind, and I thought that the saints might well be hidden in the
+criminal class. About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was
+crawling up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
+leaping in front of me like a gorilla.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This upward scramble was short, and we soon found ourselves tramping
+along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big thoroughfares, with
+chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts.
+The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat swollen and morbid
+anger under which my brain and body laboured. The sky and all those things that
+are commonly clear seemed overpowered by sinister spirits. Tall spectres with
+turbans of vapour seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both.
+I thought dimly of illustrations to the &lsquo;Arabian Nights&rsquo; on brown
+paper with rich but sombre tints, showing genii gathering round the Seal of
+Solomon. By the way, what was the Seal of Solomon? Nothing to do with
+sealing-wax really, I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as
+being of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour, poured out
+of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured look
+of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak. But the scene
+grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of the housetops and
+saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great cities creates the
+strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a forest of chimney-pots. And there
+stood in every chimney-pot, as if it were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall
+tree of coloured vapour. The colours of the smoke were various; for some
+chimneys were from firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere
+rubbish heaps. And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed
+unnatural, like fumes from a witch&rsquo;s pot. It was as if the shameful and
+ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate spurt
+of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed. Here, aglow from
+underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of
+sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray, like the long hair of
+witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another place the smoke was of an awful
+opaque ivory yellow, such as might be the disembodiment of one of their old,
+leprous waxen images. But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister,
+sulphurous green, as clear and crooked as Arabic&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the &rsquo;bus. He was
+understood to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by leaving
+out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed that she was sure
+it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a
+blue, and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood then resumed the reading of
+the document.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern city
+that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked and vain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all colours,
+but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our
+strength that put a rich refuse in the sky. These were the rivers of our vanity
+pouring into the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and
+looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it as a
+sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind. Only our worst things
+were going to heaven. Only our criminals could still ascend like angels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one of
+the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals like lamp-posts along
+that uplifted and aerial highway. He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the
+moment I thought he was merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble
+along the terrace. So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on
+either side, and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
+them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long, consecutive, and
+genteel rows of houses which are still to be found lifting their heads above
+poorer districts, the remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative
+builders. Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted only by
+such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old emptied palaces of
+Italy. Indeed, some little time later, when the fog had lifted a little, I
+discovered that we were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
+below us into one flat square or wide street below another, like a giant
+stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric building of London, and
+looking like the last ledges of the land. But a cloud sealed the giant stairway
+as yet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted by
+something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky. Instead of my burglar
+lifting his hand from the chimney he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more
+heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an
+inkstand. I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt
+sure he had arranged his criminal approach long before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
+of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden sense of
+comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what connected this abrupt bit
+of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies. Then I remembered
+the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades
+of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of
+unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses were of lath and paint and
+pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and
+pantaloons. The law-breaking of my companion seemed not only seriously
+excusable, but even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous
+preposterous people with their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their
+chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown
+from getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was a
+serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous
+and vapourous visions, the heaven of a higher levity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced
+chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower, for, tall as he
+was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible. Something again far
+off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way of invading the houses of men.
+I thought of little chimney-sweeps, and &lsquo;The Water Babies;&rsquo; but I
+decided that it was not that. Then I remembered what it was that made me
+connect such topsy-turvy trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of
+crime. Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black
+hole; but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two afterwards,
+the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the fog,
+and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me to
+follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends. I
+jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking of
+Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In every well-appointed gentleman&rsquo;s house, I reflected, there was
+the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen; but
+there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is, so to speak, the
+underground passage between earth and heaven. By this starry tunnel Santa Claus
+manages&mdash;like the skylark&mdash; to be true to the kindred points of
+heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed
+lack of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used. But Santa
+Claus&rsquo;s door was really the front door: it was the door fronting the
+universe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below
+the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet
+larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I
+suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps, as
+my companion had retraced them from the beginning of the garden wall. The name
+of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses. I remembered why
+Santa Claus came, and why he was welcome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all their horror of
+offences against property. I had heard all the regular denunciations of
+robbery, both right and wrong; I had read the Ten Commandments in church a
+thousand times. And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way down a
+ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar, I saw suddenly for the
+first time that theft, after all, is really wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strangely soft
+footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft, till he knelt
+down on a part of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts, lifted a
+sort of trapdoor. This released a light from below, and we found ourselves
+looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room, of the sort that in large houses
+often leads out of a bedroom, and is an adjunct to it. Light thus breaking from
+beneath our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just
+lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless been long disused
+until the advent of my enterprising friend. But I did not look at this long,
+for the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost unnatural
+attractiveness. To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle, by so
+forgotten a door, was an epoch in one&rsquo;s psychology. It was like having
+found a fourth dimension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly and
+soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him; though, for lack of
+practice in crime, I was by no means soundless. Before the echo of my boots had
+died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door, half opened it, and
+stood looking down the staircase and listening. Then, leaving the door still
+half open, he came back into the middle of the room, and ran his roving blue
+eye round its furniture and ornament. The room was comfortably lined with books
+in that rich and human way that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and
+full, but slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the
+purposes of reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that look like
+red goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors
+in its lower part. There were three windows, high but narrow. After another
+glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged
+inside. He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely handsome
+cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like port. Somehow the sight of the
+thief returning with this ridiculous little luxury in his hand woke within me
+once more all the revelation and revulsion I had felt above.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t do it!&rsquo; I cried quite incoherently,
+&lsquo;Santa Claus&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Ah,&rsquo; said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table
+and stood looking at me, &lsquo;you&rsquo;ve thought about that, too.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I can&rsquo;t express a millionth part of what I&rsquo;ve thought
+of,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;but it&rsquo;s something like this... oh,
+can&rsquo;t you see it? Why are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though he
+comes like a thief in the night? He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost
+treachery&mdash;because there are more toys where he has been. What should we
+feel if there were less? Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that
+should take away the children&rsquo;s balls and dolls while they slept? Could a
+Greek tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening?
+Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer&mdash;can you think of anything so base
+as a toy-stealer?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and
+laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective
+eyes fixed on my face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Man!&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;all stealing is toy-stealing.
+That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of
+men should be really respected because of their worthlessness. I know
+Naboth&rsquo;s vineyard is as painted as Noah&rsquo;s Ark. I know
+Nathan&rsquo;s ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand. That is
+why I could not take them away. I did not mind so much, as long as I thought of
+men&rsquo;s things as their valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their
+vanities.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After a moment I added abruptly, &lsquo;Only saints and sages ought to
+be robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly
+people of the things that are their poor little pride.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both, and
+lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t do it!&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;It might be the last
+bottle of some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite
+proud of it. Don&rsquo;t you see there&rsquo;s something sacred in the
+silliness of such things?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s not the last bottle,&rsquo; answered my criminal
+calmly; &lsquo;there&rsquo;s plenty more in the cellar.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You know the house, then?&rsquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Too well,&rsquo; he answered, with a sadness so strange as to
+have something eerie about it. &lsquo;I am always trying to forget what I
+know&mdash; and to find what I don&rsquo;t know.&rsquo; He drained his glass.
+&lsquo;Besides,&rsquo; he added, &lsquo;it will do him good.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;What will do him good?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The wine I&rsquo;m drinking,&rsquo; said the strange person.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Does he drink too much, then?&rsquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;No,&rsquo; he answered, &lsquo;not unless I do.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Do you mean,&rsquo; I demanded, &lsquo;that the owner of this
+house approves of all you do?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;God forbid,&rsquo; he answered; &lsquo;but he has to do the
+same.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows unreasonably
+increased a sense of riddle, and even terror, about this tall, narrow house we
+had entered out of the sky. I had once more the notion about the gigantic
+genii&mdash; I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds and
+yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our little lamp-lit room as
+at a lighted stage of marionettes. My companion went on playing with the pistol
+in front of him, and talking with the same rather creepy confidentialness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I am always trying to find him&mdash;to catch him unawares. I
+come in through skylights and trapdoors to find him; but whenever I find
+him&mdash;he is doing what I am doing.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. &lsquo;There is some one
+coming,&rsquo; I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it. Not from
+the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber (which seemed
+somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were coming nearer. I am quite
+unable to say what mystery, or monster, or double, I expected to see when the
+door was pushed open from within. I am only quite certain that I did not expect
+to see what I did see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity, a
+rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic&mdash; her
+dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves, with a face which,
+though still comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as intelligence.
+All she said was, &lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t hear you come in.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I came in another way,&rsquo; said the Permeator, somewhat
+vaguely. &lsquo;I&rsquo;d left my latchkey at home.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+really very sorry,&rsquo; I cried. &lsquo;I know my position is irregular.
+Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Mine,&rsquo; said the burglar, &lsquo;May I present you to my
+wife?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat; and I did not get
+out of it till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith (such was the prosaic name of this
+far from prosaic household) lingered a little, talking slightly and pleasantly.
+She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd mixture of shyness and
+sharpness; as if she knew the world well, but was still a little harmlessly
+afraid of it. Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a husband had
+left her a little nervous. Anyhow, when she had retired to the inner chamber
+once more, that extraordinary man poured forth his apologia and autobiography
+over the dwindling wine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and
+scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless nihilism
+was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a war between the
+members and the spirit, but one in which the members were right. While his
+brain accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it. As he put
+it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge
+University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand
+flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and
+driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done
+it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for
+non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down.
+Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under
+his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across
+all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means
+careless. His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not
+an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and
+skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most
+serious part of it. &lsquo;What is more immortal,&rsquo; he would cry,
+&lsquo;than love and war? Type of all desire and joy&mdash;beer. Type of all
+battle and conquest&mdash;skittles.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There was something in him of what the old world called the solemnity of
+revels&mdash;when they spoke of &lsquo;solemnizing&rsquo; a mere masquerade or
+wedding banquet. Nevertheless he was not a mere pagan any more than he was a
+mere practical joker. His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith, in
+itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t deny,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that there should be
+priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain
+strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets,
+actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom
+I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn&rsquo;t enough
+blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very
+noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages looking up an eternal
+perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die. But for these
+little white rats it was just as true that death was their only chance of
+learning to live.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt it
+continually slipping from himself as much as from others. He had the same
+pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually ran
+preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong speed to keep alive the mere
+conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial and yet insane details
+that had once reminded him of the awful subconscious reality. When the don had
+hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs, vibrating in the
+void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire of the old definition of man as
+a two-legged animal without feathers. The wretched professor had been brought
+into peril by his head, which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved
+by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and neglect. Smith could think
+of no other way of announcing or recording this, except to send a telegram to
+an old friend (by this time a total stranger) to say that he had just seen a
+man with two legs; and that the man was alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket when
+he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very headlong
+weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was alive; and he soon
+found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the fact. What
+was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a
+rowing-boat, and one who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic
+negation. He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring
+her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to
+her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had nearly
+murdered her, he completely married her; and she was the lady in green to whom
+I had recently said &lsquo;good-night.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury.
+Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that Smith was
+married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did not care for
+any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home;
+but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down. &lsquo;I am a very
+domestic fellow,&rsquo; he explained with gravity, &lsquo;and have often come
+in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He lost
+his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total
+stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was.
+The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in such
+transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible to explain to her that he
+did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always
+felt in other people&rsquo;s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I know there&rsquo;s a fellow called Smith,&rsquo; he said in his
+rather weird way, &lsquo;living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I
+know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed
+politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight. Sometimes he
+would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture; would seem to apologize to
+the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as cautiously as a cragsman, to
+renew in himself the sense of their skeleton of reality. Every stair is a
+ladder and every stool a leg, he said. And at other times he would play the
+stranger exactly in the opposite sense, and would enter by another way, so as
+to feel like a thief and a robber. He would break and violate his own home, as
+he had done with me that night. It was near morning before I could tear myself
+from this queer confidence of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands
+with him on the doorstep the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of
+daylight revealed the stairway of irregular street levels that looked like the
+end of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a
+maniac. What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being? A
+man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married! A
+man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor&rsquo;s! On this I
+have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it, though no one
+understands. I believe the maniac was one of those who do not merely come, but
+are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships by Him who made His angels winds
+and His messengers a flaming fire. This, at least, I know for certain. Whether
+such men have laughed or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at
+their weeping. Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted
+it. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if
+from the sting of an adder. But it is equally true that men flee from the
+embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear. Nothing brings down
+more curses than a real benediction. For the goodness of good things, like the
+badness of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather
+than spoken. We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older
+than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the
+everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the
+world.&mdash;I am, yours faithfully, &ldquo;Raymond Percy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, &rsquo;oly, &rsquo;oly, &rsquo;oly!&rdquo; said Mr. Moses Gould.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been in an almost
+religious state of submission and assent. Something had bound them together;
+something in the sacred tradition of the last two words of the letter;
+something also in the touching and boyish embarrassment with which Inglewood
+had read them&mdash; for he had all the thin-skinned reverence of the agnostic.
+Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way as ever lived; far kinder to his
+family than more refined men of pleasure, simple and steadfast in his
+admiration, a thoroughly wholesome animal and a thoroughly genuine character.
+But wherever there is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or
+racial, unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces.
+English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism, looked up and saw on the
+face of Moses a certain smile. It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which
+has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval
+towns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, &rsquo;oly, &rsquo;oly, &rsquo;oly!&rdquo; said Moses Gould.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding that this was not well received, he explained further, exuberance
+deepening on his dark exuberant features.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when &rsquo;e&rsquo;s
+corfin&rsquo; up a fly,&rdquo; he said pleasantly. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you see
+you&rsquo;ve bunged up old Smith anyhow. If this parson&rsquo;s tale&rsquo;s
+O.K.&mdash;why, Smith is &rsquo;ot. &rsquo;E&rsquo;s pretty &rsquo;ot. We find
+him elopin&rsquo; with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab. Well, what abart
+this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her blarsted
+shyness&mdash;transmigogrified into a blighted sharpness? Miss Gray ain&rsquo;t
+been very sharp, but I reckon she&rsquo;ll be pretty shy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a brute,&rdquo; growled Michael Moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance along
+the table at Innocent Smith. He was still bowed above his paper toys, and a
+wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or shame. He carefully
+plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and tucked it in elsewhere; then
+the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"></a>
+Chapter III<br/>
+The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge</h3>
+
+<p>
+Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American, and his respect
+for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ignoring,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the delicate and considerable knightly
+protests that have been called forth by my colleague&rsquo;s native sense of
+oration, and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems
+unsuitable to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my
+colleague&rsquo;s question by no means devoid of rel&rsquo;vancy. The last
+charge against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge on the paper is
+of bigamy and desertion. It does without question appear that the defence, in
+aspiring to rebut this last charge, have really admitted the next. Either
+Innocent Smith is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else that is
+exploded; but he is pretty well fixed for attempted bigamy. It all depends on
+what view we take of the alleged letter from Curate Percy. Under these
+conditions I feel justified in claiming my right to questions. May I ask how
+the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy? Did it come direct from
+the prisoner?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We have had nothing direct from the prisoner,&rdquo; said Moon quietly.
+&ldquo;The few documents which the defence guarantees came to us from another
+quarter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From what quarter?&rdquo; asked Dr. Pym.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you insist,&rdquo; answered Moon, &ldquo;we had them from Miss
+Gray.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead, opened them
+very wide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you really mean to say,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that Miss Gray was in
+possession of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; said Inglewood, and sat down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice, and
+then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy&rsquo;s
+narrative is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents in
+our own possession. Of these the principal and most certain is the testimony of
+Innocent Smith&rsquo;s gardener, who was present at the most dramatic and
+eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr. Gould, the gardener,
+please.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the gardener. That
+functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith when they
+had a little house on the edge of Croydon. From the gardener&rsquo;s tale, with
+its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain he had seen the place. It was
+one of those corners of town or country that one does not forget, for it looked
+like a frontier. The garden hung very high above the lane, and its end was
+steep and sharp, like a fortress. Beyond was a roll of real country, with a
+white path sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and branches of great
+gray trees writhing and twisting against the sky. But as if to assert that the
+lane itself was suburban, were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing
+upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-green and a red pillar-box that
+stood exactly at the corner. Inglewood was sure of the place; he had passed it
+twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle; he had always dimly felt it
+was a place where something might occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel
+that the face of his frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have
+appeared over the garden bushes above. The gardener&rsquo;s account, unlike the
+curate&rsquo;s, was quite free from decorative adjectives, however many he may
+have uttered privately when writing it. He simply said that on a particular
+morning Mr. Smith came out and began to play about with a rake, as he often
+did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two
+children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree, and
+hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in
+its final agony. Never, apparently, did he think of putting the rake to any of
+its proper uses, and the gardener, in consequence, treated his actions with
+coldness and brevity. But the gardener was certain that on one particular
+morning in October he (the gardener) had come round the corner of the house
+carrying the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped red and
+white jacket (which might have been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a
+part of his pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his wife,
+who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the garden, these decisive and
+very loud expressions&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t stay here any longer. I&rsquo;ve got another wife and much
+better children a long way from here. My other wife&rsquo;s got redder hair
+than yours, and my other garden&rsquo;s got a much finer situation; and
+I&rsquo;m going off to them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky,
+higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again. Then he cleared
+the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down in the lane below, and set
+off up the road without even a hat. Much of the picture was doubtless supplied
+by Inglewood&rsquo;s accidental memory of the place. He could see with his
+mind&rsquo;s eye that big bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up
+the crooked woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind. But the
+gardener, on his own account, was quite prepared to swear to the public
+confession of bigamy, to the temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky,
+and the final disappearance of the man up the road. Moreover, being a local
+man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumours that Smith had embarked on
+the south-eastern coast, nothing was known of him again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few but
+clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge. So far from
+denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on the Continent, he
+seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account. &ldquo;I hope you are not
+so insular,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that you will not respect the word of a
+French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener. By Mr.
+Inglewood&rsquo;s favour we will hear the French innkeeper.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already reading
+the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them to run something
+like this:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&mdash;Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin&rsquo;s Cafe on the sea-front at
+Gras, rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I know of the
+stranger out of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks for
+beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim
+flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit beauty to pervade
+one&rsquo;s whole life, just as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or
+cover all the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the onions!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there
+are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot as yet
+pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening I felt like
+a poet&mdash;like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe in the mad
+Montmartre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter and
+poisonous. I had never known it look so unfamiliar before. In the sky was that
+early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and the wind blew
+shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where they sell the newspapers,
+and along the sand-hills by the shore. There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown
+sail standing in silently from the sea. It was already quite close, and out of
+it clambered a man of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the
+water not up to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men.
+He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him
+look like a Triton. Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging to him,
+he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside, asked for
+cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded. Then the
+monster, with great politeness, invited me to partake of a vermouth before my
+dinner, and we fell into conversation. He had apparently crossed from Kent by a
+small boat got at a private bargain because of some odd fancy he had for
+passing promptly in an easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the
+official boats. He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house.
+When I naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not
+know; it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed it
+with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, &lsquo;over there.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when he
+saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly minute. He
+gave a description of the house detailed enough for an auctioneer. I have
+forgotten nearly all the details except the last two, which were that the
+lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red pillar-box at the corner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;A red pillar-box!&rsquo; I cried in astonishment. &lsquo;Why, the
+place must be in England!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I had forgotten,&rsquo; he said, nodding heavily. &lsquo;That is
+the island&rsquo;s name.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;But, <i>nom du nom</i>,&rsquo; I cried testily,
+&lsquo;you&rsquo;ve just come from England, my boy.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;They SAID it was England,&rsquo; said my imbecile,
+conspiratorially. &lsquo;They said it was Kent. But Kentish men are such liars
+one can&rsquo;t believe anything they say.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Monsieur,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;you must pardon me. I am elderly,
+and the <i>fumisteries</i> of the young men are beyond me. I go by common
+sense, or, at the largest, by that extension of applied common sense called
+science.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Science!&rsquo; cried the stranger. &lsquo;There is only one good
+thing science ever discovered&mdash;a good thing, good tidings of great
+joy&mdash; that the world is round.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my
+intelligence. &lsquo;I mean,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that going right round the
+world is the shortest way to where you are already.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Is it not even shorter,&rsquo; I asked, &lsquo;to stop where you
+are?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;No, no, no!&rsquo; he cried emphatically. &lsquo;That way is long
+and very weary. At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find
+the wife I really married and the house that is really mine. And that house
+will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,&rsquo; he asked
+with a sudden intensity, &lsquo;do you never want to rush out of your house in
+order to find it?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;No, I think not,&rsquo; I replied; &lsquo;reason tells a man from
+the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life. I remain here,
+content to fulfil the life of man. All my interests are here, and most of my
+friends, and&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And yet,&rsquo; he cried, starting to his almost terrific height,
+&lsquo;you made the French Revolution!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Pardon me,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;I am not quite so elderly. A
+relative perhaps.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I mean your sort did!&rsquo; exclaimed this personage.
+&lsquo;Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French
+Revolution. Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you&rsquo;re just back
+where you were before. Why, blast it all, that&rsquo;s just where we all want
+to be&mdash;back where we were before! That is revolution&mdash;going right
+round! Every revolution, like a repentance, is a return.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again, and
+then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck the tiny table with
+his colossal fist and went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
+English Revolution. God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny. The
+Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman
+marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone. But I am going to turn the
+world upside down, too. I&rsquo;m going to turn myself upside down. I&rsquo;m
+going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes, where
+trees and men hang head downward in the sky. But my revolution, like yours,
+like the earth&rsquo;s, will end up in the holy, happy place&mdash; the
+celestial, incredible place&mdash;the place where we were before.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason, he
+leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight, swinging his pole and
+leaving behind him an excessive payment, which also pointed to some loss of
+mental balance. This is all I know of the episode of the man landed from the
+fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of justice.&mdash; Accept,
+Sir, the assurances of the very high consideration, with which I have the
+honour to be your obedient servant, &ldquo;Jules Durobin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The next document in our dossier,&rdquo; continued Inglewood,
+&ldquo;comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia, and runs
+as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&mdash;My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the stationmaster at the
+station near Crazok. The great trains go by across the plains taking people to
+China, but very few people get down at the platform where I have to watch. This
+makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon the books I have.
+But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbours, for enlightened ideas
+have not spread in this part of Russia so much as in other parts. Many of the
+peasants round here have never heard of Bernard Shaw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since the
+failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult. The revolutionists
+committed many acts contrary to the pure principles of humanitarianism, with
+which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books, they were ill acquainted. I did
+not approve of these cruel acts, though provoked by the tyranny of the
+government; but now there is a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the
+memory of them. This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains came
+through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching a train that had come
+in. Only one person got out of the train, far away up at the other end of it,
+for it was a very long train. It was evening, with a cold, greenish sky. A
+little snow had fallen, but not enough to whiten the plain, which stretched
+away a sort of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops of some
+distant tablelands caught the evening light like lakes. As the solitary man
+came stamping along on the thin snow by the train he grew larger and larger; I
+thought I had never seen so large a man. But he looked even taller than he was,
+I think, because his shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little.
+From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty
+white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole such as
+peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled in
+one of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution,
+though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government side. I was just
+moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and laid out right and
+left with such energy that he came through them without scathe and strode right
+up to me, leaving them staggered and really astonished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim, he
+could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;There are not many houses to be had round here,&rsquo; I answered
+in the same language, &lsquo;the district has been very disturbed. A
+revolution, as you know, has recently been suppressed. Any further
+building&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh! I don&rsquo;t mean that,&rsquo; he cried; &lsquo;I mean a
+real house&mdash;a live house. It really is a live house, for it runs away from
+me.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture moved
+me profoundly. We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere of folk-lore, and
+its unfortunate effects can still be seen in the bright colours of the
+children&rsquo;s dolls and of the ikons. For an instant the idea of a house
+running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the enlightenment of man moves
+slowly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Have you no other house of your own?&rsquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I have left it,&rsquo; he said very sadly. &lsquo;It was not the
+house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all
+women, and yet I could not feel it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And so,&rsquo; I said with sympathy, &lsquo;you walked straight
+out of the front door, like a masculine Nora.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Nora?&rsquo; he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be
+a Russian word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I mean Nora in &ldquo;The Doll&rsquo;s House,&rdquo;&rsquo; I
+replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an Englishman;
+for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but
+&lsquo;ukases.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The Doll&rsquo;s House!&rsquo; he cried vehemently;
+&lsquo;why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a
+house is to be a doll&rsquo;s house. Don&rsquo;t you remember, when you were a
+child, how those little windows WERE windows, while the big windows
+weren&rsquo;t. A child has a doll&rsquo;s house, and shrieks when a front door
+opens inwards. A banker has a real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who
+fail to emit the faintest shriek when their real front doors open
+inwards.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly
+silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and was saying
+in a sort of loud whisper, &lsquo;I have found out how to make a big thing
+small. I have found out how to turn a house into a doll&rsquo;s house. Get a
+long way off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift of
+distance. Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite little against
+the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again. I shall see the funny
+little toy lamp-post painted green against the gate, and all the dear little
+people like dolls looking out of the window. For the windows really open in my
+doll&rsquo;s house.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;But why?&rsquo; I asked, &lsquo;should you wish to return to that
+particular doll&rsquo;s house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against
+convention, having made yourself in the conventional sense disreputable, having
+dared to be free, why should you not take advantage of your freedom? As the
+greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your marriage was
+only your mood. You have a right to leave it all behind, like the clippings of
+your hair or the parings of your nails. Having once escaped, you have the world
+before you. Though the words may seem strange to you, you are free in
+Russia.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains, where the
+only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke out of the railway
+engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot and heavy cloud of
+that cold clear evening of pale green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; he said with a huge sigh, &lsquo;I am free in Russia.
+You are right. I could really walk into that town over there and have love all
+over again, and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody
+could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask him what
+he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You have convinced me,&rsquo; he said with the same dreamy eye,
+&lsquo;why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his
+wife.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And why is it dangerous?&rsquo; I inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why, because nobody can find him,&rsquo; answered this odd
+person, &lsquo;and we all want to be found.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The most original modern thinkers,&rsquo; I remarked,
+&lsquo;Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we want
+most is to be lost: to find ourselves in untrodden paths, and to do
+unprecedented things: to break with the past and belong to the future.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on what
+was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene&mdash;the dark purple plains, the
+neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents. &lsquo;I shall not
+find the house here,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;It is still eastward&mdash; further
+and further eastward.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot of
+his pole upon the frozen earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And if I do go back to my country,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;I may
+be locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit
+unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the
+silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs;
+but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road I am treading is
+an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out; I am a revolutionist. But
+don&rsquo;t you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are
+only attempts to get back to Eden&mdash; to something we have had, to something
+we at least have heard of? Don&rsquo;t you see one only breaks the fence or
+shoots the moon in order to get HOME?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;No,&rsquo; I answered after due reflection, &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t
+think I should accept that.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Ah,&rsquo; he said with a sort of a sigh, &lsquo;then you have
+explained a second thing to me.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;What do you mean?&rsquo; I asked; &lsquo;what thing?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Why your revolution has failed,&rsquo; he said; and walking
+across quite suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away
+at last. And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening
+flats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse to the best
+advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person: I should like to find
+out if he has produced any literary works.&mdash;Yours, etc., &ldquo;Paul
+Nickolaiovitch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which kept
+the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again without
+interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile. &ldquo;The
+Court will be indulgent,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if the next note lacks the
+special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own
+way:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting.&mdash;I am Wong-Hi,
+and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest of Fu.
+The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it must be very
+dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought. I am indeed in one place,
+for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall
+doubtless die. But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place
+changes. The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees, like
+a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like
+porcelain, and sometimes green like jade, and sometimes red like garnet. But
+the night is always ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly seen any
+stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look as over a sea, when I
+go to the top of the temple at morning. And yet when he came, it was as if an
+elephant had strayed from the armies of the great kings of India. For palms
+snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came forth in the sunshine before the
+temple one taller than the sons of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival, and
+he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon. His
+face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so that
+they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke our speech brokenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He said to me, &lsquo;This is only a temple; I am trying to find a
+house.&rsquo; And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside
+his house was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I have not seen your house nor any houses,&rsquo; I answered.
+&lsquo;I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Do you believe in the gods?&rsquo; he asked with hunger in his
+eyes, like the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a strange question to ask,
+for what should a man do except what men have done?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;My Lord,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;it must be good for men to hold up
+their hands even if the skies are empty. For if there are gods, they will be
+pleased, and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased. Sometimes
+the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony, but the trees
+and the temple stand still under it all. So the great Confucius taught us that
+if we do always the same things with our hands and our feet as do the wise
+beasts and birds, with our heads we may think many things: yes, my Lord, and
+doubt many things. So long as men offer rice at the right season, and kindle
+lanterns at the right hour, it matters little whether there be gods or no. For
+these things are not to appease gods, but to appease men.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous; yet his look was
+very gentle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Break your temple,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;and your gods will be
+freed.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered: &lsquo;And so, if there be
+no gods, I shall have nothing but a broken temple.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was withheld threw
+out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him. And when I asked him for what
+he should be forgiven he answered: &lsquo;For being right.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and
+satisfying,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;it is a shame that they should be wrong. We
+are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so many iniquities&mdash; it is a
+shame we should be right after all.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought that he
+and his people were right.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And he answered: &lsquo;We are right because we are bound where men
+should be bound, and free where men should be free. We are right because we
+doubt and destroy laws and customs&mdash; but we do not doubt our own right to
+destroy them. For you live by customs, but we live by creeds. Behold me! In my
+country I am called Smip. My country is abandoned, my name is defiled, because
+I pursue around the world what really belongs to me. You are steadfast as the
+trees because you do not believe. I am as fickle as the tempest because I do
+believe. I do believe in my own house, which I shall find again. And at the
+last remaineth the green lantern and the red post.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I said to him: &lsquo;At the last remaineth only wisdom.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout, and rushing
+forward disappeared among the trees. I have not seen this man again nor any
+other man. The virtues of the wise are of fine brass. &ldquo;Wong-Hi.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The next letter I have to read,&rdquo; proceeded Arthur Inglewood,
+&ldquo;will probably make clear the nature of our client&rsquo;s curious but
+innocent experiment. It is dated from a mountain village in California, and
+runs as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&mdash;A person answering to the rather extraordinary description
+required certainly went, some time ago, over the high pass of the Sierras on
+which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationary inhabitant. I keep
+a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on the very top of this
+specially steep and threatening pass. My name is Louis Hara, and the very name
+may puzzle you about my nationality. Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one
+has been for fifteen years without society it is hard to have patriotism; and
+where there is not even a hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father
+was an Irishman of the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian
+kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old Spanish families
+round San Francisco, yet accused for all that of some admixture of Red Indian
+blood. I was well educated and fond of music and books. But, like many other
+hybrids, I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting many
+things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though a lonely living in this
+little cabaret in the mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of
+a savage. Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore
+in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a great straw hat
+as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I had a bowie knife at my belt
+and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression
+on the few peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place. But I promise
+you I never looked as mad as that man did. Compared with him I was Fifth
+Avenue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
+effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks
+coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself. Straight
+cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that they
+seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags collect a mere glitter
+of phosphorous. These terraces and towers of rock do not, like smaller crests,
+seem to be the end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning:
+its huge foundations. We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us
+like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.
+For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the stars crowded
+us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The spheres burst about us more like
+thunderbolts hurled at the earth than planets circling placidly about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All this may have driven me mad; I am not sure. I know there is one
+angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and on windy
+nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks&mdash; yes, city
+against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night. It was on such
+an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass. Broadly speaking, only
+strange men did struggle up the pass. But I had never seen one like this one
+before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake, all
+bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the ensign of some
+old barbarian tribe. His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung
+down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him were rags
+and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air of being dressed like an
+Indian in feathers or autumn leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was,
+he used sometimes as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I do
+not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards
+showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket. &lsquo;But THAT,&rsquo; he
+said, &lsquo;I use only for peaceful purposes.&rsquo; I have no notion what he
+meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from
+the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had travelled
+long among alien, cruel things and found at last something that he knew. Then
+he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass
+that hangs over my door. It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to
+me long ago: she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a
+crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star. He seemed so
+mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady&rsquo;s blue gown and the big
+gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing, which I had not
+done for fourteen years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward where
+the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich velvet, fading
+away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark mountain amphitheatre;
+and between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into
+the heights the straight solitary rock we call Green Finger. Of a queer
+volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing,
+it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and before he
+spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond the great green rock in the purple sky hung
+a single star.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;A star in the east,&rsquo; he said in a strange hoarse voice like
+one of our ancient eagles&rsquo;. &lsquo;The wise men followed the star and
+found the house. But if I followed the star, should I find the house?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It depends perhaps,&rsquo; I said, smiling, &lsquo;on whether you
+are a wise man.&rsquo; I refrained from adding that he certainly didn&rsquo;t
+look it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You may judge for yourself,&rsquo; he answered. &lsquo;I am a man
+who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from
+it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It certainly sounds paradoxical,&rsquo; I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about
+the room,&rsquo; he continued, &lsquo;and all the time I knew they were walking
+and talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of
+different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a
+devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable. Never
+did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like a cold
+ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did
+more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a
+treadmill.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Do you really mean,&rsquo; I cried, &lsquo;that you have come
+right round the world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the
+west.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,&rsquo; he replied sadly.
+&lsquo;I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something in the word &lsquo;pilgrim&rsquo; awoke down in the roots of
+my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world, and
+of something from whence I came. I looked again at the little pictured lantern
+at which I had not looked for fourteen years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;My grandmother,&rsquo; I said in a low tone, &lsquo;would have
+said that we were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
+home-sickness that forbids us rest.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift out beyond
+the Green Finger into the darkening void.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then he said, &lsquo;I think your grandmother was right,&rsquo; and
+stood up leaning on his grassy pole. &lsquo;I think that must be the
+reason,&rsquo; he said&mdash;&lsquo;the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic
+and so unappeased. But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given
+us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good
+reason.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I dare say,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;What reason?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Because otherwise,&rsquo; he said, pointing his pole out at the
+sky and the abyss, &lsquo;we might worship that.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;What do you mean?&rsquo; I demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Eternity,&rsquo; he said in his harsh voice, &lsquo;the largest
+of the idols&mdash; the mightiest of the rivals of God.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,&rsquo; I suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I mean,&rsquo; he said with increasing vehemence, &lsquo;that if
+there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a
+hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a
+hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things
+however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against
+all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not
+anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much
+surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the perilous
+paths below, and left me alone with the eagles. But since he went a fever of
+homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins
+that I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.&mdash; Yours
+faithfully, Louis Hara.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a short silence Inglewood said: &ldquo;And, finally, we desire to put in
+as evidence the following document:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to Mrs. I.
+Smith at &lsquo;The Laurels&rsquo; in Croydon for the last six months. When I
+came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow, but her
+husband was away. She was left with plenty of money and did not seem disturbed
+about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon. She said he was rather
+eccentric and a little change did him good. One evening last week I was
+bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn when I nearly dropped them. The end
+of a long rake was suddenly stuck over the hedge, and planted like a
+jumping-pole; and over the hedge, just like a monkey on a stick, came a huge,
+horrible man, all hairy and ragged like Robinson Crusoe. I screamed out, but my
+mistress didn&rsquo;t even get out of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted
+shaving. Then he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup of
+tea, and then I realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself. He has stopped
+here ever since and does not really give much trouble, though I sometimes fancy
+he is a little weak in his head. &ldquo;Ruth Davis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;P.S.&mdash;I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and said,
+very loud and strong: &lsquo;Oh, what a lovely place you&rsquo;ve got;&rsquo;
+just as if he&rsquo;d never seen it before.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one heavy
+shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible solemnity upon
+the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women had left the court before
+the more recent of the investigations. Mrs. Duke was still asleep, and Innocent
+Smith, looking like a large hunchback in the twilight, was bending closer and
+closer to his paper toys. But the five men really engaged in the controversy,
+and concerned not to convince the tribunal but to convince each other, still
+sat round the table like the Committee of Public Safety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another, cocked
+his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair backwards so far as to
+be in direct danger of falling over, emitted a startling and prolonged whistle
+like a steam engine, and asserted that it was all his eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind the books again
+and answered with considerable excitement, throwing his papers about.
+&ldquo;All those fairy-tales you&rsquo;ve been reading out,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;Oh! don&rsquo;t talk to me! I ain&rsquo;t littery and that, but I know
+fairy-tales when I hear &rsquo;em. I got a bit stumped in some of the
+philosophical bits and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we&rsquo;re
+living in West &rsquo;Ampstead and not in &rsquo;Ell; and the long and the
+short of it is that some things &rsquo;appen and some things don&rsquo;t
+&rsquo;appen. Those are the things that don&rsquo;t &rsquo;appen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; said Moon gravely, &ldquo;that we quite clearly
+explained&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained,&rdquo; assented Mr. Gould
+with extraordinary volubility. &ldquo;You&rsquo;d explain an elephant off the
+doorstep, you would. I ain&rsquo;t a clever chap like you; but I ain&rsquo;t a
+born natural, Michael Moon, and when there&rsquo;s an elephant on my doorstep I
+don&rsquo;t listen to no explanations. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s got a trunk,&rsquo; I
+says.&mdash;&lsquo;My trunk,&rsquo; you says: &lsquo;I&rsquo;m fond of
+travellin&rsquo;, and a change does me good.&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;But the
+blasted thing&rsquo;s got tusks,&rsquo; I says.&mdash;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t look a
+gift &rsquo;orse in the mouth,&rsquo; you says, &lsquo;but thank the goodness
+and the graice that on your birth &rsquo;as smiled.&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;But
+it&rsquo;s nearly as big as the &rsquo;ouse,&rsquo; I
+says.&mdash;&lsquo;That&rsquo;s the bloomin&rsquo; perspective,&rsquo; you
+says, &lsquo;and the sacred magic of distance.&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Why, the
+elephant&rsquo;s trumpetin&rsquo; like the Day of Judgement,&rsquo; I
+says.&mdash;&lsquo;That&rsquo;s your own conscience a-talking to you, Moses
+Gould,&rsquo; you says in a grive and tender voice. Well, I &rsquo;ave got a
+conscience as much as you. I don&rsquo;t believe most of the things they tell
+you in church on Sundays; and I don&rsquo;t believe these &rsquo;ere things any
+more because you goes on about &rsquo;em as if you was in church. I believe an
+elephant&rsquo;s a great big ugly dingerous beast&mdash; and I believe
+Smith&rsquo;s another.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean to say,&rdquo; asked Inglewood, &ldquo;that you still doubt
+the evidence of exculpation we have brought forward?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I do still doubt it,&rdquo; said Gould warmly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+all a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off. &rsquo;Ow can we
+test all those tales? &rsquo;Ow can we drop in and buy the &lsquo;Pink
+&rsquo;Un&rsquo; at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or whatever it was?
+&rsquo;Ow can we go and do a gargle at the saloon-bar on top of the Sierra
+Mountains? But anybody can go and see Bunting&rsquo;s boarding-house at
+Worthing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any one,&rdquo; continued Gould, &ldquo;can call on Mr. Trip.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a comforting thought,&rdquo; replied Michael with restraint;
+&ldquo;but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For just exactly the sime reason,&rdquo; cried the excited Moses,
+hammering on the table with both hands, &ldquo;for just exactly the sime reason
+that he should communicate with Messrs. &rsquo;Anbury and Bootle of Paternoster
+Row and with Miss Gridley&rsquo;s &rsquo;igh class Academy at &rsquo;Endon, and
+with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life,&rdquo; said Michael,
+&ldquo;why is it among the duties of man to communicate with old Lady
+Bullingdon who lives at Penge?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It ain&rsquo;t one of the duties of man,&rdquo; said Gould, &ldquo;nor
+one of his pleasures, either, I can tell you. She takes the crumpet, does Lady
+Bullingdon at Penge. But it&rsquo;s one of the duties of a prosecutor
+pursuin&rsquo; the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend Smith,
+and it&rsquo;s the sime with all the others I mentioned.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why do you bring in these people here?&rdquo; asked Inglewood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why! Because we&rsquo;ve got proof enough to sink a steamboat,&rdquo;
+roared Moses; &ldquo;because I&rsquo;ve got the papers in my very &rsquo;and;
+because your precious Innocent is a blackguard and &rsquo;ome smasher, and
+these are the &rsquo;omes he&rsquo;s smashed. I don&rsquo;t set up for a
+&rsquo;oly man; but I wouldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;ave all those poor girls on my
+conscience for something. And I think a chap that&rsquo;s capable of deserting
+and perhaps killing &rsquo;em all is about capable of cracking a crib or
+shootin&rsquo; an old schoolmaster&mdash;so I don&rsquo;t care much about the
+other yarns one way or another.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough, &ldquo;that we
+are approaching this matter rather irregularly. This is really the fourth
+charge on the charge sheet, and perhaps I had better put it before you in an
+ordered and scientific manner.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence of the darkening room.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"></a>
+Chapter IV<br/>
+The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A modern man,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym, &ldquo;must, if he be
+thoughtful, approach the problem of marriage with some caution. Marriage is a
+stage&mdash;doubtless a suitable stage&mdash;in the long advance of mankind
+towards a goal which we cannot as yet conceive; which we are not, perhaps, as
+yet fitted even to desire. What, gentlemen, is the ethical position of
+marriage? Have we outlived it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Outlived it?&rdquo; broke out Moon; &ldquo;why, nobody&rsquo;s ever
+survived it! Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve&mdash;and all as
+dead as mutton.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc&rsquo;lar in its
+character,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym frigidly. &ldquo;I cannot tell what may be Mr.
+Moon&rsquo;s matured and ethical view of marriage&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can tell,&rdquo; said Michael savagely, out of the gloom.
+&ldquo;Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should
+decline.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Michael,&rdquo; said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, &ldquo;you MUST
+keep quiet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Moon,&rdquo; said Pym with exquisite good temper, &ldquo;probably
+regards the institution in a more antiquated manner. Probably he would make it
+stringent and uniform. He would treat divorce in some great soul of
+steel&mdash;the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson&mdash;
+exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who scoots from his
+wife. Science has views broader and more humane. Just as murder for the
+scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction, just as theft for the scientist
+is a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so polygamy for the scientist is an
+extreme development of the instinct for variety. A man thus afflicted is
+incapable of constancy. Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting
+from flower to flower&mdash; as there is, doubtless, for the intermittent
+groaning which appears to afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment. Our own
+world-scorning Winterbottom has even dared to say, &lsquo;For a certain rare
+and fine physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of
+females, as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.&rsquo; In
+any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all authoritative
+inquirers. Such a type, if the widower of a negress, does in many ascertained
+cases espouse <i>en seconde noces</i> an albino; such a type, when freed from
+the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian, will often evolve from its own
+imaginative instinct the consoling figure of an Eskimo. To such a type there
+can be no doubt that the prisoner belongs. If blind doom and unbearable
+temptation constitute any slight excuse for a man, there is no doubt that he
+has these excuses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric ideality in
+admitting half of our story without further dispute. We should like to
+acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted a style by conceding also
+that the story told by Curate Percy about the canoe, the weir, and the young
+wife seems to be substantially true. Apparently Smith did marry a young woman
+he had nearly run down in a boat; it only remains to be considered whether it
+would not have been kinder of him to have murdered her instead of marrying her.
+In confirmation of this fact I can now con-cede to the defence an
+unquestionable record of such a marriage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the &ldquo;Maidenhead
+Gazette&rdquo; which distinctly recorded the marriage of the daughter of a
+&ldquo;coach,&rdquo; a tutor well known in the place, to Mr. Innocent Smith,
+late of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown at once both
+tragic and triumphant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I pause upon this pre-liminary fact,&rdquo; he said seriously,
+&ldquo;because this fact alone would give us the victory, were we aspiring
+after victory and not after truth. As far as the personal and domestic problem
+holds us, that problem is solved. Dr. Warner and I entered this house at an
+instant of highly emotional diff&rsquo;culty. England&rsquo;s Warner has
+entered many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time he entered to
+save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence. Smith was just about to carry
+away a young girl from this house; his cab and bag were at the very door. He
+had told her she was going to await the marriage license at the house of his
+aunt. That aunt,&rdquo; continued Cyrus Pym, his face darkening
+grandly&mdash;&ldquo;that visionary aunt had been the dancing
+will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp who had led many a high-souled maiden to her doom. Into
+how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word? When he said
+&lsquo;aunt&rsquo; there glowed about her all the merriment and high morality
+of the Anglo-Saxon home. Kettles began to hum, pussy cats to purr, in that very
+wild cab that was being driven to destruction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another denizen of
+the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was not only perfectly
+serious, but was really eloquent and affecting&mdash; when the difference of
+the hemispheres was adjusted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at least
+represented himself to one innocent female of this house as an eligible
+bachelor, being, in fact, a married man. I agree with my colleague, Mr. Gould,
+that no other crime could approximate to this. As to whether what our ancestors
+called purity has any ultimate ethical value indeed, science hesitates with a
+high, proud hesitation. But what hesitation can there be about the baseness of
+a citizen who ventures, by brutal experiments upon living females, to
+anticipate the verdict of science on such a point?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith in Highbury may
+or may not be the same as the lady he married in Maidenhead. If one short sweet
+spell of constancy and heart repose interrupted the plunging torrent of his
+profligate life, we will not deprive him of that long past possibility. After
+that conjectural date, alas, he seems to have plunged deeper and deeper into
+the shaking quagmires of infidelity and shame.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no more light
+left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral effect. After a
+pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer, he continued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first instance of the accused&rsquo;s repeated and irregular
+nuptials,&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses
+herself with the high haughtiness which must be excused in those who look out
+upon all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep. The
+communication she has sent to us runs as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference is made,
+and has no desire to deal with it in detail. The girl Polly Green was a
+perfectly adequate dressmaker, and lived in the village for about two years.
+Her unattached condition was bad for her as well as for the general morality of
+the village. Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it to be understood that she
+favoured the marriage of the young woman. The villagers, naturally wishing to
+oblige Lady Bullingdon, came forward in several cases; and all would have been
+well had it not been for the deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl
+Green herself. Lady Bullingdon supposes that where there is a village there
+must be a village idiot, and in her village, it seems, there was one of these
+wretched creatures. Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite aware
+that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual idiots and the
+ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes. She noticed, however, the
+startling smallness of his head in comparison to the rest of his body; and,
+indeed, the fact of his having appeared upon election day wearing the rosette
+of both the two opposing parties appears to Lady Bullingdon to put the matter
+quite beyond doubt. Lady Bullingdon was astounded to learn that this afflicted
+being had put himself forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question.
+Lady Bullingdon&rsquo;s nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point, telling
+him that he was a &lsquo;donkey&rsquo; to dream of such a thing, and actually
+received, along with an imbecile grin, the answer that donkeys generally go
+after carrots. But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy
+girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she was actually asked
+in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man in a far superior position to her
+own. Lady Bullingdon could not, of course, countenance such an arrangement for
+a moment, and the two unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine marriage. Lady
+Bullingdon cannot exactly recall the man&rsquo;s name, but thinks it was Smith.
+He was always called in the village the Innocent. Later, Lady Bullingdon
+believes he murdered Green in a mental outbreak.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The next communication,&rdquo; proceeded Pym, &ldquo;is more conspicuous
+for brevity, but I am of the opinion that it will adequately convey the upshot.
+It is dated from the offices of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, publishers, and is
+as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir,&mdash;Yrs. rcd. and conts. noted. Rumour re typewriter possibly
+refers to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago to marry an
+organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police attention.
+Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when apparently went mad. Record
+was written at the time, part of which I enclose.&mdash; Yrs., etc., W. Trip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The fuller statement runs as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs. Bernard and
+Juke, bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found to contain the following:
+&lsquo;Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3, as we wish to know whether it is
+really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.&rsquo; To this Mr. Juke, a person of a
+playful mind, returned the answer: &lsquo;Sir, I am in a position to give it as
+my most decided opinion that it is not really decided that 00000073bb!!!!!xy.
+Yrs., etc., &lsquo;J. Juke.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the
+original letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed
+substituted these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated to
+her. Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she was in an unbalanced
+state, and was not much reassured when she merely remarked that she always went
+like that when she heard the barrel organ. Becoming yet more hysterical and
+extravagant, she made a series of most improbable statements&mdash;as, that she
+was engaged to the barrel-organ man, that he was in the habit of serenading her
+on that instrument, that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the
+typewriter (in the style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the organ
+man&rsquo;s musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself so ardent
+that he could detect the note of the different letters on the machine, and was
+enraptured by them as by a melody. To all these statements of course our Mr.
+Trip and the rest of us only paid that sort of assent that is paid to persons
+who must as quickly as possible be put in the charge of their relations. But on
+our conducting the lady downstairs, her story received the most startling and
+even exasperating confirmation; for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with a
+small head and manifestly a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at
+the office doors like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding his
+alleged <i>fiancée</i>. When I myself came on the scene he was flinging his
+great, ape-like arms about and reciting a poem to her. But we were used to
+lunatics coming and reciting poems in our office, and we were not quite
+prepared for what followed. The actual verse he uttered began, I think,
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&lsquo;O vivid, inviolate head,<br/>
+Ringed&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+but he never got any further. Mr. Trip made a sharp movement towards him, and
+the next moment the giant picked up the poor lady typewriter like a doll, sat
+her on top of the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office doors, and raced
+away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow. I put the police upon the
+matter; but no trace of the amazing pair could be found. I was sorry myself;
+for the lady was not only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position.
+As I am leaving the service of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, I put these things
+in a record and leave it with them. (Signed) Aubrey Clarke, Publishers&rsquo;
+Reader.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the last document,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym complacently, &ldquo;is from
+one of those high-souled women who have in this age introduced your English
+girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics, and every form of ideality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear Sir (she writes),&mdash;I have no objection to telling you the
+facts about the absurd incident you mention; though I would ask you to
+communicate them with some caution, for such things, however entertaining in
+the abstract, are not always auxiliary to the success of a girls&rsquo; school.
+The truth is this: I wanted some one to deliver a lecture on a philological or
+historical question&mdash;a lecture which, while containing solid educational
+matter, should be a little more popular and entertaining than usual, as it was
+the last lecture of the term. I remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had
+written somewhere or other an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous
+name&mdash; an essay which showed considerable knowledge of genealogy and
+topography. I wrote to him, asking if he would come and give us a bright
+address upon English surnames; and he did. It was very bright, almost too
+bright. To put the matter otherwise, by the time that he was halfway through it
+became apparent to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally and
+entirely off his head. He began rationally enough by dealing with the two
+departments of place names and trade names, and he said (quite rightly, I dare
+say) that the loss of all significance in names was an instance of the
+deadening of civilization. But then he went on calmly to maintain that every
+man who had a place name ought to go to live in that place, and that every man
+who had a trade name ought instantly to adopt that trade; that people named
+after colours should always dress in those colours, and that people named after
+trees or plants (such as Beech or Rose) ought to surround and decorate
+themselves with these vegetables. In a slight discussion that arose afterwards
+among the elder girls the difficulties of the proposal were clearly, and even
+eagerly, pointed out. It was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband that it
+was substantially impossible for her to play the part assigned to her; Miss
+Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which no modern views on the sexes could
+apparently extricate her; and some young ladies, whose surnames happened to be
+Low, Coward, and Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the idea. But all this
+happened afterwards. What happened at the crucial moment was that the lecturer
+produced several horseshoes and a large iron hammer from his bag, announced his
+immediate intention of setting up a smithy in the neighbourhood, and called on
+every one to rise in the same cause as for a heroic revolution. The other
+mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched man, but I must confess that by
+an accident this very intercession produced the worst explosion of his
+insanity. He was waving the hammer, and wildly demanding the names of
+everybody; and it so happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers, was
+wearing a brown dress&mdash;a reddish-brown dress that went quietly enough with
+the warmer colour of her hair, as well she knew. She was a nice girl, and nice
+girls do know about those things. But when our maniac discovered that we really
+had a Miss Brown who WAS brown, his <i>idée fixe</i> blew up like a powder
+magazine, and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls, he
+publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress. You can imagine the
+effect of such a scene at a girls&rsquo; school. At least, if you fail to
+imagine it, I certainly fail to describe it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can think of it
+now as a joke. There was only one curious detail, which I will tell you, as you
+say your inquiry is vital; but I should desire you to consider it a little more
+confidential than the rest. Miss Brown, who was an excellent girl in every way,
+did quite suddenly and surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards. I
+should never have thought that her head would be the one to be really turned by
+so absurd an excitement.&mdash;Believe me, yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and
+seriousness, &ldquo;that these letters speak for themselves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint of whether his
+native gravity was mixed with his native irony.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Throughout this inquiry,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but especially in this
+its closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument; I
+mean the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy women
+apparently seduced by Smith. There is no sort of proof that they were murdered,
+but that implication is perpetually made when the question is asked as to how
+they died. Now I am not interested in how they died, or when they died, or
+whether they died. But I am interested in another analogous question&mdash;that
+of how they were born, and when they were born, and whether they were born. Do
+not misunderstand me. I do not dispute the existence of these women, or the
+veracity of those who have witnessed to them. I merely remark on the notable
+fact that only one of these victims, the Maidenhead girl, is described as
+having any home or parents. All the rest are boarders or birds of
+passage&mdash;a guest, a solitary dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing
+typewriting. Lady Bullingdon, looking from her turrets, which she bought from
+the Whartons with the old soap-boiler&rsquo;s money when she jumped at marrying
+an unsuccessful gentleman from Ulster&mdash;Lady Bullingdon, looking out from
+those turrets, did really see an object which she describes as Green. Mr. Trip,
+of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed to Smith. Miss
+Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest. She did house, feed, and
+teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded in decoying away. We admit that all
+these women really lived. But we still ask whether they were ever born?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, crikey!&rdquo; said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There could hardly,&rdquo; interposed Pym with a quiet smile, &ldquo;be
+a better instance of the neglect of true scientific process. The scientist,
+when once convinced of the fact of vitality and consciousness, would infer from
+these the previous process of generation.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If these gals,&rdquo; said Gould impatiently&mdash;&ldquo;if these gals
+were all alive (all alive O!) I&rsquo;d chance a fiver they were all
+born.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d lose your fiver,&rdquo; said Michael, speaking gravely out
+of the gloom. &ldquo;All those admirable ladies were alive. They were more
+alive for having come into contact with Smith. They were all quite definitely
+alive, but only one of them was ever born.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are you asking us to believe&mdash;&rdquo; began Dr. Pym.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am asking you a second question,&rdquo; said Moon sternly. &ldquo;Can
+the court now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance? Dr.
+Pym, in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe, the relations of
+the sexes, said that Smith was the slave of a lust for variety which would lead
+a man first to a negress and then to an albino, first to a Patagonian giantess
+and then to a tiny Eskimo. But is there any evidence of such variety here? Is
+there any trace of a gigantic Patagonian in the story? Was the typewriter an
+Eskimo? So picturesque a circumstance would not surely have escaped remark. Was
+Lady Bullingdon&rsquo;s dressmaker a negress? A voice in my bosom answers,
+&lsquo;No!&rsquo; Lady Bullingdon, I am sure, would think a negress so
+conspicuous as to be almost Socialistic, and would feel something a little
+rakish even about an albino.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But was there in Smith&rsquo;s taste any such variety as the learned
+doctor describes? So far as our slight materials go, the very opposite seems to
+be the case. We have only one actual description of any of the prisoner&rsquo;s
+wives&mdash; the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic curate.
+&lsquo;Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn
+leaves.&rsquo; Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours, some of which
+would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance); but I think such an
+expression would be most naturally used of the shades from red-brown to red,
+especially as ladies with their coppery-coloured hair do frequently wear light
+artistic greens. Now when we come to the next wife, we find the eccentric
+lover, when told he is a donkey, answering that donkeys always go after
+carrots; a remark which Lady Bullingdon evidently regarded as pointless and
+part of the natural table-talk of a village idiot, but which has an obvious
+meaning if we suppose that Polly&rsquo;s hair was red. Passing to the next
+wife, the one he took from the girls&rsquo; school, we find Miss Gridley
+noticing that the schoolgirl in question wore &lsquo;a reddish-brown dress,
+that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of her hair.&rsquo; In other
+words, the colour of the girl&rsquo;s hair was something redder than red-brown.
+Lastly, the romantic organ-grinder declaimed in the office some poetry that
+only got as far as the words,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&lsquo;O vivid, inviolate head,<br/>
+Ringed&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets will enable us to guess
+that &lsquo;ringed with a glory of red,&rsquo; or &lsquo;ringed with its
+passionate red,&rsquo; was the line that rhymed to &lsquo;head.&rsquo; In this
+case once more, therefore, there is good reason to suppose that Smith fell in
+love with a girl with some sort of auburn or darkish-red
+hair&mdash;rather,&rdquo; he said, looking down at the table, &ldquo;rather
+like Miss Gray&rsquo;s hair.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready with one of his more
+pedantic interpellations; but Moses Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his
+nose, with an expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence in his
+brilliant eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Moon&rsquo;s contention at present,&rdquo; interposed Pym, &ldquo;is
+not, even if veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view of I.
+Smith, which we have nailed to the mast. Science has long anticipated such a
+complication. An incurable attraction to a particular type of physical woman is
+one of the commonest of criminal per-versities, and when not considered
+narrowly, but in the light of induction and evolution&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At this late stage,&rdquo; said Michael Moon very quietly, &ldquo;I may
+perhaps relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me throughout
+the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution may go and boil
+themselves. The Missing Link and all that is well enough for kids, but
+I&rsquo;m talking about things we know here. All we know of the Missing Link is
+that he is missing&mdash;and he won&rsquo;t be missed either. I know all about
+his human head and his horrid tail; they belong to a very old game called
+&lsquo;Heads I win, tails you lose.&rsquo; If you do find a fellow&rsquo;s
+bones, it proves he lived a long while ago; if you don&rsquo;t find his bones,
+it proves how long ago he lived. That is the game you&rsquo;ve been playing
+with this Smith affair. Because Smith&rsquo;s head is small for his shoulders
+you call him microcephalous; if it had been large, you&rsquo;d have called it
+water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith&rsquo;s seraglio seemed pretty
+various, variety was the sign of madness: now, because it&rsquo;s turning out
+to be a bit monochrome&mdash;now monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer from
+all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person, and I&rsquo;m jolly well
+going to get some of the advantages too; and with all politeness I propose not
+to be bullied with long words instead of short reasons, or consider your
+business a triumphant progress merely because you&rsquo;re always finding out
+that you were wrong. Having relieved myself of these feelings, I have merely to
+add that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more beautiful than
+the Parthenon, or the monument on Bunker&rsquo;s Hill, and that I propose to
+resume and conclude my remarks on the many marriages of Mr. Innocent Smith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Besides this red hair, there is another unifying thread that runs
+through these scattered incidents. There is something very peculiar and
+suggestive about the names of these women. Mr. Trip, you will remember, said he
+thought the typewriter&rsquo;s name was Blake, but could not remember exactly.
+I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that case we have a curious
+series: Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon&rsquo;s village; Miss Brown at the Hendon
+School; Miss Black at the publishers. A chord of colours, as it were, which
+ends up with Miss Gray at Beacon House, West Hampstead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition. &ldquo;What is the meaning
+of this queer coincidence about colours? Personally I cannot doubt for a moment
+that these names are purely arbitrary names, assumed as part of some general
+scheme or joke. I think it very probable that they were taken from a series of
+costumes&mdash; that Polly Green only meant Polly (or Mary) when in green, and
+that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when in gray. This would
+explain&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid. &ldquo;Do you actually mean
+to suggest&mdash;&rdquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Michael; &ldquo;I do mean to suggest that. Innocent
+Smith has had many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had
+only one wife. She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to
+Miss Duke in the garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of other
+occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle. It is odd and
+extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other principle plainly
+applied in the modern world would be. His principle can be quite simply stated:
+he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every
+electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two
+legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for
+this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own
+property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to
+his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman
+whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at
+schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her
+again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a
+perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual
+value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are not
+quite so clear. I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom of all this. I
+am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am quite sure that it is
+worth a man&rsquo;s uttering and defending.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The idea that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an entangled
+civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not wrong at
+all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging and barging,
+rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not merely pardonable; they
+are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked about firing a pistol off even at a
+friend, so long as you do not mean to hit him and know you won&rsquo;t. It is
+no more wrong than throwing a pebble at the sea&mdash;less, for you do
+occasionally hit the sea. There is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot
+and breaking through a roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or
+property of other men. It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from the
+top than to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom. There is nothing
+wicked about walking round the world and coming back to your own house; it is
+no more wicked than walking round the garden and coming back to your own house.
+And there is nothing wicked about picking up your wife here, there, and
+everywhere, if, forsaking all others, you keep only to her so long as you both
+shall live. It is as innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.
+You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as
+you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being seen going)
+into a pawnbroker&rsquo;s or a public-house. You think there is something
+squalid and commonplace about such a connection. You are mistaken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This man&rsquo;s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has
+distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he
+has kept the commandments. It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a
+gambling hell, and you found that he only played for trouser buttons. It is as
+if you found a man making a clandestine appointment with a lady at a Covent
+Garden ball, and then you found it was his grandmother. Everything is ugly and
+discreditable, except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that he
+has done no wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will then be asked, &lsquo;Why does Innocent Smith continue far into
+his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false
+charges?&rsquo; To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is
+happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive. He
+is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are
+still to him what they once were to us all. And if you ask me yet again why he
+alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very
+simple answer to that, though it is one that will not be approved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don&rsquo;t like it. If
+Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent. If he can defy the
+conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just
+because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still
+as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want
+to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour&rsquo;s goods, that he has
+captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own
+goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves
+the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred
+honeymoons. If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman,
+he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a
+song&mdash; at least, not a comic song.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or appeals
+in any particular way to my sympathies. I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow
+is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed
+itself. Speaking singly, I feel as if man was tied to tragedy, and there was no
+way out of the trap of old age and doubt. But if there is a way out, then, by
+Christ and St. Patrick, this is the way out. If one could keep as happy as a
+child or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a
+dog. Barely and brutally to be good&mdash;that may be the road, and he may have
+found it. Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face of my old
+friend Moses. Mr. Gould does not believe that being perfectly good in all
+respects would make a man merry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; &ldquo;I
+do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man
+merry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Michael quietly, &ldquo;will you tell me one thing?
+Which of us has ever tried it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological epoch which
+awaits the emergence of some unexpected type; for there rose at last in the
+stillness a massive figure that the other men had almost completely forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner cheerfully, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+been pretty well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery
+for a couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin, and I&rsquo;m
+engaged for a city dinner. Among the hundred flowers of futility on both sides
+I was unable to detect any sort of reason why a lunatic should be allowed to
+shoot me in the back garden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly to the
+garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:
+&ldquo;But really the bullet missed you by several feet.&rdquo; And another
+voice added: &ldquo;The bullet missed him by several years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then Moon said suddenly,
+&ldquo;We have been sitting with a ghost. Dr. Herbert Warner died years
+ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"></a>
+Chapter V<br/>
+How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House</h3>
+
+<p>
+Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the garden; they
+were silent, and the sun had set. Such spaces of daylight as remained open in
+the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be compared to nothing but a
+cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran across them had a soft but
+vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke. All the rest of the scene swept and
+faded away into a dove-like gray, and seemed to melt and mount into
+Mary&rsquo;s dark-gray figure until she seemed clothed with the garden and the
+skies. There was something in these last quiet colours that gave her a setting
+and a supremacy; and the twilight, which concealed Diana&rsquo;s statelier
+figure and Rosamund&rsquo;s braver array, exhibited and emphasized her, leaving
+her the lady of the garden, and alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long fallen silent
+was being revived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But where is your husband taking you?&rdquo; asked Diana in her
+practical voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To an aunt,&rdquo; said Mary; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s just the joke. There
+really is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged to be
+turned out of the other boarding-house down the road. We never take more than a
+week of this kind of holiday, but sometimes we take two of them
+together.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Does the aunt mind much?&rdquo; asked Rosamund innocently. &ldquo;Of
+course, I dare say it&rsquo;s very narrow-minded and&mdash;what&rsquo;s that
+other word?&mdash; you know, what Goliath was&mdash;but I&rsquo;ve known many
+aunts who would think it&mdash;well, silly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Silly?&rdquo; cried Mary with great heartiness. &ldquo;Oh, my Sunday
+hat! I should think it was silly! But what do you expect? He really is a good
+man, and it might have been snakes or something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Snakes?&rdquo; inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him,&rdquo; replied Mary
+with perfect simplicity. &ldquo;Auntie let him have them in his pockets, but
+not in the bedroom.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you&mdash;&rdquo; began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I do as auntie did,&rdquo; said Mary; &ldquo;as long as we&rsquo;re
+not away from the children more than a fortnight together I play the game. He
+calls me &lsquo;Manalive;&rsquo; and you must write it all one word, or
+he&rsquo;s quite flustered.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if men want things like that,&rdquo; began Diana.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, what&rsquo;s the good of talking about men?&rdquo; cried Mary
+impatiently; &ldquo;why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid
+thing. There aren&rsquo;t any men. There are no such people. There&rsquo;s a
+man; and whoever he is he&rsquo;s quite different.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So there is no safety,&rdquo; said Diana in a low voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; answered Mary, lightly enough;
+&ldquo;there&rsquo;s only two things generally true of them. At certain curious
+times they&rsquo;re just fit to take care of us, and they&rsquo;re never fit to
+take care of themselves.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is a gale getting up,&rdquo; said Rosamund suddenly. &ldquo;Look
+at those trees over there, a long way off, and the clouds going quicker.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know what you&rsquo;re thinking about,&rdquo; said Mary; &ldquo;and
+don&rsquo;t you be silly fools. Don&rsquo;t you listen to the lady novelists.
+You go down the king&rsquo;s highway; for God&rsquo;s truth, it is God&rsquo;s.
+Yes, my dear Michael will often be extremely untidy. Arthur Inglewood will be
+worse&mdash;he&rsquo;ll be untidy. But what else are all the trees and clouds
+for, you silly kittens?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The clouds and trees are all waving about,&rdquo; said Rosamund.
+&ldquo;There is a storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow.
+Michael is really rather like a storm: he frightens me and makes me
+happy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you be frightened,&rdquo; said Mary. &ldquo;All over, these
+men have one advantage; they are the sort that go out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves along the
+path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; said Mary, &ldquo;they are the kind that look outwards
+and get interested in the world. It doesn&rsquo;t matter a bit whether
+it&rsquo;s arguing, or bicycling, or breaking down the ends of the earth as
+poor old Innocent does. Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries
+to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and
+tries to understand you. When poor old Adam had gone out gardening (Arthur will
+go out gardening), the other sort came along and wormed himself in, nasty old
+snake.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You agree with your aunt,&rdquo; said Rosamund, smiling: &ldquo;no
+snakes in the bedroom.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t agree with my aunt very much,&rdquo; replied Mary simply,
+&ldquo;but I think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons and
+griffins, so long as it got him out of the house.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house, turning
+the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold. The golden gates
+were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had sat like a clumsy statue for
+so many hours, came flying and turning cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting,
+&ldquo;Acquitted! acquitted!&rdquo; Echoing the cry, Michael scampered across
+the lawn to Rosamund and wildly swung her into a few steps of what was supposed
+to be a waltz. But the company knew Innocent and Michael by this time, and
+their extravagances were gaily taken for granted; it was far more extraordinary
+that Arthur Inglewood walked straight up to Diana and kissed her as if it had
+been his sister&rsquo;s birthday. Even Dr. Pym, though he refrained from
+dancing, looked on with real benevolence; for indeed the whole of the absurd
+revelation had disturbed him less than the others; he half supposed that such
+irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions were part of the mediaeval
+mummeries of the Old Land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window was
+lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with laughter
+and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the house again, they
+saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had clambered out of his own
+attic window, and roaring again and again, &ldquo;Beacon House!&rdquo; whirled
+round his head a huge log or trunk from the wood fire below, of which the river
+of crimson flame and purple smoke drove out on the deafening air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties; but when the wind
+died down, and the party, at the top of their evening&rsquo;s merriment, looked
+again for Mary and for him, they were not to be found.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The End
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1718 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1718)
diff --git a/old/1718-h.htm.2021-01-27 b/old/1718-h.htm.2021-01-27
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+
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta content="pg2html (binary v0.17)" name="linkgenerator" />
+    <title>
+      Manalive, 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: .75em; margin-bottom: .75em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
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+    .foot { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: 80%; font-style: italic;}
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+    .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%;}
+    .xx-small {font-size: 60%;}
+    .x-small {font-size: 75%;}
+    .small {font-size: 85%;}
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+    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
+    .indent35  { margin-left: 35%;}
+    .indent40  { margin-left: 40%;}
+    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%;}
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+                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
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+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border:        solid 1px;}
+    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
+    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Manalive, 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: Manalive
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2005 [EBook #1718]
+Last Updated: September 6, 2018
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANALIVE ***
+
+
+Etext produced by Jim Henry III and edited by Martin Ward
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      MANALIVE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By G. K. Chesterton
+    </h2>
+    <h4>
+      Published by Thomas Nelson and Sons: 1912
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PART"> <b>Part I</b> &mdash; THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT
+      SMITH </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter I &mdash; How the Great Wind Came to
+      Beacon House </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter II &mdash; The Luggage of an Optimist
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter III &mdash; The Banner of Beacon </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter IV &mdash; The Garden of the God </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter V &mdash; The Allegorical Practical Joker
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <b>Part II</b> &mdash; THE EXPLANATIONS OF
+      INNOCENT SMITH </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter I &mdash; The Eye of Death; or, the
+      Murder Charge </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter II &mdash; The Two Curates; or, the
+      Burglary Charge </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> Chapter III &mdash; The Round Road; or, the
+      Desertion Charge </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> Chapter IV &mdash; The Wild Weddings; or, the
+      Polygamy Charge </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> Chapter V &mdash; How the Great Wind Went from
+      Beacon House </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="link2H_PART" id="link2H_PART"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART I &mdash; THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter I &mdash; How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and
+      tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests
+      and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it
+      refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the
+      inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic
+      explosion, littering the floor with some professor&rsquo;s papers till
+      they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a
+      boy read &ldquo;Treasure Island&rdquo; and wrapping him in roaring dark.
+      But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump
+      of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had
+      looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick
+      tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and
+      they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and
+      far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
+      comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
+      Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the
+      hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed
+      herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and
+      lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds
+      far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode
+      heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a
+      telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were
+      like the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung
+      and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic
+      wings. There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than
+      the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody
+      harm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
+      terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round about
+      this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished at all
+      those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped
+      mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has never been
+      able to shake off. At some stage of those heights a terrace of tall gray
+      houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round
+      at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding establishment
+      called &ldquo;Beacon House,&rdquo; offered abruptly to the sunset its
+      high, narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted
+      ship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The proprietor of the
+      boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons against
+      whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both before and after all her
+      calamities; she was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or rather under
+      the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a
+      clientele, mostly of young but listless folks. And there were actually
+      five inmates standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale
+      broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea bursts
+      against the base of an outstanding cliff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with
+      cold cloud. Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray
+      and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior.
+      When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left and
+      right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold. The burst of light
+      released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost
+      simultaneously; and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling
+      violence. The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair. Every
+      shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar, and
+      strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element.
+      Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist. The
+      three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against
+      a wall. The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly,
+      they were blown into the house. Their two frocks, blue and white, looked
+      like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale. Nor is
+      such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic
+      about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and unlifting day.
+      Grass and garden trees seemed glittering with something at once good and
+      unnatural, like a fire from fairyland. It seemed like a strange sunrise at
+      the wrong end of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a white hat of the
+      proportions of a parachute, which might have wafted her away into the
+      coloured clouds of evening. She was their one splash of splendour, and
+      irradiated wealth in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily
+      with a friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
+      brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous. On top of her
+      wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking; but she had not
+      married, perhaps because there was always a crowd of men around her. She
+      was not fast (though some might have called her vulgar), but she gave
+      irresolute youths an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible.
+      A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra, or as if he were
+      asking for a great actress at the stage door. Indeed, some theatrical
+      spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt; she played the guitar and the
+      mandoline; she always wanted charades; and with that great rending of the
+      sky by sun and storm, she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her.
+      To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose like the curtain
+      of some long-expected pantomime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this apocalypse
+      in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic and practical
+      creatures alive. She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous niece whose
+      strength alone upheld that mansion of decay. But as the gale swung and
+      swelled the blue and white skirts till they took on the monstrous contours
+      of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory stirred in her that was almost
+      romance&mdash;a memory of a dusty volume of <i>Punch</i> in an aunt&rsquo;s
+      house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops and croquet hoops and some
+      pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part. This half-perceptible
+      fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly, and Diana Duke entered
+      the house even more promptly than her companion. Tall, slim, aquiline, and
+      dark, she seemed made for such swiftness. In body she was of the breed of
+      those birds and beasts that are at once long and alert, like greyhounds or
+      herons or even like an innocent snake. The whole house revolved on her as
+      on a rod of steel. It would be wrong to say that she commanded; for her
+      own efficiency was so impatient that she obeyed herself before any one
+      else obeyed her. Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open
+      a door, before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork,
+      it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands. She was
+      light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness. She spurned the
+      ground, and she meant to spurn it. People talk of the pathos and failure
+      of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may
+      succeed in everything but womanhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s enough to blow your head off,&rdquo; said the young
+      woman in white, going to the looking-glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening gloves,
+      and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon cloth
+      for tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enough to blow your head off, I say,&rdquo; said Miss Rosamund
+      Hunt, with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches had
+      always been safe for an encore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only your hat, I think,&rdquo; said Diana Duke, &ldquo;but I dare
+      say that is sometimes more important.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rosamund&rsquo;s face showed for an instant the offence of a spoilt child,
+      and then the humour of a very healthy person. She broke into a laugh and
+      said, &ldquo;Well, it would have to be a big wind to blow your head off.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from the
+      sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull
+      walls with ruby and gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody once told me,&rdquo; said Rosamund Hunt, &ldquo;that it&rsquo;s
+      easier to keep one&rsquo;s head when one has lost one&rsquo;s heart.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t talk such rubbish,&rdquo; said Diana with savage
+      sharpness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but the wind was still
+      stiffly blowing, and the three men who stood their ground might also have
+      considered the problem of hats and heads. And, indeed, their position,
+      touching hats, was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of the three
+      abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge as
+      vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him. The second man
+      tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles, and ultimately held it
+      in his hand. The third had no hat, and, by his attitude, seemed never to
+      have had one in his life. Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy wand to
+      test men and women, for there was much of the three men in this
+      difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and
+      solidity. He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man, with
+      flat fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young doctor by
+      the name of Warner. But if his blondness and blandness seemed at first a
+      little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool. If Rosamund Hunt was
+      the only person there with much money, he was the only person who had as
+      yet found any kind of fame. His treatise on &ldquo;The Probable Existence
+      of Pain in the Lowest Organisms&rdquo; had been universally hailed by the
+      scientific world as at once solid and daring. In short, he undoubtedly had
+      brains; and perhaps it was not his fault if they were the kind of brains
+      that most men desire to analyze with a poker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a
+      small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness. It
+      was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor was present;
+      for Warner lived in no such ramshackle lodging-house, but in a
+      professional palace in Harley Street. This young man was really the
+      youngest and best-looking of the three. But he was one of those persons,
+      both male and female, who seem doomed to be good-looking and
+      insignificant. Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose the
+      delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown and red as he stood
+      blushing and blinking against the wind. He was one of those obvious
+      unnoticeable people: every one knew that he was Arthur Inglewood,
+      unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent, living on a little money of his
+      own, and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography and cycling.
+      Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the glare of
+      golden sunset there was something about him indistinct, like one of his
+      own red-brown amateur photographs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely sporting clothes,
+      and the large pipe in his mouth made him look all the leaner. He had a
+      long ironical face, blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the
+      blue chin of an actor. An Irishman he was, an actor he was not, except in
+      the old days of Miss Hunt&rsquo;s charades, being, as a matter of fact, an
+      obscure and flippant journalist named Michael Moon. He had once been
+      hazily supposed to be reading for the Bar; but (as Warner would say with
+      his rather elephantine wit) it was mostly at another kind of bar that his
+      friends found him. Moon, however, did not drink, nor even frequently get
+      drunk; he simply was a gentleman who liked low company. This was partly
+      because company is quieter than society: and if he enjoyed talking to a
+      barmaid (as apparently he did), it was chiefly because the barmaid did the
+      talking. Moreover he would often bring other talent to assist her. He
+      shared that strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and without
+      ambition&mdash;the trick of going about with his mental inferiors. There
+      was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house, a
+      man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused Michael so much that he went
+      round with him from bar to bar, like the owner of a performing monkey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew
+      clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven. One
+      felt one might at last find something lighter than light. In the fullness
+      of this silent effulgence all things collected their colours again: the
+      gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One bird fluttered
+      like a loosened leaf from one tree to another, and his brown feathers were
+      brushed with fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inglewood,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird,
+      &ldquo;have you any friends?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad beaming face,
+      said,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, I go out a great deal.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant, who
+      spoke a moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young, as coming
+      out of that brown and even dusty interior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; answered Inglewood, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve
+      lost touch with my old friends. The greatest friend I ever had was at
+      school, a fellow named Smith. It&rsquo;s odd you should mention it,
+      because I was thinking of him to-day, though I haven&rsquo;t seen him for
+      seven or eight years. He was on the science side with me at school&mdash;
+      a clever fellow though queer; and he went up to Oxford when I went to
+      Germany. The fact is, it&rsquo;s rather a sad story. I often asked him to
+      come and see me, and when I heard nothing I made inquiries, you know. I
+      was shocked to learn that poor Smith had gone off his head. The accounts
+      were a bit cloudy, of course, some saying that he had recovered again; but
+      they always say that. About a year ago I got a telegram from him myself.
+      The telegram, I&rsquo;m sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; assented Dr. Warner stolidly; &ldquo;insanity is
+      generally incurable.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So is sanity,&rdquo; said the Irishman, and studied him with a
+      dreary eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Symptoms?&rdquo; asked the doctor. &ldquo;What was this telegram?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a shame to joke about such things,&rdquo; said
+      Inglewood, in his honest, embarrassed way; &ldquo;the telegram was Smith&rsquo;s
+      illness, not Smith. The actual words were, `Man found alive with two legs.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alive with two legs,&rdquo; repeated Michael, frowning. &ldquo;Perhaps
+      a version of alive and kicking? I don&rsquo;t know much about people out
+      of their senses; but I suppose they ought to be kicking.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And people in their senses?&rdquo; asked Warner, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, they ought to be kicked,&rdquo; said Michael with sudden
+      heartiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The message is clearly insane,&rdquo; continued the impenetrable
+      Warner. &ldquo;The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal
+      type. Even a baby does not expect to find a man with three legs.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three legs,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, &ldquo;would be very
+      convenient in this wind.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them off their
+      balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden. Beyond, all sorts of
+      accidental objects could be seen scouring the wind-scoured sky&mdash;straws,
+      sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a disappearing hat. Its
+      disappearance, however, was not final; after an interval of minutes they
+      saw it again, much larger and closer, like a white panama, towering up
+      into the heavens like a balloon, staggering to and fro for an instant like
+      a stricken kite, and then settling in the centre of their own lawn as
+      falteringly as a fallen leaf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody&rsquo;s lost a good hat,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall, flying after
+      the fluttering panama. It was a big green umbrella. After that came
+      hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone bag, and after that came a figure like a
+      flying wheel of legs, as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs, it alighted
+      upon two, like the man in the queer telegram. It took the form of a large
+      light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes. He had bright blonde hair
+      that the wind brushed back like a German&rsquo;s, a flushed eager face
+      like a cherub&rsquo;s, and a prominent pointing nose, a little like a dog&rsquo;s.
+      His head, however, was by no means cherubic in the sense of being without
+      a body. On the contrary, on his vast shoulders and shape generally
+      gigantesque, his head looked oddly and unnaturally small. This gave rise
+      to a scientific theory (which his conduct fully supported) that he was an
+      idiot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward. His life was full
+      of arrested half gestures of assistance. And even this prodigy of a big
+      man in green, leaping the wall like a bright green grasshopper, did not
+      paralyze that small altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost hat.
+      He was stepping forward to recover the green gentleman&rsquo;s head-gear,
+      when he was struck rigid with a roar like a bull&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unsportsmanlike!&rdquo; bellowed the big man. &ldquo;Give it fair
+      play, give it fair play!&rdquo; And he came after his own hat quickly but
+      cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and
+      dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again
+      freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of
+      a ~pas de quatre~. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo
+      leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to
+      pick up the thread: &ldquo;Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase
+      their crowns... quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats...
+      old English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at bay...
+      mangled hounds... Got him!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the wind rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky on his
+      strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat, missed it, and
+      pitched sprawling face foremost on the grass. The hat rose over him like a
+      bird in triumph. But its triumph was premature; for the lunatic, flung
+      forward on his hands, threw up his boots behind, waved his two legs in the
+      air like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought again of the
+      telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet. A prolonged and
+      piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end. The eyes of all
+      the men were blinded by the invisible blast, as by a strange, clear
+      cataract of transparency rushing between them and all objects about them.
+      But as the large man fell back in a sitting posture and solemnly crowned
+      himself with the hat, Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, that he
+      had been holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy, another
+      short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending very quick,
+      swallowed in abrupt silence. The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner&rsquo;s
+      official hat sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an
+      airship, and in almost cresting a garden tree was caught in the topmost
+      branches. Another hat was gone. Those in that garden felt themselves
+      caught in an unaccustomed eddy of things happening; no one seemed to know
+      what would blow away next. Before they could speculate, the cheering and
+      hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up the tree, swinging himself
+      from fork to fork with his strong, bent, grasshopper legs, and still
+      giving forth his gasping, mysterious comments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls
+      nesting in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers...
+      gone to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours...
+      belongs to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it up!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering wind
+      like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire. The green,
+      fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold, was already
+      among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did not break
+      with the weight of his big body. He was up there among the last tossing
+      leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still talking to himself
+      cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps. He might
+      well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had gone with one
+      rush; he had bounded the wall once like a football, swept down the garden
+      like a slide, and shot up the tree like a rocket. The other three men
+      seemed buried under incident piled on incident&mdash; a wild world where
+      one thing began before another thing left off. All three had the first
+      thought. The tree had been there for the five years they had known the
+      boarding-house. Each one of them was active and strong. No one of them had
+      even thought of climbing it. Beyond that, Inglewood felt first the mere
+      fact of colour. The bright brisk leaves, the bleak blue sky, the wild
+      green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally of something glowing in his
+      infancy, something akin to a gaudy man on a golden tree; perhaps it was
+      only painted monkey on a stick. Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more of
+      a humourist, was touched on a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old,
+      young theatricals with Rosamund, and was amused to find himself almost
+      quoting Shakespeare&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;For valour.  Is not love a Hercules,
+          Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation that
+      the Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward with rather
+      rattling rapidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next. The man in
+      green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky
+      broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs.
+      It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage,
+      a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it in every
+      direction, a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it like a concertina;
+      nor can it be said that the obliging gentleman with the sharp nose showed
+      any adequate tenderness for its structure when he finally unhooked it from
+      its place. When he had found it, however, his proceedings were by some
+      counted singular. He waved it with a loud whoop of triumph, and then
+      immediately appeared to fall backwards off the tree, to which, however, he
+      remained attached by his long strong legs, like a monkey swung by his
+      tail. Hanging thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely
+      proceeded to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his brows. &ldquo;Every
+      man a king,&rdquo; explained the inverted philosopher, &ldquo;every hat
+      (consequently) a crown. But this is a crown out of heaven.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved away
+      with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming, strangely
+      enough, to wish for his former decoration in its present state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wrong, wrong!&rdquo; cried the obliging person hilariously. &ldquo;Always
+      wear uniform, even if it&rsquo;s shabby uniform! Ritualists may always be
+      untidy. Go to a dance with soot on your shirt-front; but go with a
+      shirt-front. Huntsman wears old coat, but old pink coat. Wear a topper,
+      even if it&rsquo;s got no top. It&rsquo;s the symbol that counts, old
+      cock. Take your hat, because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all
+      off by the bark, dears, and its brim not the least bit curled; but for old
+      sakes&rsquo; sake it is still, dears, the nobbiest tile in the world.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed the
+      shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician, and fell on
+      his feet among the other men, still talking, beaming and breathless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t they make more games out of wind?&rdquo; he asked
+      in some excitement. &ldquo;Kites are all right, but why should it only be
+      kites? Why, I thought of three other games for a windy day while I was
+      climbing that tree. Here&rsquo;s one of them: you take a lot of pepper&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness, &ldquo;that
+      your games are already sufficiently interesting. Are you, may I ask, a
+      professional acrobat on a tour, or a travelling advertisement of Sunny
+      Jim? How and why do you display all this energy for clearing walls and
+      climbing trees in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it, appeared to
+      grow confidential.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it&rsquo;s a trick of my own,&rdquo; he confessed candidly.
+      &ldquo;I do it by having two legs.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of folly,
+      started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes screwed up
+      and his high colour slightly heightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I believe you&rsquo;re Smith,&rdquo; he cried with his fresh,
+      almost boyish voice; and then after an instant&rsquo;s stare, &ldquo;and
+      yet I&rsquo;m not sure.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a card, I think,&rdquo; said the unknown, with baffling
+      solemnity&mdash;&ldquo;a card with my real name, my titles, offices, and
+      true purpose on this earth.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet card-case, and
+      as slowly produced a very large card. Even in the instant of its
+      production, they fancied it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of
+      ordinary gentlemen. But it was there only for an instant; for as it passed
+      from his fingers to Arthur&rsquo;s, one or another slipped his hold. The
+      strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away the stranger&rsquo;s
+      card to join the wild waste paper of the universe; and that great western
+      wind shook the whole house and passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter II &mdash; The Luggage of an Optimist
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
+      with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion of
+      small ones. If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could (I
+      suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight trumpeting
+      upon Primrose Hill. If a whale could leap from the sea like a trout,
+      perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above Yarmouth like the
+      winged island of Laputa. Such natural energy, though sublime, might
+      certainly be inconvenient, and much of this inconvenience attended the
+      gaiety and good intentions of the man in green. He was too large for
+      everything, because he was lively as well as large. By a fortunate
+      physical provision, most very substantial creatures are also reposeful;
+      and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser parts of London are not
+      built for a man as big as a bull and excitable as a kitten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house, he found him
+      talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately) to the helpless Mrs.
+      Duke. That fat, faint lady could only goggle up like a dying fish at the
+      enormous new gentleman, who politely offered himself as a lodger, with
+      vast gestures of the wide white hat in one hand, and the yellow Gladstone
+      bag in the other. Fortunately, Mrs. Duke&rsquo;s more efficient niece and
+      partner was there to complete the contract; for, indeed, all the people of
+      the house had somehow collected in the room. This fact, in truth, was
+      typical of the whole episode. The visitor created an atmosphere of comic
+      crisis; and from the time he came into the house to the time he left it,
+      he somehow got the company to gather and even follow (though in derision)
+      as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy. An hour ago, and for four
+      years previously, these people had avoided each other, even when they had
+      really liked each other. They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted
+      rooms in search of particular newspapers or private needlework. Even now
+      they all came casually, as with varying interests; but they all came.
+      There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow; there was
+      the unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance. There was Michael
+      Moon offering like a riddle the contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
+      clothes and the sombre sagacity of his visage. He was now joined by his
+      yet more comic crony, Moses Gould. Swaggering on short legs with a
+      prosperous purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs; but like
+      a dog also in this, that however he danced and wagged with delight, the
+      two dark eyes on each side of his protuberant nose glistened gloomily like
+      black buttons. There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still with the fine white hat
+      framing her square, good-looking face, and still with her native air of
+      being dressed for some party that never came off. She also, like Mr. Moon,
+      had a new companion, new so far as this narrative goes, but in reality an
+      old friend and a protegee. This was a slight young woman in dark gray, and
+      in no way notable but for a load of dull red hair, of which the shape
+      somehow gave her pale face that triangular, almost peaked, appearance
+      which was given by the lowering headdress and deep rich ruff of the
+      Elizabethan beauties. Her surname seemed to be Gray, and Miss Hunt called
+      her Mary, in that indescribable tone applied to a dependent who has
+      practically become a friend. She wore a small silver cross on her very
+      business-like gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who went
+      to church. Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke, studying
+      the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening carefully to every idiotic
+      word he said. As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but never dreamed of
+      listening to him. She had never really listened to any one in her life;
+      which, some said, was why she had survived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest&rsquo;s
+      concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously to
+      her any more than she listened seriously to any one. And she almost beamed
+      as the stranger, with yet wider and almost whirling gestures of
+      explanation with his huge hat and bag, apologized for having entered by
+      the wall instead of the front door. He was understood to put it down to an
+      unfortunate family tradition of neatness and care of his clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,&rdquo; he
+      said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke. &ldquo;She never liked me to lose
+      my cap at school. And when a man&rsquo;s been taught to be tidy and neat
+      it sticks to him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good mother;
+      but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got a funny idea of neatness,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if
+      it&rsquo;s jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees. A man can&rsquo;t
+      very well climb a tree tidily.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He can clear a wall neatly,&rdquo; said Michael Moon; &ldquo;I saw
+      him do it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment. &ldquo;My
+      dear young lady,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I was tidying the tree. You don&rsquo;t
+      want last year&rsquo;s hats there, do you, any more than last year&rsquo;s
+      leaves? The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn&rsquo;t manage the
+      hat; that wind, I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this
+      is, that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil
+      for giants. You can&rsquo;t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just
+      look at my trousers. Don&rsquo;t you know that? Haven&rsquo;t you ever had
+      a spring cleaning?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, sir,&rdquo; said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly. &ldquo;You will
+      find everything of that sort quite nice.&rdquo; For the first time she had
+      heard two words that she could understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm of
+      calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said that
+      he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked: and the
+      silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through these
+      cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room. Smith went up
+      the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his head against the
+      ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that the tall house was
+      much shorter than it used to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend&mdash;or his new friend, for he
+      did not very clearly know which he was. The face looked very like his old
+      schoolfellow&rsquo;s at one second and very unlike at another. And when
+      Inglewood broke through his native politeness so far as to say suddenly,
+      &ldquo;Is your name Smith?&rdquo; he received only the unenlightening
+      reply, &ldquo;Quite right; quite right. Very good. Excellent!&rdquo; Which
+      appeared to Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe
+      accepting a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood watched the
+      other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all the impotent attitudes of
+      the male friend. Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling
+      accuracy with which he climbed a tree&mdash;throwing things out of his bag
+      as if they were rubbish, yet managing to distribute quite a regular
+      pattern all round him on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner (he
+      had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style of
+      speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still a
+      string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like the day of judgement,&rdquo; he said, throwing a bottle so
+      that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end. &ldquo;People say vast
+      universe... infinity and astronomy; not sure... I think things are too
+      close together... packed up; for travelling... stars too close, really...
+      why, the sun&rsquo;s a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth&rsquo;s
+      a star, too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
+      ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
+      feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag is
+      unpacked... may all be put in our right places then.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he stopped, literally for breath&mdash;throwing a shirt to the other
+      end of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly
+      beyond it. Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical
+      disorder with an increasing doubt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith&rsquo;s holiday luggage, the less
+      one could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it was that almost
+      everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason; what is secondary with
+      every one else was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan in
+      brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover that the pot was
+      valueless or even unnecessary, and that it was the brown paper that was
+      truly precious. He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained
+      with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker, but that
+      cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork. He also exhibited about
+      six small bottles of wine, white and red, and Inglewood, happening to note
+      a Volnay which he knew to be excellent, supposed at first that the
+      stranger was an epicure in vintages. He was therefore surprised to find
+      that the next bottle was a vile sham claret from the colonies, which even
+      colonials (to do them justice) do not drink. It was only then that he
+      observed that all six bottles had those bright metallic seals of various
+      tints, and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the three
+      primary and three secondary colours: red, blue, and yellow; green, violet
+      and orange. There grew upon Inglewood an almost creepy sense of the real
+      childishness of this creature. For Smith was really, so far as human
+      psychology can be, innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he
+      loved the stickiness of gum, and he cut white wood greedily as if he were
+      cutting a cake. To this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended
+      or denounced; it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a
+      shop window. He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he
+      was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply
+      forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made the
+      giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth
+      when most of us grow old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials I. S. printed on
+      one side of it, and remembered that Smith had been called Innocent Smith
+      at school, though whether as a formal Christian name or a moral
+      description he could not remember. He was just about to venture another
+      question, when there was a knock at the door, and the short figure of Mr.
+      Gould offered itself, with the melancholy Moon, standing like his tall
+      crooked shadow, behind him. They had drifted up the stairs after the other
+      two men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hope there&rsquo;s no intrusion,&rdquo; said the beaming Moses with
+      a glow of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth is,&rdquo; said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy,
+      &ldquo;we thought we might see if they had made you comfortable. Miss Duke
+      is rather&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his
+      bag; &ldquo;magnificent, isn&rsquo;t she? Go close to her&mdash;hear
+      military music going by, like Joan of Arc.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has just heard a
+      wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains one small and forgotten fact.
+      For he remembered how he had himself thought of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc years
+      ago, when, hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the
+      boarding-house. Long since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr.
+      Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams.
+      Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless human types,
+      Inglewood had long come to regard himself as a timid, insufficient, and
+      &ldquo;weak&rdquo; type, who would never marry; to regard Diana Duke as a
+      materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for her as the
+      small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady&rsquo;s daughter.
+      And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly, as if he had
+      heard those distant drums.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural,&rdquo;
+      said Moon, glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of
+      slanted ceiling, like the conical hood of a dwarf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather a small box for you, sir,&rdquo; said the waggish Mr. Gould.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid room, though,&rdquo; answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically,
+      with his head inside his Gladstone bag. &ldquo;I love these pointed sorts
+      of rooms, like Gothic. By the way,&rdquo; he cried out, pointing in quite
+      a startling way, &ldquo;where does that door lead to?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To certain death, I should say,&rdquo; answered Michael Moon,
+      staring up at a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of
+      the attic. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think there&rsquo;s a loft there; and I
+      don&rsquo;t know what else it could lead to.&rdquo; Long before he had
+      finished his sentence the man with the strong green legs had leapt at the
+      door in the ceiling, swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it,
+      wrenched it open after a struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment
+      they saw the two symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they
+      vanished. Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and
+      lucid sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it
+      like a whole county upside down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hullo, you fellows!&rdquo; came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
+      apparently from some remote pinnacle. &ldquo;Come up here; and bring some
+      of my things to eat and drink. It&rsquo;s just the spot for a picnic.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small bottles of wine,
+      one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood, as if mesmerized, groped for
+      a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger. The enormous hand of Innocent Smith
+      appearing through the aperture, like a giant&rsquo;s in a fairy tale,
+      received these tributes and bore them off to the eyrie; then they both
+      hoisted themselves out of the window. They were both athletic, and even
+      gymnastic; Inglewood through his concern for hygiene, and Moon through his
+      concern for sport, which was not quite so idle and inactive as that of the
+      average sportsman. Also they both had a light-headed burst of celestial
+      sensation when the door was burst in the roof, as if a door had been burst
+      in the sky, and they could climb out on to the very roof of the universe.
+      They were both men who had long been unconsciously imprisoned in the
+      commonplace, though one took it comically, and the other seriously. They
+      were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died. But Mr.
+      Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics and their
+      subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed at the thing with
+      the shameless rationality of another race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould was
+      not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature forced him to
+      dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade; and Inglewood and Moon
+      were left alone on the long gray-green ridge of the slate roof, with their
+      feet against gutters and their backs against chimney-pots, looking
+      agnostically at each other. Their first feeling was that they had come out
+      into eternity, and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom. One
+      definition occurred to both of them&mdash;that he had come out into the
+      light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun.
+      The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to
+      hold all the gods. The round of the ether turned from green to yellow
+      gradually like a great unripe fruit. All around the sunken sun it was like
+      a lemon; round all the east it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive
+      of a greengage; but the whole had still the emptiness of daylight and none
+      of the secrecy of dusk. Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale
+      green were shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed
+      falling towards the earth in every kind of colossal perspective. One of
+      them really had the character of some many-mitred, many-bearded,
+      many-winged Assyrian image, huge head downwards, hurled out of heaven&mdash;a
+      sort of false Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan. All the other clouds had
+      preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god&rsquo;s palaces had been
+      flung after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the height
+      of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a tiny trivial
+      noise that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below
+      a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel. They could also hear talk
+      out of the garden below; and realized that the irrepressible Smith must
+      have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents could
+      be heard, followed by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke and the
+      full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt. The air had that cold
+      kindness that comes after a storm. Michael Moon drank it in with as
+      serious a relish as he had drunk the little bottle of cheap claret, which
+      he had emptied almost at a draught. Inglewood went on eating ginger very
+      slowly and with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him. There was
+      still enough stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to make them almost
+      fancy they could smell the garden soil and the last roses of autumn.
+      Suddenly there came from the darkening room a silvery ping and pong which
+      told them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline.
+      After the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like
+      laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inglewood,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, &ldquo;have you ever heard
+      that I am a blackguard?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t heard it, and I don&rsquo;t believe it,&rdquo;
+      answered Inglewood, after an odd pause. &ldquo;But I have heard you were&mdash;what
+      they call rather wild.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,&rdquo;
+      said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; &ldquo;I am tame. I am quite tame;
+      I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind
+      of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount
+      too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned
+      women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories&mdash;
+      generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood,
+      that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly fall off
+      the roof, for indeed the Irishman&rsquo;s face, always sinister, was now
+      almost demoniacal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Christ confound it!&rdquo; cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the
+      empty claret bottle, &ldquo;this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine
+      I ever uncorked, and it&rsquo;s the only drink I have really enjoyed for
+      nine years. I was never wild until just ten minutes ago.&rdquo; And he
+      sent the bottle whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond the garden
+      into the road, where, in the profound evening silence, they could even
+      hear it break and part upon the stones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moon,&rdquo; said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, &ldquo;you
+      mustn&rsquo;t be so bitter about it. Everyone has to take the world as he
+      finds it; of course one often finds it a bit dull&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That fellow doesn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Michael decisively; &ldquo;I
+      mean that fellow Smith. I have a fancy there&rsquo;s some method in his
+      madness. It looks as if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute
+      by taking one step out of the plain road. Who would have thought of that
+      trapdoor? Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could
+      taste quite nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of
+      fairyland. Perhaps Nosey Gould&rsquo;s beastly little Empire Cigarettes
+      ought only to be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs.
+      Duke&rsquo;s cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of
+      a tree. Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill
+      Whisky&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be so rough on yourself,&rdquo; said Inglewood, in
+      serious distress. &ldquo;The dullness isn&rsquo;t your fault or the whisky&rsquo;s.
+      Fellows who don&rsquo;t&mdash; fellows like me I mean&mdash;have just the
+      same feeling that it&rsquo;s all rather flat and a failure. But the world&rsquo;s
+      made like that; it&rsquo;s all survival. Some people are made to get on,
+      like Warner; and some people are made to stick quiet, like me. You can&rsquo;t
+      help your temperament. I know you&rsquo;re much cleverer than I am; but
+      you can&rsquo;t help having all the loose ways of a poor literary chap,
+      and I can&rsquo;t help having all the doubts and helplessness of a small
+      scientific chap, any more than a fish can help floating or a fern can help
+      curling up. Humanity, as Warner said so well in that lecture, really
+      consists of quite different tribes of animals all disguised as men.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken by Miss Hunt&rsquo;s
+      musical instrument banging with the abruptness of artillery into a vulgar
+      but spirited tune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rosamund&rsquo;s voice came up rich and strong in the words of some
+      fatuous, fashionable coon song:-
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darkies sing a song on the old plantation, Sing it as we sang it in
+      days long since gone by.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood&rsquo;s brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he
+      continued his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic
+      tune. But the blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a
+      light that Inglewood did not understand. Many centuries, and many villages
+      and valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood&rsquo;s
+      countrymen had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first blink
+      that it was the battle star of Ireland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing can ever alter it; it&rsquo;s in the wheels of the
+      universe,&rdquo; went on Inglewood, in a low voice: &ldquo;some men are
+      weak and some strong, and the only thing we can do is to know that we are
+      weak. I have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything, for
+      I remembered my own fickleness. I have formed opinions, but I haven&rsquo;t
+      the cheek to push them, because I&rsquo;ve so often changed them. That&rsquo;s
+      the upshot, old fellow. We can&rsquo;t trust ourselves&mdash; and we can&rsquo;t
+      help it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position at
+      the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable. Behind
+      him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly topsy-turvy
+      in the silent anarchy of heaven. Their gyration made the dark figure seem
+      yet dizzier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us...&rdquo; he said, and was suddenly silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us what?&rdquo; asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick
+      though somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some
+      difficulty in speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us go and do some of these things we can&rsquo;t do,&rdquo;
+      said Michael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them the cockatoo
+      hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to them that they must
+      come down as the &ldquo;concert&rdquo; was in full swing, and Mr. Moses
+      Gould was about to recite &ldquo;Young Lochinvar.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they dropped into Innocent&rsquo;s attic they nearly tumbled over its
+      entertaining impedimenta again. Inglewood, staring at the littered floor,
+      thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery. He was therefore
+      the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell on a large
+      well-polished American revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hullo!&rdquo; he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as
+      men step back from a serpent; &ldquo;are you afraid of burglars? or when
+      and why do you deal death out of that machine gun?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that!&rdquo; said Smith, throwing it a single glance; &ldquo;I
+      deal life out of that,&rdquo; and he went bounding down the stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter III &mdash; The Banner of Beacon
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was everybody&rsquo;s
+      birthday. It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping
+      things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits,
+      really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always
+      do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but
+      while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is
+      true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the
+      most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are
+      never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till
+      it is declared by authority. Even the wild authority of the harlequin
+      Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy
+      regulations and conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic
+      life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and
+      toppling construction. Each person with a hobby found it turning into an
+      institution. Rosamund&rsquo;s songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of
+      opera; Michael&rsquo;s jests and paragraphs into a magazine. His pipe and
+      her mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of smoking concert. The
+      bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his own
+      growing importance. He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs were
+      turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana. But no
+      one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and offices, for
+      they followed each other in wild succession like the topics of a rambling
+      talker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of pleasant
+      obstacles. Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag reels of
+      exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing could be more shy and impersonal
+      than poor Arthur&rsquo;s photography. Yet the preposterous Smith was seen
+      assisting him eagerly through sunny morning hours, and an indefensible
+      sequence described as &ldquo;Moral Photography&rdquo; began to unroll
+      about the boarding-house. It was only a version of the old photographer&rsquo;s
+      joke which produces the same figure twice on one plate, making a man play
+      chess with himself, dine with himself, and so on. But these plates were
+      more hysterical and ambitious&mdash;as, &ldquo;Miss Hunt forgets Herself,&rdquo;
+      showing that lady answering her own too rapturous recognition with a most
+      appalling stare of ignorance; or &ldquo;Mr. Moon questions Himself,&rdquo;
+      in which Mr. Moon appeared as one driven to madness under his own legal
+      cross-examination, which was conducted with a long forefinger and an air
+      of ferocious waggery. One highly successful trilogy&mdash;representing
+      Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before
+      Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella&mdash;
+      Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall, like a sort
+      of fresco, with the inscription,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control&mdash; These three
+      alone will make a man a prig.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash; Tennyson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic
+      energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the
+      discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a considerable feminine
+      care for dress&mdash;the one feminine thing that had never failed her
+      solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a theory
+      (which he really seemed to take seriously) that ladies might combine
+      economy with magnificence if they would draw light chalk patterns on a
+      plain dress and then dust them off again. He set up &ldquo;Smith&rsquo;s
+      Lightning Dressmaking Company,&rdquo; with two screens, a cardboard
+      placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw him
+      an abandoned black overall or working dress on which to exercise the
+      talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment aflame with
+      red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her shoulders, and
+      looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards
+      cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in
+      it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing
+      for one flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green
+      and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in the
+      &ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo; A pang too swift to be named pain or
+      pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier. He remembered
+      how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to fall in love
+      with anybody; but it was like remembering a worship of some Babylonian
+      princess in some previous existence. At his next glimpse of her (and he
+      caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and
+      she went by quickly in her working clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as actively
+      resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down. But among
+      the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she liked it. For
+      she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad,
+      wild animals of some utterly separate species. And it is doubtful if she
+      really saw anything more eccentric or inexplicable in Smith&rsquo;s
+      chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers than she had in the chemicals of
+      Inglewood or the sardonic speeches of Moon. Courtesy, on the other hand,
+      is a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith&rsquo;s manners were as
+      courteous as they were unconventional. She said he was &ldquo;a real
+      gentleman,&rdquo; by which she simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a
+      very different thing. She would sit at the head of the table with fat,
+      folded hands and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while every one
+      else was talking at once. At least, the only other exception was Rosamund&rsquo;s
+      companion, Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more eager sort. Though
+      she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute.
+      Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion. Innocent Smith seemed
+      to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure of making
+      her talk. He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed; if he achieved
+      anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure, and to turn
+      her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery. But if she was a
+      riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh and unspoilt riddle,
+      like the riddle of the sky and the woods in spring. Indeed, though she was
+      rather older than the other two girls, she had an early morning ardour, a
+      fresh earnestness of youth, which Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere
+      spending of money, and Diana in the mere guarding of it. Smith looked at
+      her again and again. Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way&mdash;which
+      was really the right way. She had the knack of saying everything with her
+      face: her silence was a sort of steady applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday (which seemed more
+      like a week&rsquo;s holiday than a day&rsquo;s) one experiment towers
+      supreme, not because it was any sillier or more successful than the
+      others, but because out of this particular folly flowed all of the odd
+      events that were to follow. All the other practical jokes exploded of
+      themselves, and left vacancy; all the other fictions returned upon
+      themselves, and were finished like a song. But the string of solid and
+      startling events&mdash; which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a
+      pistol, and a marriage licence&mdash;were all made primarily possible by
+      the joke about the High Court of Beacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon. He was
+      in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly; yet he
+      had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman. He used his old useless
+      knowledge as a barrister to talk entertainingly of a tribunal that was a
+      parody on the pompous anomalies of English law. The High Court of Beacon,
+      he declared, was a splendid example of our free and sensible constitution.
+      It had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna Carta, and now
+      held absolute power over windmills, wine and spirit licences, ladies
+      traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing and parricide,
+      as well as anything whatever that happened in the town of Market Bosworth.
+      The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High Court of Beacon met once
+      in every four centuries; but in the intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the
+      whole powers of the institution were vested in Mrs. Duke. Tossed about
+      among the rest of the company, however, the High Court did not retain its
+      historical and legal seriousness, but was used somewhat unscrupulously in
+      a riot of domestic detail. If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the
+      tablecloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which the sittings and
+      findings of the Court would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a window to
+      remain shut, he would suddenly remember that none but the third son of the
+      lord of the manor of Penge had the right to open it. They even went to the
+      length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries. The proposed
+      trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather above the heads of the
+      company, especially of the criminal; but the trial of Inglewood on a
+      charge of photographic libel, and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of
+      insanity, were admitted to be in the best tradition of the Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not more
+      and more flippant like Michael Moon. This proposal of a private court of
+      justice, which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a political
+      humourist, Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of an abstract
+      philosopher. It was by far the best thing they could do, he declared, to
+      claim sovereign powers even for the individual household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule for
+      homes,&rdquo; he cried eagerly to Michael. &ldquo;It would be better if
+      every father COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans; it would be
+      better, because nobody would be killed. Let&rsquo;s issue a Declaration of
+      Independence from Beacon House. We could grow enough greens in that garden
+      to support us, and when the tax-collector comes let&rsquo;s tell him we&rsquo;re
+      self-supporting, and play on him with the hose.... Well, perhaps, as you
+      say, we couldn&rsquo;t very well have a hose, as that comes from the main;
+      but we could sink a well in this chalk, and a lot could be done with
+      water-jugs.... Let this really be Beacon House. Let&rsquo;s light a
+      bonfire of independence on the roof, and see house after house answering
+      it across the valley of the Thames! Let us begin the League of the Free
+      Families! Away with Local Government! A fig for Local Patriotism! Let
+      every house be a sovereign state as this is, and judge its own children by
+      its own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon. Let us cut the painter, and
+      begin to be happy together, as if we were on a desert island.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know that desert island,&rdquo; said Michael Moon; &ldquo;it only
+      exists in the `Swiss Family Robinson.&rsquo; A man feels a strange desire
+      for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash comes down some unexpected
+      cocoa-nut from some undiscovered monkey. A literary man feels inclined to
+      pen a sonnet, and at once an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket
+      and shoots out one of his quills.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you say a word against the `Swiss Family Robinson,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+      cried Innocent with great warmth. &ldquo;It mayn&rsquo;t be exact science,
+      but it&rsquo;s dead accurate philosophy. When you&rsquo;re really
+      shipwrecked, you do really find what you want. When you&rsquo;re really on
+      a desert island, you never find it a desert. If we were really besieged in
+      this garden, we&rsquo;d find a hundred English birds and English berries
+      that we never knew were here. If we were snowed up in this room, we&rsquo;d
+      be the better for reading scores of books in that bookcase that we don&rsquo;t
+      even know are there; we&rsquo;d have talks with each other, good, terrible
+      talks, that we shall go to the grave without guessing; we&rsquo;d find
+      materials for everything&mdash; christening, marriage, or funeral; yes,
+      even for a coronation&mdash; if we didn&rsquo;t decide to be a republic.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A coronation on `Swiss Family&rsquo; lines, I suppose,&rdquo; said
+      Michael, laughing. &ldquo;Oh, I know you would find everything in that
+      atmosphere. If we wanted such a simple thing, for instance, as a
+      Coronation Canopy, we should walk down beyond the geraniums and find the
+      Canopy Tree in full bloom. If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold,
+      why, we should be digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine
+      under the lawn. And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a
+      great storm would wash everything on shore, and we should find there was a
+      Whale on the premises.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,&rdquo;
+      asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion. &ldquo;I bet you&rsquo;ve
+      never examined the premises! I bet you&rsquo;ve never been round at the
+      back as I was this morning&mdash; for I found the very thing you say could
+      only grow on a tree. There&rsquo;s an old sort of square tent up against
+      the dustbin; it&rsquo;s got three holes in the canvas, and a pole&rsquo;s
+      broken, so it&rsquo;s not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy&mdash;&rdquo;
+      And his voice quite failed him to express its shining adequacy; then he
+      went on with controversial eagerness: &ldquo;You see I take every
+      challenge as you make it. I believe every blessed thing you say couldn&rsquo;t
+      be here has been here all the time. You say you want a whale washed up for
+      oil. Why, there&rsquo;s oil in that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don&rsquo;t
+      believe anybody has touched it or thought of it for years. And as for your
+      gold crown, we&rsquo;re none of us wealthy here, but we could collect
+      enough ten-shilling bits from our own pockets to string round a man&rsquo;s
+      head for half an hour; or one of Miss Hunt&rsquo;s gold bangles is nearly
+      big enough to&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter. &ldquo;All is
+      not gold that glitters,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and besides&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a mistake that is!&rdquo; cried Innocent Smith, leaping up in
+      great excitement. &ldquo;All is gold that glitters&mdash; especially now
+      we are a Sovereign State. What&rsquo;s the good of a Sovereign State if
+      you can&rsquo;t define a sovereign? We can make anything a precious metal,
+      as men could in the morning of the world. They didn&rsquo;t choose gold
+      because it was rare; your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime
+      much rarer. They chose gold because it was bright&mdash;because it was a
+      hard thing to find, but pretty when you&rsquo;ve found it. You can&rsquo;t
+      fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits; you can only look at it&mdash;and
+      you can look at it out here.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open the
+      doors into the garden. At the same time also, with one of his gestures
+      that never seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were, he
+      stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn as if
+      for a dance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier than
+      that of the day before. The west was swimming with sanguine colours, and a
+      sort of sleepy flame lay along the lawn. The twisted shadows of the one or
+      two garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as in common
+      daylight, but like arabesques written in vivid violet ink on some page of
+      Eastern gold. The sunset was one of those festive and yet mysterious
+      conflagrations in which common things by their colours remind us of costly
+      or curious things. The slates upon the sloping roof burned like the plumes
+      of a vast peacock, in every mysterious blend of blue and green. The
+      red-brown bricks of the wall glowed with all the October tints of strong
+      ruby and tawny wines. The sun seemed to set each object alight with a
+      different coloured flame, like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent&rsquo;s
+      hair, which was of a rather colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of
+      pagan gold on it as he strode across the lawn towards the one tall ridge
+      of rockery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would be the good of gold,&rdquo; he was saying, &ldquo;if it
+      did not glitter? Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than
+      for a black sun at noon? A black button would do just as well. Don&rsquo;t
+      you see that everything in this garden looks like a jewel? And will you
+      kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks
+      like a jewel? Leave off buying and selling, and start looking! Open your
+      eyes, and you&rsquo;ll wake up in the New Jerusalem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All is gold that glitters&mdash; Tree and tower of brass; Rolls the
+      golden evening air Down the golden grass. Kick the cry to Jericho, How
+      yellow mud is sold; All is gold that glitters, For the glitter is the
+      gold.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who wrote that?&rdquo; asked Rosamund, amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one will ever write it,&rdquo; answered Smith, and cleared the
+      rockery with a flying leap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; said Rosamund to Michael Moon, &ldquo;he ought to be
+      sent to an asylum. Don&rsquo;t you think so?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his
+      long, swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or
+      mood, he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the
+      social extravagance of the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum,&rdquo; repeated the
+      lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was unmistakably
+      sneering. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s
+      at all necessary.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; asked Rosamund quickly. &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because he is in one now,&rdquo; answered Michael Moon, in a quiet
+      but ugly voice. &ldquo;Why, didn&rsquo;t you know?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice;
+      for the Irishman&rsquo;s face and voice were really almost creepy. With
+      his dark figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine he looked like the
+      devil in paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry,&rdquo; he continued, with a sort of harsh
+      humility. &ldquo;Of course we don&rsquo;t talk about it much... but I
+      thought we all really knew.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knew what?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; answered Moon, &ldquo;that Beacon House is a certain
+      rather singular sort of house&mdash;a house with the tiles loose, shall we
+      say? Innocent Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn&rsquo;t you
+      come when he called before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of
+      course he has to be extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very
+      bumptious eccentric thing to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+      his bedside manner.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You daren&rsquo;t say such a thing!&rdquo; cried Rosamund in a
+      rage. &ldquo;You daren&rsquo;t suggest that I&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not more than I am,&rdquo; said Michael soothingly; &ldquo;not more
+      than the rest of us. Haven&rsquo;t you ever noticed that Miss Duke never
+      sits still&mdash;a notorious sign? Haven&rsquo;t you ever observed that
+      Inglewood is always washing his hands&mdash; a known mark of mental
+      disease? I, of course, am a dipsomaniac.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you,&rdquo; broke out his companion, not
+      without agitation. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve heard you had some bad habits&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All habits are bad habits,&rdquo; said Michael, with deadly calm.
+      &ldquo;Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by
+      settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by
+      being tamed. YOU went mad about money, because you&rsquo;re an heiress.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lie,&rdquo; cried Rosamund furiously. &ldquo;I never
+      was mean about money.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were worse,&rdquo; said Michael, in a low voice and yet
+      violently. &ldquo;You thought that other people were. You thought every
+      man who came near you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself
+      go and be sane; and now you&rsquo;re mad and I&rsquo;m mad, and serve us
+      right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You brute!&rdquo; said Rosamund, quite white. &ldquo;And is this
+      true?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his
+      abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then
+      stepped back with an ironical bow. &ldquo;Not literally true, of course,&rdquo;
+      he said; &ldquo;only really true. An allegory, shall we say? a social
+      satire.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I hate and despise your satires,&rdquo; cried Rosamund Hunt,
+      letting loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone, and
+      speaking every word to wound. &ldquo;I despise it as I despise your rank
+      tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling, and your
+      Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and
+      your rotten failure at everything. I don&rsquo;t care whether you call it
+      snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly things to look at,
+      and action. You won&rsquo;t frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Victrix causa deae&mdash;&rdquo; said Michael gloomily; and this
+      angered her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it to be
+      witty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I dare say you know Greek,&rdquo; she said, with cheerful
+      inaccuracy; &ldquo;you haven&rsquo;t done much with that either.&rdquo;
+      And she crossed the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house slowly,
+      and with a thought-clouded brow. He was one of those men who are quite
+      clever, but quite the reverse of quick. As he came back out of the sunset
+      garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped swiftly to her feet
+      and began putting away the tea things. But it was not before Inglewood had
+      seen an instantaneous picture so unique that he might well have
+      snapshotted it with his everlasting camera. For Diana had been sitting in
+      front of her unfinished work with her chin on her hand, looking straight
+      out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are busy,&rdquo; said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he
+      had seen, and wishing to ignore it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no time for dreaming in this world,&rdquo; answered
+      the young lady with her back to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking lately,&rdquo; said Inglewood in a low voice,
+      &ldquo;that there&rsquo;s no time for waking up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the
+      garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t smoke or drink, you know,&rdquo; he said
+      irrelevantly, &ldquo;because I think they&rsquo;re drugs. And yet I fancy
+      all hobbies, like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too. Getting under a
+      black hood, getting into a dark room&mdash;getting into a hole anyhow.
+      Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air.
+      Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself. That&rsquo;s
+      the matter with all of us. We&rsquo;re too busy to wake up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the girl solidly, &ldquo;what is there to wake up
+      to?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be!&rdquo; cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
+      excitement&mdash;&ldquo;there must be something to wake up to! All we do
+      is preparations&mdash;your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner&rsquo;s
+      scientific appliances. We&rsquo;re always preparing for something&mdash;something
+      that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house; but
+      what is going to HAPPEN in the house?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes, and seemed to
+      be searching for some form of words which she could not find.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund
+      Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the
+      doorway. She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an
+      expression of the most infantile astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, here&rsquo;s a fine game!&rdquo; she said, panting. &ldquo;What
+      am I to do now, I wonder? I&rsquo;ve wired for Dr. Warner; that&rsquo;s
+      all I can think of doing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving
+      forward like one used to be called upon for assistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Mary,&rdquo; said the heiress, &ldquo;my companion Mary
+      Gray: that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her in the
+      garden, after ten hours&rsquo; acquaintance, and he wants to go off with
+      her now for a special licence.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked out on the
+      garden, still golden with evening light. Nothing moved there but a bird or
+      two hopping and twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road
+      outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow
+      Gladstone bag on top of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IV &mdash; The Garden of the God
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance and
+      utterance of the other girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said shortly, &ldquo;I suppose Miss Gray can
+      decline him if she doesn&rsquo;t want to marry him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she DOES want to marry him!&rdquo; cried Rosamund in
+      exasperation. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s a wild, wicked fool, and I won&rsquo;t be
+      parted from her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; said Diana icily, &ldquo;but I really don&rsquo;t
+      see what we can do.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the man&rsquo;s balmy, Diana,&rdquo; reasoned her friend
+      angrily. &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t let my nice governess marry a man that&rsquo;s
+      balmy! You or somebody MUST stop it!&mdash;Mr. Inglewood, you&rsquo;re a
+      man; go and tell them they simply can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can,&rdquo; said
+      Inglewood, with a depressed air. &ldquo;I have far less right of
+      intervention than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral
+      force than she.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t either of you got much,&rdquo; cried Rosamund,
+      the last stays of her formidable temper giving way; &ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll
+      go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck. I think I know some one
+      who will help me more than you do, at any rate... he&rsquo;s a
+      cantankerous beast, but he&rsquo;s a man, and has a mind, and knows it...&rdquo;
+      And she flung out into the garden, with cheeks aflame, and the parasol
+      whirling like a Catherine wheel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over the
+      hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down his
+      long blue chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her, after the
+      nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of her other
+      friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon,&rdquo; she said frankly. &ldquo;I
+      hated you for being a cynic; but I&rsquo;ve been well punished, for I want
+      a cynic just now. I&rsquo;ve had my fill of sentiment&mdash;I&rsquo;m fed
+      up with it. The world&rsquo;s gone mad, Mr. Moon&mdash;all except the
+      cynics, I think. That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and
+      she&mdash; and she&mdash;doesn&rsquo;t seem to mind.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly,
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not joking; that&rsquo;s Mr. Smith&rsquo;s cab outside.
+      He swears he&rsquo;ll take her off now to his aunt&rsquo;s, and go for a
+      special licence. Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand for an
+      instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side of the garden.
+      &ldquo;My practical advice to you is this,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;Let him
+      go for his special licence, and ask him to get another one for you and me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that one of your jokes?&rdquo; asked the young lady. &ldquo;Do
+      say what you really mean.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,&rdquo; said Moon
+      with ponderous precision&mdash;&ldquo;a plain, practical man: a man of
+      affairs; a man of facts and the daylight. He has let down twenty ton of
+      good building bricks suddenly on my head, and I am glad to say they have
+      woken me up. We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in
+      this very sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so, but now
+      we&rsquo;re going to be married, Rosamund, and I can&rsquo;t see why that
+      cab...&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; said Rosamund stoutly, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know
+      what you mean.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a lie!&rdquo; cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening
+      eyes. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m all for lies in an ordinary way; but don&rsquo;t
+      you see that to-night they won&rsquo;t do? We&rsquo;ve wandered into a
+      world of facts, old girl. That grass growing, and that sun going down, and
+      that cab at the door, are facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself
+      by saying I was after your money, and didn&rsquo;t really love you. But if
+      I stood here now and told you I didn&rsquo;t love you&mdash;you wouldn&rsquo;t
+      believe me: for truth is in this garden to-night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Mr. Moon...&rdquo; said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face. &ldquo;Is my name
+      Moon?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Is your name Hunt? On my honour, they sound
+      to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names. It&rsquo;s as if your
+      name was `Swim&rsquo; and my name was `Sunrise.&rsquo; But our real names
+      are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is no good,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes;
+      &ldquo;one can never go back.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can go where I damn please,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;and I can
+      carry you on my shoulder.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!&rdquo; cried
+      the girl earnestly. &ldquo;You could carry me off my feet, I dare say,
+      soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These
+      things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith&rsquo;s, they&mdash;
+      they do attract women, I don&rsquo;t deny it. As you say, we&rsquo;re all
+      telling the truth to-night. They&rsquo;ve attracted poor Mary, for one.
+      They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages
+      do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment&mdash; you&rsquo;ve got
+      used to your drinks and things&mdash;I shan&rsquo;t be pretty much longer&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imprudent marriages!&rdquo; roared Michael. &ldquo;And pray where
+      in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk
+      about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long
+      enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night?
+      You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you&rsquo;ll
+      be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn&rsquo;t be unhappy,
+      like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we&rsquo;ll be
+      disappointed. I, for one, don&rsquo;t expect till I die to be so good a
+      man as I am at this minute&mdash; a tower with all the trumpets shouting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see all this,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in
+      her solid face, &ldquo;and do you really want to marry me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My darling, what else is there to do?&rdquo; reasoned the Irishman.
+      &ldquo;What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth,
+      except to marry you? What&rsquo;s the alternative to marriage, barring
+      sleep? It&rsquo;s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns
+      do in Ireland, you must marry Man&mdash;that is Me. The only third thing
+      is to marry yourself&mdash; yourself, yourself, yourself&mdash;the only
+      companion that is never satisfied&mdash; and never satisfactory.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Michael,&rdquo; said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, &ldquo;if you
+      won&rsquo;t talk so much, I&rsquo;ll marry you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s no time for talking,&rdquo; cried Michael Moon; &ldquo;singing
+      is the only thing. Can&rsquo;t you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go and fetch it for me,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp
+      authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished; then he shot
+      away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered shoes out of the Greek
+      fairy tale. He cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of
+      mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two of the open
+      parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead; he
+      twisted round and came back slowly, whistling. The events of that
+      enchanted evening were not at an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious
+      thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit of
+      Rosamund. It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour,
+      seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels,
+      the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words can express
+      how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens.
+      Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet
+      of paper or a sheet of steel. It indicates no surrender, far less any
+      sympathy. The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the
+      most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is a separate sexual power, and
+      proves nothing one way or the other about force of character. But to young
+      men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was
+      like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted
+      it) any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent. He acted
+      as men do when a theatre catches fire&mdash;very differently from how they
+      would have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse. He
+      had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress
+      was the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in
+      consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own conduct
+      except by the protests it evoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood&mdash;leave me alone; that&rsquo;s
+      not the way to help.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I can help you,&rdquo; said Arthur, with grinding certainty;
+      &ldquo;I can, I can, I can...&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you said,&rdquo; cried the girl, &ldquo;that you were much
+      weaker than me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I am weaker than you,&rdquo; said Arthur, in a voice that went
+      vibrating through everything, &ldquo;but not just now.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let go my hands!&rdquo; cried Diana. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t be
+      bullied.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one element he was much stronger than she&mdash;the matter of humour.
+      This leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying: &ldquo;Well, you
+      are mean. You know quite well you&rsquo;ll bully me all the rest of my
+      life. You might allow a man the one minute of his life when he&rsquo;s
+      allowed to bully.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry, and for the
+      first time since her childhood Diana was entirely off her guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean you want to marry me?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, there&rsquo;s a cab at the door!&rdquo; cried Inglewood,
+      springing up with an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors
+      that led into the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time
+      that the house and garden were on a steep height over London. And yet,
+      though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret:
+      it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of the turrets of
+      heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring all sorts of
+      details with a senseless delight. He noticed for the first time that the
+      railings of the gate beyond the garden bushes were moulded like little
+      spearheads and painted blue. He noticed that one of the blue spears was
+      loosened in its place, and hung sideways; and this almost made him laugh.
+      He thought it somehow exquisitely harmless and funny that the railing
+      should be crooked; he thought he should like to know how it happened, who
+      did it, and how the man was getting on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realized that
+      they were not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon, both of
+      whom they had last seen in the blackest temper of detachment, were
+      standing together on the lawn. They were standing in quite an ordinary
+      manner, and yet they looked somehow like people in a book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said Diana, &ldquo;what lovely air!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive
+      that it rang out like a complaint. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just like that
+      horrid, beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me feel happy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it isn&rsquo;t like anything but itself!&rdquo; answered Diana,
+      breathing deeply. &ldquo;Why, it&rsquo;s all cold, and yet it feels like
+      fire.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,&rdquo; said Mr. Moon.
+      &ldquo;Balmy&mdash;especially on the crumpet.&rdquo; And he fanned himself
+      quite unnecessarily with his straw hat. They were all full of little leaps
+      and pulsations of objectless and airy energy. Diana stirred and stretched
+      her long arms rigidly, as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating
+      restfulness; Michael stood still for long intervals, with gathered
+      muscles, then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still again; Rosamund
+      did not trip, for women never trip, except when they fall on their noses,
+      but she struck the ground with her foot as she moved, as if to some
+      inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood, leaning quite quietly against a tree,
+      had unconsciously clutched a branch and shaken it with a creative
+      violence. Those giant gestures of Man, that made the high statues and the
+      strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their limbs. Silently as they
+      strolled and stood they were bursting like batteries with an animal
+      magnetism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on
+      each side, &ldquo;let&rsquo;s dance round that bush!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, what bush do you mean?&rdquo; asked Rosamund, looking round
+      with a sort of radiant rudeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bush that isn&rsquo;t there,&rdquo; said Michael&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      Mulberry Bush.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had taken each other&rsquo;s hands, half laughing and quite ritually;
+      and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round, like a
+      demon spinning the world for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of the
+      horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring of
+      heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a child; she
+      seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate, or
+      to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The circle broke&mdash;as all such perfect circles of levity must break&mdash;
+      and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away
+      against the blue rails of the gate. When reeling there he suddenly raised
+      shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it&rsquo;s Warner!&rdquo; he shouted, waving his arms. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+      jolly old Warner&mdash; with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that Dr. Warner?&rdquo; cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a
+      burst of memory, amusement, and distress. &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m so sorry!
+      Oh, do tell him it&rsquo;s all right!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s take hands and tell him,&rdquo; said Michael Moon. For
+      indeed, while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind
+      the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion in
+      the cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by an heiress to
+      come to a case of dangerous mania, and when, as you come in through the
+      garden to the house, the heiress and her landlady and two of the gentlemen
+      boarders join hands and dance round you in a ring, calling out, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+      all right! it&rsquo;s all right!&rdquo; you are apt to be flustered and
+      even displeased. Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person. The
+      two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained to him
+      that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure, was just such a
+      classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round by a ring of laughing maidens
+      on some old golden Greek seashore&mdash; even then he seemed to miss the
+      point of the general rejoicing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inglewood!&rdquo; cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with
+      a stare, &ldquo;are you mad?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered, easily and
+      quietly enough, &ldquo;Not now. The truth is, Warner, I&rsquo;ve just made
+      a rather important medical discovery&mdash;quite in your line.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; asked the great doctor stiffly&mdash;&ldquo;what
+      discovery?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve discovered that health really is catching, like disease,&rdquo;
+      answered Arthur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading,&rdquo; said Michael,
+      performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful expression. &ldquo;Twenty
+      thousand more cases taken to the hospitals; nurses employed night and day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Warner studied Michael&rsquo;s grave face and lightly moving legs with
+      an unfathomed wonder. &ldquo;And is THIS, may I ask,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;the sanity that is spreading?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must forgive me, Dr. Warner,&rdquo; cried Rosamund Hunt
+      heartily. &ldquo;I know I&rsquo;ve treated you badly; but indeed it was
+      all a mistake. I was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but
+      now it all seems like a dream&mdash;and and Mr. Smith is the sweetest,
+      most sensible, most delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may
+      marry any one he likes&mdash;except me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should suggest Mrs. Duke,&rdquo; said Michael.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gravity of Dr. Warner&rsquo;s face increased. He took a slip of pink
+      paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale blue eyes quietly fixed on
+      Rosamund&rsquo;s face all the time. He spoke with a not inexcusable
+      frigidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Miss Hunt,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are not yet very
+      reassuring. You sent me this wire only half an hour ago: `Come at once, if
+      possible, with another doctor. Man&mdash;Innocent Smith&mdash;gone mad on
+      premises, and doing dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?&rsquo; I
+      went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is
+      also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he has come
+      round with me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmly tell me that this
+      criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing, with accompaniments
+      that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity. I hardly
+      comprehend the change.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody&rsquo;s
+      soul?&rdquo; cried Rosamund, in despair. &ldquo;Must I confess we had got
+      so morbid as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and
+      that we didn&rsquo;t even know it was only because we wanted to get
+      married ourselves? We&rsquo;ll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor;
+      we&rsquo;re happy enough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is Mr. Smith?&rdquo; asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their
+      farce, who had not been visible for an hour or more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I think he&rsquo;s on the other side of the house, by the
+      dustbin,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may be on the road to Russia,&rdquo; said Warner, &ldquo;but he
+      must be found.&rdquo; And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of
+      the house by the sunflowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope,&rdquo; said Rosamund, &ldquo;he won&rsquo;t really
+      interfere with Mr. Smith.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Interfere with the daisies!&rdquo; said Michael with a snort.
+      &ldquo;A man can&rsquo;t be locked up for falling in love&mdash;at least I
+      hope not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; I think even a doctor couldn&rsquo;t make a disease out of him.
+      He&rsquo;d throw off the doctor like the disease, don&rsquo;t you know? I
+      believe it&rsquo;s a case of a sort of holy well. I believe Innocent Smith
+      is simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass with
+      the point of her white shoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Inglewood, &ldquo;that Smith is not
+      extraordinary at all. He&rsquo;s comic just because he&rsquo;s so
+      startlingly commonplace. Don&rsquo;t you know what it is to be all one
+      family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the
+      holidays? That bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy&rsquo;s hamper.
+      This tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any schoolboy
+      would have climbed. Yes, that&rsquo;s the thing that has haunted us all
+      about him, the thing we could never fit a word to. Whether he is my old
+      schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old schoolfellows. He is the
+      endless bun-eating, ball-throwing animal that we have all been.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is only you absurd boys,&rdquo; said Diana. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+      believe any girl was ever so silly, and I&rsquo;m sure no girl was ever so
+      happy, except&mdash;&rdquo; and she stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith,&rdquo; said Michael
+      Moon in a low voice. &ldquo;Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain.
+      He is not there. Haven&rsquo;t you noticed that we never saw him since we
+      found ourselves? He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only
+      our own youth returned. Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of
+      his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on
+      this lawn. Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing,
+      but the man we shall never see. In a spring garden before breakfast we
+      shall smell the smell called Smith. In the snapping of brisk twigs in tiny
+      fires we shall hear a noise named Smith. Everything insatiable and
+      innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like babies at a bun
+      feast, in the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white
+      firwood, we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity;
+      but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate things
+      not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and heavens; he&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.
+      Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,
+      leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road. He clutched the blue
+      railings of the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction of
+      the noise. He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face
+      that seemed made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and
+      resplendent as Warner&rsquo;s, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder
+      part of his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Murder!&rdquo; he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very
+      penetrating voice. &ldquo;Stop that murderer there!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows of the house,
+      and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came flying round the corner
+      like a leaping rabbit. Yet before he had reached the group a third
+      discharge had deafened them, and they saw with their own eyes two spots of
+      white sky drilled through the second of the unhappy Herbert&rsquo;s high
+      hats. The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot, and
+      came down on all fours, staring like a cow. The hat with the two
+      shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him, and Innocent
+      Smith came round the corner like a railway train. He was looking twice his
+      proper size&mdash;a giant clad in green, the big revolver still smoking in
+      his hand, his face sanguine and in shadow, his eyes blazing like all
+      stars, and his yellow hair standing out all ways like Struwelpeter&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness, Inglewood
+      had time to feel once more what he had felt when he saw the other lovers
+      standing on the lawn&mdash;the sensation of a certain cut and coloured
+      clearness that belongs rather to the things of art than to the things of
+      experience. The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the green
+      bulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked railings
+      behind, clutched by the stranger&rsquo;s yellow vulture claws and peered
+      over by his long vulture neck, the silk hat on the gravel, and the little
+      cloudlet of smoke floating across the garden as innocently as the puff of
+      a cigarette&mdash; all these seemed unnaturally distinct and definite.
+      They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation. Indeed, every
+      object grew more and more particular and precious because the whole
+      picture was breaking up. Things look so bright just before they burst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased, Arthur had stepped
+      across and taken one of Smith&rsquo;s arms. Simultaneously the little
+      stranger had run up the steps and taken the other. Smith went into peals
+      of laughter, and surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness. Moon
+      raised the doctor to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly on the
+      garden gate. The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women mostly are
+      in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that, somehow or other,
+      a light had been dashed out of the sky. The doctor himself, when he had
+      risen, collected his hat and wits, and dusting himself down with an air of
+      great disgust, turned to them in brief apology. He was very white with his
+      recent panic, but he spoke with perfect self-control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will excuse us, ladies,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;my friend and
+      Mr. Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways. I think we had
+      better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate with you later.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed Smith
+      was led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant boom of mirth
+      could again be heard through the half-open window; but there came no echo
+      of the quiet voices of the physicians. The girls walked about the garden
+      together, rubbing up each other&rsquo;s spirits as best they might;
+      Michael Moon still hung heavily against the gate. Somewhere about the
+      expiration of that time Dr. Warner came out of the house with a face less
+      pale but even more stern, and the little man with the fish-bone face
+      advanced gravely in his rear. And if the face of Warner in the sunlight
+      was that of a hanging judge, the face of the little man behind was more
+      like a death&rsquo;s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Hunt,&rdquo; said Dr. Herbert Warner, &ldquo;I only wish to
+      offer you my warm thanks and admiration. By your prompt courage and wisdom
+      in sending for us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and
+      put out of mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of
+      humanity&mdash; a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never
+      been before combined in flesh.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking eyes.
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t mean Mr.
+      Smith?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has gone by many other names,&rdquo; said the doctor gravely,
+      &ldquo;and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind him. That man,
+      Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and tears across the world. Whether
+      he is mad as well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests of science,
+      to discover. In any case, we shall have to take him to a magistrate first,
+      even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum. But the lunatic asylum in
+      which he is confined will have to be sealed with wall within wall, and
+      ringed with guns like a fortress, or he will break out again to bring
+      forth carnage and darkness on the earth.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler. Then
+      her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate; but he continued
+      to lean on it without moving, with his face turned away towards the
+      darkening road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter V &mdash; The Allegorical Practical Joker
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat more
+      urbane and even dapper figure than he had appeared when clutching the
+      railings and craning his neck into the garden. He even looked
+      comparatively young when he took his hat off, having fair hair parted in
+      the middle and carefully curled on each side, and lively movements,
+      especially of the hands. He had a dandified monocle slung round his neck
+      by a broad black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had
+      alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright enough for a boy&rsquo;s;
+      it was only when you looked at the fish-bone face that you beheld
+      something acrid and old. His manners were excellent, though hardly
+      English, and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people who only met
+      him once remembered him. One was a trick of closing his eyes when he
+      wished to be particularly polite; the other was one of lifting his joined
+      thumb and forefinger in the air as if holding a pinch of snuff, when he
+      was hesitating or hovering over a word. But those who were longer in his
+      company tended to forget these oddities in the stream of his quaint and
+      solemn conversation and really singular views.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Hunt,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner, &ldquo;this is Dr. Cyrus Pym.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he were
+      &ldquo;playing fair&rdquo; in some child&rsquo;s game, and gave a prompt
+      little bow, which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United
+      States.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Cyrus Pym,&rdquo; continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes
+      again), &ldquo;is perhaps the first criminological expert of America. We
+      are very fortunate to be able to consult with him in this extraordinary
+      case&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t make head or tail of anything,&rdquo; said Rosamund.
+      &ldquo;How can poor Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or by your telegram,&rdquo; said Herbert Warner, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; cried the girl impatiently.
+      &ldquo;Why, he&rsquo;s done us all more good than going to church.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I can explain to the young lady,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym.
+      &ldquo;This criminal or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a
+      method of his own, a method of the most daring ingenuity. He is popular
+      wherever he goes, for he invades every house as an uproarious child.
+      People are getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a
+      scoundrel; so he always uses the disguise of&mdash;what shall I say&mdash;the
+      Bohemian, the blameless Bohemian. He always carries people off their feet.
+      People are used to the mask of conventional good conduct. He goes in for
+      eccentric good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn and
+      solid Spanish merchant; but you&rsquo;re not prepared when he dresses up
+      as Don Quixote. You expect a humbug to behave like Sir Charles Grandison;
+      because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep, tear-moving tenderness
+      of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison so often behaved like a
+      humbug. But no real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for a humbug that
+      models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison but on Sir Roger de Coverly.
+      Setting up to be a good man a little cracked is a new criminal incognito,
+      Miss Hunt. It&rsquo;s been a great notion, and uncommonly successful; but
+      its success just makes it mighty cruel. I can forgive Dick Turpin if he
+      impersonates Dr. Busby; I can&rsquo;t forgive him when he impersonates Dr.
+      Johnson. The saint with a tile loose is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be
+      parodied.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how do you know,&rdquo; cried Rosamund desperately, &ldquo;that
+      Mr. Smith is a known criminal?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I collated all the documents,&rdquo; said the American, &ldquo;when
+      my friend Warner knocked me up on receipt of your cable. It is my
+      professional affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there&rsquo;s no
+      more doubt about them than about the Bradshaw down at the depot. This man
+      has hitherto escaped the law, through his admirable affectations of
+      infancy or insanity. But I myself, as a specialist, have privately
+      authenticated notes of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or
+      achieved in this manner. He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a
+      grand popularity. He makes things go. They do go; when he&rsquo;s gone the
+      things are gone. Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man&rsquo;s life or a man&rsquo;s
+      spoons, or more often a woman. I assure you I have all the memoranda.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have seen them,&rdquo; said Warner solidly, &ldquo;I can assure
+      you that all this is correct.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings,&rdquo; went on
+      the American doctor, &ldquo;is this perpetual deception of innocent women
+      by a wild simulation of innocence. From almost every house where this
+      great imaginative devil has been, he has taken some poor girl away with
+      him; some say he&rsquo;s got a hypnotic eye with his other queer features,
+      and that they go like automata. What&rsquo;s become of all those poor
+      girls nobody knows. Murdered, I dare say; for we&rsquo;ve lots of
+      instances, besides this one, of his turning his hand to murder, though
+      none ever brought him under the law. Anyhow, our most modern methods of
+      research can&rsquo;t find any trace of the wretched women. It&rsquo;s when
+      I think of them that I am really moved, Miss Hunt. And I&rsquo;ve really
+      nothing else to say just now except what Dr. Warner has said.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in
+      marble&mdash;&ldquo;that we all have to thank you very much for that
+      telegram.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident sincerity
+      that one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner&mdash; the falling
+      eyelids, the rising intonation, and the poised finger and thumb&mdash;which
+      were at other times a little comic. It was not so much that he was
+      cleverer than Warner; perhaps he was not so clever, though he was more
+      celebrated. But he had what Warner never had, a fresh and unaffected
+      seriousness&mdash; the great American virtue of simplicity. Rosamund
+      knitted her brows and looked gloomily toward the darkening house that
+      contained the dark prodigy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to
+      silver, and was changing from silver to gray. The long plumy shadows of
+      the one or two trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead
+      background of dusk. In the sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the
+      entrance to the house by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a
+      hurried consultation between Inglewood (who was still left in charge of
+      the mysterious captive) and Diana, who had moved to his assistance from
+      without. After a few minutes and gestures they went inside, shutting the
+      glass doors upon the garden; and the garden seemed to grow grayer still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move in
+      the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a
+      flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity,
+      and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult,
+      pedantic as he was, to call him a pedant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m vurry sorry, Miss Hunt,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but Dr.
+      Warner and I, as two quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith
+      away in that cab, and the less said about it the better. Don&rsquo;t you
+      agitate yourself, Miss Hunt. You&rsquo;ve just got to think that we&rsquo;re
+      taking away a monstrosity, something that oughtn&rsquo;t to be at all&mdash;something
+      like one of those gods in your Britannic Museum, all wings, and beards,
+      and legs, and eyes, and no shape. That&rsquo;s what Smith is, and you
+      shall soon be quit of him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about to
+      follow him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke came out
+      with more than her usual quickness across the lawn. Her face was aquiver
+      with worry and excitement, and her dark earnest eyes fixed only on the
+      other girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rosamund,&rdquo; she cried in despair, &ldquo;what shall I do with
+      her?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With her?&rdquo; cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump. &ldquo;O
+      lord, he isn&rsquo;t a woman too, is he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, no,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common
+      fairness. &ldquo;A woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean your friend Mary Gray,&rdquo; retorted Diana with equal
+      tartness. &ldquo;What on earth am I to do with her?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we tell her about Smith, you mean,&rdquo; answered
+      Rosamund, her face at once clouded and softening. &ldquo;Yes, it will be
+      pretty painful.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I HAVE told her,&rdquo; exploded Diana, with more than her
+      congenital exasperation. &ldquo;I have told her, and she doesn&rsquo;t
+      seem to mind. She still says she&rsquo;s going away with Smith in that
+      cab.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s impossible!&rdquo; ejaculated Rosamund. &ldquo;Why,
+      Mary is really religious. She&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively close to
+      her on the lawn. Her quiet companion had come down very quietly into the
+      garden, but dressed very decisively for travel. She had a neat but very
+      ancient blue tam-o&rsquo;-shanter on her head, and was pulling some rather
+      threadbare gray gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints fitted
+      excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair; the more excellently for
+      the touch of shabbiness: for a woman&rsquo;s clothes never suit her so
+      well as when they seem to suit her by accident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and attractive.
+      In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are already sad, it
+      will often happen that one reflection at some occasional angle will cause
+      to linger the last of the light. A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a
+      scrap of looking-glass, will be full of the fire that is lost to all the
+      rest of the earth. The quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray was
+      like some triangular piece of mirror that could still repeat the splendour
+      of hours before. Mary, though she was always graceful, could never before
+      have properly been called beautiful; and yet her happiness amid all that
+      misery was so beautiful as to make a man catch his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Diana,&rdquo; cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her
+      phrase; &ldquo;but how did you tell her?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is quite easy to tell her,&rdquo; answered Diana sombrely;
+      &ldquo;it makes no impression at all.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve kept everything waiting,&rdquo; said
+      Mary Gray apologetically, &ldquo;and now we must really say good-bye.
+      Innocent is taking me to his aunt&rsquo;s over at Hampstead, and I&rsquo;m
+      afraid she goes to bed early.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort of sleepy
+      light in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness; she was like one
+      speaking absently with her eye on some very distant object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mary, Mary,&rdquo; cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+      so sorry about it, but the thing can&rsquo;t be at all. We&mdash;we have
+      found out all about Mr. Smith.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All?&rdquo; repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation;
+      &ldquo;why, that must be awfully exciting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that the silent
+      Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head, as it might be to
+      listen. Then Rosamund remaining speechless, Dr. Pym came to her rescue in
+      a definite way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To begin with,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this man Smith is constantly
+      attempting murder. The Warden of Brakespeare College&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile. &ldquo;Innocent
+      told me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t say what he told you,&rdquo; replied Pym quickly,
+      &ldquo;but I&rsquo;m very much afraid it wasn&rsquo;t true. The plain
+      truth is that the man&rsquo;s stained with every known human crime. I
+      assure you I have all the documents. I have evidence of his committing
+      burglary, signed by a most eminent English curate. I have&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but there were two curates,&rdquo; cried Mary, with a certain
+      gentle eagerness; &ldquo;that was what made it so much funnier.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more, and Inglewood
+      appeared for an instant, making a sort of signal. The American doctor
+      bowed, the English doctor did not, but they both set out stolidly towards
+      the house. No one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the gate; but
+      the back of his head and shoulders had still an indescribable indication
+      that he was listening to every word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you understand, Mary,&rdquo; cried Rosamund in
+      despair; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t you know that awful things have happened even
+      before our very eyes. I should have thought you would have heard the
+      revolver shots upstairs.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I heard the shots,&rdquo; said Mary almost brightly; &ldquo;but
+      I was busy packing just then. And Innocent had told me he was going to
+      shoot at Dr. Warner; so it wasn&rsquo;t worth while to come down.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t understand what you mean,&rdquo; cried Rosamund
+      Hunt, stamping, &ldquo;but you must and shall understand what I mean. I
+      don&rsquo;t care how cruelly I put it, if only I can save you. I mean that
+      your Innocent Smith is the most awfully wicked man in the world. He has
+      sent bullets at lots of other men and gone off in cabs with lots of other
+      women. And he seems to have killed the women too, for nobody can find
+      them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is really rather naughty sometimes,&rdquo; said Mary Gray,
+      laughing softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something,&rdquo; said Rosamund,
+      and burst into tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out of the house
+      with their great green-clad captive between them. He made no resistance,
+      but was still laughing in a groggy and half-witted style. Arthur Inglewood
+      followed in the rear, a dark and red study in the last shades of distress
+      and shame. In this black, funereal, and painfully realistic style the exit
+      from Beacon House was made by a man whose entrance a day before had been
+      effected by the happy leaping of a wall and the hilarious climbing of a
+      tree. No one moved of the groups in the garden except Mary Gray, who
+      stepped forward quite naturally, calling out, &ldquo;Are you ready,
+      Innocent? Our cab&rsquo;s been waiting such a long time.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner firmly, &ldquo;I must
+      insist on asking this lady to stand aside. We shall have trouble enough as
+      it is, with the three of us in a cab.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it IS our cab,&rdquo; persisted Mary. &ldquo;Why, there&rsquo;s
+      Innocent&rsquo;s yellow bag on the top of it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand aside,&rdquo; repeated Warner roughly. &ldquo;And you, Mr.
+      Moon, please be so obliging as to move a moment. Come, come! the sooner
+      this ugly business is over the better&mdash;and how can we open the gate
+      if you will keep leaning on it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed to consider
+      and reconsider this argument. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said at last; &ldquo;but
+      how can I lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, get out of the way!&rdquo; cried Warner, almost
+      good-humouredly. &ldquo;You can lean on the gate any time.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Moon reflectively. &ldquo;Seldom the time and the
+      place and the blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you come of
+      an old country family. My ancestors leaned on gates before any one had
+      discovered how to open them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Michael!&rdquo; cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, &ldquo;are
+      you going to get out of the way?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, no; I think not,&rdquo; said Michael, after some meditation,
+      and swung himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company, while
+      still, in a lounging attitude, occupying the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hullo!&rdquo; he called out suddenly; &ldquo;what are you doing to
+      Mr. Smith?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Taking him away,&rdquo; answered Warner shortly, &ldquo;to be
+      examined.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Matriculation?&rdquo; asked Moon brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By a magistrate,&rdquo; said the other curtly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what other magistrate,&rdquo; cried Michael, raising his voice,
+      &ldquo;dares to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient
+      and independent Dukes of Beacon? What other court dares to try one of our
+      company, save only the High Court of Beacon? Have you forgotten that only
+      this afternoon we flew the flag of independence and severed ourselves from
+      all the nations of the earth?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Michael,&rdquo; cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, &ldquo;how can
+      you stand there talking nonsense? Why, you saw the dreadful thing
+      yourself. You were there when he went mad. It was you that helped the
+      doctor up when he fell over the flower-pot.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the High Court of Beacon,&rdquo; replied Moon with hauteur,
+      &ldquo;has special powers in all cases concerning lunatics, flower-pots,
+      and doctors who fall down in gardens. It&rsquo;s in our very first charter
+      from Edward I: `Si medicus quisquam in horto prostratus&mdash;&lsquo;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out of the way!&rdquo; cried Warner with sudden fury, &ldquo;or we
+      will force you out of it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious
+      fierceness. &ldquo;Shall I die in defence of this sacred pale? Will you
+      paint these blue railings red with my gore?&rdquo; and he laid hold of one
+      of the blue spikes behind him. As Inglewood had noticed earlier in the
+      evening, the railing was loose and crooked at this place, and the painted
+      iron staff and spearhead came away in Michael&rsquo;s hand as he shook it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See!&rdquo; he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air,
+      &ldquo;the very lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend
+      it. Ah, in such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!&rdquo;
+      And in a voice like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ou pour l&rsquo;honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince,
+      Navre, poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sakes alive!&rdquo; said the American gentleman, almost in an awed
+      tone. Then he added, &ldquo;Are there two maniacs here?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; there are five,&rdquo; thundered Moon. &ldquo;Smith and I are
+      the only sane people left.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Michael!&rdquo; cried Rosamund; &ldquo;Michael, what does it mean?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means bosh!&rdquo; roared Michael, and slung his painted spear
+      hurtling to the other end of the garden. &ldquo;It means that doctors are
+      bosh, and criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh&mdash; much more
+      bosh than our Court of Beacon. It means, you fatheads, that Innocent Smith
+      is no more mad or bad than the bird on that tree.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear Moon,&rdquo; began Inglewood in his modest manner,
+      &ldquo;these gentlemen&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the word of two doctors,&rdquo; exploded Moon again, without
+      listening to anybody else, &ldquo;shut up in a private hell on the word of
+      two doctors! And such doctors! Oh, my hat! Look at &lsquo;em!&mdash;do
+      just look at &lsquo;em! Would you read a book, or buy a dog, or go to a
+      hotel on the advice of twenty such? My people came from Ireland, and were
+      Catholics. What would you say if I called a man wicked on the word of two
+      priests?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t only their word, Michael,&rdquo; reasoned
+      Rosamund; &ldquo;they&rsquo;ve got evidence too.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you looked at it?&rdquo; asked Moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; &ldquo;these
+      gentlemen are in charge of it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And of everything else, it seems to me,&rdquo; said Michael.
+      &ldquo;Why, you haven&rsquo;t even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s no use,&rdquo; said Diana in an undertone to
+      Rosamund; &ldquo;Auntie can&rsquo;t say `Bo!&rsquo; to a goose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad to hear it,&rdquo; answered Michael, &ldquo;for with such
+      a flock of geese to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on
+      her lips. For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light
+      and airy style. I appeal to Mrs. Duke&mdash;it&rsquo;s her house.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Duke?&rdquo; repeated Inglewood doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Mrs. Duke,&rdquo; said Michael firmly, &ldquo;commonly called
+      the Iron Duke.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you ask Auntie,&rdquo; said Diana quietly, &ldquo;she&rsquo;ll
+      only be for doing nothing at all. Her only idea is to hush things up or to
+      let things slide. That just suits her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Michael Moon; &ldquo;and, as it happens, it
+      just suits all of us. You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke; but
+      when you are as old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew&mdash; that
+      half one&rsquo;s letters answer themselves if you can only refrain from
+      the fleshly appetite of answering them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow on the
+      grate, but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time; just as it
+      had changed from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant, it now changed
+      to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer giving good legal advice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if she
+      can,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;we all want to keep it quiet if we can. Look
+      at the large facts&mdash;the big bones of the case. I believe those
+      scientific gentlemen have made a highly scientific mistake. I believe
+      Smith is as blameless as a buttercup. I admit buttercups don&rsquo;t often
+      let off loaded pistols in private houses; I admit there is something
+      demanding explanation. But I am morally certain there&rsquo;s some
+      blunder, or some joke, or some allegory, or some accident behind all this.
+      Well, suppose I&rsquo;m wrong. We&rsquo;ve disarmed him; we&rsquo;re five
+      men to hold him; he may as well go to a lock-up later on as now. But
+      suppose there&rsquo;s even a chance of my being right. Is it anybody&rsquo;s
+      interest here to wash this linen in public?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, I&rsquo;ll take each of you in order. Once take Smith outside
+      that gate, and you take him into the front page of the evening papers. I
+      know; I&rsquo;ve written the front page myself. Miss Duke, do you or your
+      aunt want a sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house&mdash;`Doctors
+      shot here.&rsquo;? No, no&mdash;doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you
+      don&rsquo;t want the rubbish shot here. Arthur, suppose I am right, or
+      suppose I am wrong. Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours.
+      Mark my words, if he&rsquo;s proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion
+      will say you introduced him. If he&rsquo;s proved innocent, they will say
+      you helped to collar him. Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong.
+      If he&rsquo;s proved guilty, they&rsquo;ll say you engaged your companion
+      to him. If he&rsquo;s proved innocent, they&rsquo;ll print that telegram.
+      I know the Organs, damn them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more breathless
+      than had either his theatrical or his real denunciation. But he was
+      plainly in earnest, as well as positive and lucid; as was proved by his
+      proceeding quickly the moment he had found his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is just the same,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;with our medical
+      friends. You will say that Dr. Warner has a grievance. I agree. But does
+      he want specially to be snapshotted by all the journalists ~prostratus in
+      horto~? It was no fault of his, but the scene was not very dignified even
+      for him. He must have justice; but does he want to ask for justice, not
+      only on his knees, but on his hands and knees? Does he want to enter the
+      court of justice on all fours? Doctors are not allowed to advertise; and I&rsquo;m
+      sure no doctor wants to advertise himself as looking like that. And even
+      for our American guest the interest is the same. Let us suppose that he
+      has conclusive documents. Let us assume that he has revelations really
+      worth reading. Well, in a legal inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that
+      matter) ten to one he won&rsquo;t be allowed to read them. He&rsquo;ll be
+      tripped up every two or three minutes with some tangle of old rules. A man
+      can&rsquo;t tell the truth in public nowadays. But he can still tell it in
+      private; he can tell it inside that house.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is quite true,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened
+      throughout the speech with a seriousness which only an American could have
+      retained through such a scene. &ldquo;It is true that I have been
+      per-ceptibly less hampered in private inquiries.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Pym!&rdquo; cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger. &ldquo;Dr.
+      Pym! you aren&rsquo;t really going to admit&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smith may be mad,&rdquo; went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue
+      that seemed as heavy as a hatchet, &ldquo;but there was something after
+      all in what he said about Home Rule for every home. Yes, there is
+      something, when all&rsquo;s said and done, in the High Court of Beacon. It
+      is really true that human beings might often get some sort of domestic
+      justice where just now they can only get legal injustice&mdash;oh, I am a
+      lawyer too, and I know that as well. It is true that there&rsquo;s too
+      much official and indirect power. Often and often the thing a whole nation
+      can&rsquo;t settle is just the thing a family could settle. Scores of
+      young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have
+      been thrashed and sent to bed. Scores of men, I am sure, have had a
+      lifetime at Hanwell when they only wanted a week at Brighton. There IS
+      something in Smith&rsquo;s notion of domestic self-government; and I
+      propose that we put it into practice. You have the prisoner; you have the
+      documents. Come, we are a company of free, white, Christian people, such
+      as might be besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island. Let us do
+      this thing ourselves. Let us go into that house there and sit down and
+      find out with our own eyes and ears whether this thing is true or not;
+      whether this Smith is a man or a monster. If we can&rsquo;t do a little
+      thing like that, what right have we to put crosses on ballot papers?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool, saw in
+      that glance that Moon was gaining ground. The motives that led Arthur to
+      think of surrender were indeed very different from those which affected
+      Dr. Cyrus Pym. All Arthur&rsquo;s instincts were on the side of privacy
+      and polite settlement; he was very English and would often endure wrongs
+      rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric. To play at once the
+      buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend, would have been
+      absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official part he had played
+      that afternoon was very painful. He was not likely to be reluctant if any
+      one could convince him that his duty was to let sleeping dogs lie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
+      possible that seem crazy to the English. Regulations and authorities
+      exactly like one of Innocent&rsquo;s pranks or one of Michael&rsquo;s
+      satires really exist, propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling
+      business men. Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and
+      fanciful; each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village, and
+      as unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States where no man may have a
+      cigarette, States where any man may have ten wives, very strict
+      prohibition States, very lax divorce States&mdash;all these large local
+      vagaries had prepared Cyrus Pym&rsquo;s mind for small local vagaries in a
+      smaller country. Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or
+      Italian, utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions
+      are, he could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon. It
+      is firmly believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very
+      end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be some
+      Britannic institution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached through
+      the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk apparently
+      founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown. Something at
+      once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this being moved Michael to
+      even heartier outbursts of a healthy and humane flippancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, here&rsquo;s little Nosey Gould,&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t
+      the mere sight of him enough to banish all your morbid reflections?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; replied Dr. Warner, &ldquo;I really fail to see how
+      Mr. Gould affects the question; and I once more demand&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello! what&rsquo;s the funeral, gents?&rdquo; inquired the
+      newcomer with the air of an uproarious umpire. &ldquo;Doctor demandin&rsquo;
+      something? Always the way at a boarding-house, you know. Always lots of
+      demand. No supply.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his position,
+      and indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain dangerous
+      and dubious acts, and that there had even arisen an allegation that he was
+      insane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, of course he is,&rdquo; said Moses Gould equably; &ldquo;it
+      don&rsquo;t need old &lsquo;Olmes to see that. The &lsquo;awk-like face of
+      &lsquo;Olmes,&rdquo; he added with abstract relish, &ldquo;showed a shide
+      of disappointment, the sleuth-like Gould &lsquo;avin&rsquo; got there
+      before &lsquo;im.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he is mad,&rdquo; began Inglewood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Moses, &ldquo;when a cove gets out on the tile
+      the first night there&rsquo;s generally a tile loose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never objected before,&rdquo; said Diana Duke rather stiffly,
+      &ldquo;and you&rsquo;re generally pretty free with your complaints.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t compline of him,&rdquo; said Moses magnanimously,
+      &ldquo;the poor chap&rsquo;s ‘armless enough; you might tie &lsquo;im up
+      in the garden here and &lsquo;e&rsquo;d make noises at the burglars.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moses,&rdquo; said Moon with solemn fervour, &ldquo;you are the
+      incarnation of Common Sense. You think Mr. Innocent is mad. Let me
+      introduce you to the incarnation of Scientific Theory. He also thinks Mr.
+      Innocent is mad.&mdash;Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.&mdash;Moses,
+      this is the celebrated Dr. Pym.&rdquo; The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed
+      his eyes and bowed. He also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice,
+      which sounded like &ldquo;Pleased to meet you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you two people,&rdquo; said Michael cheerfully, &ldquo;who both
+      think our poor friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there
+      and prove him mad. What could be more powerful than the combination of
+      Scientific Theory with Common Sense? United you stand; divided you fall. I
+      will not be so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I
+      confine myself to recording the chronological accident that he has not
+      shown us any so far. I take the freedom of an old friend in staking my
+      shirt that Moses has no scientific theory. Yet against this strong
+      coalition I am ready to appear, armed with nothing but an intuition&mdash;which
+      is American for a guess.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Distinguished by Mr. Gould&rsquo;s assistance,&rdquo; said Pym,
+      opening his eyes suddenly. &ldquo;I gather that though he and I are
+      identical in primary di-agnosis there is yet between us something that
+      cannot be called a disagreement, something which we may perhaps call a&mdash;&rdquo;
+      He put the points of thumb and forefinger together, spreading the other
+      fingers exquisitely in the air, and seemed to be waiting for somebody else
+      to tell him what to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Catchin&rsquo; flies?&rdquo; inquired the affable Moses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A divergence,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief;
+      &ldquo;a divergence. Granted that the man in question is deranged, he
+      would not necessarily be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has it occurred to you,&rdquo; observed Moon, who was leaning on
+      the gate again, and did not turn round, &ldquo;that if he were a homicidal
+      maniac he might have killed us all here while we were talking.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something exploded silently underneath all their minds, like sealed
+      dynamite in some forgotten cellars. They all remembered for the first time
+      for some hour or two that the monster of whom they were talking was
+      standing quietly among them. They had left him in the garden like a garden
+      statue; there might have been a dolphin coiling round his legs, or a
+      fountain pouring out of his mouth, for all the notice they had taken of
+      Innocent Smith. He stood with his crest of blonde, blown hair thrust
+      somewhat forward, his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted face looking
+      patiently downwards at nothing in particular, his huge shoulders humped,
+      and his hands in his trousers pockets. So far as they could guess he had
+      not moved at all. His green coat might have been cut out of the green turf
+      on which he stood. In his shadow Pym had expounded and Rosamund
+      expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged. He had remained
+      like a thing graven; the god of the garden. A sparrow had perched on one
+      of his heavy shoulders; and then, after correcting its costume of
+      feathers, had flown away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, &ldquo;the
+      Court of Beacon has opened&mdash;and shut up again too. You all know now I
+      am right. Your buried common sense has told you what my buried common
+      sense has told me. Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of
+      a pistol, and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is
+      harmless. Back we all go to the house and clear a room for discussion. For
+      the High Court of Beacon, which has already arrived at its decision, is
+      just about to begin its inquiry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a goin&rsquo; to begin!&rdquo; cried little Mr. Moses in an
+      extraordinary sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal
+      during music or a thunderstorm. &ldquo;Follow on to the &lsquo;Igh Court
+      of Eggs and Bacon; ‘ave a kipper from the old firm! &lsquo;Is Lordship
+      complimented Mr. Gould on the &lsquo;igh professional delicacy &lsquo;e
+      had shown, and which was worthy of the best traditions of the Saloon Bar&mdash;
+      and three of Scotch hot, miss! Oh, chase me, girls!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a sort of
+      waddling dance of pure excitement; and had made a circuit of the garden
+      before he reappeared, breathless but still beaming. Moon had known his man
+      when he realized that no people presented to Moses Gould could be quite
+      serious, even if they were quite furious. The glass doors stood open on
+      the side nearest to Mr. Moses Gould; and as the feet of that festive idiot
+      were evidently turned in the same direction, everybody else went that way
+      with the unanimity of some uproarious procession. Only Diana Duke retained
+      enough rigidity to say the thing that had been boiling at her fierce
+      feminine lips for the last few hours. Under the shadow of tragedy she had
+      kept it back as unsympathetic. &ldquo;In that case,&rdquo; she said
+      sharply, &ldquo;these cabs can be sent away.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know,&rdquo; said Mary with a
+      smile. &ldquo;I dare say the cabman would get it down for us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get the bag,&rdquo; said Smith, speaking for the first
+      time in hours; his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a
+      statue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility were left
+      breathless by his precipitance. With a run and spring he was out of the
+      garden into the street; with a spring and one quivering kick he was
+      actually on the roof of the cab. The cabman happened to be standing by the
+      horse&rsquo;s head, having just removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith seemed
+      for an instant to be rolling about on the cab&rsquo;s back in the embraces
+      of his Gladstone bag. The next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a
+      royal luck, into the high seat behind, and with a shriek of piercing and
+      appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying and scampering down the
+      street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it was all the
+      other people who were turned into garden statues. Mr. Moses Gould,
+      however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally for the purposes of
+      permanent sculpture, came to life some time before the rest, and, turning
+      to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily with a stranger on an
+      omnibus, &ldquo;Tile loose, eh? Cab loose anyhow.&rdquo; There followed a
+      fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer like a club of
+      stone,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon. You have let
+      loose a maniac on the whole metropolis.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent of
+      continuous houses. The little garden that shut it in ran out into a sharp
+      point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets. Smith and
+      his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly most of those
+      standing inside of it never expected to see him again. At the apex,
+      however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal violence
+      up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the group. With a
+      common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him, but
+      they soon had reason to duck and recoil. Even as he vanished up street for
+      the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly from his hand, so that it
+      fell in the centre of the garden, scattering the company like a bomb, and
+      nearly damaging Dr. Warner&rsquo;s hat for the third time. Long before
+      they had collected themselves, the cab had shot away with a shriek that
+      went into a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice;
+      &ldquo;you may as well all go inside anyhow. We&rsquo;ve got two relics of
+      Mr. Smith at least; his fiancee and his trunk.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you want us to go inside?&rdquo; asked Arthur Inglewood, in
+      whose red brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed to have reached its
+      limit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want the rest to go in,&rdquo; said Michael in a clear voice,
+      &ldquo;because I want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting colder,
+      and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the twilight.
+      Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I refuse to listen to any such proposal,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you
+      have lost this ruffian, and I must find him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t ask you to listen to any proposal,&rdquo; answered
+      Moon quietly; &ldquo;I only ask you to listen.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately the whistling
+      noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side of the house
+      could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side. Through the
+      night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible rapidity, and
+      the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had swept up to the
+      blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood. Mr. Smith got down
+      from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness, and coming back into the
+      garden stood in the same elephantine attitude as before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get inside! get inside!&rdquo; cried Moon hilariously, with the air
+      of one shooing a company of cats. &ldquo;Come, come, be quick about it!
+      Didn&rsquo;t I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How they were all really driven into the house again it would have been
+      difficult afterwards to say. They had reached the point of being exhausted
+      with incongruities, as people at a farce are ill with laughing, and the
+      brisk growth of the storm among the trees seemed like a final gesture of
+      things in general. Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain
+      amicable exasperation, &ldquo;I say, do you really want to speak to me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;very much.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed
+      to promise. While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very
+      large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and
+      trees, proved by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray
+      indeed. A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds
+      across the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and yet laborious
+      wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Arthur,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;I began with an intuition; but
+      now I am sure. You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before
+      the blessed Court of Beacon, and to clear him too&mdash;clear him of both
+      crime and lunacy. Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit.&rdquo;
+      They walked up and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went
+      on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you,&rdquo; asked Michael, &ldquo;shut your eyes and see some
+      of those queer old hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old
+      hot countries. How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
+      Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red,
+      or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould&rsquo;s
+      ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it up at all.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood&rsquo;s first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend
+      had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless a flight of
+      irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to the
+      gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he was
+      actually kicking his heels. How he could be more happy in one by imagining
+      the other he could not conceive. Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why does everybody repeat riddles,&rdquo; went on Moon abruptly,
+      &ldquo;even if they&rsquo;ve forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to
+      remember because they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols
+      in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard to
+      guess. Their colours were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was
+      plain except the meaning.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon went
+      on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking faster
+      and faster. &ldquo;Dances, too,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;dances were not
+      frivolous. Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts.
+      The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent. Have
+      you noticed anything odd about Smith?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of
+      humour, &ldquo;have I noticed anything else?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you noticed this about him,&rdquo; asked Moon, with unshaken
+      persistency, &ldquo;that he has done so much and said so little? When
+      first he came he talked, but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he
+      wasn&rsquo;t used to it. All he really did was actions&mdash;painting red
+      flowers on black gowns or throwing yellow bags on to the grass. I tell you
+      that big green figure is figurative&mdash; like any green figure capering
+      on some white Eastern wall.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Michael,&rdquo; cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation
+      which increased with the rising wind, &ldquo;you are getting absurdly
+      fanciful.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think of what has just happened,&rdquo; said Michael steadily.
+      &ldquo;The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking all
+      the time. He fired three shots from a six-shooter and then gave it up to
+      us, when he might have shot us dead in our boots. How could he express his
+      trust in us better than that? He wanted to be tried by us. How could he
+      have shown it better than by standing quite still and letting us discuss
+      it? He wanted to show that he stood there willingly, and could escape if
+      he liked. How could he have shown it better than by escaping in the cab
+      and coming back again? Innocent Smith is not a madman&mdash;he is a
+      ritualist. He wants to express himself, not with his tongue, but with his
+      arms and legs&mdash; with my body I thee worship, as it says in the
+      marriage service. I begin to understand the old plays and pageants. I see
+      why the mutes at a funeral were mute. I see why the mummers were mum. They
+      MEANT something; and Smith means something too. All other jokes have to be
+      noisy&mdash;like little Nosey Gould&rsquo;s jokes, for instance. The only
+      silent jokes are the practical jokes. Poor Smith, properly considered, is
+      an allegorical practical joker. What he has really done in this house has
+      been as frantic as a war-dance, but as silent as a picture.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you mean,&rdquo; said the other dubiously, &ldquo;that we
+      have got to find out what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many
+      coloured picture-puzzles. But even supposing that they do mean something&mdash;why,
+      Lord bless my soul!&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted his eyes to
+      the moon, by this time risen big and luminous, and had seen a huge,
+      half-human figure sitting on the garden wall. It was outlined so sharply
+      against the moon that for the first flash it was hard to be certain even
+      that it was human: the hunched shoulders and outstanding hair had rather
+      the air of a colossal cat. It resembled a cat also in the fact that when
+      first startled it sprang up and ran with easy activity along the top of
+      the wall. As it ran, however, its heavy shoulders and small stooping head
+      rather suggested a baboon. The instant it came within reach of a tree it
+      made an ape-like leap and was lost in the branches. The gale, which by
+      this time was shaking every shrub in the garden, made the identification
+      yet more difficult, since it melted the moving limbs of the fugitive in
+      the multitudinous moving limbs of the tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is there?&rdquo; shouted Arthur. &ldquo;Who are you? Are you
+      Innocent?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite,&rdquo; answered an obscure voice among the leaves.
+      &ldquo;I cheated you once about a penknife.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
+      backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it had on
+      the gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But are you Smith?&rdquo; asked Inglewood as in an agony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very nearly,&rdquo; said the voice out of the tossing tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must have some real names,&rdquo; shrieked Inglewood in
+      despair. &ldquo;You must call yourself something.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call myself something,&rdquo; thundered the obscure voice, shaking
+      the tree so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once.
+      &ldquo;I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand
+      Homer Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, manalive!&rdquo; began Inglewood in exasperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right! that&rsquo;s right!&rdquo; came with a roar out
+      of the rocking tree; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s my real name.&rdquo; And he broke
+      a branch, and one or two autumn leaves fluttered away across the moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II &mdash; The Explanations of Innocent Smith
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter I &mdash; The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court of Beacon with
+      a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow to increase its
+      cosiness. The big room was, as it were, cut up into small rooms, with
+      walls only waist high&mdash;the sort of separation that children make when
+      they are playing at shops. This had been done by Moses Gould and Michael
+      Moon (the two most active members of this remarkable inquiry) with the
+      ordinary furniture of the place. At one end of the long mahogany table was
+      set the one enormous garden chair, which was surmounted by the old torn
+      tent or umbrella which Smith himself had suggested as a coronation canopy.
+      Inside this erection could be perceived the dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with
+      cushions and a form of countenance that already threatened slumber. At the
+      other end sat the accused Smith, in a kind of dock; for he was carefully
+      fenced in with a quadrilateral of light bedroom chairs, any of which he
+      could have tossed out the window with his big toe. He had been provided
+      with pens and paper, out of the latter of which he made paper boats, paper
+      darts, and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings. He
+      never spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious as a child on the
+      floor of an empty nursery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat the three
+      young ladies with their backs up against the window, and Mary Gray in the
+      middle; it was something between a jury box and the stall of the Queen of
+      Beauty at a tournament. Down the centre of the long table Moon had built a
+      low barrier out of eight bound volumes of &ldquo;Good Words&rdquo; to
+      express the moral wall that divided the conflicting parties. On the right
+      side sat the two advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould;
+      behind a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the case of Dr.
+      Pym) solid volumes of criminology. On the other side, Moon and Inglewood,
+      for the defence, were also fortified with books and papers; but as these
+      included several old yellow volumes by Ouida and Wilkie Collins, the hand
+      of Mr. Moon seemed to have been somewhat careless and comprehensive. As
+      for the victim and prosecutor, Dr. Warner, Moon wanted at first to have
+      him kept entirely behind a high screen in the corner, urging the
+      indelicacy of his appearance in court, but privately assuring him of an
+      unofficial permission to peep over the top now and then. Dr. Warner,
+      however, failed to rise to the chivalry of such a course, and after some
+      little disturbance and discussion he was accommodated with a seat on the
+      right side of the table in a line with his legal advisers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym, after
+      passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear, rose to open
+      the case. His statement was clear and even restrained, and such flights of
+      imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention by a certain
+      indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of American speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany, closed his
+      eyes, and opened his mouth. &ldquo;The time has gone by,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act,
+      important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered. Science has
+      profoundly...&rdquo; here he paused, poising his compressed finger and
+      thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its
+      tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said &ldquo;modified,&rdquo; and let
+      it go&mdash;&ldquo;has profoundly Modified our view of death. In
+      superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life,
+      catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity.
+      Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal and
+      inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding
+      average which we call for convenience the order of nature. In the same way
+      we have come to consider murder SOCIALLY. Rising above the mere private
+      feelings of a man while being forcibly deprived of life, we are privileged
+      to behold murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich rotation of the
+      cosmos, bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the golden-bearded
+      harvesters, the return for ever of the slayers and the slain.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed
+      slightly, putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent
+      manners of Boston, and continued: &ldquo;There is but one result of this
+      happier and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us. It
+      is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great
+      secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work, `The Destructive Type.&rsquo;
+      We do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a murderous man. The
+      type is such that its very life&mdash; I might say its very health&mdash;is
+      in killing. Some hold that it is not properly an aberration, but a newer
+      and even a higher creature. My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept
+      ferrets&mdash;&rdquo; (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud &ldquo;hurrah!&rdquo;
+      but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked
+      everywhere else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly&mdash;&ldquo;who,
+      in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the creature&rsquo;s
+      ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an end in itself. However this
+      may be with ferrets, it is certainly so with the prisoner. In his other
+      iniquities you may find the cunning of the maniac; but his acts of blood
+      have almost the simplicity of sanity. But it is the awful sanity of the
+      sun and the elements&mdash;a cruel, an evil sanity. As soon stay the
+      iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin West as stay the natural force that
+      sends him forth to slay. No environment, however scientific, could have
+      softened him. Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest
+      cloister, and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or
+      the alb. Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon
+      infancy, and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or
+      brain with the brick. Circumstances may be favourable, training may be
+      admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent
+      Smith for blood will in its appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature at
+      the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat,
+      and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It only remains for us,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to bring forward
+      actual evidence of his previous attempts. By an agreement already made
+      with the Court and the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in
+      evidence authentic letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the
+      defence is free to examine. Out of several cases of such outrages we have
+      decided to select one&mdash; the clearest and most scandalous. I will
+      therefore, without further delay, call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read
+      two letters&mdash;one from the Sub-Warden and the other from the porter of
+      Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking
+      paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face. He began in a
+      loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt as a cock-crow:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&mdash;Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord have mercy on us,&rdquo; muttered Moon, making a backward
+      movement as men do when a gun goes off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,&rdquo;
+      proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, &ldquo;and I can endorse the
+      description you gave of the un&rsquo;appy Smith. It was not alone my
+      unfortunate duty to rebuke many of the lesser violences of his
+      undergraduate period, but I was actually a witness to the last iniquity
+      which terminated that period. Hi happened to passing under the house of my
+      friend the Warden of Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College
+      and connected with it by two or three very ancient arches or props, like
+      bridges, across a small strip of water connected with the river. To my
+      grive astonishment I be&rsquo;eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air
+      and clinging to one of these pieces of masonry, his appearance and
+      attitude indicatin&rsquo; that he suffered from the grivest apprehensions.
+      After a short time I heard two very loud shots, and distinctly perceived
+      the unfortunate undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the Warden&rsquo;s
+      window and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver. Upon seeing
+      me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which impertinence was mingled with
+      insanity), and appeared to desist. I sent the college porter for a ladder,
+      and he succeeded in detaching the Warden from his painful position. Smith
+      was sent down. The photograph I enclose is from the group of the
+      University Rifle Club prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the
+      College.&mdash; Hi am, your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The other letter,&rdquo; continued Gould in a glow of triumph,
+      &ldquo;is from the porter, and won&rsquo;t take long to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;It is quite true that I am the porter of
+      Brikespeare College, and that I &lsquo;elped the Warden down when the
+      young man was shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter. The
+      young man who was shooting at him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the
+      photograph Mr. Boulter sends.&mdash; Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them. But for
+      the vocal divergences in the matter of h&rsquo;s and a&rsquo;s, the
+      Sub-Warden&rsquo;s letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it; and both
+      that and the porter&rsquo;s letter were plainly genuine. Moon handed them
+      to Inglewood, who handed them back in silence to Moses Gould.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is
+      concerned,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, &ldquo;that
+      is my case.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave
+      little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner. He did
+      not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into the abstract questions.
+      &ldquo;I do not know enough to be an agnostic,&rdquo; he said, rather
+      wearily, &ldquo;and I can only master the known and admitted elements in
+      such controversies. As for science and religion, the known and admitted
+      facts are plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the
+      doctors say is disproved. That&rsquo;s the only difference between science
+      and religion there&rsquo;s ever been, or will be. Yet these new
+      discoveries touch me, somehow,&rdquo; he said, looking down sorrowfully at
+      his boots. &ldquo;They remind me of a dear old great-aunt of mine who used
+      to enjoy them in her youth. It brings tears to my eyes. I can see the old
+      bucket by the garden fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hi! here, stop the &lsquo;bus a bit,&rdquo; cried Mr. Moses Gould,
+      rising in a sort of perspiration. &ldquo;We want to give the defence a
+      fair run&mdash;like gents, you know; but any gent would draw the line at
+      shimmering poplars.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, hang it all,&rdquo; said Moon, in an injured manner, &ldquo;if
+      Dr. Pym may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn&rsquo;t I have an
+      old aunt with poplars?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure,&rdquo; said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost
+      like a shaky authority, &ldquo;Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, as to liking her,&rdquo; began Moon, &ldquo;I&mdash;but
+      perhaps, as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question. I repeat
+      that I do not mean to follow the abstract speculations. For, indeed, my
+      answer to Dr. Pym is simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only
+      treated one side of the psychology of murder. If it is true that there is
+      a kind of man who has a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true&rdquo;&mdash;here
+      he lowered his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness&mdash;&ldquo;is
+      it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency
+      to get murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding the field that
+      Dr. Warner is such a man? I do not speak without the book, any more than
+      my learned friend. The whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein&rsquo;s
+      monumental work, `The Destructible Doctor,&rsquo; with diagrams, showing
+      the various ways in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be resolved into
+      his elements. In the light of these facts&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hi, stop the &lsquo;bus! stop the &lsquo;bus!&rdquo; cried Moses,
+      jumping up and down and gesticulating in great excitement. &ldquo;My
+      principal&rsquo;s got something to say! My principal wants to do a bit of
+      talkin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious. &ldquo;I
+      have strictly CON-fined myself,&rdquo; he said nasally, &ldquo;to books to
+      which immediate reference can be made. I have Sonnenschein&rsquo;s
+      `Destructive Type&rsquo; here on the table, if the defence wish to see it.
+      Where is this wonderful work on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about?
+      Does it exist? Can he produce it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Produce it!&rdquo; cried the Irishman with a rich scorn. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll
+      produce it in a week if you&rsquo;ll pay for the ink and paper.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would it have much authority?&rdquo; asked Pym, sitting down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, authority!&rdquo; said Moon lightly; &ldquo;that depends on a
+      fellow&rsquo;s religion.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Pym jumped up again. &ldquo;Our authority is based on masses of
+      accurate detail,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It deals with a region in which
+      things can be handled and tested. My opponent will at least admit that
+      death is a fact of experience.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not of mine,&rdquo; said Moon mournfully, shaking his head. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+      never experienced such a thing in all my life.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, really,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a
+      crackle of papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So we see,&rdquo; resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice,
+      &ldquo;that a man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of
+      evolution, doomed to such attacks. My client&rsquo;s onslaught, even if it
+      occurred, was not unique. I have in my hand letters from more than one
+      acquaintance of Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the
+      same way. Following the example of my learned friends I will read only two
+      of them. The first is from an honest and laborious matron living off the
+      Harrow Road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Moon, Sir,&mdash;Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him. Wot then?
+      It was all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned, and if your
+      Docter Warner doesn&rsquo;t like having sorsepans thrown at him, don&rsquo;t
+      let him wear his hat in a respectable woman&rsquo;s parler, and tell him
+      to leave orf smiling or tell us the joke.&mdash;Yours respectfully, Hannah
+      Miles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin, with
+      whom Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation. He writes as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;The incident to which you refer is one which I
+      regret, and which, moreover, I have never been able to explain. My own
+      branch of medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have the view of
+      a mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed almost automatic
+      action. To say that I `pulled Dr. Warner&rsquo;s nose,&rsquo; is, however,
+      inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important. That I punched his
+      nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with what regret); but
+      pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective with which I cannot
+      reproach myself. In comparison with this, the act of punching was an
+      outward, instantaneous, and even natural gesture.&mdash; Believe me, yours
+      faithfully, Burton Lestrange.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have numberless other letters,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;all
+      bearing witness to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I
+      therefore think that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the
+      question in his survey. We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says,
+      of a natural force. As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as
+      stay the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
+      Place that man in a Quakers&rsquo; meeting, among the most peaceful of
+      Christians, and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of
+      chocolate. Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be
+      stoned to death with precious stones. Circumstances may be beautiful and
+      wonderful, the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be
+      golden-bearded, the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be
+      iris-leapt, the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and
+      above all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to get
+      murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and triumphantly
+      succeeds at last.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion. But
+      even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other side of
+      the table. Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across the little
+      figure of Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers to Dr. Pym. That
+      expert nodded a great many times and finally started to his feet with a
+      sincere expression of sternness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ladies and gentlemen,&rdquo; he cried indignantly, &ldquo;as my
+      colleague has said, we should be delighted to give any latitude to the
+      defence&mdash;if there were a defence. But Mr. Moon seems to think he is
+      there to make jokes&mdash; very good jokes I dare say, but not at all
+      adapted to assist his client. He picks holes in science. He picks holes in
+      my client&rsquo;s social popularity. He picks holes in my literary style,
+      which doesn&rsquo;t seem to suit his high-toned European taste. But how
+      does this picking of holes affect the issue? This Smith has picked two
+      holes in my client&rsquo;s hat, and with an inch better aim would have
+      picked two holes in his head. All the jokes in the world won&rsquo;t
+      unpick those holes or be any use for the defence.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the evident
+      fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a dreamy way.
+      &ldquo;The defence?&rdquo; he said vaguely&mdash;&ldquo;oh, I haven&rsquo;t
+      begun that yet.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You certainly have not,&rdquo; said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of
+      applause from his side, which the other side found it impossible to
+      answer. &ldquo;Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful
+      from the very beginning&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While you&rsquo;re standing up,&rdquo; said Moon, in the same
+      almost sleepy style, &ldquo;perhaps I might ask you a question.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A question? Certainly,&rdquo; said Pym stiffly. &ldquo;It was
+      distinctly arranged between us that as we could not cross-examine the
+      witnesses, we might vicariously cross-examine each other. We are in a
+      position to invite all such inquiry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you said,&rdquo; observed Moon absently, &ldquo;that none
+      of the prisoner&rsquo;s shots really hit the doctor.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the cause of science,&rdquo; cried the complacent Pym, &ldquo;fortunately
+      not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet they were fired from a few feet away.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; about four feet.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close to
+      him too?&rdquo; asked Moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is so,&rdquo; said the witness gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, &ldquo;that
+      your Sub-Warden mentioned that Smith was one of the University&rsquo;s
+      record men for shooting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, as to that&mdash;&rdquo; began Pym, after an instant of
+      stillness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A second question,&rdquo; continued Moon, comparatively curtly.
+      &ldquo;You said there were other cases of the accused trying to kill
+      people. Why have you not got evidence of them?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again. &ldquo;In
+      those cases,&rdquo; he said precisely, &ldquo;there was no evidence from
+      outsiders, as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual
+      victims.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you get their evidence?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the case of the actual victims,&rdquo; said Pym, &ldquo;there
+      was some difficulty and reluctance, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean,&rdquo; asked Moon, &ldquo;that none of the actual
+      victims would appear against the prisoner?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would be exaggerative,&rdquo; began the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A third question,&rdquo; said Moon, so sharply that every one
+      jumped. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard
+      some shots; where&rsquo;s the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot
+      at? The Warden of Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We did ask for a statement from him,&rdquo; said Pym a little
+      nervously; &ldquo;but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed
+      it out of deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science
+      have been great.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moon leaned forward. &ldquo;You mean, I suppose,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that
+      his statement was favourable to the prisoner.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might be understood so,&rdquo; replied the American doctor;
+      &ldquo;but, really, it was difficult to understand at all. In fact, we
+      sent it back to him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of
+      Brakespeare.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only ask,&rdquo; said Michael quietly, &ldquo;because we have. To
+      conclude my case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood, to read a statement
+      of the true story&mdash;a statement attested as true by the signature of
+      the Warden himself.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though he
+      looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did, the
+      spectators were surprised to feel that his presence was, upon the whole,
+      more efficient and sufficing than his leader&rsquo;s. He was, in truth,
+      one of those modest men who cannot speak until they are told to speak; and
+      then can speak well. Moon was entirely the opposite. His own impudences
+      amused him in private, but they slightly embarrassed him in public; he
+      felt a fool while he was speaking, whereas Inglewood felt a fool only
+      because he could not speak. The moment he had anything to say he could
+      speak; and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite natural.
+      Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As my colleague has just explained,&rdquo; said Inglewood, &ldquo;there
+      are two enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence. The first
+      is a plain physical fact. By the admission of everybody, by the very
+      evidence adduced by the prosecution, it is clear that the accused was
+      celebrated as a specially good shot. Yet on both the occasions complained
+      of he shot from a distance of four or five feet, and shot at him four or
+      five times, and never hit him once. That is the first startling
+      circumstance on which we base our argument. The second, as my colleague
+      has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot find a single victim of
+      these alleged outrages to speak for himself. Subordinates speak for him.
+      Porters climb up ladders to him. But he himself is silent. Ladies and
+      gentlemen, I propose to explain on the spot both the riddle of the shots
+      and the riddle of the silence. I will first of all read the covering
+      letter in which the true account of the Cambridge incident is contained,
+      and then that document itself. When you have heard both, there will be no
+      doubt about your decision. The covering letter runs as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;The following is a very exact and even vivid
+      account of the incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College. We,
+      the undersigned, do not see any particular reason why we should refer it
+      to any isolated authorship. The truth is, it has been a composite
+      production; and we have even had some difference of opinion about the
+      adjectives. But every word of it is true.&mdash;We are, yours faithfully,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wilfred Emerson Eames, &ldquo;Warden of Brakespeare College,
+      Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Innocent Smith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The enclosed statement,&rdquo; continued Inglewood, &ldquo;runs as
+      follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river,
+      that it has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched with all sorts of
+      bridges and semi-detached buildings. The river splits itself into several
+      small streams and canals, so that in one or two corners the place has
+      almost the look of Venice. It was so especially in the case with which we
+      are concerned, in which a few flying buttresses or airy ribs of stone
+      sprang across a strip of water to connect Brakespeare College with the
+      house of the Warden of Brakespeare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not seem
+      flat when one is thus in the midst of the colleges. For in these flat fens
+      there are always wandering lakes and lingering rivers of water. And these
+      always change what might have been a scheme of horizontal lines into a
+      scheme of vertical lines. Wherever there is water the height of high
+      buildings is doubled, and a British brick house becomes a Babylonian
+      tower. In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head downwards
+      exactly to their highest or lowest chimney. The coral-coloured cloud seen
+      in that abyss is as far below the world as its original appears above it.
+      Every scrap of water is not only a window but a skylight. Earth splits
+      under men&rsquo;s feet into precipitous aerial perspectives, into which a
+      bird could as easily wing its way as&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest. The documents he had put in evidence had
+      been confined to cold affirmation of fact. The defence, in a general way,
+      had an indubitable right to put their case in their own way, but all this
+      landscape gardening seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the
+      business. &ldquo;Will the leader of the defence tell me,&rdquo; he asked,
+      &ldquo;how it can possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor&rsquo;l-coloured,
+      or that a bird could have winged itself anywhere?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said Michael, lifting himself
+      lazily; &ldquo;you see, you don&rsquo;t know yet what our defence is. Till
+      you know that, don&rsquo;t you see, anything may be relevant. Why,
+      suppose,&rdquo; he said suddenly, as if an idea had struck him, &ldquo;suppose
+      we wanted to prove the old Warden colour-blind. Suppose he was shot by a
+      black man with white hair, when he thought he was being shot by a white
+      man with yellow hair! To ascertain if that cloud was really and truly
+      coral-coloured might be of the most massive importance.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared, and
+      continued with the same fluency: &ldquo;Or suppose we wanted to maintain
+      that the Warden committed suicide&mdash;that he just got Smith to hold the
+      pistol as Brutus&rsquo;s slave held the sword. Why, it would make all the
+      difference whether the Warden could see himself plain in still water.
+      Still water has made hundreds of suicides: one sees oneself so very&mdash;well,
+      so very plain.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you, perhaps,&rdquo; inquired Pym with austere irony, &ldquo;maintain
+      that your client was a bird of some sort&mdash;say, a flamingo?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the matter of his being a flamingo,&rdquo; said Moon with sudden
+      severity, &ldquo;my client reserves his defence.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat and
+      Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors.
+      For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one. In the
+      highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are
+      best. Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own
+      thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to see
+      his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This
+      duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost thing
+      of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth, in the
+      statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought both to grow
+      on the same body.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it&rsquo;s a little transcendental at first,&rdquo;
+      interposed Inglewood, beaming round with a broad apology, &ldquo;but you
+      see this document was written in collaboration by a don and a&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drunkard, eh?&rdquo; suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather think,&rdquo; proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled and
+      critical air, &ldquo;that this part was written by the don. I merely warn
+      the Court that the statement, though indubitably accurate, bears here and
+      there the trace of coming from two authors.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that case,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing,
+      &ldquo;I cannot agree with them that two heads are better than one.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred
+      problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform: the
+      question of whether dons see double because they are drunk, or get drunk
+      because they see double. It is enough for them (the undersigned persons)
+      if they are able to pursue their own peculiar and profitable theme&mdash;which
+      is puddles. What (the undersigned persons ask themselves) is a puddle? A
+      puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed
+      objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
+      The two great historic universities of England have all this large and
+      level and reflective brilliance. Nevertheless, or, rather, on the other
+      hand, they are puddles&mdash;puddles, puddles, puddles, puddles. The
+      undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis inseparable from strong
+      conviction.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some present,
+      and continued with eminent cheerfulness:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of the
+      undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes of canal and
+      the glittering rainy gutters into which the water broke up round the back
+      of Brakespeare College. Had these thoughts crossed his mind he would have
+      been much happier than he was. Unfortunately he did not know that his
+      puzzles were puddles. He did not know that the academic mind reflects
+      infinity and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and
+      standing still. In his case, therefore, there was something solemn, and
+      even evil about the infinity implied. It was half-way through a starry
+      night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above and below. To young
+      Smith&rsquo;s sullen fancy the skies below seemed even hollower than the
+      skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he counted the stars he would
+      find one too many in the pool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping
+      on the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower. For to him, and
+      nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things.
+      Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous
+      and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a
+      glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For the young
+      men of that sad time thought that the god always comes from the machine.
+      They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god. In
+      short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them&mdash;
+      atrocious because it was true. All their universe was black with white
+      spots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the
+      glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college. The only light
+      other than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the upper
+      part of the building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till
+      morning and received his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the
+      night. Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound.
+      Smith had been at Dr. Eames&rsquo;s lecture for the first half of the
+      morning, and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second
+      half. He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon and
+      thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half. He had gone to a
+      supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating club where he was
+      perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was melancholy still.
+      Then, as he was going home to his diggings he remembered the eccentricity
+      of his friend and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved
+      desperately to turn in to that gentleman&rsquo;s private house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in
+      philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university
+      could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to
+      continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the
+      British Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up all
+      night and to be a student of Schopenhauer. Personally, he was a lean,
+      lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older
+      than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries
+      in the two essential respects of having a European reputation and a bald
+      head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,&rsquo; said
+      Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make
+      himself small, `because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is
+      really too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think
+      otherwise&mdash;bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And
+      knowing you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`All thinkers,&rsquo; said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After a patch of pause, not the first&mdash;for this depressing
+      conversation had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and
+      silence&mdash; the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: `It&rsquo;s
+      all a question of wrong calculation. The moth flies into the candle
+      because he doesn&rsquo;t happen to know that the game is not worth the
+      candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get
+      the jam into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life
+      just as they want to enjoy gin&mdash;because they are too stupid to see
+      that they are paying too big a price for it. That they never find
+      happiness&mdash;that they don&rsquo;t even know how to look for it&mdash;is
+      proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do.
+      Their discordant colours are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas
+      beyond the college on this side of the river. There&rsquo;s one with
+      spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Of course,&rsquo; he went on dreamily, `one or two men see the
+      sober fact a long way off&mdash;they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs
+      mostly try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to
+      destroy themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man
+      that wanders about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the wrong
+      door and come into the right place. He sees things at the right angle. But
+      the common world&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Oh, hang the common world!&rsquo; said the sullen Smith, letting
+      his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Let&rsquo;s give it a bad name first,&rsquo; said the Professor
+      calmly, `and then hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably
+      struggle for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill
+      it. So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us
+      dead.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Why doesn&rsquo;t he strike us dead?&rsquo; asked the
+      undergraduate abstractedly, plunging his hands into his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`He is dead himself,&rsquo; said the philosopher; `that is where he
+      is really enviable.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`To any one who thinks,&rsquo; proceeded Eames, `the pleasures of
+      life, trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a torture
+      chamber. We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the...
+      What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his
+      shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole,
+      rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up
+      on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants
+      during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was. Then
+      he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a revolver, and
+      behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite
+      unchanged, or even more mild than before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I&rsquo;ll help you out of your hole, old man,&rsquo; said Smith,
+      with rough tenderness. `I&rsquo;ll put the puppy out of his pain.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. `Do you mean to kill
+      me?&rsquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`It&rsquo;s not a thing I&rsquo;d do for every one,&rsquo; said
+      Smith with emotion; `but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night,
+      somehow. I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Put that thing down,&rsquo; shouted the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`It&rsquo;ll soon be over, you know,&rsquo; said Smith with the air
+      of a sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and
+      balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a compassionate
+      expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of
+      early daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions
+      calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the few
+      that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames&rsquo;s
+      balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still
+      shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses
+      and washed out with rains. With an ungainly and most courageous leap,
+      Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of
+      escape from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown,
+      dangling his long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.
+      The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that impression of
+      vertical infinity already remarked about the little lakes round
+      Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and chimneys pendent in
+      the pools, they felt alone in space. They felt as if they were looking
+      over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Hang the world, we said,&rsquo; observed Smith, `and the world is
+      hanged. &ldquo;He has hanged the world upon nothing,&rdquo; says the
+      Bible. Do you like being hanged upon nothing? I&rsquo;m going to be hanged
+      upon something myself. I&rsquo;m going to swing for you... Dear, tender
+      old phrase,&rsquo; he murmured; `never true till this moment. I am going
+      to swing for you. For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express
+      desire.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Help!&rsquo; cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`The puppy struggles,&rsquo; said the undergraduate, with an eye of
+      pity, `the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and
+      kinder than he,&rsquo; and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover
+      the upper part of Eames&rsquo;s bald head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Smith,&rsquo; said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort
+      of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`And so look at things from the right angle,&rsquo; observed Smith,
+      sighing gently. `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The
+      only cure is an operation&mdash;an operation that is always successful:
+      death.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything,
+      with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds sailing
+      across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink. All over the little
+      academic town the tops of different buildings took on different tints:
+      here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle, there the
+      scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some artistic shop,
+      and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof. All these
+      coloured crests seemed to have something oddly individual and significant
+      about them, like crests of famous knights pointed out in a pageant or a
+      battlefield: they each arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of
+      Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his
+      last. Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big gray
+      college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the sunshine set on
+      fire. He stared at it as though hypnotized; and suddenly the clock began
+      to strike, as if in personal reply. As if at a signal, clock after clock
+      took up the cry: all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The
+      birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college. The sun rose,
+      gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the
+      shallow waters beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for
+      the thirst of the gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible
+      from his crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape,
+      the villa with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night.
+      He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might
+      have called to a student to shut a door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Let me come off this place,&rsquo; he cried; `I can&rsquo;t bear
+      it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I rather doubt if it will bear you,&rsquo; said Smith critically;
+      `but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you
+      back into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the
+      metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get back
+      to life?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I&rsquo;d give anything to get back,&rsquo; replied the unhappy
+      professor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Give anything!&rsquo; cried Smith; `then, blast your impudence,
+      give us a song!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`What song do you mean?&rsquo; demanded the exasperated Eames;
+      `what song?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,&rsquo; answered the
+      other gravely. `I&rsquo;ll let you off if you&rsquo;ll repeat after me the
+      words&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth have smiled.
+      And perched me on this curious place, A happy English child.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly
+      told him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this
+      proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr. Eames
+      held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird alighting
+      on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic statue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You are now engaged in public worship,&rsquo; remarked Smith
+      severely, `and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the
+      very ducks on the pond.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
+      readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Not forgetting the drakes,&rsquo; said Smith sternly. (Eames
+      weakly conceded the drakes.) `Not forgetting anything, please. You shall
+      thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas and vulgar people and
+      puddles and pots and pans and sticks and rags and bones and spotted
+      blinds.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`All right, all right,&rsquo; repeated the victim in despair;
+      `sticks and rags and bones and blinds.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Spotted blinds, I think we said,&rsquo; remarked Smith with a
+      rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a long
+      metallic finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Spotted blinds,&rsquo; said Emerson Eames faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You can&rsquo;t say fairer than that,&rsquo; admitted the younger
+      man, `and now I&rsquo;ll just tell you this to wind up with. If you really
+      were what you profess to be, I don&rsquo;t see that it would matter to
+      snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff neck and dashed out all
+      your drivelling devil-worshipping brains. But in strict biographical fact
+      you are a very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I
+      love you like a brother. I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges
+      round your head so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to
+      hear), and then we will go in and have some breakfast.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor endured
+      with singular firmness, and then said, `But don&rsquo;t fire them all off.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Why not&rsquo; asked the other buoyantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Keep them,&rsquo; asked his companion, `for the next man you meet
+      who talks as we were talking.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived
+      apoplectic terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined
+      shriek with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from the
+      ladder, and some little time longer to disentangle himself from the
+      Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively, he rejoined his
+      companion in the late extraordinary scene. He was astonished to find the
+      gigantic Smith heavily shaken, and sitting with his shaggy head on his
+      hands. When addressed, he lifted a very pale face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Why, what is the matter?&rsquo; asked Eames, whose own nerves had
+      by this time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I must ask your indulgence,&rsquo; said Smith, rather brokenly. `I
+      must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`YOU have had an escape from death?&rsquo; repeated the Professor
+      in not unpardonable irritation. `Well, of all the cheek&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Oh, don&rsquo;t you understand, don&rsquo;t you understand?&rsquo;
+      cried the pale young man impatiently. `I had to do it, Eames; I had to
+      prove you wrong or die. When a man&rsquo;s young, he nearly always has
+      some one whom he thinks the top-water mark of the mind of man&mdash; some
+      one who knows all about it, if anybody knows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority, and not as
+      the scribes. Nobody could comfort me if YOU said there was no comfort. If
+      you really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had been
+      there to see. Don&rsquo;t you see that I HAD to prove you didn&rsquo;t
+      really mean it?&mdash; or else drown myself in the canal.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Well,&rsquo; said Eames hesitatingly, `I think perhaps you confuse&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Oh, don&rsquo;t tell me that!&rsquo; cried Smith with the sudden
+      clairvoyance of mental pain; `don&rsquo;t tell me I confuse enjoyment of
+      existence with the Will to Live! That&rsquo;s German, and German is High
+      Dutch, and High Dutch is Double Dutch. The thing I saw shining in your
+      eyes when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not &ldquo;the
+      Will to Live.&rdquo; What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle
+      was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and
+      beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute. I saw
+      the gray clouds turn pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack between
+      the houses. It was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life, whatever that
+      is. Eames, we&rsquo;ve been to the brink of death together; won&rsquo;t
+      you admit I&rsquo;m right?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Yes,&rsquo; said Eames very slowly, `I think you are right. You
+      shall have a First!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Right!&rsquo; cried Smith, springing up reanimated. `I&rsquo;ve
+      passed with honours, and now let me go and see about being sent down.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You needn&rsquo;t be sent down,&rsquo; said Eames with the quiet
+      confidence of twelve years of intrigue. `Everything with us comes from the
+      man on top to the people just round him: I am the man on top, and I shall
+      tell the people round me the truth.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window, but he
+      spoke with equal firmness. `I must be sent down,&rsquo; he said, `and the
+      people must not be told the truth.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`And why not&rsquo; asked the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Because I mean to follow your advice,&rsquo; answered the massive
+      youth, `I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful
+      state you and I were in last night&mdash;I wish we could even plead
+      drunkenness. I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists&mdash;pills for
+      pale people. And in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful
+      surprise&mdash; to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as silently
+      as the sunrise; not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to
+      be recalled any more than the dying breeze. I don&rsquo;t want people to
+      anticipate me as a well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come
+      virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold
+      a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him&mdash;only
+      to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton
+      at the feast.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You can scarcely be called a skeleton,&rsquo; said Dr. Eames,
+      smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`That comes of being so much at the feast,&rsquo; answered the
+      massive youth. `No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining
+      out. But that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a
+      kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that&mdash;the skull and
+      cross-bones, the ~memento mori~. It isn&rsquo;t only meant to remind us of
+      a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak
+      spirits we should grow old in eternity if we were not kept young by death.
+      Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the
+      bread and butter into fingers.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality, `But I
+      know something now, Eames. I knew it when I saw the clouds turn pink.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`What do you mean?&rsquo; asked Eames. `What did you know?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He gripped Dr. Eames&rsquo;s hand and groped his way somewhat
+      unsteadily to the door. Before he had vanished through it he had added,
+      `It&rsquo;s very dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second
+      that he understands death.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his
+      late assailant had left. Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella, and went
+      for a brisk if rotatory walk. Several times, however, he stood outside the
+      villa with the spotted blinds, studying them intently with his head
+      slightly on one side. Some took him for a lunatic and some for an
+      intending purchaser. He is not yet sure that the two characters would be
+      widely different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is,
+      in the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters. Each
+      of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other. But the
+      undersigned persons absolutely guarantee the exactitude of the story; and
+      if their version of the thing be questioned, they, the undersigned
+      persons, would deucedly well like to know who does know about it if they
+      don&rsquo;t.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The undersigned persons will now adjourn to `The Spotted Dog&rsquo;
+      for beer. Farewell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;(Signed) James Emerson Eames, &ldquo;Warden of Brakespeare College,
+      Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Innocent Smith.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter II &mdash; The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders of
+      the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together. Both the Jew
+      and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks, and they revealed
+      by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the yellow that nothing
+      could be done in the way of denial of the document. The letter from the
+      Warden was as authentic as the letter from the Sub-Warden, however
+      regrettably different in dignity and social tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very few words,&rdquo; said Inglewood, &ldquo;are required to
+      conclude our case in this matter. Surely it is now plain that our client
+      carried his pistol about with the eccentric but innocent purpose of giving
+      a wholesome scare to those whom he regarded as blasphemers. In each case
+      the scare was so wholesome that the victim himself has dated from it as
+      from a new birth. Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad
+      doctor&mdash; he walks the world curing frenzies and not distributing
+      them. That is the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I put to
+      the prosecutors. That is why they dared not produce a line by any one who
+      had actually confronted the pistol. All who had actually confronted the
+      pistol confessed that they had profited by it. That was why Smith, though
+      a good shot, never hit anybody. He never hit anybody because he was a good
+      shot. His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of blood. This, I
+      say, is the only possible explanation of these facts and of all the other
+      facts. No one can possibly explain the Warden&rsquo;s conduct except by
+      believing the Warden&rsquo;s story. Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of
+      ingenious theories, could find no other theory to cover the case.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual
+      personality,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; &ldquo;the science of
+      criminology is in its infancy, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Infancy!&rdquo; cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with
+      a gesture of enlightenment; &ldquo;why, that explains it!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I repeat,&rdquo; proceeded Inglewood, &ldquo;that neither Dr. Pym
+      nor any one else can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden&rsquo;s
+      signature, for the shots missed and the witnesses missing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return of a
+      cock-fighting coolness. &ldquo;The defence,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;omits a
+      coldly colossal fact. They say we produce none of the actual victims. Wal,
+      here is one victim&mdash;England&rsquo;s celebrated and stricken Warner. I
+      reckon he is pretty well produced. And they suggest that all the outrages
+      were followed by reconciliation. Wal, there&rsquo;s no flies on England&rsquo;s
+      Warner; and he isn&rsquo;t reconciliated much.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My learned friend,&rdquo; said Moon, getting elaborately to his
+      feet, &ldquo;must remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in
+      its infancy. Dr. Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially
+      difficult to startle into any recognition of the glory of God. We admit
+      that our client, in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was
+      not successful. But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a
+      proposal for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest convenience,
+      and without further fees.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ang it all, Michael,&rdquo; cried Gould, quite serious for
+      the first time in his life, &ldquo;you might give us a bit of bally sense
+      for a chinge.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?&rdquo;
+      asked Moon sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The creature,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner superciliously, &ldquo;asked
+      me, with characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you answered, with characteristic swank,&rdquo; cried Moon,
+      shooting out a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of
+      Smith, &ldquo;that you didn&rsquo;t keep your birthday.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something like that,&rdquo; assented the doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;he asked you why not, and you
+      said it was because you didn&rsquo;t see that birth was anything to
+      rejoice over. Agreed? Now is there any one who doubts that our tale is
+      true?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, &ldquo;Pax
+      populi vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of God.
+      Or in Dr. Pym&rsquo;s more civilized language, it is up to him to open the
+      next charge. On this we claim an acquittal.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an
+      unprecedented time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the
+      air. It almost seemed as if he had been &ldquo;struck so,&rdquo; as the
+      nurses say; and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve
+      the strain with some remark. For the last half-hour or so the eminent
+      criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view of
+      offences against property as it did of offences against life. &ldquo;Most
+      murder,&rdquo; he had said, &ldquo;is a variation of homicidal mania, and
+      in the same way most theft is a version of kleptomania. I cannot entertain
+      any doubt that my learned friends opposite adequately con-ceive how this
+      must involve a scheme of punishment more tol&rsquo;rant and humane than
+      the cruel methods of ancient codes. They will doubtless exhibit
+      consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning, so thought-arresting, so&mdash;&rdquo;
+      It was here that he paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to which
+      allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it no longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he said impatiently, &ldquo;we admit the chasm.
+      The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten
+      years. The tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him
+      to prison for ever. We pass the chasm.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances of verbal
+      fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only of his opponent&rsquo;s
+      interruption, but even of his own pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So stock-improving,&rdquo; continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, &ldquo;so
+      fraught with real high hopes of the future. Science therefore regards
+      thieves, in the abstract, just as it regards murderers. It regards them
+      not as sinners to be punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to
+      be detained and cared for,&rdquo; (his first two digits closed again as he
+      hesitated)&mdash;&ldquo;in short, for the required period. But there is
+      something special in the case we investigate here. Kleptomania commonly
+      con-joins itself&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg pardon,&rdquo; said Michael; &ldquo;I did not ask just now
+      because, to tell the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly
+      vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers of
+      scentless and delicate dust. But now that things are moving a little more,
+      there is something I should really like to know. I have hung on Dr. Pym&rsquo;s
+      lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call rapture, but I
+      have so far been unable to form any conjecture about what the accused, in
+      the present instance, is supposed to have been and gone and done.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If Mr. Moon will have patience,&rdquo; said Pym with dignity,
+      &ldquo;he will find that this was the very point to which my exposition
+      was di-rected. Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical
+      attraction to certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less
+      a man than Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict
+      specialism and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals. One
+      will have an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl sleeve-links,
+      while he passes over the most elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links,
+      placed about in the most conspicuous locations. Another will impede his
+      flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while elastic-sided
+      boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic. The specialism of the criminal,
+      I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than of any brightness of business
+      habits; but there is one kind of depredator to whom this principle is at
+      first sight hard to apply. I allude to our fellow-citizen the
+      housebreaker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has been maintained by some of our boldest young truth-seekers,
+      that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden wall could hardly be
+      caught and hypnotized by a fork that is insulated in a locked box under
+      the butler&rsquo;s bed. They have thrown down the gauntlet to American
+      science on this point. They declare that diamond links are not left about
+      in conspicuous locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as they were
+      in the great test experiment of Calypso College. We hope this experiment
+      here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge, and will bring the
+      burglar once more into line and union with his fellow criminals.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment for
+      five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in
+      explosive enlightenment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I see!&rdquo; he cried; &ldquo;you mean that Smith is a
+      burglar.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I made it quite ad&rsquo;quately lucid,&rdquo; said Mr.
+      Pym, folding up his eyelids. It was typical of this topsy-turvy private
+      trial that all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression on
+      either side, was exasperating and unintelligible to the other. Moon could
+      not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could
+      not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,&rdquo;
+      continued the American doctor, &ldquo;are cases of burglary. Pursuing the
+      same course as in the previous case, we select the indubitable instance
+      from the rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron evidence. I will now
+      call on my colleague, Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from
+      the earnest, unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from
+      the earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard
+      well, Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence,
+      and the new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of
+      great artists. But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing;
+      indeed, the sense of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary
+      leaps and gasps of his pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it
+      here as Moon read it when, a little later, it was handed across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Sir,&mdash;I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident you
+      mention, private as it was, should have filtered through our omnivorous
+      journals to the mere populace; for the position I have since attained
+      makes me, I conceive, a public character, and this was certainly the most
+      extraordinary incident in a not uneventful and perhaps not an unimportant
+      career. I am by no means without experience in scenes of civil tumult. I
+      have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose League days at
+      Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set, have spent many a
+      night at the Christian Social Union. But this other experience was quite
+      inconceivable. I can only describe it as the letting loose of a place
+      which it is not for me, as a clergyman, to mention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period, a curate at
+      Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague, induced me to attend a
+      meeting which he described, I must say profanely described, as calculated
+      to promote the kingdom of God. I found, on the contrary, that it consisted
+      entirely of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse
+      and their opinions extreme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest
+      respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say little. No one can be
+      more convinced than I of the evil of politics in the pulpit; and I never
+      offer my congregation any advice about voting except in cases in which I
+      feel strongly that they are likely to make an erroneous selection. But,
+      while I do not mean to touch at all upon political or social problems, I
+      must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest, such
+      discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism or Radicalism
+      partakes of the character of the betrayal of a sacred trust. Far be it
+      from me to say a word against the Reverend Raymond Percy, the colleague in
+      question. He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some apparently fascinating;
+      but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist, wears his hair like a pianist,
+      and behaves like an intoxicated person, will never rise in his profession,
+      or even obtain the admiration of the good and wise. Nor is it for me to
+      utter my personal judgements of the appearance of the people in the hall.
+      Yet a glance round the room, revealing ranks of debased and envious faces&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Adopting,&rdquo; said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive&mdash;&ldquo;adopting
+      the reverend gentleman&rsquo;s favourite figure of logic, may I say that
+      while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect, he is
+      a blasted old jackass.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo; said Dr. Pym; &ldquo;I protest.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must keep quiet, Michael,&rdquo; said Inglewood; &ldquo;they
+      have a right to read their story.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chair! Chair! Chair!&rdquo; cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly
+      in his own; and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered
+      all the authority of the Court of Beacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t wake the old lady,&rdquo; said Moon, lowering his
+      voice in a moody good-humour. &ldquo;I apologize. I won&rsquo;t interrupt
+      again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading of the
+      clergyman&rsquo;s letter was already continuing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
+      will say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the audience were Irish, and
+      showed the weakness of that impetuous people. When gathered together into
+      gangs and conspiracies they seem to lose altogether that lovable
+      good-nature and readiness to accept anything one tells them which
+      distinguishes them as individuals.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly, and sat
+      down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the
+      speech of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level with witticisms about
+      rent and a reserve of labour. Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration,
+      and such words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly. Some
+      hours afterward the storm broke. I had been addressing the meeting for
+      some time, pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes, their
+      insufficient attendance at evening service, their neglect of the Harvest
+      Festival, and of many other things that might materially help them to
+      improve their lot. It was, I think, about this time that an extraordinary
+      interruption occurred. An enormous, powerful man, partly concealed with
+      white plaster, arose in the middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud,
+      roaring voice, like a bull&rsquo;s) some observations which seemed to be
+      in a foreign language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, descended to his
+      level by entering into a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be the
+      victor. The meeting began to behave more respectfully for a little; yet
+      before I had said twelve sentences more the rush was made for the
+      platform. The enormous plasterer, in particular, plunged towards us,
+      shaking the earth like an elephant; and I really do not know what would
+      have happened if a man equally large, but not quite so ill-dressed, had
+      not jumped up also and held him away. This other big man shouted a sort of
+      speech to the mob as he was shoving them back. I don&rsquo;t know what he
+      said, but, what with shouting and shoving and such horseplay, he got us
+      out at a back door, while the wretched people went roaring down another
+      passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story. When he had
+      got us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
+      with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as follows:
+      `You&rsquo;re well out of that, sir; now you&rsquo;d better come along
+      with me. I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we&rsquo;ve
+      all been talking about. Come along!&rsquo; And turning his big back
+      abruptly, he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old
+      lamp-post, we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him. He had
+      certainly helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I
+      could not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds.
+      Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with all his
+      dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also. In fact, he comes of
+      the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house and has the black hair
+      and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family. I cannot but refer it to
+      vanity that he should heighten his personal advantages with black velvet
+      or a red cross of considerable ostentation, and certainly&mdash;but I
+      digress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post faded
+      behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind. The large man in
+      front of us looked larger and larger in the haze. He did not turn round,
+      but he said with his huge back to us, `All that talking&rsquo;s no good;
+      we want a little practical Socialism.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I quite agree,&rsquo; said Percy; `but I always like to understand
+      things in theory before I put them into practice.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Oh, you just leave that to me,&rsquo; said the practical
+      Socialist, or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness. `I have
+      a way with me. I&rsquo;m a Permeator.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed, so I
+      was sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey for the
+      present. It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane, where we
+      were already rather cramped, into a paved passage, at the end of which we
+      passed through a wooden gate left open. We then found ourselves, in the
+      increasing darkness and vapour, crossing what appeared to be a beaten path
+      across a kitchen garden. I called out to the enormous person going on in
+      front, but he answered obscurely that it was a short cut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
+      when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading to a
+      higher level of road. My thoughtless colleague ran up it so quickly that I
+      could not do otherwise than follow as best I could. The path on which I
+      then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow. I had never had to
+      walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous. Along one side of it grew what, in
+      the dark and density of air, I first took to be some short, strong thicket
+      of shrubs. Then I saw that they were not short shrubs; they were the tops
+      of tall trees. I, an English gentleman and clergyman of the Church of
+      England&mdash;I was walking along the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps, and let
+      loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I could all the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`It&rsquo;s a right-of-way,&rsquo; declared my indefensible
+      informant. `It&rsquo;s closed to traffic once in a hundred years.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!&rsquo; I called out; `you are not going on
+      with this blackguard?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Why, I think so,&rsquo; answered my unhappy colleague flippantly.
+      `I think you and I are bigger blackguards than he is, whatever he is.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I am a burglar,&rsquo; explained the big creature quite calmly. `I
+      am a member of the Fabian Society. I take back the wealth stolen by the
+      capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform fitted
+      to the special occasion&mdash;here a little and there a little. Do you see
+      that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof? I&rsquo;m
+      permeating that one to-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Whether this is a crime or a joke,&rsquo; I cried, `I desire to be
+      quit of it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`The ladder is just behind you,&rsquo; answered the creature with
+      horrible courtesy; `and, before you go, do let me give you my card.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I
+      should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind would
+      have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall. As it was, in the
+      wildness of the moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking my
+      way back by wall and ladder, landed in the respectable streets once more.
+      Not before, however, I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and
+      lamentable facts&mdash; that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof
+      towards the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and, what
+      was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him. I have never seen
+      either of them since that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my
+      connection with the wild set. I am far from saying that every member of
+      the Christian Social Union must necessarily be a burglar. I have no right
+      to bring any such charge. But it gave me a hint of what such courses may
+      lead to in many cases; and I saw them no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a Mr.
+      Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question. When I got home
+      that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed there under the name
+      of Innocent Smith.&mdash;Yours faithfully, &ldquo;John Clement Hawkins.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper. He knew that
+      the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that Moses
+      Gould (for one) could no more write like a canon than he could read like
+      one. After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary
+      charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We wish,&rdquo; said Michael, &ldquo;to give all reasonable
+      facilities to the prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the
+      whole court. The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over
+      all those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they
+      are made. Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing
+      instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer&rsquo;s cramp, forcing a
+      man to write his uncle&rsquo;s name instead of his own. Piracy on the high
+      seas is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to
+      inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny. Innocent Smith never did
+      commit burglary at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous
+      arrangement, and ask the prosecution two or three questions.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the first place,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;have you the date
+      of Canon Hawkins&rsquo;s last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the
+      walls and roofs?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ho, yus!&rdquo; called out Gould smartly. &ldquo;November thirteen,
+      eighteen ninety-one.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you,&rdquo; continued Moon, &ldquo;identified the houses in
+      Hoxton up which they climbed?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,&rdquo;
+      answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, &ldquo;was
+      there any burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that
+      out.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There may well have been,&rdquo; said the doctor primly, after a
+      pause, &ldquo;an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another question,&rdquo; proceeded Michael. &ldquo;Canon Hawkins,
+      in his blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment. Why
+      don&rsquo;t you produce the evidence of the other clergyman, who actually
+      followed the burglar and presumably was present at the crime?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table, as he did
+      when he was specially confident of the clearness of his reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have entirely failed,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to track the other
+      clergyman, who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had
+      seen him as-cending the gutters and the leads. I am fully aware that this
+      may strike many as sing&rsquo;lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will
+      appear pretty natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy is
+      admittedly, by the canon&rsquo;s evidence, a minister of eccentric ways.
+      His con-nection with England&rsquo;s proudest and fairest does not
+      seemingly prevent a taste for the society of the real low-down. On the
+      other hand, the prisoner Smith is, by general agreement, a man of irr&rsquo;sistible
+      fascination. I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into
+      the crime and forced him to hide his head in the real crim&rsquo;nal
+      class. That would fully account for his non-appearance, and the failure of
+      all attempts to trace him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is impossible, then, to trace him?&rdquo; asked Moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible,&rdquo; repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure it&rsquo;s impossible?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh dry up, Michael,&rdquo; cried Gould, irritably. &ldquo;We&rsquo;d
+      &lsquo;ave found ‘im if we could, for you bet &lsquo;e saw the burglary.
+      Don&rsquo;t YOU start looking for &lsquo;im. Look for your own &lsquo;ead
+      in the dustbin. You&rsquo;ll find that&mdash;after a bit,&rdquo; and his
+      voice died away in grumbling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Arthur,&rdquo; directed Michael Moon, sitting down, &ldquo;kindly
+      read Mr. Raymond Percy&rsquo;s letter to the court.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much
+      as possible,&rdquo; began Inglewood, &ldquo;I will not read the first part
+      of the letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution to admit the
+      account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as facts are
+      concerned, that given by the first clergyman. We concede, then, the canon&rsquo;s
+      story so far as it goes. This must necessarily be valuable to the
+      prosecutor and also convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy&rsquo;s
+      letter, then, at the point when all three men were standing on the garden
+      wall:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind
+      not to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud of copper
+      fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was violent and simple;
+      yet the thoughts that led up to it were so complicated and contradictory
+      that I could not retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent
+      gentleman; and I would have given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking
+      him down the road. That God should allow good people to be as bestially
+      stupid as that&mdash; rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and
+      artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
+      discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time; I
+      liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was made
+      for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had fasted
+      for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because they could not
+      get meat&mdash;and fish-bones when they could not get fish. As too many
+      British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the Church
+      Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that. Then I
+      realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had not been
+      a pageant, but a riot&mdash;and a suppressed riot. There, still living
+      patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous promises had
+      been made. In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to
+      continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without
+      being also an atheist&mdash; and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could
+      want to conserve Hoxton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the
+      Hoxton men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I
+      should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned in
+      the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all good
+      Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there is no
+      priestcraft about Hawkins&mdash;nor any other kind of craft. He is as
+      perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a
+      cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman; that is
+      his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his class. He
+      never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address. He
+      simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said. A
+      voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this brother
+      is a major.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body
+      and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body and soul
+      together, the stampede against our platform began. I took part in his
+      undeserved rescue, I followed his obscure deliverer, until (as I have
+      said) we stood together on the wall above the dim gardens, already
+      clouding with fog. Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and
+      decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of
+      the two. The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was&mdash;
+      and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not. I knew
+      there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to it myself; I knew
+      there was not so very much in the lower class, for I had lived with it a
+      long time. Many old texts about the despised and persecuted came back to
+      my mind, and I thought that the saints might well be hidden in the
+      criminal class. About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was
+      crawling up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
+      leaping in front of me like a gorilla.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This upward scramble was short, and we soon found ourselves
+      tramping along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big
+      thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as
+      bulky as small forts. The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the
+      somewhat swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body laboured.
+      The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed overpowered by
+      sinister spirits. Tall spectres with turbans of vapour seemed to stand
+      higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both. I thought dimly of
+      illustrations to the `Arabian Nights&rsquo; on brown paper with rich but
+      sombre tints, showing genii gathering round the Seal of Solomon. By the
+      way, what was the Seal of Solomon? Nothing to do with sealing-wax really,
+      I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being of that
+      heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour, poured out of
+      boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
+      look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak. But
+      the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of the
+      housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great
+      cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a forest of
+      chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it were a
+      flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour. The colours
+      of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from firesides and some
+      from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps. And yet, though
+      the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural, like fumes from a
+      witch&rsquo;s pot. It was as if the shameful and ugly shapes growing
+      shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate spurt of steam,
+      coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed. Here, aglow from
+      underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of
+      sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray, like the long
+      hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another place the smoke was
+      of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might be the disembodiment of one
+      of their old, leprous waxen images. But right across it ran a line of
+      bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as clear and crooked as Arabic&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the &lsquo;bus. He was
+      understood to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by
+      leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed that
+      she was sure it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted down by
+      Moses with a blue, and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood then
+      resumed the reading of the document.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern
+      city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked
+      and vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all
+      colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and
+      not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky. These were the rivers
+      of our vanity pouring into the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the
+      whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we
+      had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.
+      Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals could still
+      ascend like angels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one
+      of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals like
+      lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway. He put his heavy hand
+      upon it, and for the moment I thought he was merely leaning on it, tired
+      with his steep scramble along the terrace. So far as I could guess from
+      the abysses, full of fog on either side, and the veiled lights of red
+      brown and old gold glowing through them now and again, we were on the top
+      of one of those long, consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are
+      still to be found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
+      of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders. Probably enough,
+      they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted only by such small clans of the
+      poor as gather also in the old emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some
+      little time later, when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
+      were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away below us into
+      one flat square or wide street below another, like a giant stairway, in a
+      manner not unknown in the eccentric building of London, and looking like
+      the last ledges of the land. But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were
+      interrupted by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
+      Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney he leaned on, he
+      leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over
+      like the opening top of an inkstand. I remembered the short ladder leaning
+      against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged his criminal approach
+      long before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the
+      culmination of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a
+      sudden sense of comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what
+      connected this abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still
+      kindly fancies. Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of
+      roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly
+      and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the
+      scene, as if the houses were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were
+      only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The
+      law-breaking of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but even
+      comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous people with
+      their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their
+      chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from getting
+      sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was a serious
+      thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and
+      vapourous visions, the heaven of a higher levity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the
+      displaced chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower,
+      for, tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained
+      visible. Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this
+      way of invading the houses of men. I thought of little chimney-sweeps, and
+      `The Water Babies;&rsquo; but I decided that it was not that. Then I
+      remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy trespass with
+      ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime. Christmas Eve, of course, and
+      Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the
+      black hole; but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two
+      afterwards, the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery
+      part of the fog, and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its
+      voice called on me to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only
+      among old friends. I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for
+      I was still thinking of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such
+      vertical entrance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In every well-appointed gentleman&rsquo;s house, I reflected, there
+      was the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen;
+      but there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is, so to speak,
+      the underground passage between earth and heaven. By this starry tunnel
+      Santa Claus manages&mdash;like the skylark&mdash; to be true to the
+      kindred points of heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain conventions, and
+      a widely distributed lack of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps,
+      little used. But Santa Claus&rsquo;s door was really the front door: it
+      was the door fronting the universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft
+      below the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into
+      a yet larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was half-way down the
+      ladder that I suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of
+      retracing all my steps, as my companion had retraced them from the
+      beginning of the garden wall. The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought
+      me back to my senses. I remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was
+      welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all their
+      horror of offences against property. I had heard all the regular
+      denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong; I had read the Ten
+      Commandments in church a thousand times. And then and there, at the age of
+      thirty-four, half-way down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of
+      burglar, I saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all, is
+      really wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strangely
+      soft footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft, till
+      he knelt down on a part of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling
+      efforts, lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a light from below, and
+      we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room, of the sort
+      that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom, and is an adjunct to
+      it. Light thus breaking from beneath our feet like a soundless explosion,
+      showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and
+      had doubtless been long disused until the advent of my enterprising
+      friend. But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the shining room
+      underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness. To enter a modern
+      interior at so strange an angle, by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in
+      one&rsquo;s psychology. It was like having found a fourth dimension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly
+      and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him; though, for lack
+      of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless. Before the echo of my
+      boots had died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door, half
+      opened it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening. Then,
+      leaving the door still half open, he came back into the middle of the
+      room, and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament. The
+      room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human way that
+      makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full, but slovenly,
+      bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of
+      reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that look like red
+      goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed
+      doors in its lower part. There were three windows, high but narrow. After
+      another glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and
+      rummaged inside. He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely
+      handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like port. Somehow the
+      sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little luxury in his
+      hand woke within me once more all the revelation and revulsion I had felt
+      above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Don&rsquo;t do it!&rsquo; I cried quite incoherently, `Santa Claus&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Ah,&rsquo; said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table
+      and stood looking at me, `you&rsquo;ve thought about that, too.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I can&rsquo;t express a millionth part of what I&rsquo;ve thought
+      of,&rsquo; I cried, `but it&rsquo;s something like this... oh, can&rsquo;t
+      you see it? Why are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes
+      like a thief in the night? He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost
+      treachery&mdash;because there are more toys where he has been. What should
+      we feel if there were less? Down what chimney from hell would come the
+      goblin that should take away the children&rsquo;s balls and dolls while
+      they slept? Could a Greek tragedy be more gray and cruel than that
+      daybreak and awakening? Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer&mdash;can
+      you think of anything so base as a toy-stealer?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket
+      and laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue
+      reflective eyes fixed on my face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Man!&rsquo; I said, `all stealing is toy-stealing. That&rsquo;s
+      why it&rsquo;s really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men
+      should be really respected because of their worthlessness. I know Naboth&rsquo;s
+      vineyard is as painted as Noah&rsquo;s Ark. I know Nathan&rsquo;s ewe-lamb
+      is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand. That is why I could not
+      take them away. I did not mind so much, as long as I thought of men&rsquo;s
+      things as their valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After a moment I added abruptly, `Only saints and sages ought to be
+      robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly
+      people of the things that are their poor little pride.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both, and
+      lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Don&rsquo;t do it!&rsquo; I cried. `It might be the last bottle of
+      some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud
+      of it. Don&rsquo;t you see there&rsquo;s something sacred in the silliness
+      of such things?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`It&rsquo;s not the last bottle,&rsquo; answered my criminal
+      calmly; `there&rsquo;s plenty more in the cellar.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You know the house, then?&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Too well,&rsquo; he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have
+      something eerie about it. `I am always trying to forget what I know&mdash;
+      and to find what I don&rsquo;t know.&rsquo; He drained his glass.
+      `Besides,&rsquo; he added, `it will do him good.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`What will do him good?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`The wine I&rsquo;m drinking,&rsquo; said the strange person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Does he drink too much, then?&rsquo; I inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`No,&rsquo; he answered, `not unless I do.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Do you mean,&rsquo; I demanded, `that the owner of this house
+      approves of all you do?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`God forbid,&rsquo; he answered; `but he has to do the same.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows
+      unreasonable increased a sense of riddle, and even terror, about this
+      tall, narrow house we had entered out of the sky. I had once more the
+      notion about the gigantic genii&mdash; I fancied that enormous Egyptian
+      faces, of the dead reds and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each
+      window of our little lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes.
+      My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of him, and talking
+      with the same rather creepy confidentialness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I am always trying to find him&mdash;to catch him unawares. I come
+      in through skylights and trapdoors to find him; but whenever I find him&mdash;he
+      is doing what I am doing.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. `There is some one
+      coming,&rsquo; I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it. Not
+      from the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber
+      (which seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were coming
+      nearer. I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster, or double, I
+      expected to see when the door was pushed open from within. I am only quite
+      certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity, a
+      rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic&mdash; her
+      dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves, with a face
+      which, though still comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as
+      intelligence. All she said was, `I didn&rsquo;t hear you come in.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I came in another way,&rsquo; said the Permeator, somewhat
+      vaguely. `I&rsquo;d left my latchkey at home.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania. `I&rsquo;m
+      really very sorry,&rsquo; I cried. `I know my position is irregular. Would
+      you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Mine,&rsquo; said the burglar, `May I present you to my wife?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat; and I did not
+      get out of it till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith (such was the prosaic name
+      of this far from prosaic household) lingered a little, talking slightly
+      and pleasantly. She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd
+      mixture of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well, but was
+      still a little harmlessly afraid of it. Perhaps the possession of so jumpy
+      and incalculable a husband had left her a little nervous. Anyhow, when she
+      had retired to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary man poured
+      forth his apologia and autobiography over the dwindling wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and
+      scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless
+      nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a war
+      between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members were
+      right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled
+      against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As
+      the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately, it had
+      taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very
+      face of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the window
+      and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had
+      professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very
+      unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with
+      revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made
+      himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the
+      associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless.
+      His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not an
+      optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and
+      skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the
+      most serious part of it. `What is more immortal,&rsquo; he would cry,
+      `than love and war? Type of all desire and joy&mdash;beer. Type of all
+      battle and conquest&mdash;skittles.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was something in him of what the old world called the
+      solemnity of revels&mdash;when they spoke of `solemnizing&rsquo; a mere
+      masquerade or wedding banquet. Nevertheless he was not a mere pagan any
+      more than he was a mere practical joker. His eccentricities sprang from a
+      static fact of faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and
+      Christian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I don&rsquo;t deny,&rsquo; he said, `that there should be priests
+      to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain
+      strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called
+      poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The
+      intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death.
+      They hadn&rsquo;t enough blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol
+      barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been
+      born. For ages looking up an eternal perspective it might be true that
+      life is a learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as
+      true that death was their only chance of learning to live.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he
+      felt it continually slipping from himself as much as from others. He had
+      the same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually
+      ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong speed to keep alive
+      the mere conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial and yet
+      insane details that had once reminded him of the awful subconscious
+      reality. When the don had hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long
+      dangling legs, vibrating in the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked
+      satire of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without
+      feathers. The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head,
+      which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved by his legs, which
+      he had treated with coldness and neglect. Smith could think of no other
+      way of announcing or recording this, except to send a telegram to an old
+      friend (by this time a total stranger) to say that he had just seen a man
+      with two legs; and that the man was alive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket
+      when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very
+      headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was alive;
+      and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of
+      the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless
+      lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had provoked death by no
+      professions of philosophic negation. He apologized in wild gasps through
+      all his wild wet labours to bring her to the shore, and when he had done
+      so at last, he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow, with the
+      same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely
+      married her; and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently said
+      `good-night.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury.
+      Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that
+      Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did
+      not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any
+      place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled
+      down. `I am a very domestic fellow,&rsquo; he explained with gravity, `and
+      have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He
+      lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a
+      total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man
+      he was. The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in
+      such transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible to explain to her
+      that he did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that
+      he always felt in other people&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I know there&rsquo;s a fellow called Smith,&rsquo; he said in his
+      rather weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I
+      know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of
+      paralyzed politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first
+      sight. Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture;
+      would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as
+      cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton
+      of reality. Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said. And at
+      other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense, and
+      would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber. He
+      would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
+      It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence
+      of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the
+      doorstep the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed
+      the stairway of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a
+      maniac. What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a
+      being? A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to
+      be married! A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor&rsquo;s!
+      On this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it,
+      though no one understands. I believe the maniac was one of those who do
+      not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships by Him
+      who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire. This, at
+      least, I know for certain. Whether such men have laughed or wept, we have
+      laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping. Whether they cursed
+      or blessed the world, they have never fitted it. It is true that men have
+      shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an
+      adder. But it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great
+      optimist as from the embrace of a bear. Nothing brings down more curses
+      than a real benediction. For the goodness of good things, like the badness
+      of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than
+      spoken. We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older
+      than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations,
+      the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and
+      loves the world.&mdash;I am, yours faithfully, &ldquo;Raymond Percy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, &lsquo;oly, &lsquo;oly, &lsquo;oly!&rdquo; said Mr. Moses
+      Gould.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been in an almost
+      religious state of submission and assent. Something had bound them
+      together; something in the sacred tradition of the last two words of the
+      letter; something also in the touching and boyish embarrassment with which
+      Inglewood had read them&mdash; for he had all the thin-skinned reverence
+      of the agnostic. Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way as ever
+      lived; far kinder to his family than more refined men of pleasure, simple
+      and steadfast in his admiration, a thoroughly wholesome animal and a
+      thoroughly genuine character. But wherever there is conflict, crises come
+      in which any soul, personal or racial, unconsciously turns on the world
+      the most hateful of its hundred faces. English reverence, Irish mysticism,
+      American idealism, looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile.
+      It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for
+      many a cruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval towns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, &lsquo;oly, &lsquo;oly, &lsquo;oly!&rdquo; said Moses Gould.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finding that this was not well received, he explained further, exuberance
+      deepening on his dark exuberant features.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when &lsquo;e&rsquo;s
+      corfin&rsquo; up a fly,&rdquo; he said pleasantly. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you
+      see you&rsquo;ve bunged up old Smith anyhow. If this parson&rsquo;s tale&rsquo;s
+      O.K.&mdash;why, Smith is &lsquo;ot. &lsquo;E&rsquo;s pretty &lsquo;ot. We
+      find him elopin&rsquo; with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab. Well,
+      what abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her blarsted shyness&mdash;transmigogrified
+      into a blighted sharpness? Miss Gray ain&rsquo;t been very sharp, but I
+      reckon she&rsquo;ll be pretty shy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a brute,&rdquo; growled Michael Moon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance
+      along the table at Innocent Smith. He was still bowed above his paper
+      toys, and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or
+      shame. He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and
+      tucked it in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter III &mdash; The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American, and his
+      respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ignoring,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the delicate and considerable
+      knightly protests that have been called forth by my colleague&rsquo;s
+      native sense of oration, and apologizing to all for whom our wild search
+      for truth seems unsuitable to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still
+      think my colleague&rsquo;s question by no means devoid of rel&rsquo;vancy.
+      The last charge against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge
+      on the paper is of bigamy and desertion. It does without question appear
+      that the defence, in aspiring to rebut this last charge, have really
+      admitted the next. Either Innocent Smith is still under a charge of
+      attempted burglary, or else that is exploded; but he is pretty well fixed
+      for attempted bigamy. It all depends on what view we take of the alleged
+      letter from Curate Percy. Under these conditions I feel justified in
+      claiming my right to questions. May I ask how the defence got hold of the
+      letter from Curate Percy? Did it come direct from the prisoner?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have had nothing direct from the prisoner,&rdquo; said Moon
+      quietly. &ldquo;The few documents which the defence guarantees came to us
+      from another quarter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From what quarter?&rdquo; asked Dr. Pym.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you insist,&rdquo; answered Moon, &ldquo;we had them from Miss
+      Gray.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead, opened
+      them very wide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you really mean to say,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that Miss Gray
+      was in possession of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; said Inglewood, and sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice,
+      and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy&rsquo;s
+      narrative is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents
+      in our own possession. Of these the principal and most certain is the
+      testimony of Innocent Smith&rsquo;s gardener, who was present at the most
+      dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr.
+      Gould, the gardener, please.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the gardener.
+      That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith
+      when they had a little house on the edge of Croydon. From the gardener&rsquo;s
+      tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain he had seen
+      the place. It was one of those corners of town or country that one does
+      not forget, for it looked like a frontier. The garden hung very high above
+      the lane, and its end was steep and sharp, like a fortress. Beyond was a
+      roll of real country, with a white path sprawling across it, and the
+      roots, boles, and branches of great gray trees writhing and twisting
+      against the sky. But as if to assert that the lane itself was suburban,
+      were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing upland a lamp-post
+      painted a peculiar yellow-green and a red pillar-box that stood exactly at
+      the corner. Inglewood was sure of the place; he had passed it twenty times
+      in his constitutionals on the bicycle; he had always dimly felt it was a
+      place where something might occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel
+      that the face of his frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time
+      have appeared over the garden bushes above. The gardener&rsquo;s account,
+      unlike the curate&rsquo;s, was quite free from decorative adjectives,
+      however many he may have uttered privately when writing it. He simply said
+      that on a particular morning Mr. Smith came out and began to play about
+      with a rake, as he often did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his
+      eldest child (he had two children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to
+      the branch of a tree, and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks,
+      like those of a giant frog in its final agony. Never, apparently, did he
+      think of putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener, in
+      consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity. But the
+      gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he (the
+      gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying the hose, had
+      seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped red and white jacket
+      (which might have been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part of
+      his pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his wife, who
+      was looking out of the bedroom window on to the garden, these decisive and
+      very loud expressions&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t stay here any longer. I&rsquo;ve got another wife and
+      much better children a long way from here. My other wife&rsquo;s got
+      redder hair than yours, and my other garden&rsquo;s got a much finer
+      situation; and I&rsquo;m going off to them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky,
+      higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again. Then he
+      cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down in the lane
+      below, and set off up the road without even a hat. Much of the picture was
+      doubtless supplied by Inglewood&rsquo;s accidental memory of the place. He
+      could see with his mind&rsquo;s eye that big bare-headed figure with the
+      ragged rake swaggering up the crooked woodland road, and leaving lamp-post
+      and pillar-box behind. But the gardener, on his own account, was quite
+      prepared to swear to the public confession of bigamy, to the temporary
+      disappearance of the rake in the sky, and the final disappearance of the
+      man up the road. Moreover, being a local man, he could swear that, beyond
+      some local rumours that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast,
+      nothing was known of him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few
+      but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge. So
+      far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on the
+      Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account.
+      &ldquo;I hope you are not so insular,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that you will
+      not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English
+      gardener. By Mr. Inglewood&rsquo;s favour we will hear the French
+      innkeeper.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
+      reading the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them to
+      run something like this:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&mdash;Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin&rsquo;s Cafe on the
+      sea-front at Gras, rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I
+      know of the stranger out of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks
+      for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim
+      flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit beauty to pervade
+      one&rsquo;s whole life, just as one does not pave all the roads with ivory
+      or cover all the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the
+      onions!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether
+      there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot
+      as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening
+      I felt like a poet&mdash;like any little rascal of a poet who drinks
+      absinthe in the mad Montmartre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter
+      and poisonous. I had never known it look so unfamiliar before. In the sky
+      was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and
+      the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where they
+      sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore. There I saw a
+      fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from the sea. It was
+      already quite close, and out of it clambered a man of monstrous stature,
+      who came wading to shore with the water not up to his knees, though it
+      would have reached the hips of many men. He leaned on a long rake or pole,
+      which looked like a trident, and made him look like a Triton. Wet as he
+      was, and with strips of seaweed clinging to him, he walked across to my
+      cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside, asked for cherry brandy, a
+      liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded. Then the monster, with great
+      politeness, invited me to partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we
+      fell into conversation. He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small
+      boat got at a private bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing
+      promptly in an easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official
+      boats. He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house. When I
+      naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not know;
+      it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed it
+      with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, `over there.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it
+      when he saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly
+      minute. He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an
+      auctioneer. I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last two,
+      which were that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red
+      pillar-box at the corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`A red pillar-box!&rsquo; I cried in astonishment. `Why, the place
+      must be in England!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I had forgotten,&rsquo; he said, nodding heavily. `That is the
+      island&rsquo;s name.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`But, ~nom du nom~,&rsquo; I cried testily, `you&rsquo;ve just come
+      from England, my boy.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`They SAID it was England,&rsquo; said my imbecile,
+      conspiratorially. `They said it was Kent. But Kentish men are such liars
+      one can&rsquo;t believe anything they say.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Monsieur,&rsquo; I said, `you must pardon me. I am elderly, and
+      the ~fumisteries~ of the young men are beyond me. I go by common sense,
+      or, at the largest, by that extension of applied common sense called
+      science.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Science!&rsquo; cried the stranger. `There is only one good thing
+      science ever discovered&mdash;a good thing, good tidings of great joy&mdash;
+      that the world is round.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to
+      my intelligence. `I mean,&rsquo; he said, `that going right round the
+      world is the shortest way to where you are already.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Is it not even shorter,&rsquo; I asked, `to stop where you are?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`No, no, no!&rsquo; he cried emphatically. `That way is long and
+      very weary. At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find
+      the wife I really married and the house that is really mine. And that
+      house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,&rsquo;
+      he asked with a sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush out of your
+      house in order to find it?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`No, I think not,&rsquo; I replied; `reason tells a man from the
+      first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life. I remain here,
+      content to fulfil the life of man. All my interests are here, and most of
+      my friends, and&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`And yet,&rsquo; he cried, starting to his almost terrific height,
+      `you made the French Revolution!&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Pardon me,&rsquo; I said, `I am not quite so elderly. A relative
+      perhaps.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I mean your sort did!&rsquo; exclaimed this personage. `Yes, your
+      damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh! I know
+      some say it was no good, and you&rsquo;re just back where you were before.
+      Why, blast it all, that&rsquo;s just where we all want to be&mdash;back
+      where we were before! That is revolution&mdash;going right round! Every
+      revolution, like a repentance, is a return.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again,
+      and then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck the tiny
+      table with his colossal fist and went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
+      English Revolution. God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny.
+      The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the
+      Englishman marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone. But I am going
+      to turn the world upside down, too. I&rsquo;m going to turn myself upside
+      down. I&rsquo;m going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland of
+      the Antipodes, where trees and men hang head downward in the sky. But my
+      revolution, like yours, like the earth&rsquo;s, will end up in the holy,
+      happy place&mdash; the celestial, incredible place&mdash;the place where
+      we were before.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason,
+      he leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight, swinging his
+      pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment, which also pointed to
+      some loss of mental balance. This is all I know of the episode of the man
+      landed from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of
+      justice.&mdash; Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high
+      consideration, with which I have the honour to be your obedient servant,
+      &ldquo;Jules Durobin.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next document in our dossier,&rdquo; continued Inglewood,
+      &ldquo;comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia, and
+      runs as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&mdash;My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the stationmaster
+      at the station near Crazok. The great trains go by across the plains
+      taking people to China, but very few people get down at the platform where
+      I have to watch. This makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back
+      much upon the books I have. But I cannot discuss these very much with my
+      neighbours, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia
+      so much as in other parts. Many of the peasants round here have never
+      heard of Bernard Shaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since
+      the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult. The
+      revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles of
+      humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books, they
+      were ill acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts, though
+      provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there is a tendency to
+      reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them. This is very
+      unfortunate for Intelligents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains
+      came through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching a train that
+      had come in. Only one person got out of the train, far away up at the
+      other end of it, for it was a very long train. It was evening, with a
+      cold, greenish sky. A little snow had fallen, but not enough to whiten the
+      plain, which stretched away a sort of sad purple in all directions, save
+      where the flat tops of some distant tablelands caught the evening light
+      like lakes. As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by
+      the train he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen so large a
+      man. But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because his shoulders
+      were very big and his head comparatively little. From the big shoulders
+      hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty white, very thin
+      for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole such as peasants rake
+      in weeds with to burn them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was
+      entangled in one of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the
+      extinct revolution, though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the
+      government side. I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up
+      his rake and laid out right and left with such energy that he came through
+      them without scathe and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and
+      really astonished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim, he
+      could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`There are not many houses to be had round here,&rsquo; I answered
+      in the same language, `the district has been very disturbed. A revolution,
+      as you know, has recently been suppressed. Any further building&mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Oh! I don&rsquo;t mean that,&rsquo; he cried; `I mean a real house&mdash;a
+      live house. It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture moved
+      me profoundly. We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere of folk-lore,
+      and its unfortunate effects can still be seen in the bright colours of the
+      children&rsquo;s dolls and of the ikons. For an instant the idea of a
+      house running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the enlightenment of
+      man moves slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Have you no other house of your own?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I have left it,&rsquo; he said very sadly. `It was not the house
+      that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all
+      women, and yet I could not feel it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`And so,&rsquo; I said with sympathy, `you walked straight out of
+      the front door, like a masculine Nora.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Nora?&rsquo; he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a
+      Russian word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I mean Nora in &ldquo;The Doll&rsquo;s House,&rdquo;&rsquo; I
+      replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an
+      Englishman; for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but
+      `ukases.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`"The Doll&rsquo;s House&rdquo;?&rsquo; he cried vehemently; `why,
+      that is just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to
+      be a doll&rsquo;s house. Don&rsquo;t you remember, when you were a child,
+      how those little windows WERE windows, while the big windows weren&rsquo;t.
+      A child has a doll&rsquo;s house, and shrieks when a front door opens
+      inwards. A banker has a real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who
+      fail to emit the faintest shriek when their real front doors open inwards.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly
+      silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and was
+      saying in a sort of loud whisper, `I have found out how to make a big
+      thing small. I have found out how to turn a house into a doll&rsquo;s
+      house. Get a long way off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by his
+      great gift of distance. Once let me see my old brick house standing up
+      quite little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again.
+      I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against the gate,
+      and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the window. For
+      the windows really open in my doll&rsquo;s house.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`But why?&rsquo; I asked, `should you wish to return to that
+      particular doll&rsquo;s house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold step
+      against convention, having made yourself in the conventional sense
+      disreputable, having dared to be free, why should you not take advantage
+      of your freedom? As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you
+      called your marriage was only your mood. You have a right to leave it all
+      behind, like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails.
+      Having once escaped, you have the world before you. Though the words may
+      seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains,
+      where the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke out
+      of the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot
+      and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Yes,&rsquo; he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia. You
+      are right. I could really walk into that town over there and have love all
+      over again, and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and
+      nobody could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of
+      something.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask him
+      what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You have convinced me,&rsquo; he said with the same dreamy eye,
+      `why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his
+      wife.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`And why is it dangerous?&rsquo; I inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Why, because nobody can find him,&rsquo; answered this odd person,
+      `and we all want to be found.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`The most original modern thinkers,&rsquo; I remarked, `Ibsen,
+      Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we want most is to
+      be lost: to find ourselves in untrodden paths, and to do unprecedented
+      things: to break with the past and belong to the future.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
+      what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene&mdash;the dark purple
+      plains, the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents. `I
+      shall not find the house here,&rsquo; he said. `It is still eastward&mdash;
+      further and further eastward.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the
+      foot of his pole upon the frozen earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`And if I do go back to my country,&rsquo; he cried, `I may be
+      locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit
+      unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the
+      silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the
+      suburbs; but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road I
+      am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out; I am a
+      revolutionist. But don&rsquo;t you see that all these real leaps and
+      destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden&mdash; to
+      something we have had, to something we at least have heard of? Don&rsquo;t
+      you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get HOME?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`No,&rsquo; I answered after due reflection, `I don&rsquo;t think I
+      should accept that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Ah,&rsquo; he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have explained
+      a second thing to me.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`What do you mean?&rsquo; I asked; `what thing?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Why your revolution has failed,&rsquo; he said; and walking across
+      quite suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at
+      last. And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening
+      flats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse to the best
+      advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person: I should like to
+      find out if he has produced any literary works.&mdash;Yours, etc., &ldquo;Paul
+      Nickolaiovitch.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which
+      kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was
+      again without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his
+      pile. &ldquo;The Court will be indulgent,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;if the
+      next note lacks the special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is
+      ceremonious enough in its own way:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting.&mdash;I am
+      Wong-Hi, and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the
+      forest of Fu. The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that
+      it must be very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought. I am
+      indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy,
+      and in this I shall doubtless die. But if a man remain in one place he
+      shall see that the place changes. The pagoda of my temple stands up
+      silently out of all the trees, like a yellow pagoda above many green
+      pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes
+      green like jade, and sometimes red like garnet. But the night is always
+      ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly
+      seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look as over
+      a sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning. And yet when he
+      came, it was as if an elephant had strayed from the armies of the great
+      kings of India. For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came forth
+      in the sunshine before the temple one taller than the sons of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival,
+      and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a
+      dragon. His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the
+      foreigners, so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he
+      spoke our speech brokenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.&rsquo;
+      And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his house
+      was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I have not seen your house nor any houses,&rsquo; I answered. `I
+      dwell in this temple and serve the gods.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Do you believe in the gods?&rsquo; he asked with hunger in his
+      eyes, like the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a strange question to
+      ask, for what should a man do except what men have done?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`My Lord,&rsquo; I said, `it must be good for men to hold up their
+      hands even if the skies are empty. For if there are gods, they will be
+      pleased, and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
+      Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony,
+      but the trees and the temple stand still under it all. So the great
+      Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things with our hands
+      and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our heads we may think
+      many things: yes, my Lord, and doubt many things. So long as men offer
+      rice at the right season, and kindle lanterns at the right hour, it
+      matters little whether there be gods or no. For these things are not to
+      appease gods, but to appease men.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous; yet his look
+      was very gentle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Break your temple,&rsquo; he said, `and your gods will be freed.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered: `And so, if there be no
+      gods, I shall have nothing but a broken temple.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was withheld
+      threw out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him. And when I asked
+      him for what he should be forgiven he answered: `For being right.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying,&rsquo;
+      he cried, `it is a shame that they should be wrong. We are so vulgar and
+      violent, we have done you so many iniquities&mdash; it is a shame we
+      should be right after all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought
+      that he and his people were right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he answered: `We are right because we are bound where men
+      should be bound, and free where men should be free. We are right because
+      we doubt and destroy laws and customs&mdash; but we do not doubt our own
+      right to destroy them. For you live by customs, but we live by creeds.
+      Behold me! In my country I am called Smip. My country is abandoned, my
+      name is defiled, because I pursue around the world what really belongs to
+      me. You are steadfast as the trees because you do not believe. I am as
+      fickle as the tempest because I do believe. I do believe in my own house,
+      which I shall find again. And at the last remaineth the green lantern and
+      the red post.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said to him: `At the last remaineth only wisdom.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout, and
+      rushing forward disappeared among the trees. I have not seen this man
+      again nor any other man. The virtues of the wise are of fine brass.
+      &ldquo;Wong-Hi.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next letter I have to read,&rdquo; proceeded Arthur Inglewood,
+      &ldquo;will probably make clear the nature of our client&rsquo;s curious
+      but innocent experiment. It is dated from a mountain village in
+      California, and runs as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&mdash;A person answering to the rather extraordinary
+      description required certainly went, some time ago, over the high pass of
+      the Sierras on which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationary
+      inhabitant. I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on the
+      very top of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is Louis
+      Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my nationality. Well, it
+      puzzles me a great deal. When one has been for fifteen years without
+      society it is hard to have patriotism; and where there is not even a
+      hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father was an Irishman of
+      the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian kind. My mother
+      was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old Spanish families round San
+      Francisco, yet accused for all that of some admixture of Red Indian blood.
+      I was well educated and fond of music and books. But, like many other
+      hybrids, I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting
+      many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though a lonely living
+      in this little cabaret in the mountains. In my solitude I fell into many
+      of the ways of a savage. Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a
+      Red Indian, I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers,
+      with a great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I
+      had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I
+      produced a pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that
+      could climb up to my place. But I promise you I never looked as mad as
+      that man did. Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
+      effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks
+      coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.
+      Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so
+      tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags
+      collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and towers of rock
+      do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world. Rather they
+      seem to be its awful beginning: its huge foundations. We could almost
+      fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and
+      carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum. For just as the peaks
+      failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the stars crowded us (as it seemed),
+      coming impossibly near. The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts
+      hurled at the earth than planets circling placidly about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this may have driven me mad; I am not sure. I know there is one
+      angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and on
+      windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks&mdash;
+      yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.
+      It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass.
+      Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass. But I had
+      never seen one like this one before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake,
+      all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the ensign
+      of some old barbarian tribe. His hair, which was as long and rank as the
+      grass, hung down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about
+      him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air of
+      being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves. The rake or
+      pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes as an alpenstock,
+      sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I do not know why he should have used
+      it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me, an excellent
+      six-shooter in his pocket. `But THAT,&rsquo; he said, `I use only for
+      peaceful purposes.&rsquo; I have no notion what he meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine
+      from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had
+      travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last something that
+      he knew. Then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead
+      and coloured glass that hangs over my door. It is old, but of no value; my
+      grandmother gave it to me long ago: she was devout, and it happens that
+      the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men
+      and the Star. He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our
+      Lady&rsquo;s blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led me also
+      to look at the thing, which I had not done for fourteen years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward
+      where the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich
+      velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark
+      mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out of
+      the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call
+      Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what
+      looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or
+      needle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and
+      before he spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond the great green rock in the
+      purple sky hung a single star.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`A star in the east,&rsquo; he said in a strange hoarse voice like
+      one of our ancient eagles&rsquo;. `The wise men followed the star and
+      found the house. But if I followed the star, should I find the house?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`It depends perhaps,&rsquo; I said, smiling, `on whether you are a
+      wise man.&rsquo; I refrained from adding that he certainly didn&rsquo;t
+      look it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You may judge for yourself,&rsquo; he answered. `I am a man who
+      left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`It certainly sounds paradoxical,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the
+      room,&rsquo; he continued, `and all the time I knew they were walking and
+      talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of
+      different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a
+      devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
+      Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like
+      a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a
+      testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it
+      swung full circle like a treadmill.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Do you really mean,&rsquo; I cried, `that you have come right
+      round the world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,&rsquo; he replied sadly. `I
+      have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something in the word `pilgrim&rsquo; awoke down in the roots of my
+      ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world,
+      and of something from whence I came. I looked again at the little pictured
+      lantern at which I had not looked for fourteen years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`My grandmother,&rsquo; I said in a low tone, `would have said that
+      we were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
+      home-sickness that forbids us rest.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift out
+      beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,&rsquo; and stood
+      up leaning on his grassy pole. `I think that must be the reason,&rsquo; he
+      said&mdash;`the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
+      But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us the love of
+      special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I dare say,&rsquo; I said. `What reason?&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Because otherwise,&rsquo; he said, pointing his pole out at the
+      sky and the abyss, `we might worship that.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`What do you mean?&rsquo; I demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`Eternity,&rsquo; he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the
+      idols&mdash; the mightiest of the rivals of God.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,&rsquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;`I mean,&rsquo; he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there
+      be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a
+      hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post
+      and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do
+      all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a
+      witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is
+      somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not
+      be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green
+      lamp-post after all.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the
+      perilous paths below, and left me alone with the eagles. But since he went
+      a fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy
+      meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether
+      America will endure.&mdash; Yours faithfully, Louis Hara.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a short silence Inglewood said: &ldquo;And, finally, we desire to
+      put in as evidence the following document:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to
+      Mrs. I. Smith at `The Laurels&rsquo; in Croydon for the last six months.
+      When I came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow,
+      but her husband was away. She was left with plenty of money and did not
+      seem disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon.
+      She said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good. One
+      evening last week I was bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn when I
+      nearly dropped them. The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck over the
+      hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge, just like a
+      monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all hairy and ragged like
+      Robinson Crusoe. I screamed out, but my mistress didn&rsquo;t even get out
+      of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted shaving. Then he sat down
+      quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup of tea, and then I
+      realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself. He has stopped here ever
+      since and does not really give much trouble, though I sometimes fancy he
+      is a little weak in his head. &ldquo;Ruth Davis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;P.S.&mdash;I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and
+      said, very loud and strong: `Oh, what a lovely place you&rsquo;ve got;&rsquo;
+      just as if he&rsquo;d never seen it before.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one
+      heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible
+      solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women had left
+      the court before the more recent of the investigations. Mrs. Duke was
+      still asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a large hunchback in the
+      twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper toys. But the five
+      men really engaged in the controversy, and concerned not to convince the
+      tribunal but to convince each other, still sat round the table like the
+      Committee of Public Safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another,
+      cocked his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair backwards so
+      far as to be in direct danger of falling over, emitted a startling and
+      prolonged whistle like a steam engine, and asserted that it was all his
+      eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind the books
+      again and answered with considerable excitement, throwing his papers
+      about. &ldquo;All those fairy-tales you&rsquo;ve been reading out,&rdquo;
+      he said. &ldquo;Oh! don&rsquo;t talk to me! I ain&rsquo;t littery and
+      that, but I know fairy-tales when I hear &lsquo;em. I got a bit stumped in
+      some of the philosophical bits and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S.
+      But we&rsquo;re living in West &lsquo;Ampstead and not in &lsquo;Ell; and
+      the long and the short of it is that some things &lsquo;appen and some
+      things don&rsquo;t &lsquo;appen. Those are the things that don&rsquo;t
+      &lsquo;appen.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought,&rdquo; said Moon gravely, &ldquo;that we quite clearly
+      explained&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained,&rdquo; assented Mr.
+      Gould with extraordinary volubility. &ldquo;You&rsquo;d explain an
+      elephant off the doorstep, you would. I ain&rsquo;t a clever chap like
+      you; but I ain&rsquo;t a born natural, Michael Moon, and when there&rsquo;s
+      an elephant on my doorstep I don&rsquo;t listen to no explanations. `It&rsquo;s
+      got a trunk,&rsquo; I says.&mdash;`My trunk,&rsquo; you says: `I&rsquo;m
+      fond of travellin&rsquo;, and a change does me good.&rsquo;&mdash;`But the
+      blasted thing&rsquo;s got tusks,&rsquo; I says.&mdash;`Don&rsquo;t look a
+      gift &lsquo;orse in the mouth,&rsquo; you says, `but thank the goodness
+      and the graice that on your birth &lsquo;as smiled.&rsquo;&mdash;`But it&rsquo;s
+      nearly as big as the &lsquo;ouse,&rsquo; I says.&mdash;`That&rsquo;s the
+      bloomin&rsquo; perspective,&rsquo; you says, `and the sacred magic of
+      distance.&rsquo;&mdash;`Why, the elephant&rsquo;s trumpetin&rsquo; like
+      the Day of Judgement,&rsquo; I says.&mdash;`That&rsquo;s your own
+      conscience a-talking to you, Moses Gould,&rsquo; you says in a grive and
+      tender voice. Well, I &lsquo;ave got a conscience as much as you. I don&rsquo;t
+      believe most of the things they tell you in church on Sundays; and I don&rsquo;t
+      believe these &lsquo;ere things any more because you goes on about &lsquo;em
+      as if you was in church. I believe an elephant&rsquo;s a great big ugly
+      dingerous beast&mdash; and I believe Smith&rsquo;s another.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to say,&rdquo; asked Inglewood, &ldquo;that you still
+      doubt the evidence of exculpation we have brought forward?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I do still doubt it,&rdquo; said Gould warmly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+      all a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off. ‘Ow can we
+      test all those tales? &lsquo;Ow can we drop in and buy the `Pink &lsquo;Un&rsquo;
+      at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or whatever it was? &lsquo;Ow can we
+      go and do a gargle at the saloon-bar on top of the Sierra Mountains? But
+      anybody can go and see Bunting&rsquo;s boarding-house at Worthing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any one,&rdquo; continued Gould, &ldquo;can call on Mr. Trip.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a comforting thought,&rdquo; replied Michael with restraint;
+      &ldquo;but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For just exactly the sime reason,&rdquo; cried the excited Moses,
+      hammering on the table with both hands, &ldquo;for just exactly the sime
+      reason that he should communicate with Messrs. &lsquo;Anbury and Bootle of
+      Paternoster Row and with Miss Gridley&rsquo;s &lsquo;igh class Academy at
+      &lsquo;Endon, and with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life,&rdquo; said
+      Michael, &ldquo;why is it among the duties of man to communicate with old
+      Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It ain&rsquo;t one of the duties of man,&rdquo; said Gould, &ldquo;nor
+      one of his pleasures, either, I can tell you. She takes the crumpet, does
+      Lady Bullingdon at Penge. But it&rsquo;s one of the duties of a prosecutor
+      pursuin&rsquo; the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend
+      Smith, and it&rsquo;s the sime with all the others I mentioned.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why do you bring in these people here?&rdquo; asked Inglewood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why! Because we&rsquo;ve got proof enough to sink a steamboat,&rdquo;
+      roared Moses; &ldquo;because I&rsquo;ve got the papers in my very &lsquo;and;
+      because your precious Innocent is a blackguard and &lsquo;ome smasher, and
+      these are the &lsquo;omes he&rsquo;s smashed. I don&rsquo;t set up for a
+      &lsquo;oly man; but I wouldn&rsquo;t &lsquo;ave all those poor girls on my
+      conscience for something. And I think a chap that&rsquo;s capable of
+      deserting and perhaps killing &lsquo;em all is about capable of cracking a
+      crib or shootin&rsquo; an old schoolmaster&mdash;so I don&rsquo;t care
+      much about the other yarns one way or another.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough, &ldquo;that
+      we are approaching this matter rather irregularly. This is really the
+      fourth charge on the charge sheet, and perhaps I had better put it before
+      you in an ordered and scientific manner.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence of the darkening
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IV &mdash; The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A modern man,&rdquo; said Dr. Cyrus Pym, &ldquo;must, if he be
+      thoughtful, approach the problem of marriage with some caution. Marriage
+      is a stage&mdash;doubtless a suitable stage&mdash;in the long advance of
+      mankind towards a goal which we cannot as yet conceive; which we are not,
+      perhaps, as yet fitted even to desire. What, gentlemen, is the ethical
+      position of marriage? Have we outlived it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Outlived it?&rdquo; broke out Moon; &ldquo;why, nobody&rsquo;s ever
+      survived it! Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve&mdash;and
+      all as dead as mutton.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc&rsquo;lar in its character,&rdquo;
+      said Dr. Pym frigidly. &ldquo;I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon&rsquo;s
+      matured and ethical view of marriage&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can tell,&rdquo; said Michael savagely, out of the gloom. &ldquo;Marriage
+      is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Michael,&rdquo; said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, &ldquo;you
+      MUST keep quiet.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Moon,&rdquo; said Pym with exquisite good temper, &ldquo;probably
+      regards the institution in a more antiquated manner. Probably he would
+      make it stringent and uniform. He would treat divorce in some great soul
+      of steel&mdash;the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson&mdash;
+      exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who scoots
+      from his wife. Science has views broader and more humane. Just as murder
+      for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction, just as theft for
+      the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so polygamy for the
+      scientist is an extreme development of the instinct for variety. A man
+      thus afflicted is incapable of constancy. Doubtless there is a physical
+      cause for this flitting from flower to flower&mdash; as there is,
+      doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears to afflict Mr. Moon
+      at the present moment. Our own world-scorning Winterbottom has even dared
+      to say, `For a certain rare and fine physical type polygamy is but the
+      realization of the variety of females, as comradeship is the realization
+      of the variety of males.&rsquo; In any case, the type that tends to
+      variety is recognized by all authoritative inquirers. Such a type, if the
+      widower of a negress, does in many ascertained cases espouse ~en seconde
+      noces~ an albino; such a type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a
+      female Patagonian, will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the
+      consoling figure of an Eskimo. To such a type there can be no doubt that
+      the prisoner belongs. If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute
+      any slight excuse for a man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric ideality
+      in admitting half of our story without further dispute. We should like to
+      acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted a style by conceding
+      also that the story told by Curate Percy about the canoe, the weir, and
+      the young wife seems to be substantially true. Apparently Smith did marry
+      a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat; it only remains to be
+      considered whether it would not have been kinder of him to have murdered
+      her instead of marrying her. In confirmation of this fact I can now
+      con-cede to the defence an unquestionable record of such a marriage.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the &ldquo;Maidenhead
+      Gazette&rdquo; which distinctly recorded the marriage of the daughter of a
+      &ldquo;coach,&rdquo; a tutor well known in the place, to Mr. Innocent
+      Smith, late of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown at once both
+      tragic and triumphant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I pause upon this pre-liminary fact,&rdquo; he said seriously,
+      &ldquo;because this fact alone would give us the victory, were we aspiring
+      after victory and not after truth. As far as the personal and domestic
+      problem holds us, that problem is solved. Dr. Warner and I entered this
+      house at an instant of highly emotional diff&rsquo;culty. England&rsquo;s
+      Warner has entered many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time
+      he entered to save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence. Smith was
+      just about to carry away a young girl from this house; his cab and bag
+      were at the very door. He had told her she was going to await the marriage
+      license at the house of his aunt. That aunt,&rdquo; continued Cyrus Pym,
+      his face darkening grandly&mdash;&ldquo;that visionary aunt had been the
+      dancing will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp who had led many a high-souled maiden to
+      her doom. Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word?
+      When he said `aunt&rsquo; there glowed about her all the merriment and
+      high morality of the Anglo-Saxon home. Kettles began to hum, pussy cats to
+      purr, in that very wild cab that was being driven to destruction.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another denizen
+      of the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was not only
+      perfectly serious, but was really eloquent and affecting&mdash; when the
+      difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at least
+      represented himself to one innocent female of this house as an eligible
+      bachelor, being, in fact, a married man. I agree with my colleague, Mr.
+      Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this. As to whether what
+      our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical value indeed, science
+      hesitates with a high, proud hesitation. But what hesitation can there be
+      about the baseness of a citizen who ventures, by brutal experiments upon
+      living females, to anticipate the verdict of science on such a point?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith in
+      Highbury may or may not be the same as the lady he married in Maidenhead.
+      If one short sweet spell of constancy and heart repose interrupted the
+      plunging torrent of his profligate life, we will not deprive him of that
+      long past possibility. After that conjectural date, alas, he seems to have
+      plunged deeper and deeper into the shaking quagmires of infidelity and
+      shame.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no more
+      light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral effect.
+      After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer, he
+      continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first instance of the accused&rsquo;s repeated and irregular
+      nuptials,&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;comes from Lady Bullingdon, who
+      expresses herself with the high haughtiness which must be excused in those
+      who look out upon all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral
+      keep. The communication she has sent to us runs as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference is
+      made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail. The girl Polly Green
+      was a perfectly adequate dressmaker, and lived in the village for about
+      two years. Her unattached condition was bad for her as well as for the
+      general morality of the village. Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it to
+      be understood that she favoured the marriage of the young woman. The
+      villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon, came forward in
+      several cases; and all would have been well had it not been for the
+      deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl Green herself. Lady
+      Bullingdon supposes that where there is a village there must be a village
+      idiot, and in her village, it seems, there was one of these wretched
+      creatures. Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite aware that
+      it is really difficult to distinguish between actual idiots and the
+      ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes. She noticed, however, the
+      startling smallness of his head in comparison to the rest of his body;
+      and, indeed, the fact of his having appeared upon election day wearing the
+      rosette of both the two opposing parties appears to Lady Bullingdon to put
+      the matter quite beyond doubt. Lady Bullingdon was astounded to learn that
+      this afflicted being had put himself forward as one of the suitors of the
+      girl in question. Lady Bullingdon&rsquo;s nephew interviewed the wretch
+      upon the point, telling him that he was a `donkey&rsquo; to dream of such
+      a thing, and actually received, along with an imbecile grin, the answer
+      that donkeys generally go after carrots. But Lady Bullingdon was yet
+      further amazed to find the unhappy girl inclined to accept this monstrous
+      proposal, though she was actually asked in marriage by Garth, the
+      undertaker, a man in a far superior position to her own. Lady Bullingdon
+      could not, of course, countenance such an arrangement for a moment, and
+      the two unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine marriage. Lady
+      Bullingdon cannot exactly recall the man&rsquo;s name, but thinks it was
+      Smith. He was always called in the village the Innocent. Later, Lady
+      Bullingdon believes he murdered Green in a mental outbreak.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next communication,&rdquo; proceeded Pym, &ldquo;is more
+      conspicuous for brevity, but I am of the opinion that it will adequately
+      convey the upshot. It is dated from the offices of Messrs. Hanbury and
+      Bootle, publishers, and is as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&mdash;Yrs. rcd. and conts. noted. Rumour re typewriter
+      possibly refers to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago
+      to marry an organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted
+      police attention. Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when
+      apparently went mad. Record was written at the time, part of which I
+      enclose.&mdash; Yrs., etc., W. Trip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fuller statement runs as follows:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs. Bernard
+      and Juke, bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found to contain the
+      following: `Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3, as we wish to know whether
+      it is really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.&rsquo; To this Mr. Juke, a person
+      of a playful mind, returned the answer: `Sir, I am in a position to give
+      it as my most decided opinion that it is not really decided that
+      00000073bb!!!!!xy. Yrs., etc., `J. Juke.&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the
+      original letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed
+      substituted these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated
+      to her. Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she was in an
+      unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely remarked that
+      she always went like that when she heard the barrel organ. Becoming yet
+      more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series of most improbable
+      statements&mdash;as, that she was engaged to the barrel-organ man, that he
+      was in the habit of serenading her on that instrument, that she was in the
+      habit of playing back to him upon the typewriter (in the style of King
+      Richard and Blondel), and that the organ man&rsquo;s musical ear was so
+      exquisite and his adoration of herself so ardent that he could detect the
+      note of the different letters on the machine, and was enraptured by them
+      as by a melody. To all these statements of course our Mr. Trip and the
+      rest of us only paid that sort of assent that is paid to persons who must
+      as quickly as possible be put in the charge of their relations. But on our
+      conducting the lady downstairs, her story received the most startling and
+      even exasperating confirmation; for the organ-grinder, an enormous man
+      with a small head and manifestly a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel
+      organ in at the office doors like a battering-ram, and was boisterously
+      demanding his alleged fiancee. When I myself came on the scene he was
+      flinging his great, ape-like arms about and reciting a poem to her. But we
+      were used to lunatics coming and reciting poems in our office, and we were
+      not quite prepared for what followed. The actual verse he uttered began, I
+      think,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      `O vivid, inviolate head, Ringed &mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      but he never got any further. Mr. Trip made a sharp movement towards him,
+      and the next moment the giant picked up the poor lady typewriter like a
+      doll, sat her on top of the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office
+      doors, and raced away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow. I put the
+      police upon the matter; but no trace of the amazing pair could be found. I
+      was sorry myself; for the lady was not only pleasant but unusually
+      cultivated for her position. As I am leaving the service of Messrs.
+      Hanbury and Bootle, I put these things in a record and leave it with them.
+      (Signed) Aubrey Clarke, Publishers&rsquo; Reader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the last document,&rdquo; said Dr. Pym complacently, &ldquo;is
+      from one of those high-souled women who have in this age introduced your
+      English girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics, and every form of
+      ideality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Sir (she writes),&mdash;I have no objection to telling you the
+      facts about the absurd incident you mention; though I would ask you to
+      communicate them with some caution, for such things, however entertaining
+      in the abstract, are not always auxiliary to the success of a girls&rsquo;
+      school. The truth is this: I wanted some one to deliver a lecture on a
+      philological or historical question&mdash;a lecture which, while
+      containing solid educational matter, should be a little more popular and
+      entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term. I
+      remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere or other an
+      amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name&mdash; an essay which
+      showed considerable knowledge of genealogy and topography. I wrote to him,
+      asking if he would come and give us a bright address upon English
+      surnames; and he did. It was very bright, almost too bright. To put the
+      matter otherwise, by the time that he was halfway through it became
+      apparent to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally and
+      entirely off his head. He began rationally enough by dealing with the two
+      departments of place names and trade names, and he said (quite rightly, I
+      dare say) that the loss of all significance in names was an instance of
+      the deadening of civilization. But then he went on calmly to maintain that
+      every man who had a place name ought to go to live in that place, and that
+      every man who had a trade name ought instantly to adopt that trade; that
+      people named after colours should always dress in those colours, and that
+      people named after trees or plants (such as Beech or Rose) ought to
+      surround and decorate themselves with these vegetables. In a slight
+      discussion that arose afterwards among the elder girls the difficulties of
+      the proposal were clearly, and even eagerly, pointed out. It was urged,
+      for instance, by Miss Younghusband that it was substantially impossible
+      for her to play the part assigned to her; Miss Mann was in a similar
+      dilemma, from which no modern views on the sexes could apparently
+      extricate her; and some young ladies, whose surnames happened to be Low,
+      Coward, and Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the idea. But all this
+      happened afterwards. What happened at the crucial moment was that the
+      lecturer produced several horseshoes and a large iron hammer from his bag,
+      announced his immediate intention of setting up a smithy in the
+      neighbourhood, and called on every one to rise in the same cause as for a
+      heroic revolution. The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the
+      wretched man, but I must confess that by an accident this very
+      intercession produced the worst explosion of his insanity. He was waving
+      the hammer, and wildly demanding the names of everybody; and it so
+      happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers, was wearing a brown
+      dress&mdash;a reddish-brown dress that went quietly enough with the warmer
+      colour of her hair, as well she knew. She was a nice girl, and nice girls
+      do know about those things. But when our maniac discovered that we really
+      had a Miss Brown who WAS brown, his ~idee fixe~ blew up like a powder
+      magazine, and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls, he
+      publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress. You can imagine the
+      effect of such a scene at a girls&rsquo; school. At least, if you fail to
+      imagine it, I certainly fail to describe it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can think
+      of it now as a joke. There was only one curious detail, which I will tell
+      you, as you say your inquiry is vital; but I should desire you to consider
+      it a little more confidential than the rest. Miss Brown, who was an
+      excellent girl in every way, did quite suddenly and surreptitiously leave
+      us only a day or two afterwards. I should never have thought that her head
+      would be the one to be really turned by so absurd an excitement.&mdash;Believe
+      me, yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and
+      seriousness, &ldquo;that these letters speak for themselves.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint of whether
+      his native gravity was mixed with his native irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throughout this inquiry,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but especially in
+      this its closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one
+      argument; I mean the fact that no one knows what has become of all the
+      unhappy women apparently seduced by Smith. There is no sort of proof that
+      they were murdered, but that implication is perpetually made when the
+      question is asked as to how they died. Now I am not interested in how they
+      died, or when they died, or whether they died. But I am interested in
+      another analogous question&mdash;that of how they were born, and when they
+      were born, and whether they were born. Do not misunderstand me. I do not
+      dispute the existence of these women, or the veracity of those who have
+      witnessed to them. I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of
+      these victims, the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or
+      parents. All the rest are boarders or birds of passage&mdash;a guest, a
+      solitary dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting. Lady Bullingdon,
+      looking from her turrets, which she bought from the Whartons with the old
+      soap-boiler&rsquo;s money when she jumped at marrying an unsuccessful
+      gentleman from Ulster&mdash;Lady Bullingdon, looking out from those
+      turrets, did really see an object which she describes as Green. Mr. Trip,
+      of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed to Smith.
+      Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest. She did house,
+      feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded in decoying away. We
+      admit that all these women really lived. But we still ask whether they
+      were ever born?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, crikey!&rdquo; said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There could hardly,&rdquo; interposed Pym with a quiet smile,
+      &ldquo;be a better instance of the neglect of true scientific process. The
+      scientist, when once convinced of the fact of vitality and consciousness,
+      would infer from these the previous process of generation.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If these gals,&rdquo; said Gould impatiently&mdash;&ldquo;if these
+      gals were all alive (all alive O!) I&rsquo;d chance a fiver they were all
+      born.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;d lose your fiver,&rdquo; said Michael, speaking gravely
+      out of the gloom. &ldquo;All those admirable ladies were alive. They were
+      more alive for having come into contact with Smith. They were all quite
+      definitely alive, but only one of them was ever born.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you asking us to believe&mdash;&rdquo; began Dr. Pym.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am asking you a second question,&rdquo; said Moon sternly.
+      &ldquo;Can the court now sitting throw any light on a truly singular
+      circumstance? Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture on what are called, I
+      believe, the relations of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave of a
+      lust for variety which would lead a man first to a negress and then to an
+      albino, first to a Patagonian giantess and then to a tiny Eskimo. But is
+      there any evidence of such variety here? Is there any trace of a gigantic
+      Patagonian in the story? Was the typewriter an Eskimo? So picturesque a
+      circumstance would not surely have escaped remark. Was Lady Bullingdon&rsquo;s
+      dressmaker a negress? A voice in my bosom answers, `No!&rsquo; Lady
+      Bullingdon, I am sure, would think a negress so conspicuous as to be
+      almost Socialistic, and would feel something a little rakish even about an
+      albino.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But was there in Smith&rsquo;s taste any such variety as the
+      learned doctor describes? So far as our slight materials go, the very
+      opposite seems to be the case. We have only one actual description of any
+      of the prisoner&rsquo;s wives&mdash; the short but highly poetic account
+      by the aesthetic curate. `Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair
+      of autumn leaves.&rsquo; Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours,
+      some of which would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance); but
+      I think such an expression would be most naturally used of the shades from
+      red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their coppery-coloured hair do
+      frequently wear light artistic greens. Now when we come to the next wife,
+      we find the eccentric lover, when told he is a donkey, answering that
+      donkeys always go after carrots; a remark which Lady Bullingdon evidently
+      regarded as pointless and part of the natural table-talk of a village
+      idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we suppose that Polly&rsquo;s
+      hair was red. Passing to the next wife, the one he took from the girls&rsquo;
+      school, we find Miss Gridley noticing that the schoolgirl in question wore
+      `a reddish-brown dress, that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of
+      her hair.&rsquo; In other words, the colour of the girl&rsquo;s hair was
+      something redder than red-brown. Lastly, the romantic organ-grinder
+      declaimed in the office some poetry that only got as far as the words,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      `O vivid, inviolate head, Ringed &mdash;&rsquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets will enable us to
+      guess that `ringed with a glory of red,&rsquo; or `ringed with its
+      passionate red,&rsquo; was the line that rhymed to `head.&rsquo; In this
+      case once more, therefore, there is good reason to suppose that Smith fell
+      in love with a girl with some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair&mdash;rather,&rdquo;
+      he said, looking down at the table, &ldquo;rather like Miss Gray&rsquo;s
+      hair.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready with one of his
+      more pedantic interpellations; but Moses Gould suddenly struck his
+      forefinger on his nose, with an expression of extreme astonishment and
+      intelligence in his brilliant eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Moon&rsquo;s contention at present,&rdquo; interposed Pym,
+      &ldquo;is not, even if veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal
+      view of I. Smith, which we have nailed to the mast. Science has long
+      anticipated such a complication. An incurable attraction to a particular
+      type of physical woman is one of the commonest of criminal per-versities,
+      and when not considered narrowly, but in the light of induction and
+      evolution&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At this late stage,&rdquo; said Michael Moon very quietly, &ldquo;I
+      may perhaps relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me
+      throughout the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution may go
+      and boil themselves. The Missing Link and all that is well enough for
+      kids, but I&rsquo;m talking about things we know here. All we know of the
+      Missing Link is that he is missing&mdash;and he won&rsquo;t be missed
+      either. I know all about his human head and his horrid tail; they belong
+      to a very old game called `Heads I win, tails you lose.&rsquo; If you do
+      find a fellow&rsquo;s bones, it proves he lived a long while ago; if you
+      don&rsquo;t find his bones, it proves how long ago he lived. That is the
+      game you&rsquo;ve been playing with this Smith affair. Because Smith&rsquo;s
+      head is small for his shoulders you call him microcephalous; if it had
+      been large, you&rsquo;d have called it water-on-the-brain. As long as poor
+      old Smith&rsquo;s seraglio seemed pretty various, variety was the sign of
+      madness: now, because it&rsquo;s turning out to be a bit monochrome&mdash;now
+      monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer from all the disadvantages of
+      being a grown-up person, and I&rsquo;m jolly well going to get some of the
+      advantages too; and with all politeness I propose not to be bullied with
+      long words instead of short reasons, or consider your business a
+      triumphant progress merely because you&rsquo;re always finding out that
+      you were wrong. Having relieved myself of these feelings, I have merely to
+      add that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more beautiful
+      than the Parthenon, or the monument on Bunker&rsquo;s Hill, and that I
+      propose to resume and conclude my remarks on the many marriages of Mr.
+      Innocent Smith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Besides this red hair, there is another unifying thread that runs
+      through these scattered incidents. There is something very peculiar and
+      suggestive about the names of these women. Mr. Trip, you will remember,
+      said he thought the typewriter&rsquo;s name was Blake, but could not
+      remember exactly. I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that
+      case we have a curious series: Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon&rsquo;s
+      village; Miss Brown at the Hendon School; Miss Black at the publishers. A
+      chord of colours, as it were, which ends up with Miss Gray at Beacon
+      House, West Hampstead.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition. &ldquo;What is the
+      meaning of this queer coincidence about colours? Personally I cannot doubt
+      for a moment that these names are purely arbitrary names, assumed as part
+      of some general scheme or joke. I think it very probable that they were
+      taken from a series of costumes&mdash; that Polly Green only meant Polly
+      (or Mary) when in green, and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly)
+      when in gray. This would explain&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid. &ldquo;Do you actually
+      mean to suggest&mdash;&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Michael; &ldquo;I do mean to suggest that.
+      Innocent Smith has had many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but
+      he has had only one wife. She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and
+      is now talking to Miss Duke in the garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of
+      other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle. It is odd
+      and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other principle
+      plainly applied in the modern world would be. His principle can be quite
+      simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to
+      remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still
+      a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires
+      bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and
+      collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes
+      plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this
+      reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a
+      permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools,
+      boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her
+      again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought
+      by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her
+      perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions
+      are not quite so clear. I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom
+      of all this. I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
+      quite sure that it is worth a man&rsquo;s uttering and defending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The idea that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an entangled
+      civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not
+      wrong at all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging and
+      barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not merely
+      pardonable; they are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked about firing a
+      pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not mean to hit him and
+      know you won&rsquo;t. It is no more wrong than throwing a pebble at the
+      sea&mdash;less, for you do occasionally hit the sea. There is nothing
+      wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking through a roof, so long
+      as you are not injuring the life or property of other men. It is no more
+      wrong to choose to enter a house from the top than to choose to open a
+      packing-case from the bottom. There is nothing wicked about walking round
+      the world and coming back to your own house; it is no more wicked than
+      walking round the garden and coming back to your own house. And there is
+      nothing wicked about picking up your wife here, there, and everywhere, if,
+      forsaking all others, you keep only to her so long as you both shall live.
+      It is as innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden. You
+      associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as
+      you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being seen
+      going) into a pawnbroker&rsquo;s or a public-house. You think there is
+      something squalid and commonplace about such a connection. You are
+      mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This man&rsquo;s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he
+      has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions,
+      but he has kept the commandments. It is as if a man were found gambling
+      wildly in a gambling hell, and you found that he only played for trouser
+      buttons. It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment with
+      a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it was his grandmother.
+      Everything is ugly and discreditable, except the facts; everything is
+      wrong about him, except that he has done no wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continue far into
+      his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false
+      charges?&rsquo; To this I merely answer that he does it because he really
+      is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and
+      alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly
+      practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all. And if you
+      ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such
+      inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it is
+      one that will not be approved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don&rsquo;t like it.
+      If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent. If he can defy the
+      conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just
+      because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is
+      still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he
+      does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour&rsquo;s
+      goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the
+      trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to
+      commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he
+      loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons. If he had really murdered
+      a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel
+      that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song&mdash; at least, not a
+      comic song.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or
+      appeals in any particular way to my sympathies. I am an Irishman, and a
+      certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my
+      creed, or of my creed itself. Speaking singly, I feel as if man was tied
+      to tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt. But
+      if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick, this is the way
+      out. If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it would be by being
+      as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog. Barely and brutally to be
+      good&mdash;that may be the road, and he may have found it. Well, well,
+      well, I see a look of skepticism on the face of my old friend Moses. Mr.
+      Gould does not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would
+      make a man merry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity;
+      &ldquo;I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would
+      make a man merry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Michael quietly, &ldquo;will you tell me one
+      thing? Which of us has ever tried it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological epoch
+      which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type; for there rose at last
+      in the stillness a massive figure that the other men had almost completely
+      forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Dr. Warner cheerfully, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+      been pretty well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent
+      tomfoolery for a couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin,
+      and I&rsquo;m engaged for a city dinner. Among the hundred flowers of
+      futility on both sides I was unable to detect any sort of reason why a
+      lunatic should be allowed to shoot me in the back garden.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly to
+      the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:
+      &ldquo;But really the bullet missed you by several feet.&rdquo; And
+      another voice added: &ldquo;The bullet missed him by several years.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then Moon said
+      suddenly, &ldquo;We have been sitting with a ghost. Dr. Herbert Warner
+      died years ago.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter V &mdash; How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the garden;
+      they were silent, and the sun had set. Such spaces of daylight as remained
+      open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be compared to
+      nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran across
+      them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke. All the rest
+      of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like gray, and seemed to
+      melt and mount into Mary&rsquo;s dark-gray figure until she seemed clothed
+      with the garden and the skies. There was something in these last quiet
+      colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy; and the twilight, which
+      concealed Diana&rsquo;s statelier figure and Rosamund&rsquo;s braver
+      array, exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the lady of the garden,
+      and alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long fallen
+      silent was being revived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But where is your husband taking you?&rdquo; asked Diana in her
+      practical voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To an aunt,&rdquo; said Mary; &ldquo;that&rsquo;s just the joke.
+      There really is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged
+      to be turned out of the other boarding-house down the road. We never take
+      more than a week of this kind of holiday, but sometimes we take two of
+      them together.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does the aunt mind much?&rdquo; asked Rosamund innocently. &ldquo;Of
+      course, I dare say it&rsquo;s very narrow-minded and&mdash;what&rsquo;s
+      that other word?&mdash; you know, what Goliath was&mdash;but I&rsquo;ve
+      known many aunts who would think it&mdash;well, silly.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silly?&rdquo; cried Mary with great heartiness. &ldquo;Oh, my
+      Sunday hat! I should think it was silly! But what do you expect? He really
+      is a good man, and it might have been snakes or something.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Snakes?&rdquo; inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him,&rdquo; replied
+      Mary with perfect simplicity. &ldquo;Auntie let him have them in his
+      pockets, but not in the bedroom.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&mdash;&rdquo; began Diana, knitting her dark brows a
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I do as auntie did,&rdquo; said Mary; &ldquo;as long as we&rsquo;re
+      not away from the children more than a fortnight together I play the game.
+      He calls me `Manalive;&rsquo; and you must write it all one word, or he&rsquo;s
+      quite flustered.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if men want things like that,&rdquo; began Diana.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what&rsquo;s the good of talking about men?&rdquo; cried Mary
+      impatiently; &ldquo;why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some
+      horrid thing. There aren&rsquo;t any men. There are no such people. There&rsquo;s
+      a man; and whoever he is he&rsquo;s quite different.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So there is no safety,&rdquo; said Diana in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; answered Mary, lightly enough;
+      &ldquo;there&rsquo;s only two things generally true of them. At certain
+      curious times they&rsquo;re just fit to take care of us, and they&rsquo;re
+      never fit to take care of themselves.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a gale getting up,&rdquo; said Rosamund suddenly. &ldquo;Look
+      at those trees over there, a long way off, and the clouds going quicker.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know what you&rsquo;re thinking about,&rdquo; said Mary; &ldquo;and
+      don&rsquo;t you be silly fools. Don&rsquo;t you listen to the lady
+      novelists. You go down the king&rsquo;s highway; for God&rsquo;s truth, it
+      is God&rsquo;s. Yes, my dear Michael will often be extremely untidy.
+      Arthur Inglewood will be worse&mdash;he&rsquo;ll be untidy. But what else
+      are all the trees and clouds for, you silly kittens?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The clouds and trees are all waving about,&rdquo; said Rosamund.
+      &ldquo;There is a storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited,
+      somehow. Michael is really rather like a storm: he frightens me and makes
+      me happy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you be frightened,&rdquo; said Mary. &ldquo;All over,
+      these men have one advantage; they are the sort that go out.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves along
+      the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; said Mary, &ldquo;they are the kind that look
+      outwards and get interested in the world. It doesn&rsquo;t matter a bit
+      whether it&rsquo;s arguing, or bicycling, or breaking down the ends of the
+      earth as poor old Innocent does. Stick to the man who looks out of the
+      window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks
+      in at the window and tries to understand you. When poor old Adam had gone
+      out gardening (Arthur will go out gardening), the other sort came along
+      and wormed himself in, nasty old snake.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You agree with your aunt,&rdquo; said Rosamund, smiling: &ldquo;no
+      snakes in the bedroom.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t agree with my aunt very much,&rdquo; replied Mary
+      simply, &ldquo;but I think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect
+      dragons and griffins, so long as it got him out of the house.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
+      turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold. The
+      golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had sat like a
+      clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning cart-wheels down
+      the lawn and shouting, &ldquo;Acquitted! acquitted!&rdquo; Echoing the
+      cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and wildly swung her
+      into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz. But the company knew
+      Innocent and Michael by this time, and their extravagances were gaily
+      taken for granted; it was far more extraordinary that Arthur Inglewood
+      walked straight up to Diana and kissed her as if it had been his sister&rsquo;s
+      birthday. Even Dr. Pym, though he refrained from dancing, looked on with
+      real benevolence; for indeed the whole of the absurd revelation had
+      disturbed him less than the others; he half supposed that such
+      irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions were part of the mediaeval
+      mummeries of the Old Land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window was
+      lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with
+      laughter and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the house
+      again, they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had
+      clambered out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again,
+      &ldquo;Beacon House!&rdquo; whirled round his head a huge log or trunk
+      from the wood fire below, of which the river of crimson flame and purple
+      smoke drove out on the deafening air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties; but when the
+      wind died down, and the party, at the top of their evening&rsquo;s
+      merriment, looked again for Mary and for him, they were not to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The End
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton
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diff --git a/old/1718.txt b/old/1718.txt
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1718.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6775 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Manalive, 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: Manalive
+
+Author: G. K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2005 [EBook #1718]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANALIVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Electronic edition MANALIV0 published 1993 by Jim Henry III
+Edited by Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          Manalive
+
+                     by G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+First published 1912 by Thomas Nelson and Sons
+
+Electronic edition MANALIV0 published 1993 by Jim Henry III
+Edited by Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)
+
+
+PLEASE report any typos you may happen to notice, such as misplaced
+punctuation and the like, to
+
+Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)
+
+and
+
+Jim Henry III 405 Gardner Road Stockbridge, GA 30281-1515
+
+Or send email to JIM HENRY on
+
+Digital Publishing Association BBS (205) 854-1660 Faster-than-Light BBS
+(404) 292-8761
+
+ILink Bookmark conference Annex Library conference
+
+Thank you!  I hope you enjoy reading _Manalive_ as much as I have.
+I will soon be releasing _Tales of the Long Bow_, also by G. K. Chesterton.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           Table of Contents
+
+
+   Part I: The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
+      I.   How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
+      II.  The Luggage of an Optimist
+      III. The Banner of Beacon
+      IV.  The Garden of the God
+      V.   The Allegorical Practical Joker
+
+
+  Part II: The Explanations of Innocent Smith
+      I.   The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge
+      II.  The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge
+      III. The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge
+      IV.  The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge
+      V.   How the Great Wind went from Beacon House
+
+
+
+                           Part I
+
+                The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
+
+
+
+                          Chapter I
+
+                   How the Great Wind Came
+                       to Beacon House
+
+
+A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
+and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent
+of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea.  In a million holes
+and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him
+like a blow.  In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered
+houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with
+some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive,
+or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island"
+and wrapping him in roaring dark.  But everywhere it bore drama into
+undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world.
+Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five
+dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy;
+it was as if she had hanged her five children.  The wind came, and they
+were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far
+down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
+comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
+Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself
+into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
+might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent
+the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon,
+and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures
+of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat.
+Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars,
+thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes
+of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed
+them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
+There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
+than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind
+that blows nobody harm.
+
+The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
+terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh.  It was round
+about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished
+at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers
+and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has
+never been able to shake off.  At some stage of those heights a terrace
+of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians,
+curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding
+establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the sunset its high,
+narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship.
+
+The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.  The proprietor
+of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless
+persons against whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both
+before and after all her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt.
+But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece
+she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young
+but listless folks.  And there were actually five inmates
+standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale
+broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea
+bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.
+
+All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with
+cold cloud.  Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray
+and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior.
+When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left
+and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold.  The burst of light
+released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously;
+and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling violence.
+The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair.
+Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar,
+and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element.
+Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist.
+The three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against
+a wall.  The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly,
+they were blown into the house.  Their two frocks, blue and white,
+looked like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale.
+Nor is such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something
+oddly romantic about this inrush of air and light after a long,
+leaden and unlifting day.  Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
+with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland.
+It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.
+
+The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore
+a white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might
+have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.
+She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
+in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a
+friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
+brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous.
+On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking;
+but she had not married, perhaps because there was always
+a crowd of men around her.  She was not fast (though some
+might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths
+an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible.
+A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra,
+or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door.
+Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
+she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
+and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm,
+she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her.
+To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose
+like the curtain of some long-expected pantomime.
+
+Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this
+apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic
+and practical creatures alive.  She was, indeed, no other than
+the strenuous niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay.
+But as the gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they
+took on the monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory
+stirred in her that was almost romance--a memory of a dusty volume
+of _Punch_ in an aunt's house in infancy:  pictures of crinoline hoops
+and croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part.
+This half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly,
+and Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion.
+Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.
+In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once
+long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake.
+The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel.  It would
+be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so
+impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.
+Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door,
+before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork,
+it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands.
+She was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness.
+She spurned the ground, and she meant to spurn it.  People talk
+of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible
+thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
+
+"It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman in white,
+going to the looking-glass.
+
+The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening gloves,
+and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon
+cloth for tea.
+
+"Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund Hunt,
+with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches
+had always been safe for an encore.
+
+"Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke, "but I dare say that is
+sometimes more important."
+
+Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a
+spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person.
+She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be a big
+wind to blow your head off."
+
+There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from
+the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull
+walls with ruby and gold.
+
+"Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's easier
+to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."
+
+"Oh, don't talk such rubbish," said Diana with savage sharpness.
+
+Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour;
+but the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men
+who stood their ground might also have considered the problem
+of hats and heads.  And, indeed, their position, touching hats,
+was somewhat typical of them.  The tallest of the three abode
+the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge
+as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him.
+The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles,
+and ultimately held it in his hand.  The third had no hat, and,
+by his attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life.
+Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women,
+for there was much of the three men in this difference.
+
+The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and solidity.
+He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man, with flat
+fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young doctor
+by the name of Warner.  But if his blondness and blandness seemed
+at first a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool.
+If Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money,
+he was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame.
+His treatise on "The Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms"
+had been universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid
+and daring.  In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was
+not his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire
+to analyze with a poker.
+
+The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a
+small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness.
+It was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor
+was present; for Warner lived in no such ramshackle lodging-house,
+but in a professional palace in Harley Street.  This young
+man was really the youngest and best-looking of the three.
+But he was one of those persons, both male and female,
+who seem doomed to be good-looking and insignificant.
+Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose
+the delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown
+and red as he stood blushing and blinking against the wind.
+He was one of those obvious unnoticeable people:
+every one knew that he was Arthur Inglewood, unmarried, moral,
+decidedly intelligent, living on a little money of his own,
+and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography and cycling.
+Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the
+glare of golden sunset there was something about him indistinct,
+like one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.
+
+The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely
+sporting clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him look
+all the leaner.  He had a long ironical face, blue-black hair,
+the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the blue chin of an actor.
+An Irishman he was, an actor he was not, except in the old
+days of Miss Hunt's charades, being, as a matter of fact,
+an obscure and flippant journalist named Michael Moon.  He had
+once been hazily supposed to be reading for the Bar;
+but (as Warner would say with his rather elephantine wit)
+it was mostly at another kind of bar that his friends found him.
+Moon, however, did not drink, nor even frequently get drunk;
+he simply was a gentleman who liked low company.
+This was partly because company is quieter than society:
+and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid (as apparently
+he did), it was chiefly because the barmaid did the talking.
+Moreover he would often bring other talent to assist her.
+He shared that strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and
+without ambition--the trick of going about with his mental inferiors.
+There was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same
+boarding-house, a man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused
+Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar,
+like the owner of a performing monkey.
+
+The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew
+clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven.
+One felt one might at last find something lighter than light.
+In the fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their
+colours again:  the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold.
+One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another,
+and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.
+
+"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird,
+"have you any friends?"
+
+Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad
+beaming face, said,--
+
+"Oh yes, I go out a great deal."
+
+Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant,
+who spoke a moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young,
+as coming out of that brown and even dusty interior.
+
+"Really," answered Inglewood, "I'm afraid I've lost touch with
+my old friends.  The greatest friend I ever had was at school,
+a fellow named Smith.  It's odd you should mention it, because I
+was thinking of him to-day, though I haven't seen him for seven
+or eight years.  He was on the science side with me at school--
+a clever fellow though queer; and he went up to Oxford when I
+went to Germany.  The fact is, it's rather a sad story.
+I often asked him to come and see me, and when I heard nothing I
+made inquiries, you know.  I was shocked to learn that poor Smith
+had gone off his head.  The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course,
+some saying that he had recovered again; but they always say that.
+About a year ago I got a telegram from him myself.  The telegram,
+I'm sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt."
+
+"Quite so," assented Dr. Warner stolidly; "insanity is generally incurable."
+
+"So is sanity," said the Irishman, and studied him with a dreary eye.
+
+"Symptoms?" asked the doctor.  "What was this telegram?"
+
+"It's a shame to joke about such things," said Inglewood, in his honest,
+embarrassed way; "the telegram was Smith's illness, not Smith.  The actual
+words were, `Man found alive with two legs.'"
+
+"Alive with two legs," repeated Michael, frowning.  "Perhaps a version
+of alive and kicking?  I don't know much about people out of their senses;
+but I suppose they ought to be kicking."
+
+"And people in their senses?" asked Warner, smiling.
+
+"Oh, they ought to be kicked," said Michael with sudden heartiness.
+
+"The message is clearly insane," continued the impenetrable Warner.
+"The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type.
+Even a baby does not expect to find a man with three legs."
+
+"Three legs," said Michael Moon, "would be very convenient in this wind."
+
+A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them
+off their balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden.
+Beyond, all sorts of accidental objects could be seen scouring
+the wind-scoured sky--straws, sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance,
+a disappearing hat.  Its disappearance, however, was not final;
+after an interval of minutes they saw it again, much larger and closer,
+like a white panama, towering up into the heavens like a balloon,
+staggering to and fro for an instant like a stricken kite,
+and then settling in the centre of their own lawn as falteringly
+as a fallen leaf.
+
+"Somebody's lost a good hat," said Dr. Warner shortly.
+
+Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall,
+flying after the fluttering panama.  It was a big green umbrella.
+After that came hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone bag,
+and after that came a figure like a flying wheel of legs,
+as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
+
+But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs,
+it alighted upon two, like the man in the queer telegram.
+It took the form of a large light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes.
+He had bright blonde hair that the wind brushed back like a German's,
+a flushed eager face like a cherub's, and a prominent pointing nose,
+a little like a dog's. His head, however, was by no means cherubic
+in the sense of being without a body.  On the contrary, on his vast
+shoulders and shape generally gigantesque, his head looked oddly
+and unnaturally small.  This gave rise to a scientific theory
+(which his conduct fully supported) that he was an idiot.
+
+Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward.
+His life was full of arrested half gestures of assistance.
+And even this prodigy of a big man in green, leaping the wall
+like a bright green grasshopper, did not paralyze that small
+altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost hat.
+He was stepping forward to recover the green gentleman's
+head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar like a bull's.
+
+"Unsportsmanlike!" bellowed the big man.  "Give it fair play,
+give it fair play!"  And he came after his own hat quickly
+but cautiously, with burning eyes.  The hat had seemed at first
+to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn;
+but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down
+the garden with the devilry of a ~pas de quatre~. The eccentric went
+bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech,
+of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread:
+"Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns...
+quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats... old
+English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at bay...
+mangled hounds... Got him!"
+
+As the wind rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky
+on his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat,
+missed it, and pitched sprawling face foremost on the grass.
+The hat rose over him like a bird in triumph.  But its triumph
+was premature; for the lunatic, flung forward on his hands,
+threw up his boots behind, waved his two legs in the air
+like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought again
+of the telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet.
+A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end.
+The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible blast,
+as by a strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between
+them and all objects about them.  But as the large man fell back
+in a sitting posture and solemnly crowned himself with the hat,
+Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, that he had been
+holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.
+
+While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy,
+another short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending
+very quick, swallowed in abrupt silence.  The shiny black cylinder
+of Dr. Warner's official hat sailed off his head in the long,
+smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost cresting a garden
+tree was caught in the topmost branches.  Another hat was gone.
+Those in that garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy
+of things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away next.
+Before they could speculate, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter
+was already halfway up the tree, swinging himself from fork to fork
+with his strong, bent, grasshopper legs, and still giving forth
+his gasping, mysterious comments.
+
+"Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls nesting
+in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers... gone
+to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs
+to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it up!"
+
+The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering
+wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire.
+The green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold,
+was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did
+not break with the weight of his big body.  He was up there among the last
+tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still talking
+to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps.
+He might well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had
+gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a football,
+swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the tree like a rocket.
+The other three men seemed buried under incident piled on incident--
+a wild world where one thing began before another thing left off.
+All three had the first thought.  The tree had been there for the five years
+they had known the boarding-house. Each one of them was active and strong.
+No one of them had even thought of climbing it.  Beyond that,
+Inglewood felt first the mere fact of colour.  The bright brisk leaves,
+the bleak blue sky, the wild green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally
+of something glowing in his infancy, something akin to a gaudy man
+on a golden tree; perhaps it was only painted monkey on a stick.
+Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more of a humourist, was touched on
+a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old, young theatricals with Rosamund,
+and was amused to find himself almost quoting Shakespeare--
+
+        "For valour.  Is not love a Hercules,
+         Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?"
+
+
+Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation
+that the Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward
+with rather rattling rapidity.
+
+He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next.
+The man in green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky
+broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs.
+It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage,
+a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it in every direction,
+a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it like a concertina; nor can it
+be said that the obliging gentleman with the sharp nose showed any adequate
+tenderness for its structure when he finally unhooked it from its place.
+When he had found it, however, his proceedings were by some counted singular.
+He waved it with a loud whoop of triumph, and then immediately appeared
+to fall backwards off the tree, to which, however, he remained
+attached by his long strong legs, like a monkey swung by his tail.
+Hanging thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely proceeded
+to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his brows.  "Every man a king,"
+explained the inverted philosopher, "every hat (consequently) a crown.
+But this is a crown out of heaven."
+
+And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved away
+with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming, strangely enough,
+to wish for his former decoration in its present state.
+
+"Wrong, wrong!" cried the obliging person hilariously.
+"Always wear uniform, even if it's shabby uniform!
+Ritualists may always be untidy.  Go to a dance with soot on
+your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front. Huntsman wears old coat,
+but old pink coat.  Wear a topper, even if it's got no top.
+It's the symbol that counts, old cock.  Take your hat,
+because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all off
+by the bark, dears, and its brim not the least bit curled;
+but for old sakes' sake it is still, dears, the nobbiest tile
+in the world."
+
+Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed
+the shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician,
+and fell on his feet among the other men, still talking,
+beaming and breathless.
+
+"Why don't they make more games out of wind?" he asked in some excitement.
+"Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites?  Why, I thought
+of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing that tree.
+Here's one of them:  you take a lot of pepper--"
+
+"I think," interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness,
+"that your games are already sufficiently interesting.
+Are you, may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour,
+or a travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim?  How and why do you
+display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing trees
+in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?"
+
+The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it,
+appeared to grow confidential.
+
+"Well, it's a trick of my own," he confessed candidly.
+"I do it by having two legs."
+
+Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of folly,
+started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes screwed up
+and his high colour slightly heightened.
+
+"Why, I believe you're Smith," he cried with his fresh, almost boyish voice;
+and then after an instant's stare, "and yet I'm not sure."
+
+"I have a card, I think," said the unknown, with baffling solemnity--"a card
+with my real name, my titles, offices, and true purpose on this earth."
+
+He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet
+card-case, and as slowly produced a very large card.
+Even in the instant of its production, they fancied it was
+of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary gentlemen.
+But it was there only for an instant; for as it passed from
+his fingers to Arthur's, one or another slipped his hold.
+The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away
+the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the universe;
+and that great western wind shook the whole house and passed.
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter II
+
+                 The Luggage of an Optimist
+
+
+We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
+with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion
+of small ones.  If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could
+(I suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight
+trumpeting upon Primrose Hill.  If a whale could leap from the sea
+like a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above
+Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa.  Such natural energy,
+though sublime, might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this
+inconvenience attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green.
+He was too large for everything, because he was lively as well as large.
+By a fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures
+are also reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser
+parts of London are not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable
+as a kitten.
+
+When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house,
+he found him talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately)
+to the helpless Mrs. Duke.  That fat, faint lady could only
+goggle up like a dying fish at the enormous new gentleman,
+who politely offered himself as a lodger, with vast gestures
+of the wide white hat in one hand, and the yellow Gladstone bag
+in the other.  Fortunately, Mrs. Duke's more efficient niece
+and partner was there to complete the contract; for, indeed,
+all the people of the house had somehow collected in the room.
+This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode.
+The visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from
+the time he came into the house to the time he left it, he somehow
+got the company to gather and even follow (though in derision)
+as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy.  An hour ago,
+and for four years previously, these people had avoided
+each other, even when they had really liked each other.
+They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in search
+of particular newspapers or private needlework.  Even now they
+all came casually, as with varying interests; but they all came.
+There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow;
+there was the unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance.
+There was Michael Moon offering like a riddle the contrast
+of the horsy crudeness of his clothes and the sombre sagacity
+of his visage.  He was now joined by his yet more comic crony,
+Moses Gould.  Swaggering on short legs with a prosperous
+purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs;
+but like a dog also in this, that however he danced and
+wagged with delight, the two dark eyes on each side of his
+protuberant nose glistened gloomily like black buttons.
+There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still with the fine white hat
+framing her square, good-looking face, and still with her native
+air of being dressed for some party that never came off.
+She also, like Mr. Moon, had a new companion, new so far as this
+narrative goes, but in reality an old friend and a protegee.
+This was a slight young woman in dark gray, and in no way
+notable but for a load of dull red hair, of which the shape
+somehow gave her pale face that triangular, almost peaked,
+appearance which was given by the lowering headdress and deep rich
+ruff of the Elizabethan beauties.  Her surname seemed to be Gray,
+and Miss Hunt called her Mary, in that indescribable tone
+applied to a dependent who has practically become a friend.
+She wore a small silver cross on her very business-like
+gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who went
+to church.  Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke,
+studying the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening
+carefully to every idiotic word he said.  As for Mrs. Duke,
+she smiled up at him, but never dreamed of listening to him.
+She had never really listened to any one in her life; which, some said,
+was why she had survived.
+
+Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest's
+concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke
+seriously to her any more than she listened seriously to any one.
+And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet wider and almost
+whirling gestures of explanation with his huge hat and bag,
+apologized for having entered by the wall instead of the front door.
+He was understood to put it down to an unfortunate family tradition
+of neatness and care of his clothes.
+
+"My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,"
+he said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke.  "She never liked
+me to lose my cap at school.  And when a man's been taught
+to be tidy and neat it sticks to him."
+
+Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good mother;
+but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.
+
+"You've got a funny idea of neatness," she said, "if it's
+jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees.
+A man can't very well climb a tree tidily."
+
+"He can clear a wall neatly," said Michael Moon; "I saw him do it."
+
+Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment.
+"My dear young lady," he said, "I was tidying the tree.  You don't want
+last year's hats there, do you, any more than last year's leaves?
+The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn't manage the hat; that wind,
+I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that tidiness
+is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants.
+You can't tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.
+Don't you know that?  Haven't you ever had a spring cleaning?"
+
+"Oh yes, sir," said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly.  "You will find
+everything of that sort quite nice."  For the first time she
+had heard two words that she could understand.
+
+Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm
+of calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said
+that he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked:
+and the silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through
+these cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room.
+Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his head
+against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that the tall
+house was much shorter than it used to be.
+
+Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend--or his new friend,
+for he did not very clearly know which he was.  The face looked
+very like his old schoolfellow's at one second and very unlike
+at another.  And when Inglewood broke through his native
+politeness so far as to say suddenly, "Is your name Smith?"
+he received only the unenlightening reply, "Quite right;
+quite right.  Very good.  Excellent!"  Which appeared to Inglewood,
+on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe accepting
+a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.
+
+Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood
+watched the other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all
+the impotent attitudes of the male friend.  Mr. Smith unpacked
+with the same kind of whirling accuracy with which he climbed
+a tree--throwing things out of his bag as if they were rubbish,
+yet managing to distribute quite a regular pattern all round
+him on the floor.
+
+As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner
+(he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style
+of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still
+a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.
+
+"Like the day of judgement," he said, throwing a bottle
+so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end.
+"People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy;
+not sure... I think things are too close together... packed up;
+for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's
+a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star,
+too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
+ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
+feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag
+is unpacked... may all be put in our right places then."
+
+Here he stopped, literally for breath--throwing a shirt to the other end
+of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly beyond it.
+Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with
+an increasing doubt.
+
+In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's holiday luggage,
+the less one could make anything of it.  One peculiarity of it
+was that almost everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason;
+what is secondary with every one else was primary with him.
+He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the unthinking
+assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary,
+and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious.
+He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained
+with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
+but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork.
+He also exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
+and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent,
+supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages.
+He was therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham
+claret from the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice)
+do not drink.  It was only then that he observed that all six
+bottles had those bright metallic seals of various tints,
+and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the three
+primary and three secondary colours:  red, blue, and yellow;
+green, violet and orange.  There grew upon Inglewood an almost
+creepy sense of the real childishness of this creature.
+For Smith was really, so far as human psychology can be, innocent.
+He had the sensualities of innocence:  he loved the stickiness of gum,
+and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake.
+To this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced;
+it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window.
+He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation;
+but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play.
+He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party.
+He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to manhood,
+and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.
+
+As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials
+I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had
+been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as a formal
+Christian name or a moral description he could not remember.
+He was just about to venture another question, when there was a knock
+at the door, and the short figure of Mr. Gould offered itself,
+with the melancholy Moon, standing like his tall crooked shadow,
+behind him.  They had drifted up the stairs after the other two
+men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.
+
+"Hope there's no intrusion," said the beaming Moses with a glow
+of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
+
+"The truth is," said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy,
+"we thought we might see if they had made you comfortable.
+Miss Duke is rather--"
+
+"I know," cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag;
+"magnificent, isn't she?  Go close to her--hear military music going by,
+like Joan of Arc."
+
+Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has
+just heard a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains
+one small and forgotten fact.  For he remembered how he had
+himself thought of Jeanne d'Arc years ago, when, hardly more
+than a schoolboy, he had first come to the boarding-house. Long
+since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr. Warner had
+crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams.
+Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless
+human types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as
+a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type, who would never marry;
+to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant;
+and to regard his first fancy for her as the small,
+dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady's daughter.
+And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly,
+as if he had heard those distant drums.
+
+"She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural," said Moon,
+glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling,
+like the conical hood of a dwarf.
+
+"Rather a small box for you, sir," said the waggish Mr. Gould.
+
+"Splendid room, though," answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
+head inside his Gladstone bag.  "I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
+like Gothic.  By the way," he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way,
+"where does that door lead to?"
+
+"To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon, staring up at
+a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
+"I don't think there's a loft there; and I don't know what else it
+could lead to."  Long before he had finished his sentence the man
+with the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling,
+swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after
+a struggle, and clambered through it.  For a moment they saw the two
+symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
+Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
+sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across
+it like a whole county upside down.
+
+"Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
+apparently from some remote pinnacle.  "Come up here;
+and bring some of my things to eat and drink.  It's just the spot
+for a picnic."
+
+With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
+bottles of wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
+as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger.
+The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture,
+like a giant's in a fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them
+off to the eyrie; then they both hoisted themselves out of the window.
+They were both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
+concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was
+not quite so idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman.
+Also they both had a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when
+the door was burst in the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky,
+and they could climb out on to the very roof of the universe.
+They were both men who had long been unconsciously imprisoned in
+the commonplace, though one took it comically, and the other seriously.
+They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died.
+But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics
+and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed
+at the thing with the shameless rationality of another race.
+
+When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould
+was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature
+forced him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade;
+and Inglewood and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green
+ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters and their
+backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other.
+Their first feeling was that they had come out into eternity,
+and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom. One definition
+occurred to both of them--that he had come out into the light
+of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun.
+The sky above them was full of mythology.  Heaven seemed deep
+enough to hold all the gods.  The round of the ether turned
+from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
+All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it
+was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage; but the whole
+had still the emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk.
+Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were
+shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed
+falling towards the earth in every kind of colossal perspective.
+One of them really had the character of some many-mitred,
+many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian image, huge head downwards,
+hurled out of heaven--a sort of false Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan.
+All the other clouds had preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god's
+palaces had been flung after him.
+
+And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the height
+of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a tiny trivial
+noise that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below
+a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel.  They could also hear
+talk out of the garden below; and realized that the irrepressible Smith
+must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents
+could be heard, followed by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke
+and the full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt.  The air had
+that cold kindness that comes after a storm.  Michael Moon drank it in with
+as serious a relish as he had drunk the little bottle of cheap claret,
+which he had emptied almost at a draught.  Inglewood went on eating ginger
+very slowly and with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him.
+There was still enough stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to make them
+almost fancy they could smell the garden soil and the last roses of autumn.
+Suddenly there came from the darkening room a silvery ping and pong which
+told them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline.
+After the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like laughter.
+
+"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, "have you ever heard that I
+am a blackguard?"
+
+"I haven't heard it, and I don't believe it," answered Inglewood,
+after an odd pause.  "But I have heard you were--what they
+call rather wild."
+
+"If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,"
+said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; "I am tame.
+I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls.
+I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time
+every night.  I even drink about the same amount too much.
+I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned
+women with mauve faces.  I hear the same number of dirty stories--
+generally the same dirty stories.  You may assure my friends,
+Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization
+has thoroughly tamed."
+
+Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly
+fall off the roof, for indeed the Irishman's face, always sinister,
+was now almost demoniacal.
+
+"Christ confound it!" cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the empty
+claret bottle, "this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine
+I ever uncorked, and it's the only drink I have really enjoyed
+for nine years.  I was never wild until just ten minutes ago."
+And he sent the bottle whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond
+the garden into the road, where, in the profound evening silence,
+they could even hear it break and part upon the stones.
+
+"Moon," said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, "you mustn't be
+so bitter about it.  Everyone has to take the world as he finds it;
+of course one often finds it a bit dull--"
+
+"That fellow doesn't," said Michael decisively; "I mean that
+fellow Smith.  I have a fancy there's some method in his madness.
+It looks as if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute by taking
+one step out of the plain road.  Who would have thought of that trapdoor?
+Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste quite
+nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of fairyland.
+Perhaps Nosey Gould's beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought only to
+be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort.  Perhaps Mrs. Duke's
+cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree.
+Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill Whisky--"
+
+"Don't be so rough on yourself," said Inglewood, in serious distress.
+"The dullness isn't your fault or the whisky's. Fellows who don't--
+fellows like me I mean--have just the same feeling that it's all rather
+flat and a failure.  But the world's made like that; it's all survival.
+Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and some people are
+made to stick quiet, like me.  You can't help your temperament.
+I know you're much cleverer than I am; but you can't help having
+all the loose ways of a poor literary chap, and I can't help
+having all the doubts and helplessness of a small scientific chap,
+any more than a fish can help floating or a fern can help curling up.
+Humanity, as Warner said so well in that lecture, really consists
+of quite different tribes of animals all disguised as men."
+
+In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken
+by Miss Hunt's musical instrument banging with the abruptness
+of artillery into a vulgar but spirited tune.
+
+Rosamund's voice came up rich and strong in the words of some fatuous,
+fashionable coon song:-
+
+        "Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
+         Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by."
+
+
+Inglewood's brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he continued
+his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic tune.
+But the blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a light
+that Inglewood did not understand.  Many centuries, and many villages
+and valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood's countrymen
+had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first blink that it
+was the battle star of Ireland.
+
+"Nothing can ever alter it; it's in the wheels of the universe,"
+went on Inglewood, in a low voice:  "some men are weak and some strong,
+and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak.
+I have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything,
+for I remembered my own fickleness.  I have formed opinions, but I
+haven't the cheek to push them, because I've so often changed them.
+That's the upshot, old fellow.  We can't trust ourselves--
+and we can't help it."
+
+Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position
+at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.
+Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly
+topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven.  Their gyration made
+the dark figure seem yet dizzier.
+
+"Let us..." he said, and was suddenly silent.
+
+"Let us what?" asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though somewhat
+more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in speech.
+
+"Let us go and do some of these things we can't do," said Michael.
+
+At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them
+the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to
+them that they must come down as the "concert" was in full swing,
+and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite "Young Lochinvar."
+
+As they dropped into Innocent's attic they nearly tumbled over its
+entertaining impedimenta again.  Inglewood, staring at the littered floor,
+thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery.
+He was therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell
+on a large well-polished American revolver.
+
+"Hullo!" he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step back
+from a serpent; "are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do you deal
+death out of that machine gun?"
+
+"Oh, that!" said Smith, throwing it a single glance; "I deal life
+out of that," and he went bounding down the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter III
+
+                    The Banner of Beacon
+
+
+All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
+everybody's birthday.  It is the fashion to talk of institutions
+as cold and cramping things.  The truth is that when people are in
+exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention,
+they always must, and they always do, create institutions.
+When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay
+and vigorous they invariably make rules.  This, which is true of all
+the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most
+trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp.
+We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty
+cannot exist till it is declared by authority.  Even the wild
+authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it
+produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions.
+He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not
+expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction.
+Each person with a hobby found it turning into an institution.
+Rosamund's songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of opera;
+Michael's jests and paragraphs into a magazine.  His pipe and her
+mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of smoking concert.
+The bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his
+own growing importance.  He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
+were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana.
+But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and offices,
+for they followed each other in wild succession like the topics
+of a rambling talker.
+
+Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of
+pleasant obstacles.  Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag
+reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer.  Nothing could be more shy
+and impersonal than poor Arthur's photography.  Yet the preposterous
+Smith was seen assisting him eagerly through sunny morning hours,
+and an indefensible sequence described as "Moral Photography"
+began to unroll about the boarding-house. It was only a version of the old
+photographer's joke which produces the same figure twice on one plate,
+making a man play chess with himself, dine with himself, and so on.
+But these plates were more hysterical and ambitious--as, "Miss Hunt
+forgets Herself," showing that lady answering her own too
+rapturous recognition with a most appalling stare of ignorance;
+or "Mr. Moon questions Himself," in which Mr. Moon appeared as one
+driven to madness under his own legal cross-examination, which was
+conducted with a long forefinger and an air of ferocious waggery.
+One highly successful trilogy--representing Inglewood recognizing
+Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before Inglewood,
+and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella--
+Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall,
+like a sort of fresco, with the inscription,--
+
+        "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control--
+         These three alone will make a man a prig."
+
+                                                -- Tennyson.
+
+
+Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than
+the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke.  But Innocent had somehow
+blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went
+with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing
+that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith
+pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously)
+that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw
+light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again.
+He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company," with two screens,
+a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana
+actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on
+which to exercise the talents of a modiste.  He promptly produced
+for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held
+it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress.
+And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle
+(with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up;
+and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one
+flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green
+and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden
+in the "Arabian Nights."  A pang too swift to be named pain
+or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
+He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was
+ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering
+a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence.
+At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it)
+the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly
+in her working clothes.
+
+As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
+actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
+But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
+liked it.  For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all
+men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
+And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or
+inexplicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers
+than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches
+of Moon.  Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody
+can understand, and Smith's manners were as courteous as they
+were unconventional.  She said he was "a real gentleman," by which she
+simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.
+She would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands and a fat,
+folded smile for hours and hours, while every one else was talking at once.
+At least, the only other exception was Rosamund's companion,
+Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more eager sort.  Though she
+never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute.
+Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.  Innocent Smith
+seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure
+of making her talk.  He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed;
+if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure,
+and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery.
+But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh
+and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in spring.
+Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls,
+she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth,
+which Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money,
+and Diana in the mere guarding of it.  Smith looked at her again and again.
+Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way--which was really
+the right way.  She had the knack of saying everything with her face:
+her silence was a sort of steady applause.
+
+But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday
+(which seemed more like a week's holiday than a day's)
+one experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier
+or more successful than the others, but because out of this
+particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to follow.
+All the other practical jokes exploded of themselves, and left vacancy;
+all the other fictions returned upon themselves, and were finished
+like a song.  But the string of solid and startling events--
+which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol,
+and a marriage licence--were all made primarily possible
+by the joke about the High Court of Beacon.
+
+It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon.  He was
+in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly;
+yet he had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman.
+He used his old useless knowledge as a barrister to talk
+entertainingly of a tribunal that was a parody on the pompous
+anomalies of English law.  The High Court of Beacon, he declared,
+was a splendid example of our free and sensible constitution.
+It had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna Carta,
+and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and spirit licences,
+ladies traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing
+and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened in the town of
+Market Bosworth.  The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High Court
+of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in the intervals
+(as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the institution were vested
+in Mrs. Duke.  Tossed about among the rest of the company, however,
+the High Court did not retain its historical and legal seriousness,
+but was used somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail.
+If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the tablecloth, he was quite
+sure it was a rite without which the sittings and findings of the Court
+would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a window to remain shut,
+he would suddenly remember that none but the third son of the lord
+of the manor of Penge had the right to open it.  They even went
+to the length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
+The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
+above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal;
+but the trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic libel,
+and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity, were admitted
+to be in the best tradition of the Court.
+
+But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not more and
+more flippant like Michael Moon.  This proposal of a private court of justice,
+which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a political humourist,
+Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of an abstract philosopher.
+It was by far the best thing they could do, he declared, to claim sovereign
+powers even for the individual household.
+
+"You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule
+for homes," he cried eagerly to Michael.  "It would be better
+if every father COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans;
+it would be better, because nobody would be killed.
+Let's issue a Declaration of Independence from Beacon House.
+We could grow enough greens in that garden to support us,
+and when the tax-collector comes let's tell him we're self-supporting,
+and play on him with the hose....  Well, perhaps, as you say,
+we couldn't very well have a hose, as that comes from the main;
+but we could sink a well in this chalk, and a lot could be
+done with water-jugs....  Let this really be Beacon House.
+Let's light a bonfire of independence on the roof, and see house
+after house answering it across the valley of the Thames!  Let us begin
+the League of the Free Families!  Away with Local Government!  A fig
+for Local Patriotism!  Let every house be a sovereign state as this is,
+and judge its own children by its own law, as we do by the Court
+of Beacon.  Let us cut the painter, and begin to be happy together,
+as if we were on a desert island."
+
+"I know that desert island," said Michael Moon; "it only
+exists in the `Swiss Family Robinson.'  A man feels a strange
+desire for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash comes down
+some unexpected cocoa-nut from some undiscovered monkey.
+A literary man feels inclined to pen a sonnet, and at once
+an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and shoots out
+one of his quills."
+
+"Don't you say a word against the `Swiss Family Robinson,'"
+cried Innocent with great warmth.  "It mayn't be
+exact science, but it's dead accurate philosophy.
+When you're really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want.
+When you're really on a desert island, you never find it a desert.
+If we were really besieged in this garden, we'd find a hundred
+English birds and English berries that we never knew were here.
+If we were snowed up in this room, we'd be the better for reading
+scores of books in that bookcase that we don't even know are there;
+we'd have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall
+go to the grave without guessing; we'd find materials for everything--
+christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation--
+if we didn't decide to be a republic."
+
+"A coronation on `Swiss Family' lines, I suppose," said Michael, laughing.
+"Oh, I know you would find everything in that atmosphere.  If we wanted
+such a simple thing, for instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we should
+walk down beyond the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full bloom.
+If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
+digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under the lawn.
+And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a great storm
+would wash everything on shore, and we should find there was a Whale
+on the premises."
+
+"And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,"
+asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion.
+"I bet you've never examined the premises!  I bet you've
+never been round at the back as I was this morning--
+for I found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
+There's an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin;
+it's got three holes in the canvas, and a pole's broken,
+so it's not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy--" And his
+voice quite failed him to express its shining adequacy;
+then he went on with controversial eagerness:  "You see I
+take every challenge as you make it.  I believe every blessed
+thing you say couldn't be here has been here all the time.
+You say you want a whale washed up for oil.  Why, there's oil
+in that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don't believe
+anybody has touched it or thought of it for years.
+And as for your gold crown, we're none of us wealthy here,
+but we could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own
+pockets to string round a man's head for half an hour;
+or one of Miss Hunt's gold bangles is nearly big enough to--"
+
+The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter.
+"All is not gold that glitters," she said, "and besides--"
+
+"What a mistake that is!" cried Innocent Smith,
+leaping up in great excitement.  "All is gold that glitters--
+especially now we are a Sovereign State.  What's the good
+of a Sovereign State if you can't define a sovereign?
+We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning
+of the world.  They didn't choose gold because it was rare;
+your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer.
+They chose gold because it was bright--because it was
+a hard thing to find, but pretty when you've found it.
+You can't fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits;
+you can only look at it--and you can look at it out here."
+
+With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open
+the doors into the garden.  At the same time also, with one of his
+gestures that never seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were,
+he stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn
+as if for a dance.
+
+The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier than that
+of the day before.  The west was swimming with sanguine colours, and a sort
+of sleepy flame lay along the lawn.  The twisted shadows of the one or two
+garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as in common daylight,
+but like arabesques written in vivid violet ink on some page of Eastern gold.
+The sunset was one of those festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in
+which common things by their colours remind us of costly or curious things.
+The slates upon the sloping roof burned like the plumes of a vast peacock,
+in every mysterious blend of blue and green.  The red-brown bricks of
+the wall glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines.
+The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame,
+like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent's hair, which was of a rather
+colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode
+across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.
+
+"What would be the good of gold," he was saying, "if it did not glitter?
+Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a
+black sun at noon?  A black button would do just as well.
+Don't you see that everything in this garden looks like a jewel?
+And will you kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel
+except that it looks like a jewel?  Leave off buying and selling,
+and start looking!  Open your eyes, and you'll wake up in
+the New Jerusalem.
+
+        "All is gold that glitters--
+           Tree and tower of brass;
+         Rolls the golden evening air
+           Down the golden grass.
+         Kick the cry to Jericho,
+           How yellow mud is sold;
+         All is gold that glitters,
+           For the glitter is the gold."
+
+
+"And who wrote that?" asked Rosamund, amused.
+
+"No one will ever write it," answered Smith, and cleared the rockery
+with a flying leap.
+
+"Really," said Rosamund to Michael Moon, "he ought to be sent to an asylum.
+Don't you think so?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long,
+swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or mood,
+he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the social
+extravagance of the garden.
+
+"I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum," repeated the lady.
+
+The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was
+unmistakably sneering.  "No," he said; "I don't think it's
+at all necessary."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Rosamund quickly.  "Why not?"
+
+"Because he is in one now," answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly voice.
+"Why, didn't you know?"
+
+"What?" cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice;
+for the Irishman's face and voice were really almost creepy.
+With his dark figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine
+he looked like the devil in paradise.
+
+"I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh humility.
+"Of course we don't talk about it much... but I thought we
+all really knew."
+
+"Knew what?"
+
+"Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain rather singular
+sort of house--a house with the tiles loose, shall we say?  Innocent Smith
+is only the doctor that visits us; hadn't you come when he called before?
+As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery.
+Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us.
+Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree--that's his bedside manner."
+
+"You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a rage.
+"You daren't suggest that I--"
+
+"Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more than the rest of us.
+Haven't you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still--a notorious sign?
+Haven't you ever observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands--
+a known mark of mental disease?  I, of course, am a dipsomaniac."
+
+"I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not without agitation.
+"I've heard you had some bad habits--"
+
+"All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly calm.
+"Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down
+in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
+YOU went mad about money, because you're an heiress."
+
+"It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously.  "I never was mean about money."
+
+"You were worse," said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently.
+"You thought that other people were.  You thought every man who came near
+you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
+and now you're mad and I'm mad, and serve us right."
+
+"You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white.  "And is this true?"
+
+With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable
+when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for
+some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow.
+"Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true.
+An allegory, shall we say? a social satire."
+
+"And I hate and despise your satires," cried Rosamund Hunt,
+letting loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone,
+and speaking every word to wound.  "I despise it as I despise
+your rank tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling,
+and your Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty
+little newspaper, and your rotten failure at everything.
+I don't care whether you call it snobbishness or not, I like
+life and success, and jolly things to look at, and action.
+You won't frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander."
+
+"Victrix causa deae--" said Michael gloomily; and this angered
+her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it
+to be witty.
+
+"Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she said, with cheerful inaccuracy;
+"you haven't done much with that either."  And she crossed the garden,
+pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.
+
+In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house slowly,
+and with a thought-clouded brow.  He was one of those men who are
+quite clever, but quite the reverse of quick.  As he came back
+out of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke
+slipped swiftly to her feet and began putting away the tea things.
+But it was not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique
+that he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting camera.
+For Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her chin
+on her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.
+
+"You are busy," said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen,
+and wishing to ignore it.
+
+"There's no time for dreaming in this world," answered the young lady
+with her back to him.
+
+"I have been thinking lately," said Inglewood in a low voice,
+"that there's no time for waking up."
+
+She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the garden.
+
+"I don't smoke or drink, you know," he said irrelevantly,
+"because I think they're drugs.  And yet I fancy all hobbies,
+like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too.  Getting under a
+black hood, getting into a dark room--getting into a hole anyhow.
+Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air.
+Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself.
+That's the matter with all of us.  We're too busy to wake up."
+
+"Well," said the girl solidly, "what is there to wake up to?"
+
+"There must be!" cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
+excitement--"there must be something to wake up to!
+All we do is preparations--your cleanliness, and my healthiness,
+and Warner's scientific appliances.  We're always preparing
+for something--something that never comes off.  I ventilate
+the house, and you sweep the house; but what is going to HAPPEN
+in the house?"
+
+She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes,
+and seemed to be searching for some form of words which she
+could not find.
+
+Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt,
+in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the doorway.
+She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of
+the most infantile astonishment.
+
+"Well, here's a fine game!" she said, panting.  "What am I to do now,
+I wonder?  I've wired for Dr. Warner; that's all I can think of doing."
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving
+forward like one used to be called upon for assistance.
+
+"It's Mary," said the heiress, "my companion Mary Gray:
+that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her
+in the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and he wants
+to go off with her now for a special licence."
+
+Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked
+out on the garden, still golden with evening light.
+Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and twittering;
+but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road outside
+the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow
+Gladstone bag on top of it.
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter IV
+
+                    The Garden of the God
+
+
+Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance
+and utterance of the other girl.
+
+"Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she
+doesn't want to marry him."
+
+"But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in exasperation.
+"She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be parted from her."
+
+"Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what we can do."
+
+"But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her friend angrily.
+"I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's balmy!
+You or somebody MUST stop it!--Mr. Inglewood, you're a man;
+go and tell them they simply can't."
+
+"Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said Inglewood,
+with a depressed air.  "I have far less right of intervention
+than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral
+force than she."
+
+"You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund,
+the last stays of her formidable temper giving way;
+"I think I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck.
+I think I know some one who will help me more than you do,
+at any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man,
+and has a mind, and knows it..." And she flung out into the garden,
+with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.
+
+She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over
+the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down
+his long blue chin.  The very hardness of his expression pleased her,
+after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying
+of her other friends.
+
+"I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly.  "I hated you
+for being a cynic; but I've been well punished, for I want a cynic
+just now.  I've had my fill of sentiment--I'm fed up with it.
+The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon--all except the cynics, I think.
+That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she--
+and she--doesn't seem to mind."
+
+Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly,
+"I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab outside.  He swears he'll
+take her off now to his aunt's, and go for a special licence.
+Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon."
+
+Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand
+for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side
+of the garden.  "My practical advice to you is this," he said:
+"Let him go for his special licence, and ask him to get another
+one for you and me."
+
+"Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady.
+"Do say what you really mean."
+
+"I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,"
+said Moon with ponderous precision--"a plain, practical man:
+a man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight.
+He has let down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly
+on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up.
+We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this
+very sunlight.  We have had a little nap for five years or so,
+but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't see
+why that cab..."
+
+"Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you mean."
+
+"What a lie!" cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes.
+"I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but don't you see that to-night
+they won't do?  We've wandered into a world of facts, old girl.
+That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door,
+are facts.  You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I
+was after your money, and didn't really love you.  But if I stood
+here now and told you I didn't love you--you wouldn't believe me:
+for truth is in this garden to-night."
+
+"Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
+
+He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face.
+"Is my name Moon?" he asked.  "Is your name Hunt?  On my honour,
+they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names.
+It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name was `Sunrise.' But our
+real names are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep."
+
+"It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes;
+"one can never go back."
+
+"I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can carry
+you on my shoulder."
+
+"But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!"
+cried the girl earnestly.  "You could carry me off my feet, I dare say,
+soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that.
+These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith's, they--
+they do attract women, I don't deny it.  As you say, we're all
+telling the truth to-night. They've attracted poor Mary, for one.
+They attract me, Michael.  But the cold fact remains:
+imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment--
+you've got used to your drinks and things--I shan't be
+pretty much longer--"
+
+"Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael.  "And pray where in earth
+or heaven are there any prudent marriages?  Might as well talk
+about prudent suicides.  You and I have dawdled round each other
+long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray,
+who met last night?  You never know a husband till you marry him.
+Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy.  Who the devil are you
+that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
+Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed.  I, for one,
+don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute--
+a tower with all the trumpets shouting."
+
+"You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face,
+"and do you really want to marry me?"
+
+"My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman.  "What other
+occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to
+marry you?  What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep?
+It's not liberty, Rosamund.  Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland,
+you must marry Man--that is Me.  The only third thing is to marry yourself--
+yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied--
+and never satisfactory."
+
+"Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you won't talk so much,
+I'll marry you."
+
+"It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; "singing is the only thing.
+Can't you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?"
+
+"Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp authority.
+
+The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished;
+then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered
+shoes out of the Greek fairy tale.  He cleared three yards
+and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily levity;
+but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows,
+his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead;
+he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling.  The events
+of that enchanted evening were not at an end.
+
+Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious
+thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit
+of Rosamund.  It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour,
+seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels,
+the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor.  No words can express
+how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens.
+Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of
+paper or a sheet of steel.  It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.
+The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the most
+effeminate man can grow a beard.  It is a separate sexual power,
+and proves nothing one way or the other about force of character.
+But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke
+crying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.
+
+He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it)
+any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent.  He acted
+as men do when a theatre catches fire--very differently from how they
+would have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse.
+He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress
+was the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs
+(in consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own
+conduct except by the protests it evoked.
+
+"Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood--leave me alone; that's not the way to help."
+
+"But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding certainty;
+"I can, I can, I can..."
+
+"Why, you said," cried the girl, "that you were much weaker than me."
+
+"So I am weaker than you," said Arthur, in a voice that went
+vibrating through everything, "but not just now."
+
+"Let go my hands!" cried Diana.  "I won't be bullied."
+
+In one element he was much stronger than she--the matter of humour.
+This leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying:  "Well, you are mean.
+You know quite well you'll bully me all the rest of my life.
+You might allow a man the one minute of his life when he's allowed to bully."
+
+It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry,
+and for the first time since her childhood Diana was entirely
+off her guard.
+
+"Do you mean you want to marry me?" she said.
+
+"Why, there's a cab at the door!" cried Inglewood, springing up
+with an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors
+that led into the garden.
+
+As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time
+that the house and garden were on a steep height over London.  And yet,
+though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret:
+it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of the
+turrets of heaven.
+
+Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring
+all sorts of details with a senseless delight.  He noticed for
+the first time that the railings of the gate beyond the garden
+bushes were moulded like little spearheads and painted blue.
+He noticed that one of the blue spears was loosened in its place,
+and hung sideways; and this almost made him laugh.  He thought it
+somehow exquisitely harmless and funny that the railing should
+be crooked; he thought he should like to know how it happened,
+who did it, and how the man was getting on.
+
+When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realized
+that they were not alone.  Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon,
+both of whom they had last seen in the blackest temper of detachment,
+were standing together on the lawn.  They were standing in quite
+an ordinary manner, and yet they looked somehow like people in a book.
+
+"Oh," said Diana, "what lovely air!"
+
+"I know," called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive
+that it rang out like a complaint.  "It's just like that horrid,
+beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me feel happy."
+
+"Oh, it isn't like anything but itself!" answered Diana, breathing deeply.
+"Why, it's all cold, and yet it feels like fire."
+
+"Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,"
+said Mr. Moon.  "Balmy--especially on the crumpet."
+And he fanned himself quite unnecessarily with his straw hat.
+They were all full of little leaps and pulsations of objectless
+and airy energy.  Diana stirred and stretched her long arms rigidly,
+as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating restfulness;
+Michael stood still for long intervals, with gathered muscles,
+then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still again;
+Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip, except when they
+fall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her foot
+as she moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood,
+leaning quite quietly against a tree, had unconsciously
+clutched a branch and shaken it with a creative violence.
+Those giant gestures of Man, that made the high statues
+and the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their limbs.
+Silently as they strolled and stood they were bursting like
+batteries with an animal magnetism.
+
+"And now," cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each side,
+"let's dance round that bush!"
+
+"Why, what bush do you mean?" asked Rosamund, looking round with a sort
+of radiant rudeness.
+
+"The bush that isn't there," said Michael--"the Mulberry Bush."
+
+They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and quite ritually;
+and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round,
+like a demon spinning the world for a top.  Diana felt, as the circle of
+the horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring
+of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a child;
+she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate,
+or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
+
+The circle broke--as all such perfect circles of levity must break--
+and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away
+against the blue rails of the gate.  When reeling there he suddenly
+raised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
+
+"Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms.  "It's jolly old Warner--
+with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!"
+
+"Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a
+burst of memory, amusement, and distress.  "Oh, I'm so sorry!
+Oh, do tell him it's all right!"
+
+"Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon.  For indeed,
+while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind
+the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion
+in the cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.
+
+Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by
+an heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when,
+as you come in through the garden to the house, the heiress
+and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders join hands
+and dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's all right! it's
+all right!" you are apt to be flustered and even displeased.
+Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.
+The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained
+to him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure,
+was just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round
+by a ring of laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore--
+even then he seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
+
+"Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare,
+"are you mad?"
+
+Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered,
+easily and quietly enough, "Not now.  The truth is, Warner, I've just
+made a rather important medical discovery--quite in your line."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly--"what discovery?"
+
+"I've discovered that health really is catching, like disease,"
+answered Arthur.
+
+"Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said Michael,
+performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful expression.
+"Twenty thousand more cases taken to the hospitals;
+nurses employed night and day."
+
+Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly moving
+legs with an unfathomed wonder.  "And is THIS, may I ask,"
+he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"
+
+"You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt heartily.
+"I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake.
+I was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now
+it all seems like a dream--and and Mr. Smith is the sweetest,
+most sensible, most delightful old thing that ever existed,
+and he may marry any one he likes--except me."
+
+"I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.
+
+The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased.  He took a slip
+of pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale
+blue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.
+He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.
+
+"Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very reassuring.
+You sent me this wire only half an hour ago:  `Come at once,
+if possible, with another doctor.  Man--Innocent Smith--gone mad
+on premises, and doing dreadful things.  Do you know anything of him?'
+I went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor
+who is also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy;
+he has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab.  Now you calmly
+tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing,
+with accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity.
+I hardly comprehend the change."
+
+"Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody's soul?"
+cried Rosamund, in despair.  "Must I confess we had got so morbid
+as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that we
+didn't even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves?
+We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we're happy enough."
+
+"Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.
+
+Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their farce,
+who had not been visible for an hour or more.
+
+"I--I think he's on the other side of the house, by the dustbin," he said.
+
+"He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he must be found."
+And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house
+by the sunflowers.
+
+"I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with Mr. Smith."
+
+"Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort.
+"A man can't be locked up for falling in love--at least
+I hope not."
+
+"No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of him.
+He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you know?
+I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well.  I believe Innocent Smith
+is simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary."
+
+It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass
+with the point of her white shoe.
+
+"I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not extraordinary at all.
+He's comic just because he's so startlingly commonplace.
+Don't you know what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts
+and uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays?
+That bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.
+This tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any
+schoolboy would have climbed.  Yes, that's the thing that has
+haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.
+Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my
+old schoolfellows.  He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
+animal that we have all been."
+
+"That is only you absurd boys," said Diana.  "I don't believe
+any girl was ever so silly, and I'm sure no girl was ever
+so happy, except--" and she stopped.
+
+"I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith," said Michael Moon in a
+low voice.  "Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain.  He is not there.
+Haven't you noticed that we never saw him since we found ourselves?
+He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only our own
+youth returned.  Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab,
+the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn.
+Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing,
+but the man we shall never see.  In a spring garden before breakfast
+we shall smell the smell called Smith.  In the snapping of brisk twigs
+in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith.  Everything insatiable
+and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like babies at a bun feast,
+in the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white firwood,
+we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity;
+but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate things
+not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and heavens; he--"
+
+He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.
+Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,
+leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road.  He clutched the blue railings
+of the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise.
+He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face that seemed
+made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and resplendent
+as Warner's, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder part of his head.
+
+"Murder!" he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating voice.
+"Stop that murderer there!"
+
+Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows
+of the house, and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came
+flying round the corner like a leaping rabbit.  Yet before
+he had reached the group a third discharge had deafened them,
+and they saw with their own eyes two spots of white sky drilled
+through the second of the unhappy Herbert's high hats.
+The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot,
+and came down on all fours, staring like a cow.  The hat with
+the two shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him,
+and Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway train.
+He was looking twice his proper size--a giant clad in green,
+the big revolver still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine
+and in shadow, his eyes blazing like all stars, and his yellow
+hair standing out all ways like Struwelpeter's.
+
+Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness,
+Inglewood had time to feel once more what he had felt when
+he saw the other lovers standing on the lawn--the sensation
+of a certain cut and coloured clearness that belongs rather
+to the things of art than to the things of experience.
+The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the green
+bulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked
+railings behind, clutched by the stranger's yellow vulture
+claws and peered over by his long vulture neck, the silk hat
+on the gravel, and the little cloudlet of smoke floating
+across the garden as innocently as the puff of a cigarette--
+all these seemed unnaturally distinct and definite.
+They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation.
+Indeed, every object grew more and more particular
+and precious because the whole picture was breaking up.
+Things look so bright just before they burst.
+
+Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased,
+Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith's arms.
+Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and taken
+the other.  Smith went into peals of laughter, and surrendered
+his pistol with perfect willingness.  Moon raised the doctor
+to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly on the garden gate.
+The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women mostly
+are in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that,
+somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the sky.
+The doctor himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits,
+and dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to
+them in brief apology.  He was very white with his recent panic,
+but he spoke with perfect self-control.
+
+"You will excuse us, ladies," he said; "my friend and
+Mr. Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways.
+I think we had better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate
+with you later."
+
+And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed Smith
+was led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.
+
+From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant
+boom of mirth could again be heard through the half-open window;
+but there came no echo of the quiet voices of the physicians.
+The girls walked about the garden together, rubbing up each other's
+spirits as best they might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against
+the gate.  Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner
+came out of the house with a face less pale but even more stern,
+and the little man with the fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear.
+And if the face of Warner in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge,
+the face of the little man behind was more like a death's head.
+
+"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner, "I only wish to offer you my warm
+thanks and admiration.  By your prompt courage and wisdom in sending
+for us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put out
+of mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity--
+a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been before
+combined in flesh."
+
+Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking eyes.
+"What do you mean?" she asked.  "You can't mean Mr. Smith?"
+
+"He has gone by many other names," said the doctor gravely,
+"and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind him.  That man,
+Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and tears across the world.
+Whether he is mad as well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests
+of science, to discover.  In any case, we shall have to take him
+to a magistrate first, even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum.
+But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will have to be
+sealed with wall within wall, and ringed with guns like a fortress,
+or he will break out again to bring forth carnage and darkness
+on the earth."
+
+Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler.
+Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate;
+but he continued to lean on it without moving, with his face turned
+away towards the darkening road.
+
+
+
+
+                          Chapter V
+
+               The Allegorical Practical Joker
+
+
+The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat
+more urbane and even dapper figure than he had appeared when
+clutching the railings and craning his neck into the garden.
+He even looked comparatively young when he took his hat off,
+having fair hair parted in the middle and carefully curled
+on each side, and lively movements, especially of the hands.
+He had a dandified monocle slung round his neck by a broad black ribbon,
+and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had alighted on him.
+His dress and gestures were bright enough for a boy's; it was only
+when you looked at the fish-bone face that you beheld something
+acrid and old.  His manners were excellent, though hardly English,
+and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people who only met
+him once remembered him.  One was a trick of closing his eyes
+when he wished to be particularly polite; the other was one of
+lifting his joined thumb and forefinger in the air as if holding
+a pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering over a word.
+But those who were longer in his company tended to forget these
+oddities in the stream of his quaint and solemn conversation
+and really singular views.
+
+"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Warner, "this is Dr. Cyrus Pym."
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he were
+"playing fair" in some child's game, and gave a prompt little bow,
+which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United States.
+
+"Dr. Cyrus Pym," continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes again), "is perhaps
+the first criminological expert of America.  We are very fortunate to be able
+to consult with him in this extraordinary case--"
+
+"I can't make head or tail of anything," said Rosamund.  "How can
+poor Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?"
+
+"Or by your telegram," said Herbert Warner, smiling.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand," cried the girl impatiently.
+"Why, he's done us all more good than going to church."
+
+"I think I can explain to the young lady," said Dr. Cyrus Pym.  "This criminal
+or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method of his own,
+a method of the most daring ingenuity.  He is popular wherever he goes,
+for he invades every house as an uproarious child.  People are
+getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel;
+so he always uses the disguise of--what shall I say--the Bohemian,
+the blameless Bohemian.  He always carries people off their feet.
+People are used to the mask of conventional good conduct.
+He goes in for eccentric good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress
+up as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant; but you're not prepared
+when he dresses up as Don Quixote.  You expect a humbug to behave like
+Sir Charles Grandison; because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep,
+tear-moving tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison
+so often behaved like a humbug.  But no real red-blooded citizen is quite
+ready for a humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison
+but on Sir Roger de Coverly.  Setting up to be a good man a little cracked
+is a new criminal incognito, Miss Hunt.  It's been a great notion,
+and uncommonly successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel.
+I can forgive Dick Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can't forgive
+him when he impersonates Dr. Johnson.  The saint with a tile loose
+is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be parodied."
+
+"But how do you know," cried Rosamund desperately, "that Mr. Smith
+is a known criminal?"
+
+"I collated all the documents," said the American, "when my friend Warner
+knocked me up on receipt of your cable.  It is my professional affair
+to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there's no more doubt about them
+than about the Bradshaw down at the depot.  This man has hitherto escaped
+the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or insanity.
+But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated notes
+of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this manner.
+He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a grand popularity.
+He makes things go.  They do go; when he's gone the things are gone.
+Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man's life or a man's spoons, or more often a woman.
+I assure you I have all the memoranda."
+
+"I have seen them," said Warner solidly, "I can assure you
+that all this is correct."
+
+"The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings," went on the American
+doctor, "is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a wild simulation
+of innocence.  From almost every house where this great imaginative devil
+has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him; some say he's got
+a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and that they go like automata.
+What's become of all those poor girls nobody knows.  Murdered, I dare say;
+for we've lots of instances, besides this one, of his turning his hand
+to murder, though none ever brought him under the law.  Anyhow, our most
+modern methods of research can't find any trace of the wretched women.
+It's when I think of them that I am really moved, Miss Hunt.  And I've
+really nothing else to say just now except what Dr. Warner has said."
+
+"Quite so," said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in marble--"that
+we all have to thank you very much for that telegram."
+
+The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident
+sincerity that one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner--
+the falling eyelids, the rising intonation, and the poised
+finger and thumb--which were at other times a little comic.
+It was not so much that he was cleverer than Warner;
+perhaps he was not so clever, though he was more celebrated.
+But he had what Warner never had, a fresh and unaffected seriousness--
+the great American virtue of simplicity.  Rosamund knitted
+her brows and looked gloomily toward the darkening house
+that contained the dark prodigy.
+
+Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to silver,
+and was changing from silver to gray.  The long plumy shadows of the one or
+two trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead background of dusk.
+In the sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the entrance to the house
+by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a hurried consultation
+between Inglewood (who was still left in charge of the mysterious captive)
+and Diana, who had moved to his assistance from without.  After a few minutes
+and gestures they went inside, shutting the glass doors upon the garden;
+and the garden seemed to grow grayer still.
+
+The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move
+in the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a
+flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity,
+and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult,
+pedantic as he was, to call him a pedant.
+
+"I'm vurry sorry, Miss Hunt," he said; "but Dr. Warner and I,
+as two quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith
+away in that cab, and the less said about it the better.
+Don't you agitate yourself, Miss Hunt.  You've just got to think
+that we're taking away a monstrosity, something that oughtn't to be
+at all--something like one of those gods in your Britannic Museum,
+all wings, and beards, and legs, and eyes, and no shape.
+That's what Smith is, and you shall soon be quit of him."
+
+He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about
+to follow him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke
+came out with more than her usual quickness across the lawn.
+Her face was aquiver with worry and excitement, and her dark earnest
+eyes fixed only on the other girl.
+
+"Rosamund," she cried in despair, "what shall I do with her?"
+
+"With her?" cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump.  "O lord,
+he isn't a woman too, is he?"
+
+"No, no, no," said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common fairness.
+"A woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that."
+
+"I mean your friend Mary Gray," retorted Diana with equal tartness.
+"What on earth am I to do with her?"
+
+"How can we tell her about Smith, you mean," answered Rosamund, her face
+at once clouded and softening.  "Yes, it will be pretty painful."
+
+"But I HAVE told her," exploded Diana, with more than her
+congenital exasperation.  "I have told her, and she doesn't seem to mind.
+She still says she's going away with Smith in that cab."
+
+"But it's impossible!" ejaculated Rosamund.  "Why, Mary is
+really religious.  She--"
+
+She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively
+close to her on the lawn.  Her quiet companion had come down very
+quietly into the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel.
+She had a neat but very ancient blue tam-o'-shanter on her head,
+and was pulling some rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands.
+Yet the two tints fitted excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair;
+the more excellently for the touch of shabbiness:  for a woman's clothes
+never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her by accident.
+
+But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and attractive.
+In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are
+already sad, it will often happen that one reflection at some
+occasional angle will cause to linger the last of the light.
+A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a scrap of looking-glass,
+will be full of the fire that is lost to all the rest of the earth.
+The quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray was like some
+triangular piece of mirror that could still repeat the splendour
+of hours before.  Mary, though she was always graceful,
+could never before have properly been called beautiful; and yet
+her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful as to make
+a man catch his breath.
+
+"O Diana," cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
+"but how did you tell her?"
+
+"It is quite easy to tell her," answered Diana sombrely;
+"it makes no impression at all."
+
+"I'm afraid I've kept everything waiting," said Mary Gray apologetically,
+"and now we must really say good-bye. Innocent is taking me to his aunt's
+over at Hampstead, and I'm afraid she goes to bed early."
+
+Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort
+of sleepy light in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness;
+she was like one speaking absently with her eye on some
+very distant object.
+
+"Mary, Mary," cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, "I'm so sorry about it,
+but the thing can't be at all.  We--we have found out all about Mr. Smith."
+
+"All?" repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation;
+"why, that must be awfully exciting."
+
+There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that
+the silent Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head,
+as it might be to listen.  Then Rosamund remaining speechless,
+Dr. Pym came to her rescue in a definite way.
+
+"To begin with," he said, "this man Smith is constantly attempting murder.
+The Warden of Brakespeare College--"
+
+"I know," said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile.
+"Innocent told me."
+
+"I can't say what he told you," replied Pym quickly, "but I'm very much
+afraid it wasn't true.  The plain truth is that the man's stained
+with every known human crime.  I assure you I have all the documents.
+I have evidence of his committing burglary, signed by a most eminent
+English curate.  I have--"
+
+"Oh, but there were two curates," cried Mary, with a certain gentle eagerness;
+"that was what made it so much funnier."
+
+The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more,
+and Inglewood appeared for an instant, making a sort of signal.
+The American doctor bowed, the English doctor did not,
+but they both set out stolidly towards the house.
+No one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the gate;
+but the back of his head and shoulders had still an indescribable
+indication that he was listening to every word.
+
+"But don't you understand, Mary," cried Rosamund in despair; "don't you
+know that awful things have happened even before our very eyes.
+I should have thought you would have heard the revolver shots upstairs."
+
+"Yes, I heard the shots," said Mary almost brightly; "but I was busy packing
+just then.  And Innocent had told me he was going to shoot at Dr. Warner;
+so it wasn't worth while to come down."
+
+"Oh, I don't understand what you mean," cried Rosamund Hunt,
+stamping, "but you must and shall understand what I mean.
+I don't care how cruelly I put it, if only I can save you.
+I mean that your Innocent Smith is the most awfully wicked
+man in the world.  He has sent bullets at lots of other men
+and gone off in cabs with lots of other women.  And he seems
+to have killed the women too, for nobody can find them."
+
+"He is really rather naughty sometimes," said Mary Gray,
+laughing softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.
+
+"Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something," said Rosamund,
+and burst into tears.
+
+At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out
+of the house with their great green-clad captive between them.
+He made no resistance, but was still laughing in a groggy
+and half-witted style.  Arthur Inglewood followed in the rear,
+a dark and red study in the last shades of distress and shame.
+In this black, funereal, and painfully realistic style the exit
+from Beacon House was made by a man whose entrance a day before
+had been effected by the happy leaping of a wall and the hilarious
+climbing of a tree.  No one moved of the groups in the garden
+except Mary Gray, who stepped forward quite naturally,
+calling out, "Are you ready, Innocent?  Our cab's been waiting
+such a long time."
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," said Dr. Warner firmly, "I must insist on asking
+this lady to stand aside.  We shall have trouble enough as it is,
+with the three of us in a cab."
+
+"But it IS our cab," persisted Mary.  "Why, there's Innocent's yellow
+bag on the top of it."
+
+"Stand aside," repeated Warner roughly.  "And you, Mr. Moon,
+please be so obliging as to move a moment.  Come, come! the sooner
+this ugly business is over the better--and how can we open the gate
+if you will keep leaning on it?"
+
+Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed
+to consider and reconsider this argument.  "Yes," he said at last;
+"but how can I lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?"
+
+"Oh, get out of the way!" cried Warner, almost good-humouredly.
+"You can lean on the gate any time."
+
+"No," said Moon reflectively.  "Seldom the time and the place
+and the blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you
+come of an old country family.  My ancestors leaned on gates
+before any one had discovered how to open them."
+
+"Michael!" cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, "are you going to get
+out of the way?"
+
+"Why, no; I think not," said Michael, after some meditation,
+and swung himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company,
+while still, in a lounging attitude, occupying the path.
+
+"Hullo!" he called out suddenly; "what are you doing to Mr. Smith?"
+
+"Taking him away," answered Warner shortly, "to be examined."
+
+"Matriculation?" asked Moon brightly.
+
+"By a magistrate," said the other curtly.
+
+"And what other magistrate," cried Michael, raising his voice,
+"dares to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient
+and independent Dukes of Beacon?  What other court dares to try
+one of our company, save only the High Court of Beacon?  Have you
+forgotten that only this afternoon we flew the flag of independence
+and severed ourselves from all the nations of the earth?"
+
+"Michael," cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, "how can you stand
+there talking nonsense?  Why, you saw the dreadful thing yourself.
+You were there when he went mad.  It was you that helped the doctor
+up when he fell over the flower-pot."
+
+"And the High Court of Beacon," replied Moon with hauteur,
+"has special powers in all cases concerning lunatics,
+flower-pots, and doctors who fall down in gardens.
+It's in our very first charter from Edward I:  `Si medicus
+quisquam in horto prostratus--'"
+
+"Out of the way!" cried Warner with sudden fury, "or we will force
+you out of it."
+
+"What!" cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious fierceness.
+"Shall I die in defence of this sacred pale?  Will you paint
+these blue railings red with my gore?" and he laid hold of one
+of the blue spikes behind him.  As Inglewood had noticed earlier
+in the evening, the railing was loose and crooked at this place,
+and the painted iron staff and spearhead came away in Michael's
+hand as he shook it.
+
+"See!" he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air,
+"the very lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend it.
+Ah, in such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!"
+And in a voice like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard--
+
+"Ou pour l'honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince, Navre,
+poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province."
+
+
+"Sakes alive!" said the American gentleman, almost in an awed tone.
+Then he added, "Are there two maniacs here?"
+
+"No; there are five," thundered Moon.  "Smith and I are the only
+sane people left."
+
+"Michael!" cried Rosamund; "Michael, what does it mean?"
+
+"It means bosh!" roared Michael, and slung his painted spear
+hurtling to the other end of the garden.  "It means that doctors
+are bosh, and criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh--
+much more bosh than our Court of Beacon.  It means, you fatheads,
+that Innocent Smith is no more mad or bad than the bird
+on that tree."
+
+"But, my dear Moon," began Inglewood in his modest manner, "these gentlemen--"
+
+"On the word of two doctors," exploded Moon again,
+without listening to anybody else, "shut up in a private hell
+on the word of two doctors!  And such doctors!  Oh, my hat!
+Look at 'em!--do just look at 'em!  Would you read a book,
+or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty such?
+My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics.  What would
+you say if I called a man wicked on the word of two priests?"
+
+"But it isn't only their word, Michael," reasoned Rosamund;
+"they've got evidence too."
+
+"Have you looked at it?" asked Moon.
+
+"No," said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; "these gentlemen
+are in charge of it."
+
+"And of everything else, it seems to me," said Michael.  "Why, you
+haven't even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke."
+
+"Oh, that's no use," said Diana in an undertone to Rosamund; "Auntie can't
+say `Bo!' to a goose."
+
+"I am glad to hear it," answered Michael, "for with such a flock of geese
+to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on her lips.
+For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light
+and airy style.  I appeal to Mrs. Duke--it's her house."
+
+"Mrs. Duke?" repeated Inglewood doubtfully.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Duke," said Michael firmly, "commonly called the Iron Duke."
+
+"If you ask Auntie," said Diana quietly, "she'll only be for doing nothing
+at all.  Her only idea is to hush things up or to let things slide.
+That just suits her."
+
+"Yes," replied Michael Moon; "and, as it happens, it just suits
+all of us.  You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke;
+but when you are as old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew--
+that half one's letters answer themselves if you can only refrain
+from the fleshly appetite of answering them."
+
+He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow
+on the grate, but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time;
+just as it had changed from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant,
+it now changed to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer giving
+good legal advice.
+
+"It isn't only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if
+she can," he said; "we all want to keep it quiet if we can.
+Look at the large facts--the big bones of the case.  I believe
+those scientific gentlemen have made a highly scientific mistake.
+I believe Smith is as blameless as a buttercup.  I admit
+buttercups don't often let off loaded pistols in private houses;
+I admit there is something demanding explanation.
+But I am morally certain there's some blunder, or some joke,
+or some allegory, or some accident behind all this.
+Well, suppose I'm wrong.  We've disarmed him; we're five men
+to hold him; he may as well go to a lock-up later on as now.
+But suppose there's even a chance of my being right.
+Is it anybody's interest here to wash this linen in public?
+
+"Come, I'll take each of you in order.  Once take Smith outside that gate,
+and you take him into the front page of the evening papers.  I know;
+I've written the front page myself.  Miss Duke, do you or your aunt want
+a sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house--`Doctors shot here.'?
+No, no--doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you don't want the rubbish
+shot here.  Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I am wrong.
+Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours.  Mark my words,
+if he's proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you
+introduced him.  If he's proved innocent, they will say you helped
+to collar him.  Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong.
+If he's proved guilty, they'll say you engaged your companion to him.
+If he's proved innocent, they'll print that telegram.
+I know the Organs, damn them."
+
+He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more
+breathless than had either his theatrical or his real denunciation.
+But he was plainly in earnest, as well as positive and lucid;
+as was proved by his proceeding quickly the moment he had
+found his breath.
+
+"It is just the same," he cried, "with our medical friends.
+You will say that Dr. Warner has a grievance.  I agree.
+But does he want specially to be snapshotted by all the
+journalists ~prostratus in horto~? It was no fault of his,
+but the scene was not very dignified even for him.
+He must have justice; but does he want to ask for justice,
+not only on his knees, but on his hands and knees?
+Does he want to enter the court of justice on all fours?
+Doctors are not allowed to advertise; and I'm sure no
+doctor wants to advertise himself as looking like that.
+And even for our American guest the interest is the same.
+Let us suppose that he has conclusive documents.
+Let us assume that he has revelations really worth reading.
+Well, in a legal inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that matter)
+ten to one he won't be allowed to read them.  He'll be tripped
+up every two or three minutes with some tangle of old rules.
+A man can't tell the truth in public nowadays.  But he can
+still tell it in private; he can tell it inside that house."
+
+"It is quite true," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened throughout
+the speech with a seriousness which only an American could have retained
+through such a scene.  "It is true that I have been per-ceptibly less
+hampered in private inquiries."
+
+"Dr. Pym!" cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger.
+"Dr. Pym! you aren't really going to admit--"
+
+"Smith may be mad," went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue
+that seemed as heavy as a hatchet, "but there was something
+after all in what he said about Home Rule for every home.
+Yes, there is something, when all's said and done, in the High Court
+of Beacon.  It is really true that human beings might often get
+some sort of domestic justice where just now they can only get
+legal injustice--oh, I am a lawyer too, and I know that as well.
+It is true that there's too much official and indirect power.
+Often and often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing
+a family could settle.  Scores of young criminals have been fined
+and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.
+Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they
+only wanted a week at Brighton.  There IS something in Smith's
+notion of domestic self-government; and I propose that we put it
+into practice.  You have the prisoner; you have the documents.
+Come, we are a company of free, white, Christian people,
+such as might be besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island.
+Let us do this thing ourselves.  Let us go into that house there
+and sit down and find out with our own eyes and ears whether this
+thing is true or not; whether this Smith is a man or a monster.
+If we can't do a little thing like that, what right have we to put
+crosses on ballot papers?"
+
+Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool,
+saw in that glance that Moon was gaining ground.  The motives that led
+Arthur to think of surrender were indeed very different from those
+which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym.  All Arthur's instincts were on the side
+of privacy and polite settlement; he was very English and would often
+endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric.
+To play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend,
+would have been absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official
+part he had played that afternoon was very painful.  He was not likely
+to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
+sleeping dogs lie.
+
+On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
+possible that seem crazy to the English.  Regulations and authorities exactly
+like one of Innocent's pranks or one of Michael's satires really exist,
+propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men.
+Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and fanciful;
+each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village, and as
+unexpected as an apple-pie bed.  States where no man may have a cigarette,
+States where any man may have ten wives, very strict prohibition States,
+very lax divorce States--all these large local vagaries had prepared
+Cyrus Pym's mind for small local vagaries in a smaller country.
+Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or Italian,
+utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions are,
+he could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon.  It is
+firmly believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very
+end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be
+some Britannic institution.
+
+Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached
+through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk
+apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.
+Something at once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this
+being moved Michael to even heartier outbursts of a healthy
+and humane flippancy.
+
+"Why, here's little Nosey Gould," he exclaimed.  "Isn't the mere
+sight of him enough to banish all your morbid reflections?"
+
+"Really," replied Dr. Warner, "I really fail to see how Mr. Gould
+affects the question; and I once more demand--"
+
+"Hello! what's the funeral, gents?" inquired the newcomer with the air
+of an uproarious umpire.  "Doctor demandin' something?  Always the way
+at a boarding-house, you know.  Always lots of demand.  No supply."
+
+As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his position,
+and indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain dangerous
+and dubious acts, and that there had even arisen an allegation that
+he was insane.
+
+"Well, of course he is," said Moses Gould equably; "it don't
+need old 'Olmes to see that.  The 'awk-like face of 'Olmes,"
+he added with abstract relish, "showed a shide of disappointment,
+the sleuth-like Gould 'avin' got there before 'im."
+
+"If he is mad," began Inglewood.
+
+"Well," said Moses, "when a cove gets out on the tile the first night
+there's generally a tile loose."
+
+"You never objected before," said Diana Duke rather stiffly,
+"and you're generally pretty free with your complaints."
+
+"I don't compline of him," said Moses magnanimously, "the poor chap's
+'armless enough; you might tie 'im up in the garden here and 'e'd
+make noises at the burglars."
+
+"Moses," said Moon with solemn fervour, "you are the incarnation
+of Common Sense.  You think Mr. Innocent is mad.  Let me introduce you
+to the incarnation of Scientific Theory.  He also thinks Mr. Innocent
+is mad.--Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.--Moses, this is the celebrated
+Dr. Pym."  The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and bowed.
+He also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice, which sounded
+like "Pleased to meet you."
+
+"Now you two people," said Michael cheerfully, "who both think our poor
+friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there and prove him mad.
+What could be more powerful than the combination of Scientific Theory
+with Common Sense?  United you stand; divided you fall.  I will not be
+so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I confine myself
+to recording the chronological accident that he has not shown us any so far.
+I take the freedom of an old friend in staking my shirt that Moses has no
+scientific theory.  Yet against this strong coalition I am ready to appear,
+armed with nothing but an intuition--which is American for a guess."
+
+"Distinguished by Mr. Gould's assistance," said Pym, opening his
+eyes suddenly.  "I gather that though he and I are identical
+in primary di-agnosis there is yet between us something that
+cannot be called a disagreement, something which we may perhaps
+call a--" He put the points of thumb and forefinger together,
+spreading the other fingers exquisitely in the air, and seemed
+to be waiting for somebody else to tell him what to say.
+
+"Catchin' flies?" inquired the affable Moses.
+
+"A divergence," said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief; "a divergence.
+Granted that the man in question is deranged, he would not necessarily
+be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac--"
+
+"Has it occurred to you," observed Moon, who was leaning on the gate again,
+and did not turn round, "that if he were a homicidal maniac he might have
+killed us all here while we were talking."
+
+Something exploded silently underneath all their minds,
+like sealed dynamite in some forgotten cellars.  They all
+remembered for the first time for some hour or two that the monster
+of whom they were talking was standing quietly among them.
+They had left him in the garden like a garden statue; there might
+have been a dolphin coiling round his legs, or a fountain pouring out
+of his mouth, for all the notice they had taken of Innocent Smith.
+He stood with his crest of blonde, blown hair thrust somewhat forward,
+his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted face looking patiently
+downwards at nothing in particular, his huge shoulders humped,
+and his hands in his trousers pockets.  So far as they could guess
+he had not moved at all.  His green coat might have been cut out
+of the green turf on which he stood.  In his shadow Pym had expounded
+and Rosamund expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged.
+He had remained like a thing graven; the god of the garden.
+A sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and then,
+after correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.
+
+"Why," cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, "the Court of Beacon
+has opened--and shut up again too.  You all know now I am right.
+Your buried common sense has told you what my buried common sense has
+told me.  Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol,
+and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is harmless.
+Back we all go to the house and clear a room for discussion.
+For the High Court of Beacon, which has already arrived at its decision,
+is just about to begin its inquiry."
+
+"Just a goin' to begin!" cried little Mr. Moses in an extraordinary
+sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal during music
+or a thunderstorm.  "Follow on to the 'Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon;
+'ave a kipper from the old firm!  'Is Lordship complimented
+Mr. Gould on the 'igh professional delicacy 'e had shown,
+and which was worthy of the best traditions of the Saloon Bar--
+and three of Scotch hot, miss!  Oh, chase me, girls!"
+
+The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a
+sort of waddling dance of pure excitement; and had made a circuit
+of the garden before he reappeared, breathless but still beaming.
+Moon had known his man when he realized that no people presented
+to Moses Gould could be quite serious, even if they were
+quite furious.  The glass doors stood open on the side nearest
+to Mr. Moses Gould; and as the feet of that festive idiot were
+evidently turned in the same direction, everybody else went
+that way with the unanimity of some uproarious procession.
+Only Diana Duke retained enough rigidity to say the thing that had
+been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few hours.
+Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as unsympathetic.
+"In that case," she said sharply, "these cabs can be sent away."
+
+"Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know," said Mary with a smile.
+"I dare say the cabman would get it down for us."
+
+"I'll get the bag," said Smith, speaking for the first time in hours;
+his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.
+
+Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility
+were left breathless by his precipitance.  With a run and spring
+he was out of the garden into the street; with a spring and
+one quivering kick he was actually on the roof of the cab.
+The cabman happened to be standing by the horse's head, having just
+removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith seemed for an instant to be
+rolling about on the cab's back in the embraces of his Gladstone bag.
+The next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a royal luck,
+into the high seat behind, and with a shriek of piercing and
+appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying and scampering
+down the street.
+
+His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it
+was all the other people who were turned into garden statues.
+Mr. Moses Gould, however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally
+for the purposes of permanent sculpture, came to life some time before
+the rest, and, turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily
+with a stranger on an omnibus, "Tile loose, eh?  Cab loose anyhow."
+There followed a fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer
+like a club of stone,--
+
+"This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon.  You have let
+loose a maniac on the whole metropolis."
+
+Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent
+of continuous houses.  The little garden that shut it in ran out into
+a sharp point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets.
+Smith and his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly
+most of those standing inside of it never expected to see him again.
+At the apex, however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal
+violence up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the group.
+With a common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him,
+but they soon had reason to duck and recoil.  Even as he vanished up
+street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly from his hand,
+so that it fell in the centre of the garden, scattering the company
+like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner's hat for the third time.
+Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot away with a
+shriek that went into a whisper.
+
+"Well," said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice;
+"you may as well all go inside anyhow.  We've got two relics
+of Mr. Smith at least; his fiancee and his trunk."
+
+"Why do you want us to go inside?" asked Arthur Inglewood,
+in whose red brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed
+to have reached its limit.
+
+"I want the rest to go in," said Michael in a clear voice,
+"because I want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you."
+
+There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting colder,
+and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the twilight.
+Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.
+
+"I refuse to listen to any such proposal," he said; "you have lost
+this ruffian, and I must find him."
+
+"I don't ask you to listen to any proposal," answered Moon quietly;
+"I only ask you to listen."
+
+He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately
+the whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side
+of the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
+Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
+rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had
+swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
+Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness,
+and coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine
+attitude as before.
+
+"Get inside! get inside!" cried Moon hilariously, with the air
+of one shooing a company of cats.  "Come, come, be quick about it!
+Didn't I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?"
+
+How they were all really driven into the house again it would
+have been difficult afterwards to say.  They had reached the point
+of being exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce
+are ill with laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among
+the trees seemed like a final gesture of things in general.
+Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain amicable
+exasperation, "I say, do you really want to speak to me?"
+
+"I do," said Michael, "very much."
+
+Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed
+to promise.  While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very
+large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees,
+proved by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray indeed.
+A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds across
+the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and yet laborious wind.
+
+"Arthur," said Michael, "I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
+You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed Court
+of Beacon, and to clear him too--clear him of both crime and lunacy.
+Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit."  They walked up
+and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
+
+"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of those queer old
+hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot countries.
+How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
+Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red,
+or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's
+ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it
+up at all."
+
+Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend
+had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless
+a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was
+asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly
+suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels.
+How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could
+not conceive.  Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.
+
+"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon abruptly,
+"even if they've forgotten the answers?  Riddles are easy to remember
+because they are hard to guess.  So were those stiff old symbols
+in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard
+to guess.  Their colours were plain.  Their shapes were plain.
+Everything was plain except the meaning."
+
+Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon
+went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking
+faster and faster.  "Dances, too," he said; "dances were not frivolous.
+Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts.
+The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent.
+Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?"
+
+"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour,
+"have I noticed anything else?"
+
+"Have you noticed this about him," asked Moon, with unshaken persistency,
+"that he has done so much and said so little?  When first he came he talked,
+but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he wasn't used to it.
+All he really did was actions--painting red flowers on black gowns or throwing
+yellow bags on to the grass.  I tell you that big green figure is figurative--
+like any green figure capering on some white Eastern wall."
+
+"My dear Michael," cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation which increased
+with the rising wind, "you are getting absurdly fanciful."
+
+"I think of what has just happened," said Michael steadily.
+"The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking
+all the time.  He fired three shots from a six-shooter and then
+gave it up to us, when he might have shot us dead in our boots.
+How could he express his trust in us better than that?
+He wanted to be tried by us.  How could he have shown it better
+than by standing quite still and letting us discuss it?
+He wanted to show that he stood there willingly,
+and could escape if he liked.  How could he have shown it
+better than by escaping in the cab and coming back again?
+Innocent Smith is not a madman--he is a ritualist.  He wants to
+express himself, not with his tongue, but with his arms and legs--
+with my body I thee worship, as it says in the marriage service.
+I begin to understand the old plays and pageants.  I see why
+the mutes at a funeral were mute.  I see why the mummers were mum.
+They MEANT something; and Smith means something too.
+All other jokes have to be noisy--like little Nosey Gould's jokes,
+for instance.  The only silent jokes are the practical jokes.
+Poor Smith, properly considered, is an allegorical practical joker.
+What he has really done in this house has been as frantic
+as a war-dance, but as silent as a picture."
+
+"I suppose you mean," said the other dubiously, "that we have got to find out
+what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many coloured picture-puzzles.
+But even supposing that they do mean something--why, Lord bless my soul!--"
+
+Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted
+his eyes to the moon, by this time risen big and luminous,
+and had seen a huge, half-human figure sitting on the garden wall.
+It was outlined so sharply against the moon that for the first flash
+it was hard to be certain even that it was human:  the hunched
+shoulders and outstanding hair had rather the air of a colossal cat.
+It resembled a cat also in the fact that when first startled it
+sprang up and ran with easy activity along the top of the wall.
+As it ran, however, its heavy shoulders and small stooping head
+rather suggested a baboon.  The instant it came within reach
+of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was lost in the branches.
+The gale, which by this time was shaking every shrub in the garden,
+made the identification yet more difficult, since it melted
+the moving limbs of the fugitive in the multitudinous moving
+limbs of the tree.
+
+"Who is there?" shouted Arthur.  "Who are you?  Are you Innocent?"
+
+"Not quite," answered an obscure voice among the leaves.
+"I cheated you once about a penknife."
+
+The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
+backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it
+had on the gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.
+
+"But are you Smith?" asked Inglewood as in an agony.
+
+"Very nearly," said the voice out of the tossing tree.
+
+"But you must have some real names," shrieked Inglewood in despair.
+"You must call yourself something."
+
+"Call myself something," thundered the obscure voice, shaking the tree
+so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once.
+"I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand
+Homer Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare--"
+
+"But, manalive!" began Inglewood in exasperation.
+
+"That's right! that's right!" came with a roar out of the rocking tree;
+"that's my real name."  And he broke a branch, and one or two autumn
+leaves fluttered away across the moon.
+
+
+
+
+                           Part II
+
+             The Explanations of Innocent Smith
+
+
+
+
+                          Chapter I
+
+                      The Eye of Death;
+                    or, the Murder Charge
+
+
+The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court
+of Beacon with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow
+to increase its cosiness.  The big room was, as it were,
+cut up into small rooms, with walls only waist high--the sort
+of separation that children make when they are playing at shops.
+This had been done by Moses Gould and Michael Moon
+(the two most active members of this remarkable inquiry)
+with the ordinary furniture of the place.  At one end of the long
+mahogany table was set the one enormous garden chair, which was
+surmounted by the old torn tent or umbrella which Smith himself
+had suggested as a coronation canopy.  Inside this erection
+could be perceived the dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions
+and a form of countenance that already threatened slumber.
+At the other end sat the accused Smith, in a kind of dock;
+for he was carefully fenced in with a quadrilateral of light
+bedroom chairs, any of which he could have tossed out the window
+with his big toe.  He had been provided with pens and paper,
+out of the latter of which he made paper boats, paper darts,
+and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings.
+He never spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious
+as a child on the floor of an empty nursery.
+
+On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat
+the three young ladies with their backs up against the window,
+and Mary Gray in the middle; it was something between a jury
+box and the stall of the Queen of Beauty at a tournament.
+Down the centre of the long table Moon had built a low barrier
+out of eight bound volumes of "Good Words" to express the moral
+wall that divided the conflicting parties.  On the right side
+sat the two advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould;
+behind a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the case
+of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology.  On the other side,
+Moon and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified
+with books and papers; but as these included several old yellow
+volumes by Ouida and Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon
+seemed to have been somewhat careless and comprehensive.
+As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr. Warner, Moon wanted at first
+to have him kept entirely behind a high screen in the corner,
+urging the indelicacy of his appearance in court, but privately
+assuring him of an unofficial permission to peep over the top
+now and then.  Dr. Warner, however, failed to rise to the chivalry
+of such a course, and after some little disturbance and discussion
+he was accommodated with a seat on the right side of the table
+in a line with his legal advisers.
+
+It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym,
+after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear,
+rose to open the case.  His statement was clear and even restrained,
+and such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention
+by a certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers
+of American speech.
+
+He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany,
+closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.  "The time has gone by,"
+he said, "when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act,
+important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered.
+Science has profoundly..." here he paused, poising his compressed
+finger and thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea
+very tight by its tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said
+"modified," and let it go--"has profoundly Modified our view of death.
+In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life,
+catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity.
+Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal
+and inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding
+average which we call for convenience the order of nature.
+In the same way we have come to consider murder SOCIALLY.
+Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly
+deprived of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole,
+to see the rich rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings
+the golden harvests and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return
+for ever of the slayers and the slain."
+
+He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed slightly,
+putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent manners
+of Boston, and continued:  "There is but one result of this happier
+and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us.
+It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor,
+our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work,
+`The Destructive Type.'  We do not denounce Smith as a murderer,
+but rather as a murderous man.  The type is such that its very life--
+I might say its very health--is in killing.  Some hold that it is
+not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature.
+My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets--" (here Moon
+suddenly ejaculated a loud "hurrah!" but so instantaneously
+resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere
+else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly--"who,
+in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the creature's
+ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an end in itself.
+However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so with the prisoner.
+In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of the maniac;
+but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity.
+But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements--a cruel,
+an evil sanity.  As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin
+West as stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay.
+No environment, however scientific, could have softened him.
+Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest cloister,
+and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb.
+Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy,
+and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope
+or brain with the brick.  Circumstances may be favourable,
+training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental
+hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed season
+burst like a well-timed bomb."
+
+Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature
+at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat,
+and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.
+
+"It only remains for us," he said, "to bring forward actual evidence
+of his previous attempts.  By an agreement already made with the Court
+and the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence authentic
+letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is free to examine.
+Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided to select one--
+the clearest and most scandalous.  I will therefore, without further delay,
+call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two letters--one from the Sub-Warden and
+the other from the porter of Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University."
+
+Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking
+paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face.
+He began in a loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt
+as a cock-crow:--
+
+
+"Sir,--Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge--"
+
+
+"Lord have mercy on us," muttered Moon, making a backward movement as men
+do when a gun goes off.
+
+
+"Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,"
+proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, "and I can endorse the description
+you gave of the un'appy Smith.  It was not alone my unfortunate duty
+to rebuke many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period,
+but I was actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated
+that period.  Hi happened to passing under the house of my friend
+the Warden of Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College
+and connected with it by two or three very ancient arches or props,
+like bridges, across a small strip of water connected with the river.
+To my grive astonishment I be'eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air
+and clinging to one of these pieces of masonry, his appearance and
+attitude indicatin' that he suffered from the grivest apprehensions.
+After a short time I heard two very loud shots, and distinctly perceived
+the unfortunate undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the Warden's
+window and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver.
+Upon seeing me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which
+impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared to desist.
+I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he succeeded in detaching
+the Warden from his painful position.  Smith was sent down.
+The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle Club
+prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.--
+Hi am, your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.
+
+
+"The other letter," continued Gould in a glow of triumph, "is from the porter,
+and won't take long to read.
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare College,
+and that I 'elped the Warden down when the young man was shooting at him,
+as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter.  The young man who was shooting at
+him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the photograph Mr. Boulter sends.--
+Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker."
+
+
+Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them.
+But for the vocal divergences in the matter of h's and a's,
+the Sub-Warden's letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it;
+and both that and the porter's letter were plainly genuine.
+Moon handed them to Inglewood, who handed them back in silence
+to Moses Gould.
+
+"So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is concerned,"
+said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, "that is my case."
+
+Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave
+little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner.
+He did not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into the
+abstract questions.  "I do not know enough to be an agnostic,"
+he said, rather wearily, "and I can only master the known and admitted
+elements in such controversies.  As for science and religion,
+the known and admitted facts are plain enough.  All that the parsons
+say is unproved.  All that the doctors say is disproved.
+That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been,
+or will be.  Yet these new discoveries touch me, somehow," he said,
+looking down sorrowfully at his boots.  "They remind me of a dear
+old great-aunt of mine who used to enjoy them in her youth.
+It brings tears to my eyes.  I can see the old bucket by the garden
+fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind--"
+
+"Hi! here, stop the 'bus a bit," cried Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a sort
+of perspiration.  "We want to give the defence a fair run--like gents,
+you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering poplars."
+
+"Well, hang it all," said Moon, in an injured manner, "if Dr. Pym
+may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn't I have an old
+aunt with poplars?"
+
+"I am sure," said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost
+like a shaky authority, "Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes."
+
+"Why, as to liking her," began Moon, "I--but perhaps,
+as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question.
+I repeat that I do not mean to follow the abstract speculations.
+For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is simple and severely concrete.
+Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the psychology of murder.
+If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a natural
+tendency to murder, is it not equally true"--here he lowered
+his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness--"is
+it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has
+a natural tendency to get murdered?  Is it not at least
+a hypothesis holding the field that Dr. Warner is such a man?
+I do not speak without the book, any more than my learned friend.
+The whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein's monumental work,
+`The Destructible Doctor,' with diagrams, showing the various ways
+in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be resolved into his elements.
+In the light of these facts--"
+
+"Hi, stop the 'bus! stop the 'bus!" cried Moses, jumping up and down and
+gesticulating in great excitement.  "My principal's got something to say!
+My principal wants to do a bit of talkin'."
+
+Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious.
+"I have strictly CON-fined myself," he said nasally,
+"to books to which immediate reference can be made.
+I have Sonnenschein's `Destructive Type' here on the table,
+if the defence wish to see it.  Where is this wonderful work
+on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about?  Does it exist?
+Can he produce it?"
+
+"Produce it!" cried the Irishman with a rich scorn.
+"I'll produce it in a week if you'll pay for the ink and paper."
+
+"Would it have much authority?" asked Pym, sitting down.
+
+"Oh, authority!" said Moon lightly; "that depends on a fellow's religion."
+
+Dr. Pym jumped up again.  "Our authority is based on masses
+of accurate detail," he said.  "It deals with a region in which
+things can be handled and tested.  My opponent will at least
+admit that death is a fact of experience."
+
+"Not of mine," said Moon mournfully, shaking his head.
+"I've never experienced such a thing in all my life."
+
+"Well, really," said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a crackle of papers.
+
+"So we see," resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice, "that a
+man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution,
+doomed to such attacks.  My client's onslaught, even if it occurred,
+was not unique.  I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance
+of Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way.
+Following the example of my learned friends I will read only two of them.
+The first is from an honest and laborious matron living off the Harrow Road.
+
+
+"Mr. Moon, Sir,--Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him.  Wot then?
+It was all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned,
+and if your Docter Warner doesn't like having sorsepans thrown at him,
+don't let him wear his hat in a respectable woman's parler, and tell
+him to leave orf smiling or tell us the joke.--Yours respectfully,
+                                               Hannah Miles.
+
+
+"The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin,
+with whom Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation.
+He writes as follows:--
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--The incident to which you refer is one which I regret,
+and which, moreover, I have never been able to explain.
+My own branch of medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have
+the view of a mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed
+almost automatic action.  To say that I `pulled Dr. Warner's nose,'
+is, however, inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important.
+That I punched his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with
+what regret); but pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective
+with which I cannot reproach myself.  In comparison with this, the act
+of punching was an outward, instantaneous, and even natural gesture.--
+Believe me, yours faithfully, Burton Lestrange.
+
+
+"I have numberless other letters," continued Moon, "all bearing witness
+to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I therefore think
+that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the question in his survey.
+We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a natural force.
+As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as stay
+the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
+Place that man in a Quakers' meeting, among the most peaceful of Christians,
+and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of chocolate.
+Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be stoned
+to death with precious stones.  Circumstances may be beautiful and wonderful,
+the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be golden-bearded,
+the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be iris-leapt,
+the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and above
+all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to get
+murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and triumphantly
+succeeds at last."
+
+He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion.
+But even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other
+side of the table.  Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across
+the little figure of Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers
+to Dr. Pym.  That expert nodded a great many times and finally started
+to his feet with a sincere expression of sternness.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried indignantly, "as my colleague has said,
+we should be delighted to give any latitude to the defence--if there
+were a defence.  But Mr. Moon seems to think he is there to make jokes--
+very good jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to assist his client.
+He picks holes in science.  He picks holes in my client's social popularity.
+He picks holes in my literary style, which doesn't seem to suit his high-toned
+European taste.  But how does this picking of holes affect the issue?
+This Smith has picked two holes in my client's hat, and with an inch better
+aim would have picked two holes in his head.  All the jokes in the world
+won't unpick those holes or be any use for the defence."
+
+Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the evident
+fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a dreamy way.
+"The defence?" he said vaguely--"oh, I haven't begun that yet."
+
+"You certainly have not," said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of applause
+from his side, which the other side found it impossible to answer.
+"Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful from
+the very beginning--"
+
+"While you're standing up," said Moon, in the same almost sleepy style,
+"perhaps I might ask you a question."
+
+"A question?  Certainly," said Pym stiffly.  "It was distinctly
+arranged between us that as we could not cross-examine
+the witnesses, we might vicariously cross-examine each other.
+We are in a position to invite all such inquiry."
+
+"I think you said," observed Moon absently, "that none of the prisoner's
+shots really hit the doctor."
+
+"For the cause of science," cried the complacent Pym, "fortunately not."
+
+"Yet they were fired from a few feet away."
+
+"Yes; about four feet."
+
+"And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close
+to him too?" asked Moon.
+
+"That is so," said the witness gravely.
+
+"I think," said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, "that your Sub-Warden
+mentioned that Smith was one of the University's record men for shooting."
+
+"Why, as to that--" began Pym, after an instant of stillness.
+
+"A second question," continued Moon, comparatively curtly.
+"You said there were other cases of the accused trying to kill people.
+Why have you not got evidence of them?"
+
+The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again.
+"In those cases," he said precisely, "there was no evidence from outsiders,
+as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual victims."
+
+"Why didn't you get their evidence?"
+
+"In the case of the actual victims," said Pym, "there was some difficulty
+and reluctance, and--"
+
+"Do you mean," asked Moon, "that none of the actual victims would
+appear against the prisoner?"
+
+"That would be exaggerative," began the other.
+
+"A third question," said Moon, so sharply that every one jumped.
+"You've got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard some shots;
+where's the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot at?
+The Warden of Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman."
+
+"We did ask for a statement from him," said Pym a little nervously;
+"but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it out
+of deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science
+have been great."
+
+Moon leaned forward.  "You mean, I suppose," he said, "that his statement
+was favourable to the prisoner."
+
+"It might be understood so," replied the American doctor;
+"but, really, it was difficult to understand at all.
+In fact, we sent it back to him."
+
+"You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of Brakespeare."
+
+"No."
+
+"I only ask," said Michael quietly, "because we have.
+To conclude my case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood,
+to read a statement of the true story--a statement attested
+as true by the signature of the Warden himself."
+
+Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though
+he looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did,
+the spectators were surprised to feel that his presence was,
+upon the whole, more efficient and sufficing than his leader's. He was,
+in truth, one of those modest men who cannot speak until they are told
+to speak; and then can speak well.  Moon was entirely the opposite.
+His own impudences amused him in private, but they slightly
+embarrassed him in public; he felt a fool while he was speaking,
+whereas Inglewood felt a fool only because he could not speak.
+The moment he had anything to say he could speak;
+and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite natural.
+Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.
+
+"As my colleague has just explained," said Inglewood, "there are
+two enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence.
+The first is a plain physical fact.  By the admission of everybody,
+by the very evidence adduced by the prosecution, it is clear
+that the accused was celebrated as a specially good shot.
+Yet on both the occasions complained of he shot from a distance of four
+or five feet, and shot at him four or five times, and never hit him once.
+That is the first startling circumstance on which we base our argument.
+The second, as my colleague has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot
+find a single victim of these alleged outrages to speak for himself.
+Subordinates speak for him.  Porters climb up ladders to him.
+But he himself is silent.  Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain
+on the spot both the riddle of the shots and the riddle of the silence.
+I will first of all read the covering letter in which the true account
+of the Cambridge incident is contained, and then that document itself.
+When you have heard both, there will be no doubt about your decision.
+The covering letter runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--The following is a very exact and even vivid account of the
+incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College.  We, the undersigned,
+do not see any particular reason why we should refer it to any
+isolated authorship.  The truth is, it has been a composite production;
+and we have even had some difference of opinion about the adjectives.
+But every word of it is true.--We are, yours faithfully,
+
+                                     "Wilfred Emerson Eames,
+                  "Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+                                            "Innocent Smith.
+
+
+"The enclosed statement," continued Inglewood, "runs as follows:--
+
+
+"A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river,
+that it has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched
+with all sorts of bridges and semi-detached buildings.
+The river splits itself into several small streams and canals,
+so that in one or two corners the place has almost the look
+of Venice.  It was so especially in the case with which we
+are concerned, in which a few flying buttresses or airy ribs of stone
+sprang across a strip of water to connect Brakespeare College
+with the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.
+
+"The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not
+seem flat when one is thus in the midst of the colleges.
+For in these flat fens there are always wandering lakes and lingering
+rivers of water.  And these always change what might have been
+a scheme of horizontal lines into a scheme of vertical lines.
+Wherever there is water the height of high buildings is doubled,
+and a British brick house becomes a Babylonian tower.
+In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head
+downwards exactly to their highest or lowest chimney.
+The coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far
+below the world as its original appears above it.
+Every scrap of water is not only a window but a skylight.
+Earth splits under men's feet into precipitous aerial perspectives,
+into which a bird could as easily wing its way as--"
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest.  The documents he had put
+in evidence had been confined to cold affirmation of fact.
+The defence, in a general way, had an indubitable right to put
+their case in their own way, but all this landscape gardening
+seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the business.
+"Will the leader of the defence tell me," he asked, "how it can
+possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor'l-coloured,
+or that a bird could have winged itself anywhere?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Michael, lifting himself lazily;
+"you see, you don't know yet what our defence is.
+Till you know that, don't you see, anything may be relevant.
+Why, suppose," he said suddenly, as if an idea had struck him,
+"suppose we wanted to prove the old Warden colour-blind.
+Suppose he was shot by a black man with white hair, when he
+thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair!
+To ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-coloured
+might be of the most massive importance."
+
+He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared,
+and continued with the same fluency:  "Or suppose we wanted to
+maintain that the Warden committed suicide--that he just got Smith
+to hold the pistol as Brutus's slave held the sword.  Why, it would
+make all the difference whether the Warden could see himself plain
+in still water.  Still water has made hundreds of suicides:
+one sees oneself so very--well, so very plain."
+
+"Do you, perhaps," inquired Pym with austere irony, "maintain that
+your client was a bird of some sort--say, a flamingo?"
+
+"In the matter of his being a flamingo," said Moon with sudden severity,
+"my client reserves his defence."
+
+No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat
+and Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:--
+
+
+"There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors.
+For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one.
+In the highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.
+
+"This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best.
+Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own
+thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able
+to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle.
+This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat)
+the inmost thing of human philosophy.  There is a mystical, even a
+monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are better than one.
+But they ought both to grow on the same body."
+
+
+"I know it's a little transcendental at first," interposed Inglewood,
+beaming round with a broad apology, "but you see this document was written
+in collaboration by a don and a--"
+
+"Drunkard, eh?" suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy himself.
+
+"I rather think," proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled
+and critical air, "that this part was written by the don.
+I merely warn the Court that the statement, though indubitably accurate,
+bears here and there the trace of coming from two authors."
+
+"In that case," said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing,
+"I cannot agree with them that two heads are better than one."
+
+
+"The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred
+problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform:
+the question of whether dons see double because they are drunk,
+or get drunk because they see double.  It is enough for them
+(the undersigned persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar
+and profitable theme--which is puddles.  What (the undersigned
+persons ask themselves) is a puddle?  A puddle repeats infinity,
+and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively,
+a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
+The two great historic universities of England have all this large
+and level and reflective brilliance.  Nevertheless, or, rather, on the
+other hand, they are puddles--puddles, puddles, puddles, puddles.
+The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis inseparable
+from strong conviction."
+
+
+Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some present,
+and continued with eminent cheerfulness:--
+
+
+"Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of
+the undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes
+of canal and the glittering rainy gutters into which the water
+broke up round the back of Brakespeare College.  Had these thoughts
+crossed his mind he would have been much happier than he was.
+Unfortunately he did not know that his puzzles were puddles.
+He did not know that the academic mind reflects infinity and is full
+of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
+In his case, therefore, there was something solemn, and even evil
+about the infinity implied.  It was half-way through a starry
+night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above and below.
+To young Smith's sullen fancy the skies below seemed even hollower
+than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he counted
+the stars he would find one too many in the pool.
+
+"In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping
+on the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower.  For to him,
+and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things.
+Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous
+and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse
+of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes.  For the young men
+of that sad time thought that the god always comes from the machine.
+They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god.
+In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them--
+atrocious because it was true.  All their universe was black with white spots.
+
+"Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below
+to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college.
+The only light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green
+curtain in the upper part of the building, marking where
+Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and received
+his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night.
+Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound.
+Smith had been at Dr. Eames's lecture for the first half of the morning,
+and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second half.
+He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon
+and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
+He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating
+club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy
+Smith was melancholy still.  Then, as he was going home to his
+diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master,
+the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn
+in to that gentleman's private house.
+
+"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne
+in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence;
+the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover,
+a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough
+to make them a part of the British Constitution.  The bad habits
+of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student
+of Schopenhauer.  Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man,
+with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his
+pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries
+in the two essential respects of having a European reputation
+and a bald head.
+
+"`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,' said Smith, who was
+nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small,
+`because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten.
+I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise--bishops,
+and agnostics, and those sort of people.  And knowing you were the greatest
+living authority on the pessimist thinkers--'
+
+"`All thinkers,' said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.'
+
+"After a patch of pause, not the first--for this depressing conversation
+had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence--
+the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy:  `It's all a question
+of wrong calculation.  The moth flies into the candle because he doesn't
+happen to know that the game is not worth the candle.  The wasp gets
+into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him.
+IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want
+to enjoy gin--because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big
+a price for it.  That they never find happiness--that they don't even know
+how to look for it--is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness
+of everything they do.  Their discordant colours are cries of pain.
+Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river.
+There's one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!'
+
+"`Of course,' he went on dreamily, `one or two men see the sober
+fact a long way off--they go mad.  Do you notice that maniacs mostly
+try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful)
+to destroy themselves?  The madman is the man behind the scenes,
+like the man that wanders about the coulisse of a theater.
+He has only opened the wrong door and come into the right place.
+He sees things at the right angle.  But the common world--'
+
+"`Oh, hang the common world!' said the sullen Smith, letting his fist
+fall on the table in an idle despair.
+
+"`Let's give it a bad name first,' said the Professor calmly,
+`and then hang it.  A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle
+for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it.
+So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain.
+He would strike us dead.'
+
+"`Why doesn't he strike us dead?' asked the undergraduate abstractedly,
+plunging his hands into his pockets.
+
+"`He is dead himself,' said the philosopher; `that is where
+he is really enviable.'
+
+"`To any one who thinks,' proceeded Eames, `the pleasures of life,
+trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a torture chamber.
+We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the... What
+are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.'
+
+"Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder,
+and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a
+six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top.
+It fixed him like an iron eye.  Through those eternal instants during
+which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was.
+Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of
+a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith,
+apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.
+
+"`I'll help you out of your hole, old man,' said Smith,
+with rough tenderness.  `I'll put the puppy out of his pain.'
+
+"Emerson Eames retreated towards the window.  `Do you mean
+to kill me?' he cried.
+
+"`It's not a thing I'd do for every one,' said Smith with emotion;
+`but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow.
+I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.'
+
+"`Put that thing down,' shouted the Warden.
+
+"`It'll soon be over, you know,' said Smith with the air of a
+sympathetic dentist.  And as the Warden made a run for the window
+and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step
+and a compassionate expression.
+
+"Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white
+of early daybreak had already come.  One of them, however,
+had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise.  Brakespeare College
+was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament,
+and just beneath Dr. Eames's balcony there ran out what had perhaps
+been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts
+and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.
+With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this
+antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac.
+He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his
+long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.
+The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that
+impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little
+lakes round Brakespeare.  Looking down and seeing the spires
+and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.
+They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole
+and seeing the South Pole below.
+
+"`Hang the world, we said,' observed Smith, `and the world is hanged.
+"He has hanged the world upon nothing," says the Bible.  Do you like being
+hanged upon nothing?  I'm going to be hanged upon something myself.
+I'm going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,' he murmured;
+`never true till this moment.  I am going to swing for you.
+For you, dear friend.  For your sake.  At your express desire.'
+
+"`Help!' cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!'
+
+"`The puppy struggles,' said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity,
+`the poor puppy struggles.  How fortunate it is that I am wiser
+and kinder than he,' and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover
+the upper part of Eames's bald head.
+
+"`Smith,' said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort
+of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.'
+
+"`And so look at things from the right angle,' observed Smith,
+sighing gently.  `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best,
+a drug.  The only cure is an operation--an operation that is
+always successful:  death.'
+
+"As he spoke the sun rose.  It seemed to put colour into everything,
+with the rapidity of a lightning artist.  A fleet of little
+clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink.
+All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings
+took on different tints:  here the sun would pick out the green
+enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa;
+here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there
+the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof.
+All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly
+individual and significant about them, like crests of famous
+knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield:  they each
+arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames
+as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last.
+Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big
+gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the
+sunshine set on fire.  He stared at it as though hypnotized;
+and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply.
+As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry:
+all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow.
+The birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college.
+The sun rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep
+skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed golden
+and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the gods.
+Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his crazy perch,
+were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa
+with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night.
+He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.
+
+"Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority,
+as he might have called to a student to shut a door.
+
+"`Let me come off this place,' he cried; `I can't bear it.'
+
+"`I rather doubt if it will bear you,' said Smith critically;
+`but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains,
+or let you back into this room (on which complex points I
+am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up.
+Do I understand that you want to get back to life?'
+
+"`I'd give anything to get back,' replied the unhappy professor.
+
+"`Give anything!' cried Smith; `then, blast your impudence,
+give us a song!'
+
+"`What song do you mean?' demanded the exasperated Eames; `what song?'
+
+"`A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,' answered the other gravely.
+`I'll let you off if you'll repeat after me the words--
+
+        "`I thank the goodness and the grace
+            That on my birth have smiled.
+          And perched me on this curious place,
+            A happy English child.'
+
+
+"Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly
+told him to hold his hands up in the air.  Vaguely connecting this
+proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers,
+Mr. Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise.
+A bird alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him
+than of a comic statue.
+
+"`You are now engaged in public worship,' remarked Smith severely,
+`and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks
+on the pond.'
+
+"The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
+readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.
+
+"`Not forgetting the drakes,' said Smith sternly.
+(Eames weakly conceded the drakes.) `Not forgetting anything, please.
+You shall thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas
+and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and sticks
+and rags and bones and spotted blinds.'
+
+"`All right, all right,' repeated the victim in despair;
+`sticks and rags and bones and blinds.'
+
+"`Spotted blinds, I think we said,' remarked Smith with a
+rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him
+like a long metallic finger.
+
+"`Spotted blinds,' said Emerson Eames faintly.
+
+"`You can't say fairer than that,' admitted the younger man,
+`and now I'll just tell you this to wind up with.
+If you really were what you profess to be, I don't see that it
+would matter to snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff
+neck and dashed out all your drivelling devil-worshipping brains.
+But in strict biographical fact you are a very nice fellow,
+addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you like a brother.
+I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your head
+so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear),
+and then we will go in and have some breakfast.'
+
+"He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor
+endured with singular firmness, and then said, `But don't fire
+them all off.'
+
+"`Why not' asked the other buoyantly.
+
+"`Keep them,' asked his companion, `for the next man you meet
+who talks as we were talking.'
+
+"It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic
+terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek
+with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.
+
+"It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from
+the ladder, and some little time longer to disentangle himself
+from the Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively,
+he rejoined his companion in the late extraordinary scene.
+He was astonished to find the gigantic Smith heavily shaken,
+and sitting with his shaggy head on his hands.  When addressed,
+he lifted a very pale face.
+
+"`Why, what is the matter?' asked Eames, whose own nerves had by this
+time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.
+
+"`I must ask your indulgence,' said Smith, rather brokenly.
+`I must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.'
+
+"`YOU have had an escape from death?' repeated the Professor
+in not unpardonable irritation.  `Well, of all the cheek--'
+
+"`Oh, don't you understand, don't you understand?' cried the pale
+young man impatiently.  `I had to do it, Eames; I had to prove
+you wrong or die.  When a man's young, he nearly always has
+some one whom he thinks the top-water mark of the mind of man--
+some one who knows all about it, if anybody knows.
+
+"`Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority,
+and not as the scribes.  Nobody could comfort me if YOU
+said there was no comfort.  If you really thought there was
+nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see.
+Don't you see that I HAD to prove you didn't really mean it?--
+or else drown myself in the canal.'
+
+"`Well,' said Eames hesitatingly, `I think perhaps you confuse--'
+
+"`Oh, don't tell me that!' cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance
+of mental pain; `don't tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence
+with the Will to Live!  That's German, and German is High Dutch,
+and High Dutch is Double Dutch.  The thing I saw shining in your eyes
+when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not "the
+Will to Live."  What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle
+was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and
+beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute.
+I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack
+between the houses.  It was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life,
+whatever that is.  Eames, we've been to the brink of death together;
+won't you admit I'm right?'
+
+"`Yes,' said Eames very slowly, `I think you are right.
+You shall have a First!'
+
+"`Right!' cried Smith, springing up reanimated.  `I've passed
+with honours, and now let me go and see about being sent down.'
+
+"`You needn't be sent down,' said Eames with the quiet confidence
+of twelve years of intrigue.  `Everything with us comes from
+the man on top to the people just round him:  I am the man on top,
+and I shall tell the people round me the truth.'
+
+"The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window,
+but he spoke with equal firmness.  `I must be sent down,' he said,
+`and the people must not be told the truth.'
+
+"`And why not' asked the other.
+
+"`Because I mean to follow your advice,' answered the massive youth,
+`I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state
+you and I were in last night--I wish we could even plead drunkenness.
+I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists--pills for pale people.
+And in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful surprise--
+to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as the sunrise;
+not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be
+recalled any more than the dying breeze.  I don't want people to
+anticipate me as a well-known practical joke.  I want both my gifts
+to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death.
+I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man.  But I
+shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to life.
+I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast.'
+
+"`You can scarcely be called a skeleton,' said Dr. Eames, smiling.
+
+"`That comes of being so much at the feast,' answered the massive youth.
+`No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out.
+But that is not quite what I meant:  what I mean is that I caught
+a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that--the skull
+and cross-bones, the ~memento mori~. It isn't only meant to remind
+us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too.
+With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity if we were not kept
+young by death.  Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us,
+as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.'
+
+"Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality,
+`But I know something now, Eames.  I knew it when I saw
+the clouds turn pink.'
+
+"`What do you mean?' asked Eames.  `What did you know?'
+
+"`I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.'
+
+"He gripped Dr. Eames's hand and groped his way somewhat unsteadily
+to the door.  Before he had vanished through it he had added,
+`It's very dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second
+that he understands death.'
+
+"Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his
+late assailant had left.  Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella,
+and went for a brisk if rotatory walk.  Several times,
+however, he stood outside the villa with the spotted blinds,
+studying them intently with his head slightly on one side.
+Some took him for a lunatic and some for an intending purchaser.
+He is not yet sure that the two characters would be widely different.
+
+"The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is,
+in the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters.
+Each of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other.
+But the undersigned persons absolutely guarantee the exactitude
+of the story; and if their version of the thing be questioned, they,
+the undersigned persons, would deucedly well like to know who does
+know about it if they don't.
+
+"The undersigned persons will now adjourn to `The Spotted Dog'
+for beer.  Farewell.
+
+                              "(Signed) James Emerson Eames,
+                  "Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+                                           "Innocent Smith."
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter II
+
+                      The Two Curates;
+                   or, the Burglary Charge
+
+
+Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders
+of the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together.
+Both the Jew and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks,
+and they revealed by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the
+yellow that nothing could be done in the way of denial of the document.
+The letter from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
+Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and social tone.
+
+"Very few words," said Inglewood, "are required to conclude
+our case in this matter.  Surely it is now plain that our client
+carried his pistol about with the eccentric but innocent
+purpose of giving a wholesome scare to those whom he regarded
+as blasphemers.  In each case the scare was so wholesome
+that the victim himself has dated from it as from a new birth.
+Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor--
+he walks the world curing frenzies and not distributing them.
+That is the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I
+put to the prosecutors.  That is why they dared not produce
+a line by any one who had actually confronted the pistol.
+All who had actually confronted the pistol confessed that they
+had profited by it.  That was why Smith, though a good shot,
+never hit anybody.  He never hit anybody because he was a good shot.
+His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of blood.
+This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts
+and of all the other facts.  No one can possibly explain
+the Warden's conduct except by believing the Warden's story.
+Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of ingenious theories,
+could find no other theory to cover the case."
+
+"There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual personality,"
+said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; "the science of criminology is in
+its infancy, and--"
+
+"Infancy!" cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a gesture
+of enlightenment; "why, that explains it!"
+
+"I repeat," proceeded Inglewood, "that neither Dr. Pym nor any one else
+can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden's signature,
+for the shots missed and the witnesses missing."
+
+The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return
+of a cock-fighting coolness.  "The defence," he said,
+"omits a coldly colossal fact.  They say we produce none of
+the actual victims.  Wal, here is one victim--England's celebrated
+and stricken Warner.  I reckon he is pretty well produced.
+And they suggest that all the outrages were followed
+by reconciliation.  Wal, there's no flies on England's Warner;
+and he isn't reconciliated much."
+
+"My learned friend," said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet,
+"must remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy.
+Dr. Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially difficult to startle
+into any recognition of the glory of God.  We admit that our client,
+in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not successful.
+But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a proposal
+for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest convenience,
+and without further fees."
+
+"'Ang it all, Michael," cried Gould, quite serious for the first time
+in his life, "you might give us a bit of bally sense for a chinge."
+
+"What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?"
+asked Moon sharply.
+
+"The creature," said Dr. Warner superciliously, "asked me,
+with characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday."
+
+"And you answered, with characteristic swank," cried Moon, shooting out
+a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith,
+"that you didn't keep your birthday."
+
+"Something like that," assented the doctor.
+
+"Then," continued Moon, "he asked you why not, and you said it was because you
+didn't see that birth was anything to rejoice over.  Agreed?  Now is there
+any one who doubts that our tale is true?"
+
+There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, "Pax populi
+vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of God.  Or in
+Dr. Pym's more civilized language, it is up to him to open the next charge.
+On this we claim an acquittal."
+
+
+It was about an hour later.  Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an unprecedented
+time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the air.
+It almost seemed as if he had been "struck so," as the nurses say;
+and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve
+the strain with some remark.  For the last half-hour or so the eminent
+criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view
+of offences against property as it did of offences against life.
+"Most murder," he had said, "is a variation of homicidal mania,
+and in the same way most theft is a version of kleptomania.
+I cannot entertain any doubt that my learned friends opposite
+adequately con-ceive how this must involve a scheme of punishment
+more tol'rant and humane than the cruel methods of ancient codes.
+They will doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning,
+so thought-arresting, so--" It was here that he paused and indulged
+in the delicate gesture to which allusion has been made; and Michael
+could bear it no longer.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said impatiently, "we admit the chasm.
+The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him
+to prison for ten years.  The tolerant and humane ticket
+accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for ever.
+We pass the chasm."
+
+It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances
+of verbal fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only
+of his opponent's interruption, but even of his own pause.
+
+"So stock-improving," continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, "so fraught
+with real high hopes of the future.  Science therefore
+regards thieves, in the abstract, just as it regards murderers.
+It regards them not as sinners to be punished for an arbitrary period,
+but as patients to be detained and cared for," (his first two digits
+closed again as he hesitated)--"in short, for the required period.
+But there is something special in the case we investigate here.
+Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself--"
+
+"I beg pardon," said Michael; "I did not ask just now because,
+to tell the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical,
+was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers
+of scentless and delicate dust.  But now that things are moving
+a little more, there is something I should really like to know.
+I have hung on Dr. Pym's lips, of course, with an interest that it
+were weak to call rapture, but I have so far been unable to form
+any conjecture about what the accused, in the present instance,
+is supposed to have been and gone and done."
+
+"If Mr. Moon will have patience," said Pym with dignity, "he will find
+that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.
+Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction
+to certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man
+than Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict
+specialism and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals.
+One will have an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl
+sleeve-links, while he passes over the most elegant and celebrated
+diamond sleeve-links, placed about in the most conspicuous locations.
+Another will impede his flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots,
+while elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic.
+The specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity
+than of any brightness of business habits; but there is one kind
+of depredator to whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply.
+I allude to our fellow-citizen the housebreaker.
+
+"It has been maintained by some of our boldest young
+truth-seekers, that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden
+wall could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a fork
+that is insulated in a locked box under the butler's bed.
+They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science on this point.
+They declare that diamond links are not left about in conspicuous
+locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as they were
+in the great test experiment of Calypso College.  We hope this
+experiment here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge,
+and will bring the burglar once more into line and union
+with his fellow criminals."
+
+Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment
+for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table
+in explosive enlightenment.
+
+"Oh, I see!" he cried; "you mean that Smith is a burglar."
+
+"I thought I made it quite ad'quately lucid," said Mr. Pym,
+folding up his eyelids.  It was typical of this topsy-turvy private
+trial that all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression
+on either side, was exasperating and unintelligible to the other.
+Moon could not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization.
+Pym could not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.
+
+"All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,"
+continued the American doctor, "are cases of burglary.
+Pursuing the same course as in the previous case, we select
+the indubitable instance from the rest, and we take the most
+correct cast-iron evidence.  I will now call on my colleague,
+Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from the earnest,
+unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins."
+
+Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from
+the earnest and unspotted Hawkins.  Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard well,
+Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the
+new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists.
+But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing; indeed, the sense
+of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his
+pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when,
+a little later, it was handed across the table.
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident
+you mention, private as it was, should have filtered through
+our omnivorous journals to the mere populace; for the position
+I have since attained makes me, I conceive, a public character,
+and this was certainly the most extraordinary incident
+in a not uneventful and perhaps not an unimportant career.
+I am by no means without experience in scenes of civil tumult.
+I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose League
+days at Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set,
+have spent many a night at the Christian Social Union.  But this
+other experience was quite inconceivable.  I can only describe
+it as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me,
+as a clergyman, to mention.
+
+"It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period,
+a curate at Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague,
+induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must say
+profanely described, as calculated to promote the kingdom
+of God.  I found, on the contrary, that it consisted entirely
+of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse
+and their opinions extreme.
+
+"Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest
+respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say little.
+No one can be more convinced than I of the evil of politics
+in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation any advice
+about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly that they
+are likely to make an erroneous selection.  But, while I do
+not mean to touch at all upon political or social problems,
+I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest,
+such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism
+or Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal
+of a sacred trust.  Far be it from me to say a word against
+the Reverend Raymond Percy, the colleague in question.
+He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some apparently fascinating;
+but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist, wears his hair
+like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person,
+will never rise in his profession, or even obtain the admiration
+of the good and wise.  Nor is it for me to utter my personal
+judgements of the appearance of the people in the hall.
+Yet a glance round the room, revealing ranks of debased
+and envious faces--"
+
+"Adopting," said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive--"adopting
+the reverend gentleman's favourite figure of logic, may I say that
+while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect,
+he is a blasted old jackass."
+
+"Really!" said Dr. Pym; "I protest."
+
+"You must keep quiet, Michael," said Inglewood; "they have a right
+to read their story."
+
+"Chair!  Chair!  Chair!" cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in his own;
+and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all
+the authority of the Court of Beacon.
+
+"Oh, don't wake the old lady," said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody
+good-humour. "I apologize.  I won't interrupt again."
+
+Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading
+of the clergyman's letter was already continuing.
+
+"The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
+will say nothing.  It was deplorable.  Many of the audience
+were Irish, and showed the weakness of that impetuous people.
+When gathered together into gangs and conspiracies they seem
+to lose altogether that lovable good-nature and readiness to accept
+anything one tells them which distinguishes them as individuals."
+
+
+With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly,
+and sat down again.
+
+
+"These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the speech
+of Mr. Percy.  He descended to their level with witticisms about rent
+and a reserve of labour.  Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such
+words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly.  Some hours
+afterward the storm broke.  I had been addressing the meeting for some time,
+pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes, their insufficient
+attendance at evening service, their neglect of the Harvest Festival, and of
+many other things that might materially help them to improve their lot.
+It was, I think, about this time that an extraordinary interruption occurred.
+An enormous, powerful man, partly concealed with white plaster,
+arose in the middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud, roaring voice,
+like a bull's) some observations which seemed to be in a foreign language.
+Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, descended to his level by entering into
+a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be the victor.  The meeting
+began to behave more respectfully for a little; yet before I had said twelve
+sentences more the rush was made for the platform.  The enormous plasterer,
+in particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like an elephant;
+and I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally large,
+but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
+This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was shoving
+them back.  I don't know what he said, but, what with shouting and shoving
+and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the wretched people
+went roaring down another passage.
+
+"Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story.  When he had got
+us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
+with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as follows:
+`You're well out of that, sir; now you'd better come along with me.
+I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we've all
+been talking about.  Come along!'  And turning his big back abruptly,
+he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old lamp-post,
+we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him.  He had certainly
+helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I could
+not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds.
+Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with all
+his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also.  In fact,
+he comes of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house
+and has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family.
+I cannot but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal
+advantages with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation,
+and certainly--but I digress.
+
+"A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post
+faded behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind.
+The large man in front of us looked larger and larger in the haze.
+He did not turn round, but he said with his huge back to us,
+`All that talking's no good; we want a little practical Socialism.'
+
+"`I quite agree,' said Percy; `but I always like to understand things
+in theory before I put them into practice.'
+
+"`Oh, you just leave that to me,' said the practical Socialist,
+or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness.
+`I have a way with me.  I'm a Permeator.'
+
+"I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed,
+so I was sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey
+for the present.  It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane,
+where we were already rather cramped, into a paved passage,
+at the end of which we passed through a wooden gate left open.
+We then found ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour,
+crossing what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden.
+I called out to the enormous person going on in front, but he answered
+obscurely that it was a short cut.
+
+"I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
+when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading
+to a higher level of road.  My thoughtless colleague ran up it so
+quickly that I could not do otherwise than follow as best I could.
+The path on which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow.
+I had never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous.
+Along one side of it grew what, in the dark and density of air,
+I first took to be some short, strong thicket of shrubs.  Then I saw
+that they were not short shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees.
+I, an English gentleman and clergyman of the Church of England--I was
+walking along the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.
+
+"I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps,
+and let loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I
+could all the time.
+
+"`It's a right-of-way,' declared my indefensible informant.
+`It's closed to traffic once in a hundred years.'
+
+"`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!'  I called out; `you are not going
+on with this blackguard?'
+
+"`Why, I think so,' answered my unhappy colleague flippantly.
+`I think you and I are bigger blackguards than he is,
+whatever he is.'
+
+"`I am a burglar,' explained the big creature quite calmly.
+`I am a member of the Fabian Society.  I take back the wealth stolen
+by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform
+fitted to the special occasion--here a little and there a little.
+Do you see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof?
+I'm permeating that one to-night.'
+
+"`Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I cried, `I desire to be quit of it.'
+
+"`The ladder is just behind you,' answered the creature
+with horrible courtesy; `and, before you go, do let me give
+you my card.'
+
+"If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I
+should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind
+would have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall.
+As it was, in the wildness of the moment, I put it in my
+waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and ladder,
+landed in the respectable streets once more.  Not before, however,
+I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts--
+that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards
+the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and,
+what was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him.
+I have never seen either of them since that day.
+
+"In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my
+connection with the wild set.  I am far from saying that every
+member of the Christian Social Union must necessarily be a burglar.
+I have no right to bring any such charge.  But it gave me a hint
+of what such courses may lead to in many cases; and I saw them no more.
+
+"I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a
+Mr. Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question.
+When I got home that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed
+there under the name of Innocent Smith.--Yours faithfully,
+                                     "John Clement Hawkins."
+
+
+Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper.  He knew that
+the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that Moses Gould
+(for one) could no more write like a canon than he could read like one.
+After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary charge.
+
+"We wish," said Michael, "to give all reasonable facilities to
+the prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court.
+The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all
+those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym.  I know how they
+are made.  Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say
+one thing instead of another.  Forgery is a kind of writer's cramp,
+forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of his own.
+Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is
+unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny.
+Innocent Smith never did commit burglary at all.
+
+"I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement,
+and ask the prosecution two or three questions."
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.
+
+"In the first place," continued Moon, "have you the date of Canon Hawkins's
+last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and roofs?"
+
+"Ho, yus!" called out Gould smartly.  "November thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."
+
+"Have you," continued Moon, "identified the houses in Hoxton up
+which they climbed?"
+
+"Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,"
+answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.
+
+"Well," said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, "was there any burglary
+in that terrace that night?  Surely you could find that out."
+
+"There may well have been," said the doctor primly, after a pause,
+"an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities."
+
+"Another question," proceeded Michael.  "Canon Hawkins, in his
+blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment.
+Why don't you produce the evidence of the other clergyman,
+who actually followed the burglar and presumably was present
+at the crime?"
+
+Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table,
+as he did when he was specially confident of the clearness
+of his reply.
+
+"We have entirely failed," he said, "to track the other clergyman,
+who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had
+seen him as-cending the gutters and the leads.  I am fully aware
+that this may strike many as sing'lar; yet, upon reflection,
+I think it will appear pretty natural to a bright thinker.
+This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the canon's evidence,
+a minister of eccentric ways.  His con-nection with England's proudest
+and fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society
+of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith is,
+by general agreement, a man of irr'sistible fascination.
+I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into the crime
+and forced him to hide his head in the real crim'nal class.
+That would fully account for his non-appearance, and the failure
+of all attempts to trace him."
+
+"It is impossible, then, to trace him?" asked Moon.
+
+"Impossible," repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
+
+"You are sure it's impossible?"
+
+"Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould, irritably.  "We'd 'ave found
+'im if we could, for you bet 'e saw the burglary.  Don't YOU
+start looking for 'im. Look for your own 'ead in the dustbin.
+You'll find that--after a bit," and his voice died away in grumbling.
+
+"Arthur," directed Michael Moon, sitting down, "kindly read
+Mr. Raymond Percy's letter to the court."
+
+"Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much
+as possible," began Inglewood, "I will not read the first part
+of the letter sent to us.  It is only fair to the prosecution
+to admit the account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies,
+as far as facts are concerned, that given by the first clergyman.
+We concede, then, the canon's story so far as it goes.
+This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient
+to the court.  I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then, at the point
+when all three men were standing on the garden wall:--
+
+
+"As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind
+not to waver.  A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud
+of copper fog on the houses and gardens round.  My decision was
+violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so
+complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now.
+I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have
+given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road.
+That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--
+rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
+
+"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly;
+and artists love to be limited.  I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
+discipline was mere decoration.  I delighted in mere divisions of time;
+I liked eating fish on Friday.  But then I like fish; and the fast
+was made for men who like meat.  Then I came to Hoxton and found men
+who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because
+they could not get meat--and fish-bones when they could not get fish.
+As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated
+the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant.  Hoxton cures that.
+Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant
+had not been a pageant, but a riot--and a suppressed riot.
+There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom
+the tremendous promises had been made.  In the face of that I had
+to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.
+In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist--
+and a pessimist.  Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.
+
+"On the top of all this comes Hawkins.  If he had cursed all the Hoxton men,
+excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should
+have rather admired him.  If he had ordered them all to be burned
+in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
+good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people.
+But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins--nor any other kind of craft.
+He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter
+or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer.  He is a perfect gentleman;
+that is his complaint.  He does not impose his creed, but simply his class.
+He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address.
+He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said.
+A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this
+brother is a major.
+
+"When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body
+and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body
+and soul together, the stampede against our platform began.
+I took part in his undeserved rescue, I followed his
+obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we stood together
+on the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog.
+Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and decided, in a spasm
+of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of the two.
+The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was--
+and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.
+I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to
+it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class,
+for I had lived with it a long time.  Many old texts about
+the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought
+that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class.
+About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was crawling
+up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
+leaping in front of me like a gorilla.
+
+"This upward scramble was short, and we soon found
+ourselves tramping along a broad road of flat roofs,
+broader than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here
+and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts.
+The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat
+swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body laboured.
+The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed
+overpowered by sinister spirits.  Tall spectres with turbans of vapour
+seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both.
+I thought dimly of illustrations to the `Arabian Nights'
+on brown paper with rich but sombre tints, showing genii
+gathering round the Seal of Solomon.  By the way, what was
+the Seal of Solomon?  Nothing to do with sealing-wax really,
+I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
+of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour,
+poured out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
+
+"The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
+look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak.
+But the scene grew subtler with familiarity.  We stood above the average
+of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in
+great cities creates the strange thing called fog.  Beneath us rose
+a forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it
+were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.
+The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from
+firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.
+And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural,
+like fumes from a witch's pot.  It was as if the shameful and ugly
+shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate
+spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed.
+Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift
+from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
+like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another
+place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might
+be the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images.
+But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green,
+as clear and crooked as Arabic--"
+
+Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the 'bus.
+He was understood to suggest that the reader should shorten
+the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.  Mrs. Duke,
+who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice,
+and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue,
+and by Michael with a red pencil.  Inglewood then resumed
+the reading of the document.
+
+
+"Then I read the writing of the smoke.  Smoke was like the modern
+city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always
+wicked and vain.
+
+"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry
+all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain.  It was our
+weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.
+These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.
+We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it,
+and seen it as a whirlpool.  And then we had used it as a sink.
+It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.
+Only our worst things were going to heaven.  Only our criminals
+could still ascend like angels.
+
+"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped
+by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals
+like lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway.
+He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was
+merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.
+So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side,
+and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
+them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
+consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be
+found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
+of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
+Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
+only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old
+emptied palaces of Italy.  Indeed, some little time later,
+when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
+were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
+below us into one flat square or wide street below another,
+like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric
+building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.
+But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.
+
+"My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
+by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
+Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney
+he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole
+chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an inkstand.
+I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt
+sure he had arranged his criminal approach long before.
+
+"The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
+of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden sense
+of comedy and even of comfort.  I could not recall what connected this
+abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies.
+Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys
+in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally
+comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses
+were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled
+in and out of by policemen and pantaloons.  The law-breaking of my companion
+seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable.
+Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their
+foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they
+should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them?
+One would suppose that property was a serious thing.  I had reached,
+as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions,
+the heaven of a higher levity.
+
+"My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced
+chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower, for,
+tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible.
+Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way
+of invading the houses of men.  I thought of little chimney-sweeps,
+and `The Water Babies;' but I decided that it was not that.
+Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy
+trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.
+Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
+
+"Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black hole;
+but I heard a voice calling to me from below.  A second or two afterwards,
+the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the fog,
+and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me
+to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends.
+I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking
+of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.
+
+"In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected, there was
+the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen;
+but there was also the top door for the gods.  The chimney is,
+so to speak, the underground passage between earth and heaven.
+By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages--like the skylark--
+to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
+Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack
+of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.
+But Santa Claus's door was really the front door:
+it was the door fronting the universe.
+
+"I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below
+the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet
+larger loft below.  Yet it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I
+suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps,
+as my companion had retraced them from the beginning of the garden wall.
+The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses.
+I remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.
+
+"I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all
+their horror of offences against property.  I had heard all
+the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong;
+I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times.
+And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way
+down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar,
+I saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all,
+is really wrong.
+
+"It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed
+the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across
+the lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part
+of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts,
+lifted a sort of trapdoor.  This released a light from below,
+and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room,
+of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom,
+and is an adjunct to it.  Light thus breaking from beneath
+our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor
+just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless
+been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend.
+But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the shining
+room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness.
+To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle,
+by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one's psychology.
+It was like having found a fourth dimension.
+
+"My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly
+and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him;
+though, for lack of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless.
+Before the echo of my boots had died away, the big burglar
+had gone quickly to the door, half opened it, and stood looking
+down the staircase and listening.  Then, leaving the door
+still half open, he came back into the middle of the room,
+and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.
+The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human
+way that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full,
+but slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked
+for the purposes of reading in bed.  One of those stunted
+German stoves that look like red goblins stood in a corner,
+and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part.
+There were three windows, high but narrow.  After another glance round,
+my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged inside.
+He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely
+handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like port.
+Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little
+luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation
+and revulsion I had felt above.
+
+"`Don't do it!'  I cried quite incoherently, `Santa Claus--'
+
+"`Ah,' said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table
+and stood looking at me, `you've thought about that, too.'
+
+"`I can't express a millionth part of what I've thought of,' I cried,
+`but it's something like this... oh, can't you see it?  Why are children
+not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?
+He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treachery--because there are
+more toys where he has been.  What should we feel if there were less?
+Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take
+away the children's balls and dolls while they slept?  Could a Greek
+tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening?
+Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer--can you think of anything
+so base as a toy-stealer?'
+
+"The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid
+it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes
+fixed on my face.
+
+"`Man!' I said, `all stealing is toy-stealing. That's why
+it's really wrong.  The goods of the unhappy children of men
+should be really respected because of their worthlessness.
+I know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark.  I know
+Nathan's ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand.
+That is why I could not take them away.  I did not mind so much,
+as long as I thought of men's things as their valuables;
+but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.'
+
+"After a moment I added abruptly, `Only saints and sages ought to be robbed.
+They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people
+of the things that are their poor little pride.'
+
+"He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both,
+and lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.
+
+"`Don't do it!'  I cried.  `It might be the last bottle of some rotten
+vintage or other.  The master of this house may be quite proud of it.
+Don't you see there's something sacred in the silliness of such things?'
+
+"`It's not the last bottle,' answered my criminal calmly;
+`there's plenty more in the cellar.'
+
+"`You know the house, then?'  I said.
+
+"`Too well,' he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have
+something eerie about it.  `I am always trying to forget what I know--
+and to find what I don't know.'  He drained his glass.
+`Besides,' he added, `it will do him good.'
+
+"`What will do him good?'
+
+"`The wine I'm drinking,' said the strange person.
+
+"`Does he drink too much, then?'  I inquired.
+
+"`No,' he answered, `not unless I do.'
+
+"`Do you mean,' I demanded, `that the owner of this house approves
+of all you do?'
+
+"`God forbid,' he answered; `but he has to do the same.'
+
+"The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows
+unreasonable increased a sense of riddle, and even terror,
+about this tall, narrow house we had entered out of the sky.
+I had once more the notion about the gigantic genii--
+I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds
+and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our
+little lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes.
+My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of him,
+and talking with the same rather creepy confidentialness.
+
+"`I am always trying to find him--to catch him unawares.
+I come in through skylights and trapdoors to find him;
+but whenever I find him--he is doing what I am doing.'
+
+"I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear.  `There is some one coming,'
+I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it.  Not from
+the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber
+(which seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were
+coming nearer.  I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster,
+or double, I expected to see when the door was pushed open from within.
+I am only quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.
+
+"Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity,
+a rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic--
+her dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves,
+with a face which, though still comparatively young,
+conveyed experience as well as intelligence.  All she said was,
+`I didn't hear you come in.'
+
+"`I came in another way,' said the Permeator, somewhat vaguely.
+`I'd left my latchkey at home.'
+
+"I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania.
+`I'm really very sorry,' I cried.  `I know my position is irregular.
+Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is?'
+
+"`Mine,' said the burglar, `May I present you to my wife?'
+
+"I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat;
+and I did not get out of it till nearly morning.  Mrs. Smith
+(such was the prosaic name of this far from prosaic household)
+lingered a little, talking slightly and pleasantly.
+She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd mixture
+of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well,
+but was still a little harmlessly afraid of it.
+Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a husband
+had left her a little nervous.  Anyhow, when she had retired
+to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary man poured
+forth his apologia and autobiography over the dwindling wine.
+
+"He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical
+and scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career.
+A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools;
+and it bred in him a war between the members and the spirit,
+but one in which the members were right.  While his brain
+accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it.
+As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things.
+As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately,
+it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded
+firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving
+him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout.
+He had done it solely because the poor don had professed
+in theory a preference for non-existence. For this
+very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down.
+Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had
+quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic
+of the joy of life.  He cut across all the associations
+of serious-minded men.  He was gay, but by no means careless.
+His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones.
+Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that
+life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain
+that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it.
+`What is more immortal,' he would cry, `than love and war?
+Type of all desire and joy--beer.  Type of all battle
+and conquest--skittles.'
+
+"There was something in him of what the old world called
+the solemnity of revels--when they spoke of `solemnizing'
+a mere masquerade or wedding banquet.  Nevertheless he was not
+a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical joker.
+His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith,
+in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.
+
+"`I don't deny,' he said, `that there should be priests to remind
+men that they will one day die.  I only say that at certain
+strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests,
+called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
+The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough
+to fear death.  They hadn't enough blood in them to be cowards.
+Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never
+even knew they had been born.  For ages looking up an eternal
+perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die.
+But for these little white rats it was just as true that death
+was their only chance of learning to live.'
+
+"His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt
+it continually slipping from himself as much as from others.
+He had the same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger.
+He continually ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong
+speed to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive.
+He treasured up trivial and yet insane details that had once
+reminded him of the awful subconscious reality.  When the don
+had hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs,
+vibrating in the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire
+of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers.
+The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head,
+which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved
+by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and neglect.
+Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording this,
+except to send a telegram to an old friend (by this time a
+total stranger) to say that he had just seen a man with two legs;
+and that the man was alive.
+
+"The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket
+when he suddenly fell in love.  He happened to be shooting a high
+and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself
+that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt
+about the continuance of the fact.  What was worse, he found he had
+equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one
+who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation.
+He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring
+her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have
+proposed to her on the bank.  Anyhow, with the same impetuosity
+with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her;
+and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently said `good-night.'
+
+"They had settled down in these high narrow houses
+near Highbury.  Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word.
+One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very
+happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman
+but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home;
+but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down.
+`I am a very domestic fellow,' he explained with gravity,
+`and have often come in through a broken window rather than be
+late for tea.'
+
+"He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.
+He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at
+the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there
+and what kind of a man he was.  The London general servant is not
+used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies.
+And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order
+to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt
+in other people's.
+
+"`I know there's a fellow called Smith,' he said in his rather
+weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace.
+I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.'
+
+"Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed
+politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight.
+Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture;
+would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase
+as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton
+of reality.  Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.
+And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense,
+and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.
+He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
+It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence
+of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep
+the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway
+of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.
+
+"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.
+What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being?
+A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married!
+A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor's! On
+this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it,
+though no one understands.  I believe the maniac was one of those who
+do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships
+by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire.
+This, at least, I know for certain.  Whether such men have laughed
+or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping.
+Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it.
+It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist
+as if from the sting of an adder.  But it is equally true that men flee
+from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.
+Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.
+For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things,
+is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.
+We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than
+the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations,
+the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates
+and loves the world.--I am, yours faithfully,
+                                            "Raymond Percy."
+
+
+"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Mr. Moses Gould.
+
+The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been
+in an almost religious state of submission and assent.
+Something had bound them together; something in the sacred tradition
+of the last two words of the letter; something also in the touching
+and boyish embarrassment with which Inglewood had read them--
+for he had all the thin-skinned reverence of the agnostic.
+Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way as ever lived;
+far kinder to his family than more refined men of pleasure,
+simple and steadfast in his admiration, a thoroughly wholesome
+animal and a thoroughly genuine character.  But wherever there
+is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial,
+unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces.
+English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism,
+looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile.
+It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin
+for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval towns.
+
+"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Moses Gould.
+
+Finding that this was not well received, he explained further,
+exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant features.
+
+"Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when 'e's corfin' up a fly,"
+he said pleasantly.  "Don't you see you've bunged up old Smith anyhow.
+If this parson's tale's O.K.--why, Smith is 'ot.  'E's pretty 'ot.
+We find him elopin' with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab.
+Well, what abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her
+blarsted shyness--transmigogrified into a blighted sharpness?
+Miss Gray ain't been very sharp, but I reckon she'll be pretty shy."
+
+"Don't be a brute," growled Michael Moon.
+
+None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance
+along the table at Innocent Smith.  He was still bowed above his paper toys,
+and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or shame.
+He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and tucked it
+in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter III
+
+                       The Round Road;
+                  or, the Desertion Charge
+
+
+Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American,
+and his respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.
+
+"Ignoring," he said, "the delicate and considerable knightly protests
+that have been called forth by my colleague's native sense of oration,
+and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable
+to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my colleague's question
+by no means devoid of rel'vancy. The last charge against the accused was
+one of burglary; the next charge on the paper is of bigamy and desertion.
+It does without question appear that the defence, in aspiring to rebut
+this last charge, have really admitted the next.  Either Innocent Smith
+is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else that is exploded;
+but he is pretty well fixed for attempted bigamy.  It all depends on
+what view we take of the alleged letter from Curate Percy.  Under these
+conditions I feel justified in claiming my right to questions.
+May I ask how the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy?  Did it
+come direct from the prisoner?"
+
+"We have had nothing direct from the prisoner," said Moon quietly.
+"The few documents which the defence guarantees came to us
+from another quarter."
+
+"From what quarter?" asked Dr. Pym.
+
+"If you insist," answered Moon, "we had them from Miss Gray.
+
+"Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead,
+opened them very wide.
+
+"Do you really mean to say," he said, "that Miss Gray was in possession
+of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?"
+
+"Quite so," said Inglewood, and sat down.
+
+The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice,
+and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.
+
+"Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy's narrative
+is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents
+in our own possession.  Of these the principal and most certain is
+the testimony of Innocent Smith's gardener, who was present at the most
+dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity.
+Mr. Gould, the gardener, please."
+
+Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the gardener.
+That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith
+when they had a little house on the edge of Croydon.
+From the gardener's tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew
+certain he had seen the place.  It was one of those corners of town
+or country that one does not forget, for it looked like a frontier.
+The garden hung very high above the lane, and its end was steep
+and sharp, like a fortress.  Beyond was a roll of real country,
+with a white path sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and branches
+of great gray trees writhing and twisting against the sky.
+But as if to assert that the lane itself was suburban,
+were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing upland
+a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-green and a red pillar-box
+that stood exactly at the corner.  Inglewood was sure of the place;
+he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle;
+he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might occur.
+But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his
+frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared
+over the garden bushes above.  The gardener's account,
+unlike the curate's, was quite free from decorative adjectives,
+however many he may have uttered privately when writing it.
+He simply said that on a particular morning Mr. Smith came out
+and began to play about with a rake, as he often did.  Sometimes he
+would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children);
+sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree,
+and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of
+a giant frog in its final agony.  Never, apparently, did he think
+of putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener,
+in consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity.
+But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he
+(the gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying
+the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped
+red and white jacket (which might have been his smoking-jacket,
+but was quite as like a part of his pyjamas), and had heard him then
+and there call out to his wife, who was looking out of the bedroom
+window on to the garden, these decisive and very loud expressions--
+
+"I won't stay here any longer.  I've got another wife and much
+better children a long way from here.  My other wife's got redder
+hair than yours, and my other garden's got a much finer situation;
+and I'm going off to them."
+
+With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky,
+higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again.
+Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down
+in the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat.
+Much of the picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental
+memory of the place.  He could see with his mind's eye that big
+bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked
+woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind.
+But the gardener, on his own account, was quite prepared to swear
+to the public confession of bigamy, to the temporary disappearance
+of the rake in the sky, and the final disappearance of the man up
+the road.  Moreover, being a local man, he could swear that, beyond some
+local rumours that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast,
+nothing was known of him again.
+
+This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few
+but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge.
+So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on
+the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account.
+"I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect
+the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener.
+By Mr. Inglewood's favour we will hear the French innkeeper."
+
+Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
+reading the account in question.  It was in French.  It seemed to them
+to run something like this:--
+
+
+"Sir,--Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
+rather north of Dunquerque.  I am willing to write all I know
+of the stranger out of the sea.
+
+"I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets.  A man of sense
+looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful,
+such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette.  One does not permit
+beauty to pervade one's whole life, just as one does not pave
+all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums.
+My faith, but we should miss the onions!
+
+"But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there
+are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot
+as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening
+I felt like a poet--like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe
+in the mad Montmartre.
+
+"Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter
+and poisonous.  I had never known it look so unfamiliar before.
+In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to
+the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk
+where they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore.
+There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from
+the sea.  It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man
+of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up
+to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men.
+He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him
+look like a Triton.  Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging
+to him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside,
+asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded.
+Then the monster, with great politeness, invited me to partake
+of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation.
+He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private
+bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an
+easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats.
+He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house.  When I
+naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not know;
+it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed
+it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, `over there.'
+
+"I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when he
+saw it.  Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly minute.
+He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an auctioneer.
+I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last two, which were
+that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red pillar-box
+at the corner.
+
+"`A red pillar-box!' I cried in astonishment.  `Why, the place must
+be in England!'
+
+"`I had forgotten,' he said, nodding heavily.  `That is the island's name.'
+
+"`But, ~nom du nom~,' I cried testily, `you've just come
+from England, my boy.'
+
+"`They SAID it was England,' said my imbecile, conspiratorially.
+`They said it was Kent.  But Kentish men are such liars one can't
+believe anything they say.'
+
+"`Monsieur,' I said, `you must pardon me.  I am elderly,
+and the ~fumisteries~ of the young men are beyond me.
+I go by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension
+of applied common sense called science.'
+
+"`Science!' cried the stranger.  `There is only one good thing
+science ever discovered--a good thing, good tidings of great joy--
+that the world is round.'
+
+"I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression
+to my intelligence.  `I mean,' he said, `that going right round
+the world is the shortest way to where you are already.'
+
+"`Is it not even shorter,' I asked, `to stop where you are?'
+
+"`No, no, no!' he cried emphatically.  `That way is long and very weary.
+At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find
+the wife I really married and the house that is really mine.
+And that house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box.
+Do you,' he asked with a sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush
+out of your house in order to find it?'
+
+"`No, I think not,' I replied; `reason tells a man from
+the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life.
+I remain here, content to fulfil the life of man.
+All my interests are here, and most of my friends, and--'
+
+"`And yet,' he cried, starting to his almost terrific height,
+`you made the French Revolution!'
+
+"`Pardon me,' I said, `I am not quite so elderly.
+A relative perhaps.'
+
+"`I mean your sort did!' exclaimed this personage.
+`Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made
+the French Revolution.  Oh!  I know some say it was no good,
+and you're just back where you were before.  Why, blast it all,
+that's just where we all want to be--back where we were before!
+That is revolution--going right round!  Every revolution,
+like a repentance, is a return.'
+
+"He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again,
+and then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck
+the tiny table with his colossal fist and went on.
+
+"`I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
+English Revolution.  God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny.
+The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman
+marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone.  But I am going to turn
+the world upside down, too.  I'm going to turn myself upside down.
+I'm going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes,
+where trees and men hang head downward in the sky.  But my revolution,
+like yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy place--
+the celestial, incredible place--the place where we were before.'
+
+"With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason,
+he leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight,
+swinging his pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment,
+which also pointed to some loss of mental balance.
+This is all I know of the episode of the man landed from the
+fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of justice.--
+Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high consideration,
+with which I have the honour to be your obedient servant,
+                                            "Jules Durobin."
+
+
+"The next document in our dossier," continued Inglewood,
+"comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia,
+and runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Sir,--My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch:  I am the stationmaster
+at the station near Crazok.  The great trains go by across
+the plains taking people to China, but very few people get
+down at the platform where I have to watch.  This makes my life
+rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon the books I have.
+But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbours,
+for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia
+so much as in other parts.  Many of the peasants round here
+have never heard of Bernard Shaw.
+
+"I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since
+the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult.
+The revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles
+of humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books,
+they were ill acquainted.  I did not approve of these cruel acts,
+though provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there
+is a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them.
+This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.
+
+"It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains
+came through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching
+a train that had come in.  Only one person got out of the train,
+far away up at the other end of it, for it was a very long train.
+It was evening, with a cold, greenish sky.  A little snow had fallen,
+but not enough to whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort
+of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops
+of some distant tablelands caught the evening light like lakes.
+As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the train
+he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen so large a man.
+But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because his
+shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little.
+From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull
+red and dirty white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested
+on a huge pole such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.
+
+"Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled in one
+of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution,
+though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government side.
+I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and laid
+out right and left with such energy that he came through them without scathe
+and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and really astonished.
+
+"Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim,
+he could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.
+
+"`There are not many houses to be had round here,' I answered
+in the same language, `the district has been very disturbed.
+A revolution, as you know, has recently been suppressed.
+Any further building--'
+
+"`Oh! I don't mean that,' he cried; `I mean a real house--a live house.
+It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.'
+
+"`I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture
+moved me profoundly.  We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere
+of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can still be seen
+in the bright colours of the children's dolls and of the ikons.
+For an instant the idea of a house running away from a man gave
+me pleasure, for the enlightenment of man moves slowly.
+
+"`Have you no other house of your own?'  I asked.
+
+"`I have left it,' he said very sadly.  `It was not the house that grew dull,
+but I that grew dull in it.  My wife was better than all women, and yet I
+could not feel it.'
+
+"`And so,' I said with sympathy, `you walked straight out of the front door,
+like a masculine Nora.'
+
+"`Nora?' he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian word.
+
+"`I mean Nora in "The Doll's House,"' I replied.
+
+"At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an Englishman;
+for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but `ukases.'
+
+"`"The Doll's House"?' he cried vehemently; `why, that is just where Ibsen
+was so wrong!  Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll's house.
+Don't you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows
+WERE windows, while the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house,
+and shrieks when a front door opens inwards.  A banker has a real house,
+yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest shriek
+when their real front doors open inwards.'
+
+"Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly silent;
+and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and was saying
+in a sort of loud whisper, `I have found out how to make a big thing small.
+I have found out how to turn a house into a doll's house.  Get a long
+way off it:  God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift
+of distance.  Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite
+little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again.
+I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against the gate,
+and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the window.
+For the windows really open in my doll's house.'
+
+"`But why?'  I asked, `should you wish to return to that particular
+doll's house?  Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against convention,
+having made yourself in the conventional sense disreputable, having dared
+to be free, why should you not take advantage of your freedom?
+As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your
+marriage was only your mood.  You have a right to leave it all behind,
+like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails.
+Having once escaped, you have the world before you.  Though the words
+may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.'
+
+"He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains,
+where the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke
+out of the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline,
+the one hot and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.
+
+"`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia.  You are right.
+I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again,
+and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could
+ever find me.  Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'
+
+"His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask
+him what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.
+
+"`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy eye,
+`why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away
+from his wife.'
+
+"`And why is it dangerous?'  I inquired.
+
+"`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd person,
+`and we all want to be found.'
+
+"`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked,
+`Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we
+want most is to be lost:  to find ourselves in untrodden paths,
+and to do unprecedented things:  to break with the past and belong
+to the future.'
+
+"He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
+what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene--the dark purple plains,
+the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents.
+`I shall not find the house here,' he said.  `It is still eastward--
+further and further eastward.'
+
+"Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot
+of his pole upon the frozen earth.
+
+"`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be locked up in a
+madhouse before I reach my own house.  I have been a bit unconventional
+in my time!  Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the silly old
+Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs;
+but the things I do are unprecedented things.  This round road I
+am treading is an untrodden path.  I do believe in breaking out;
+I am a revolutionist.  But don't you see that all these real leaps
+and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden--
+to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?
+Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order
+to get HOME?'
+
+"`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I should accept that.'
+
+"`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have explained a second
+thing to me.'
+
+"`What do you mean?'  I asked; `what thing?'
+
+"`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking across quite
+suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at last.
+And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening flats.
+
+"I saw no more of him.  But though his views were adverse to the best
+advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person:  I should
+like to find out if he has produced any literary works.--Yours, etc.,
+                                      "Paul Nickolaiovitch."
+
+
+There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which kept
+the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again
+without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile.
+"The Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks the special
+ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own way:--
+
+
+"The Celestial Principles are permanent:  Greeting.--I am Wong-Hi,
+and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest
+of Fu.  The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it
+must be very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought.
+I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this
+temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall doubtless die.
+But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place changes.
+The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees,
+like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas.  But the skies
+are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade,
+and sometimes red like garnet.  But the night is always ebony
+and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
+
+"The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly
+seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look
+as over a sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning.
+And yet when he came, it was as if an elephant had strayed
+from the armies of the great kings of India.  For palms snapped,
+and bamboos broke, and there came forth in the sunshine before
+the temple one taller than the sons of men.
+
+"Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival,
+and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon.
+His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners,
+so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke
+our speech brokenly.
+
+"He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.'
+And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his house
+was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
+
+"`I have not seen your house nor any houses,' I answered.
+`I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.'
+
+"`Do you believe in the gods?' he asked with hunger in his eyes,
+like the hunger of dogs.  And this seemed to me a strange question
+to ask, for what should a man do except what men have done?
+
+"`My Lord,' I said, `it must be good for men to hold up their hands even
+if the skies are empty.  For if there are gods, they will be pleased,
+and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
+Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes
+ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all.
+So the great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things
+with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our
+heads we may think many things:  yes, my Lord, and doubt many things.
+So long as men offer rice at the right season, and kindle lanterns
+at the right hour, it matters little whether there be gods or no.
+For these things are not to appease gods, but to appease men.'
+
+"He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous;
+yet his look was very gentle.
+
+"`Break your temple,' he said, `and your gods will be freed.'
+
+"And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered:  `And so, if there be no gods,
+I shall have nothing but a broken temple.'
+
+"And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was
+withheld threw out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him.
+And when I asked him for what he should be forgiven he answered:
+`For being right.'
+
+"`Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying,'
+he cried, `it is a shame that they should be wrong.
+We are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so many iniquities--
+it is a shame we should be right after all.'
+
+"And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought
+that he and his people were right.
+
+"And he answered:  `We are right because we are bound where
+men should be bound, and free where men should be free.
+We are right because we doubt and destroy laws and customs--
+but we do not doubt our own right to destroy them.  For you live
+by customs, but we live by creeds.  Behold me!  In my country I
+am called Smip.  My country is abandoned, my name is defiled,
+because I pursue around the world what really belongs to me.
+You are steadfast as the trees because you do not believe.
+I am as fickle as the tempest because I do believe.
+I do believe in my own house, which I shall find again.
+And at the last remaineth the green lantern and the red post.'
+
+"I said to him:  `At the last remaineth only wisdom.'
+
+"But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout,
+and rushing forward disappeared among the trees.
+I have not seen this man again nor any other man.
+The virtues of the wise are of fine brass.
+                                                  "Wong-Hi."
+
+
+"The next letter I have to read," proceeded Arthur Inglewood, "will probably
+make clear the nature of our client's curious but innocent experiment.
+It is dated from a mountain village in California, and runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Sir,--A person answering to the rather extraordinary
+description required certainly went, some time ago,
+over the high pass of the Sierras on which I live and
+of which I am probably the sole stationary inhabitant.
+I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut,
+on the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass.
+My name is Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you
+about my nationality.  Well, it puzzles me a great deal.
+When one has been for fifteen years without society it is hard
+to have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it
+is difficult to invent a nation.  My father was an Irishman of
+the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian kind.
+My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old
+Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that
+of some admixture of Red Indian blood.  I was well educated
+and fond of music and books.  But, like many other hybrids,
+I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting
+many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though
+a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains.
+In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage.
+Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore
+in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a
+great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun.
+I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm;
+and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few
+peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place.
+But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did.
+Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.
+
+"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
+effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks
+coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.
+Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles;
+cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as
+sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous.  These terraces and towers
+of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world.
+Rather they seem to be its awful beginning:  its huge foundations.
+We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree
+of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.
+For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far,
+so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.
+The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth
+than planets circling placidly about it.
+
+"All this may have driven me mad;  I am not sure.  I know there is one
+angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little,
+and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks--
+yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.
+It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass.
+Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass.
+But I had never seen one like this one before.
+
+"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated
+garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses,
+so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.
+His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down
+below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him
+were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air
+of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves.
+The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes
+as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon.
+I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had,
+and afterwards showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket.
+`But THAT,' he said, `I use only for peaceful purposes.'
+I have no notion what he meant.
+
+"He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine
+from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one
+who had travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last
+something that he knew.  Then he sat staring rather foolishly at
+the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door.
+It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago:
+she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a crude
+picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.  He seemed
+so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady's blue gown and
+the big gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing,
+which I had not done for fourteen years.
+
+"Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward
+where the road fell away below us.  The sunset sky was a vault
+of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges
+of the dark mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below
+rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight
+solitary rock we call Green Finger.  Of a queer volcanic colour,
+and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing,
+it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
+
+"The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction,
+and before he spoke I knew what he meant.  Beyond the great green
+rock in the purple sky hung a single star.
+
+"`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of our
+ancient eagles'. `The wise men followed the star and found the house.
+But if I followed the star, should I find the house?'
+
+"`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you are a wise man.'
+I refrained from adding that he certainly didn't look it.
+
+"`You may judge for yourself,' he answered.  `I am a man who left his own
+house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.'
+
+"`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.
+
+"`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving
+about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I knew
+they were walking and talking in another house thousands
+of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond
+the series of the seas.  I loved them with a devouring love,
+because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
+Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable:
+but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off
+their dust from my feet for a testimony.  Nay, I did more.
+I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle
+like a treadmill.'
+
+"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world?
+Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'
+
+"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly.
+`I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'
+
+"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
+of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
+felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
+I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
+not looked for fourteen years.
+
+"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we
+were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
+home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
+
+"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift
+out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
+
+"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up
+leaning on his grassy pole.  `I think that must be the reason,'
+he said--`the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
+But I think there is more to be said.  I think God has given us
+the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land,
+for a good reason.'
+
+"`I dare say,' I said.  `What reason?'
+
+"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss,
+`we might worship that.'
+
+"`What do you mean?'  I demanded.
+
+"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the idols--
+the mightiest of the rivals of God.'
+
+"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I suggested.
+
+"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house
+for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge,
+or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post
+and a hedge.  I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it,
+and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot
+might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries,
+that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything.
+And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had
+a real green lamp-post after all.'
+
+"With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down
+the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the eagles.
+But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me.
+I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have
+never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.--
+Yours faithfully, Louis Hara."
+
+
+After a short silence Inglewood said:  "And, finally, we desire
+to put in as evidence the following document:--
+
+
+"This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to
+Mrs. I. Smith at `The Laurels' in Croydon for the last six months.
+When I came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow,
+but her husband was away.  She was left with plenty of money and did not
+seem disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon.
+She said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good.
+One evening last week I was bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn
+when I nearly dropped them.  The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck
+over the hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge,
+just like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all hairy
+and ragged like Robinson Crusoe.  I screamed out, but my mistress didn't
+even get out of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted shaving.
+Then he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup
+of tea, and then I realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself.
+He has stopped here ever since and does not really give much trouble,
+though I sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head.
+                                                "Ruth Davis.
+
+"P.S.--I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and said,
+very loud and strong:  `Oh, what a lovely place you've got;'
+just as if he'd never seen it before."
+
+
+The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one
+heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible
+solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women
+had left the court before the more recent of the investigations.
+Mrs. Duke was still asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a large
+hunchback in the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper toys.
+But the five men really engaged in the controversy, and concerned not
+to convince the tribunal but to convince each other, still sat round
+the table like the Committee of Public Safety.
+
+Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another,
+cocked his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair
+backwards so far as to be in direct danger of falling over,
+emitted a startling and prolonged whistle like a steam engine,
+and asserted that it was all his eye.
+
+When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind
+the books again and answered with considerable excitement,
+throwing his papers about.  "All those fairy-tales you've
+been reading out," he said.  "Oh! don't talk to me!
+I ain't littery and that, but I know fairy-tales when I hear 'em.
+I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical bits
+and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we're living
+in West 'Ampstead and not in 'Ell; and the long and the short
+of it is that some things 'appen and some things don't 'appen.
+Those are the things that don't 'appen."
+
+"I thought," said Moon gravely, "that we quite clearly explained--"
+
+"Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained," assented Mr. Gould
+with extraordinary volubility.  "You'd explain an elephant
+off the doorstep, you would.  I ain't a clever chap like you;
+but I ain't a born natural, Michael Moon, and when there's
+an elephant on my doorstep I don't listen to no explanations.
+`It's got a trunk,' I says.--`My trunk,' you says:
+`I'm fond of travellin', and a change does me good.'--`But
+the blasted thing's got tusks,' I says.--`Don't look a gift 'orse
+in the mouth,' you says, `but thank the goodness and the graice
+that on your birth 'as smiled.'--`But it's nearly as big as
+the 'ouse,' I says.--`That's the bloomin' perspective,' you says,
+`and the sacred magic of distance.'--`Why, the elephant's trumpetin'
+like the Day of Judgement,' I says.--`That's your own conscience
+a-talking to you, Moses Gould,' you says in a grive and
+tender voice.  Well, I 'ave got a conscience as much as you.
+I don't believe most of the things they tell you in church
+on Sundays; and I don't believe these 'ere things any more
+because you goes on about 'em as if you was in church.
+I believe an elephant's a great big ugly dingerous beast--
+and I believe Smith's another."
+
+"Do you mean to say," asked Inglewood, "that you still doubt the evidence
+of exculpation we have brought forward?"
+
+"Yes, I do still doubt it," said Gould warmly.  "It's all
+a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off.
+'Ow can we test all those tales?  'Ow can we drop in and buy
+the `Pink 'Un' at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or whatever
+it was?  'Ow can we go and do a gargle at the saloon-bar on top
+of the Sierra Mountains?  But anybody can go and see Bunting's
+boarding-house at Worthing."
+
+Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.
+
+"Any one," continued Gould, "can call on Mr. Trip."
+
+"It is a comforting thought," replied Michael with restraint;
+"but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?"
+
+"For just exactly the sime reason," cried the excited Moses,
+hammering on the table with both hands, "for just exactly the sime
+reason that he should communicate with Messrs.  'Anbury and Bootle
+of Paternoster Row and with Miss Gridley's 'igh class Academy
+at 'Endon, and with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge."
+
+"Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life," said Michael,
+"why is it among the duties of man to communicate with old
+Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge?"
+
+"It ain't one of the duties of man," said Gould, "nor one of his pleasures,
+either, I can tell you.  She takes the crumpet, does Lady Bullingdon
+at Penge.  But it's one of the duties of a prosecutor pursuin'
+the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend Smith,
+and it's the sime with all the others I mentioned."
+
+"But why do you bring in these people here?" asked Inglewood.
+
+"Why!  Because we've got proof enough to sink a steamboat,"
+roared Moses; "because I've got the papers in my very 'and;
+because your precious Innocent is a blackguard and 'ome smasher,
+and these are the 'omes he's smashed.  I don't set up for a 'oly man;
+but I wouldn't 'ave all those poor girls on my conscience for something.
+And I think a chap that's capable of deserting and perhaps
+killing 'em all is about capable of cracking a crib or shootin'
+an old schoolmaster--so I don't care much about the other yarns
+one way or another."
+
+"I think," said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough,
+"that we are approaching this matter rather irregularly.
+This is really the fourth charge on the charge sheet,
+and perhaps I had better put it before you in an ordered
+and scientific manner."
+
+Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence
+of the darkening room.
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter IV
+
+                     The Wild Weddings;
+                   or, the Polygamy Charge
+
+
+"A modern man," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, "must, if he be thoughtful,
+approach the problem of marriage with some caution.
+Marriage is a stage--doubtless a suitable stage--in the long
+advance of mankind towards a goal which we cannot as yet conceive;
+which we are not, perhaps, as yet fitted even to desire.
+What, gentlemen, is the ethical position of marriage?
+Have we outlived it?"
+
+"Outlived it?" broke out Moon; "why, nobody's ever survived it!
+Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve--and all
+as dead as mutton."
+
+"This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc'lar in its character,"
+said Dr. Pym frigidly.  "I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon's
+matured and ethical view of marriage--"
+
+"I can tell," said Michael savagely, out of the gloom.  "Marriage is a duel
+to the death, which no man of honour should decline."
+
+"Michael," said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, "you MUST keep quiet."
+
+"Mr. Moon," said Pym with exquisite good temper, "probably regards
+the institution in a more antiquated manner.  Probably he would make
+it stringent and uniform.  He would treat divorce in some great soul
+of steel--the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson--
+exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who
+scoots from his wife.  Science has views broader and more humane.
+Just as murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction,
+just as theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition,
+so polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct
+for variety.  A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy.
+Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower--
+as there is, doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears
+to afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment.  Our own world-scorning
+Winterbottom has even dared to say, `For a certain rare and fine
+physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of females,
+as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.'
+In any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all
+authoritative inquirers.  Such a type, if the widower of a negress,
+does in many ascertained cases espouse ~en seconde noces~ an albino;
+such a type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian,
+will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the consoling figure of
+an Eskimo.  To such a type there can be no doubt that the prisoner belongs.
+If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute any slight excuse
+for a man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses.
+
+"Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric
+ideality in admitting half of our story without further dispute.
+We should like to acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted
+a style by conceding also that the story told by Curate Percy about
+the canoe, the weir, and the young wife seems to be substantially true.
+Apparently Smith did marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat;
+it only remains to be considered whether it would not have been
+kinder of him to have murdered her instead of marrying her.
+In confirmation of this fact I can now con-cede to the defence
+an unquestionable record of such a marriage."
+
+So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the
+"Maidenhead Gazette" which distinctly recorded the marriage
+of the daughter of a "coach," a tutor well known in the place,
+to Mr. Innocent Smith, late of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown
+at once both tragic and triumphant.
+
+"I pause upon this pre-liminary fact," he said seriously,
+"because this fact alone would give us the victory,
+were we aspiring after victory and not after truth.
+As far as the personal and domestic problem holds us,
+that problem is solved.  Dr. Warner and I entered this house at
+an instant of highly emotional diff'culty. England's Warner has
+entered many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time
+he entered to save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence.
+Smith was just about to carry away a young girl from this house;
+his cab and bag were at the very door.  He had told her she was
+going to await the marriage license at the house of his aunt.
+That aunt," continued Cyrus Pym, his face darkening grandly--"that
+visionary aunt had been the dancing will-o'-the-wisp
+who had led many a high-souled maiden to her doom.
+Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word?
+When he said `aunt' there glowed about her all the merriment
+and high morality of the Anglo-Saxon home.  Kettles began to hum,
+pussy cats to purr, in that very wild cab that was being
+driven to destruction."
+
+Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another
+denizen of the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was
+not only perfectly serious, but was really eloquent and affecting--
+when the difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.
+
+"It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at
+least represented himself to one innocent female of this house
+as an eligible bachelor, being, in fact, a married man.  I agree with
+my colleague, Mr. Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this.
+As to whether what our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical
+value indeed, science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation.
+But what hesitation can there be about the baseness of a citizen
+who ventures, by brutal experiments upon living females, to anticipate
+the verdict of science on such a point?
+
+"The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith
+in Highbury may or may not be the same as the lady he married
+in Maidenhead.  If one short sweet spell of constancy and heart
+repose interrupted the plunging torrent of his profligate life,
+we will not deprive him of that long past possibility.
+After that conjectural date, alas, he seems to have plunged deeper
+and deeper into the shaking quagmires of infidelity and shame."
+
+Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no more
+light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral effect.
+After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer, he continued.
+
+"The first instance of the accused's repeated and irregular nuptials,"
+he exclaimed, "comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses herself
+with the high haughtiness which must be excused in those who look
+out upon all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep.
+The communication she has sent to us runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference
+is made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail.
+The girl Polly Green was a perfectly adequate dressmaker,
+and lived in the village for about two years.  Her unattached
+condition was bad for her as well as for the general morality
+of the village.  Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it to be
+understood that she favoured the marriage of the young woman.
+The villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon,
+came forward in several cases; and all would have been well had it
+not been for the deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl
+Green herself.  Lady Bullingdon supposes that where there is
+a village there must be a village idiot, and in her village,
+it seems, there was one of these wretched creatures.
+Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite aware
+that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual
+idiots and the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes.
+She noticed, however, the startling smallness of his head
+in comparison to the rest of his body; and, indeed, the fact
+of his having appeared upon election day wearing the rosette
+of both the two opposing parties appears to Lady Bullingdon
+to put the matter quite beyond doubt.  Lady Bullingdon was
+astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself
+forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question.
+Lady Bullingdon's nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point,
+telling him that he was a `donkey' to dream of such a thing,
+and actually received, along with an imbecile grin,
+the answer that donkeys generally go after carrots.
+But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy
+girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she
+was actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man
+in a far superior position to her own.  Lady Bullingdon could not,
+of course, countenance such an arrangement for a moment,
+and the two unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine marriage.
+Lady Bullingdon cannot exactly recall the man's name,
+but thinks it was Smith.  He was always called in the village
+the Innocent.  Later, Lady Bullingdon believes he murdered
+Green in a mental outbreak."
+
+
+"The next communication," proceeded Pym, "is more conspicuous for brevity,
+but I am of the opinion that it will adequately convey the upshot.
+It is dated from the offices of Messrs.  Hanbury and Bootle, publishers,
+and is as follows:--
+
+
+"Sir,--Yrs.  rcd.  and conts.  noted.  Rumour re typewriter possibly refers
+to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago to marry an
+organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police attention.
+Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when apparently went mad.
+Record was written at the time, part of which I enclose.--
+Yrs., etc., W. Trip.
+
+
+"The fuller statement runs as follows:--
+
+
+"On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs.
+Bernard and Juke, bookbinders.  Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found
+to contain the following:  `Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3,
+as we wish to know whether it is really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.'
+To this Mr. Juke, a person of a playful mind, returned the answer:
+`Sir, I am in a position to give it as my most decided opinion
+that it is not really decided that 00000073bb!!!!!xy. Yrs., etc.,
+                                                  `J. Juke.'
+
+
+"On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the original
+letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed substituted
+these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated to her.
+Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she was in an
+unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely remarked
+that she always went like that when she heard the barrel organ.
+Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series of most
+improbable statements--as, that she was engaged to the barrel-organ man,
+that he was in the habit of serenading her on that instrument,
+that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the typewriter
+(in the style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the organ man's
+musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself so ardent
+that he could detect the note of the different letters on the machine,
+and was enraptured by them as by a melody.  To all these statements
+of course our Mr. Trip and the rest of us only paid that sort of assent
+that is paid to persons who must as quickly as possible be put in the
+charge of their relations.  But on our conducting the lady downstairs,
+her story received the most startling and even exasperating confirmation;
+for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with a small head and manifestly
+a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the office doors
+like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding his alleged fiancee.
+When I myself came on the scene he was flinging his great, ape-like arms about
+and reciting a poem to her.  But we were used to lunatics coming and reciting
+poems in our office, and we were not quite prepared for what followed.
+The actual verse he uttered began, I think,
+
+        `O vivid, inviolate head,
+         Ringed --'
+
+but he never got any further.  Mr. Trip made a sharp
+movement towards him, and the next moment the giant picked
+up the poor lady typewriter like a doll, sat her on top
+of the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office doors,
+and raced away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow.
+I put the police upon the matter; but no trace of the amazing
+pair could be found.  I was sorry myself; for the lady was
+not only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position.
+As I am leaving the service of Messrs.  Hanbury and Bootle, I put
+these things in a record and leave it with them.
+                                     (Signed) Aubrey Clarke,
+                                        Publishers' Reader.
+
+
+"And the last document," said Dr. Pym complacently, "is from
+one of those high-souled women who have in this age introduced
+your English girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics,
+and every form of ideality.
+
+
+"Dear Sir (she writes),--I have no objection to telling you
+the facts about the absurd incident you mention; though I would
+ask you to communicate them with some caution, for such things,
+however entertaining in the abstract, are not always auxiliary
+to the success of a girls' school.  The truth is this:
+I wanted some one to deliver a lecture on a philological
+or historical question--a lecture which, while containing
+solid educational matter, should be a little more popular and
+entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term.
+I remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere
+or other an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name--
+an essay which showed considerable knowledge of genealogy
+and topography.  I wrote to him, asking if he would come and
+give us a bright address upon English surnames; and he did.
+It was very bright, almost too bright.  To put the matter otherwise,
+by the time that he was halfway through it became apparent
+to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally
+and entirely off his head.  He began rationally enough by dealing
+with the two departments of place names and trade names, and he said
+(quite rightly, I dare say) that the loss of all significance
+in names was an instance of the deadening of civilization.
+But then he went on calmly to maintain that every man who had
+a place name ought to go to live in that place, and that every
+man who had a trade name ought instantly to adopt that trade;
+that people named after colours should always dress in those colours,
+and that people named after trees or plants (such as Beech or Rose)
+ought to surround and decorate themselves with these vegetables.
+In a slight discussion that arose afterwards among the elder girls
+the difficulties of the proposal were clearly, and even eagerly,
+pointed out.  It was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband
+that it was substantially impossible for her to play the part
+assigned to her; Miss Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which
+no modern views on the sexes could apparently extricate her;
+and some young ladies, whose surnames happened to be Low, Coward,
+and Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the idea.
+But all this happened afterwards.  What happened at the crucial
+moment was that the lecturer produced several horseshoes and a
+large iron hammer from his bag, announced his immediate intention
+of setting up a smithy in the neighbourhood, and called on every
+one to rise in the same cause as for a heroic revolution.
+The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched man,
+but I must confess that by an accident this very intercession
+produced the worst explosion of his insanity.  He was waving
+the hammer, and wildly demanding the names of everybody;
+and it so happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers,
+was wearing a brown dress--a reddish-brown dress that went quietly
+enough with the warmer colour of her hair, as well she knew.
+She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know about those things.
+But when our maniac discovered that we really had a Miss Brown
+who WAS brown, his ~idee fixe~ blew up like a powder magazine,
+and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls,
+he publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress.
+You can imagine the effect of such a scene at a girls' school.
+At least, if you fail to imagine it, I certainly fail
+to describe it.
+
+"Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can
+think of it now as a joke.  There was only one curious detail,
+which I will tell you, as you say your inquiry is vital; but I should
+desire you to consider it a little more confidential than the rest.
+Miss Brown, who was an excellent girl in every way, did quite
+suddenly and surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards.
+I should never have thought that her head would be the one
+to be really turned by so absurd an excitement.--Believe me,
+yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.
+
+
+"I think," said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and seriousness,
+"that these letters speak for themselves."
+
+Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint
+of whether his native gravity was mixed with his native irony.
+
+"Throughout this inquiry," he said, "but especially in this its
+closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument;
+I mean the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy
+women apparently seduced by Smith.  There is no sort of proof
+that they were murdered, but that implication is perpetually made
+when the question is asked as to how they died.  Now I am not
+interested in how they died, or when they died, or whether they died.
+But I am interested in another analogous question--that of how they
+were born, and when they were born, and whether they were born.
+Do not misunderstand me.  I do not dispute the existence of
+these women, or the veracity of those who have witnessed to them.
+I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of these victims,
+the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or parents.
+All the rest are boarders or birds of passage--a guest, a solitary
+dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting.  Lady Bullingdon,
+looking from her turrets, which she bought from the Whartons with
+the old soap-boiler's money when she jumped at marrying an unsuccessful
+gentleman from Ulster--Lady Bullingdon, looking out from those turrets,
+did really see an object which she describes as Green.  Mr. Trip,
+of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed
+to Smith.  Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest.
+She did house, feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded
+in decoying away.  We admit that all these women really lived.
+But we still ask whether they were ever born?"
+
+"Oh, crikey!" said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.
+
+"There could hardly," interposed Pym with a quiet smile,
+"be a better instance of the neglect of true scientific process.
+The scientist, when once convinced of the fact of vitality
+and consciousness, would infer from these the previous
+process of generation."
+
+"If these gals," said Gould impatiently--"if these gals were all alive
+(all alive O!) I'd chance a fiver they were all born."
+
+"You'd lose your fiver," said Michael, speaking gravely out of the gloom.
+"All those admirable ladies were alive.  They were more alive for having
+come into contact with Smith.  They were all quite definitely alive,
+but only one of them was ever born."
+
+"Are you asking us to believe--" began Dr. Pym.
+
+"I am asking you a second question," said Moon sternly.  "Can the court
+now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance?
+Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe,
+the relations of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave
+of a lust for variety which would lead a man first to a negress
+and then to an albino, first to a Patagonian giantess and then
+to a tiny Eskimo.  But is there any evidence of such variety here?
+Is there any trace of a gigantic Patagonian in the story?
+Was the typewriter an Eskimo?  So picturesque a circumstance would not
+surely have escaped remark.  Was Lady Bullingdon's dressmaker a negress?
+A voice in my bosom answers, `No!' Lady Bullingdon, I am sure,
+would think a negress so conspicuous as to be almost Socialistic,
+and would feel something a little rakish even about an albino.
+
+"But was there in Smith's taste any such variety as the learned
+doctor describes?  So far as our slight materials go,
+the very opposite seems to be the case.  We have only
+one actual description of any of the prisoner's wives--
+the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic curate.
+`Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn leaves.'
+Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours, some of
+which would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance);
+but I think such an expression would be most naturally used of
+the shades from red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their
+coppery-coloured hair do frequently wear light artistic greens.
+Now when we come to the next wife, we find the eccentric lover,
+when told he is a donkey, answering that donkeys always go
+after carrots; a remark which Lady Bullingdon evidently
+regarded as pointless and part of the natural table-talk of a
+village idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we suppose
+that Polly's hair was red.  Passing to the next wife, the one
+he took from the girls' school, we find Miss Gridley noticing
+that the schoolgirl in question wore `a reddish-brown dress,
+that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of her hair.'
+In other words, the colour of the girl's hair was something redder
+than red-brown. Lastly, the romantic organ-grinder declaimed
+in the office some poetry that only got as far as the words,--
+
+        `O vivid, inviolate head,
+         Ringed --'
+
+But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets
+will enable us to guess that `ringed with a glory of red,'
+or `ringed with its passionate red,' was the line that rhymed
+to `head.' In this case once more, therefore, there is good
+reason to suppose that Smith fell in love with a girl with
+some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair--rather," he said,
+looking down at the table, "rather like Miss Gray's hair."
+
+Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids,
+ready with one of his more pedantic interpellations;
+but Moses Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose,
+with an expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence
+in his brilliant eyes.
+
+"Mr. Moon's contention at present," interposed Pym, "is not,
+even if veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view
+of I. Smith, which we have nailed to the mast.  Science has
+long anticipated such a complication.  An incurable attraction
+to a particular type of physical woman is one of the commonest
+of criminal per-versities, and when not considered narrowly,
+but in the light of induction and evolution--"
+
+"At this late stage," said Michael Moon very quietly, "I may perhaps
+relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me
+throughout the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution
+may go and boil themselves.  The Missing Link and all that is
+well enough for kids, but I'm talking about things we know here.
+All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing--and he won't
+be missed either.  I know all about his human head and his horrid tail;
+they belong to a very old game called `Heads I win, tails you lose.'
+If you do find a fellow's bones, it proves he lived a long while ago;
+if you don't find his bones, it proves how long ago he lived.
+That is the game you've been playing with this Smith affair.
+Because Smith's head is small for his shoulders you call
+him microcephalous; if it had been large, you'd have called it
+water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith's seraglio seemed
+pretty various, variety was the sign of madness:  now, because it's
+turning out to be a bit monochrome--now monotony is the sign of madness.
+I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person,
+and I'm jolly well going to get some of the advantages too;
+and with all politeness I propose not to be bullied with long words
+instead of short reasons, or consider your business a triumphant
+progress merely because you're always finding out that you were wrong.
+Having relieved myself of these feelings, I have merely to add
+that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more beautiful
+than the Parthenon, or the monument on Bunker's Hill, and that I
+propose to resume and conclude my remarks on the many marriages
+of Mr. Innocent Smith.
+
+"Besides this red hair, there is another unifying thread that
+runs through these scattered incidents.  There is something
+very peculiar and suggestive about the names of these women.
+Mr. Trip, you will remember, said he thought the typewriter's
+name was Blake, but could not remember exactly.
+I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that case we
+have a curious series:  Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon's village;
+Miss Brown at the Hendon School; Miss Black at the publishers.
+A chord of colours, as it were, which ends up with Miss Gray
+at Beacon House, West Hampstead."
+
+Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition.
+"What is the meaning of this queer coincidence about colours?
+Personally I cannot doubt for a moment that these names are purely
+arbitrary names, assumed as part of some general scheme or joke.
+I think it very probable that they were taken from a series of costumes--
+that Polly Green only meant Polly (or Mary) when in green,
+and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when in gray.
+This would explain--"
+
+Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid.
+"Do you actually mean to suggest--" he cried.
+
+"Yes," said Michael; "I do mean to suggest that.  Innocent Smith has had
+many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one wife.
+She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke
+in the garden.
+
+"Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of
+other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle.
+It is odd and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
+principle plainly applied in the modern world would be.  His principle
+can be quite simply stated:  he refuses to die while he is still alive.
+He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
+that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world.
+For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason
+he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
+for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his
+own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman
+whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak)
+at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might
+recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement.
+He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive
+the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run
+for her sake.
+
+"So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are
+not quite so clear.  I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom
+of all this.  I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
+quite sure that it is worth a man's uttering and defending.
+
+"The idea that Smith is attacking is this.  Living in an entangled
+civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are
+not wrong at all.  We have come to think outbreak and exuberance,
+banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong.  In themselves they
+are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable.  There is nothing
+wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not
+mean to hit him and know you won't. It is no more wrong than throwing
+a pebble at the sea--less, for you do occasionally hit the sea.
+There is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking
+through a roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or property
+of other men.  It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from
+the top than to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom.
+There is nothing wicked about walking round the world and coming back
+to your own house; it is no more wicked than walking round the garden
+and coming back to your own house.  And there is nothing wicked
+about picking up your wife here, there, and everywhere, if, forsaking
+all others, you keep only to her so long as you both shall live.
+It is as innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.
+You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association,
+as you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being
+seen going) into a pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think there
+is something squalid and commonplace about such a connection.
+You are mistaken.
+
+"This man's spiritual power has been precisely this,
+that he has distinguished between custom and creed.
+He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
+It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell,
+and you found that he only played for trouser buttons.
+It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment
+with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it
+was his grandmother.  Everything is ugly and discreditable,
+except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that
+he has done no wrong.
+
+"It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continue far into
+his middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many
+false charges?'  To this I merely answer that he does it because he really
+is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man
+and alive.  He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing
+silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all.
+And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed
+with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that,
+though it is one that will not be approved.
+
+"There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it.
+If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent.  If he can defy
+the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.
+It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life
+that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy.
+It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet
+his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all
+long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods.  It is just because
+he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex;
+it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
+If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman,
+he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song--
+at least, not a comic song."
+
+"Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy
+to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies.
+I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either
+of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed itself.
+Speaking singly, I feel as if man was tied to tragedy,
+and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt.
+But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick,
+this is the way out.  If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog,
+it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.
+Barely and brutally to be good--that may be the road, and he may have
+found it.  Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face
+of my old friend Moses.  Mr. Gould does not believe that being
+perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry."
+
+"No," said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity;
+"I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects
+would make a man merry."
+
+"Well," said Michael quietly, "will you tell me one thing?
+Which of us has ever tried it?"
+
+A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological
+epoch which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type;
+for there rose at last in the stillness a massive figure
+that the other men had almost completely forgotten.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," said Dr. Warner cheerfully, "I've been pretty
+well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery
+for a couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin,
+and I'm engaged for a city dinner.  Among the hundred flowers
+of futility on both sides I was unable to detect any sort of reason
+why a lunatic should be allowed to shoot me in the back garden."
+
+He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly to
+the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:
+"But really the bullet missed you by several feet."  And another voice added:
+"The bullet missed him by several years."
+
+There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then
+Moon said suddenly, "We have been sitting with a ghost.
+Dr. Herbert Warner died years ago."
+
+
+
+
+
+                          Chapter V
+
+                   How the Great Wind Went
+                      from Beacon House
+
+
+Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the garden;
+they were silent, and the sun had set.  Such spaces of daylight as remained
+open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be compared
+to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran
+across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke.
+All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like gray,
+and seemed to melt and mount into Mary's dark-gray figure until she seemed
+clothed with the garden and the skies.  There was something in these last
+quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy; and the twilight,
+which concealed Diana's statelier figure and Rosamund's braver array,
+exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the lady of the garden, and alone.
+
+When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long
+fallen silent was being revived.
+
+"But where is your husband taking you?" asked Diana in her practical voice.
+
+"To an aunt," said Mary; "that's just the joke.  There really
+is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged
+to be turned out of the other boarding-house down the road.
+We never take more than a week of this kind of holiday,
+but sometimes we take two of them together."
+
+"Does the aunt mind much?" asked Rosamund innocently.  "Of course,
+I dare say it's very narrow-minded and--what's that other word?--
+you know, what Goliath was--but I've known many aunts who would
+think it--well, silly."
+
+"Silly?" cried Mary with great heartiness.  "Oh, my Sunday hat!
+I should think it was silly!  But what do you expect?
+He really is a good man, and it might have been snakes or something."
+
+"Snakes?" inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.
+
+"Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him," replied Mary
+with perfect simplicity.  "Auntie let him have them in his pockets,
+but not in the bedroom."
+
+"And you--" began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.
+
+"Oh, I do as auntie did," said Mary; "as long as we're not away
+from the children more than a fortnight together I play the game.
+He calls me `Manalive;' and you must write it all one word,
+or he's quite flustered."
+
+"But if men want things like that," began Diana.
+
+"Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary impatiently;
+"why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing.
+There aren't any men.  There are no such people.  There's a man;
+and whoever he is he's quite different."
+
+"So there is no safety," said Diana in a low voice.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," answered Mary, lightly enough;
+"there's only two things generally true of them.
+At certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us,
+and they're never fit to take care of themselves."
+
+"There is a gale getting up," said Rosamund suddenly.
+"Look at those trees over there, a long way off, and the
+clouds going quicker."
+
+"I know what you're thinking about," said Mary; "and don't
+you be silly fools.  Don't you listen to the lady novelists.
+You go down the king's highway; for God's truth, it is God's. Yes,
+my dear Michael will often be extremely untidy.  Arthur Inglewood
+will be worse--he'll be untidy.  But what else are all the trees
+and clouds for, you silly kittens?"
+
+"The clouds and trees are all waving about," said Rosamund.  "There is
+a storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow.  Michael is
+really rather like a storm:  he frightens me and makes me happy."
+
+"Don't you be frightened," said Mary.  "All over, these men
+have one advantage; they are the sort that go out."
+
+A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves along
+the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.
+
+"I mean," said Mary, "they are the kind that look outwards and get interested
+in the world.  It doesn't matter a bit whether it's arguing, or bicycling,
+or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old Innocent does.  Stick to
+the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world.
+Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.
+When poor old Adam had gone out gardening (Arthur will go out gardening),
+the other sort came along and wormed himself in, nasty old snake."
+
+"You agree with your aunt," said Rosamund, smiling:  "no snakes
+in the bedroom."
+
+"I didn't agree with my aunt very much," replied Mary simply,
+"but I think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons
+and griffins, so long as it got him out of the house."
+
+Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
+turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold.
+The golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had
+sat like a clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
+cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, "Acquitted! acquitted!"
+Echoing the cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and
+wildly swung her into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz.
+But the company knew Innocent and Michael by this time,
+and their extravagances were gaily taken for granted; it was far
+more extraordinary that Arthur Inglewood walked straight up to Diana
+and kissed her as if it had been his sister's birthday.  Even Dr. Pym,
+though he refrained from dancing, looked on with real benevolence;
+for indeed the whole of the absurd revelation had disturbed him
+less than the others; he half supposed that such irresponsible
+tribunals and insane discussions were part of the mediaeval mummeries
+of the Old Land.
+
+While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window was
+lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with laughter
+and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the house again,
+they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had clambered
+out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again, "Beacon House!"
+whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the wood fire below,
+of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke drove out on
+the deafening air.
+
+He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties;
+but when the wind died down, and the party, at the top of
+their evening's merriment, looked again for Mary and for him,
+they were not to be found.
+
+
+
+                           The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton
+
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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton**
+#10 in our series by G. K. Chesterton
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+Manalive
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+by G. K. Chesterton
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+April, 1999  [Etext #1718]
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+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+Manalive
+
+by G. K. Chesterton
+
+
+
+
+First published 1912 by Thomas Nelson and Sons
+
+Electronic edition MANALIV0 published 1993 by Jim Henry III
+Edited by Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)
+
+
+PLEASE report any typos you may happen to notice, such as misplaced
+punctuation and the like, to
+
+Martin Ward (Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk)
+
+and
+
+Jim Henry III 405 Gardner Road Stockbridge, GA 30281-1515
+
+Or send email to JIM HENRY on
+
+Digital Publishing Association BBS (205) 854-1660 Faster-than-Light BBS
+(404) 292-8761
+
+ILink Bookmark conference Annex Library conference
+
+Thank you!  I hope you enjoy reading _Manalive_ as much as I have.
+I will soon be releasing _Tales of the Long Bow_, also by G. K. Chesterton.
+
+
+
+
+
+                           Table of Contents
+
+
+   Part I: The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
+      I.   How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House    
+      II.  The Luggage of an Optimist                 
+      III. The Banner of Beacon                       
+      IV.  The Garden of the God                      
+      V.   The Allegorical Practical Joker            
+
+
+  Part II: The Explanations of Innocent Smith
+      I.   The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge    
+      II.  The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge   
+      III. The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge   
+      IV.  The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge 
+      V.   How the Great Wind went from Beacon House  
+
+
+
+                           Part I
+
+                The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
+
+
+
+                          Chapter I
+
+                   How the Great Wind Came
+                       to Beacon House
+
+
+A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
+and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty
+scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea.
+It a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon,
+and astonished him like a blow.  In the inmost chambers of
+intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion,
+littering the floor with some professor's papers till they seemed
+as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a
+boy read "Treasure Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark.
+But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives,
+and carried the trump of crisis across the world.
+Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at
+a five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small,
+sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children.
+The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat
+imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed
+subconscious she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her
+fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
+Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed
+herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture
+with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames;
+and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted
+the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint
+clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below,
+as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat.  Many a dusty clerk
+or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for
+the hundredth time that they were like the plumes of a hearse;
+when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them
+round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
+There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
+than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind
+that blows nobody harm.
+
+The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
+terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh.  It was round
+about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished
+at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers
+and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has
+never been able to shake off.  At some stage of those heights a terrace
+of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians,
+curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding
+establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the sunset its high,
+narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship.
+
+The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.  The proprietor
+of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless
+persons against whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both
+before and after all her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt.
+But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece
+she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young
+but listless folks.  And there were actually five inmates
+standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale
+broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea
+bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.
+
+All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with
+cold cloud.  Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray
+and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior.
+When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left
+and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold.  The burst of light
+released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously;
+and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling violence.
+The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair.
+Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar,
+and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element.
+Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist.
+The three man stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against
+a wall.  The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly,
+they were blown into the house.  Their two frocks, blue and white,
+looked like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale.
+Nor is such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something
+oddly romantic about this inrush of air and light after a long,
+leaden and unlifting day.  Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
+with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland.
+It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.
+
+The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore
+a white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might
+have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.
+She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
+in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a
+friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
+brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous.
+On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking;
+but she had not married, perhaps because there was always
+a crowd of men around her.  She was not fast (though some
+might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths
+an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible.
+A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra,
+or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door.
+Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
+she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
+and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm,
+she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her.
+To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose
+like the curtain of some long-expected pantomime.
+
+Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this
+apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic
+and practical creatures alive.  She was, indeed, no other than
+the strenuous niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay.
+But as the gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they
+took on the monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory
+stirred in her that was almost romance--a memory of a dusty volume
+in _Punch_ in an aunt's house in infancy:  pictures of crinoline hoops
+and croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part.
+This half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly,
+and Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion.
+Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.
+In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once
+long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake.
+The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel.  It would
+be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so
+impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.
+Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door,
+before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork,
+it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands.
+She was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness.
+She spurned the ground, and she meant to spurn it.  People talk
+of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible
+thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
+
+"It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman in white,
+going to the looking-glass.
+
+The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening gloves,
+and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon
+cloth for tea.
+
+"Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund Hunt,
+with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches
+had always been safe for an encore.
+
+"Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke, "but I dare say that it
+sometimes more important."
+
+Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a
+spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person.
+She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be a big
+wind to blow your head off."
+
+There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from
+the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull
+walls with ruby and gold.
+
+"Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's easier
+to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."
+
+"Oh, don't talk such rubbish," said Diana with savage sharpness.
+
+Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour;
+but the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men
+who stood their ground might also have considered the problem
+of hats and heads.  And, indeed, their position, touching hats,
+was somewhat typical of them.  The tallest of the three abode
+the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge
+as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him.
+The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles,
+and ultimately held it in his hand.  The third had no hat, and,
+by his attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life.
+Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women,
+for there was much of the three men in this difference.
+
+The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and solidity.
+He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man, with flat
+fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young doctor
+by the name of Warner.  But if his blondness and blandness seemed
+at first a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool.
+If Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money,
+he was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame.
+His treatise on "The Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms"
+had been universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid
+and daring.  In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was
+not his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire
+to analyze with a poker.
+
+The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a
+small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness.
+It was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor
+was present; for Warner lived in no such ramshackle lodging-house,
+but in a professional palace in Harley Street.  This young
+man was really the youngest and best-looking of the three.
+But he was one of those persons, both male and female,
+who seem doomed to be good-looking and insignificant.
+Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose
+the delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown
+and red as he stood blushing and blinking against the wind.
+He was one of those obvious unnoticeable people:
+every one knew that he was Arthur Inglewood, unmarried, moral,
+decidedly intelligent, living on a little money of his own,
+and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography and cycling.
+Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the
+glare of golden sunset there was something about him indistinct,
+like one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.
+
+The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely
+sporting clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him look
+all the leaner.  He had a long ironical face, blue-black hair,
+the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the blue chin of an actor.
+An Irishman he was, an actor he was not, except in the old
+days of Miss Hunt's charades, being, as a matter of fact,
+an obscure and flippant journalist named Michael Moon.  He had
+once been hazily supposed to be reading for the Bar;
+but (as Warner would say with his rather elephantine wit)
+it was mostly at another kind of bar that his friends found him.
+Moon, however, did not drink, nor even frequently get drunk;
+he simply was a gentleman who liked low company.
+This was partly because company is quieter than society:
+and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid (as apparently
+he did), it was chiefly because the barmaid did the talking.
+Moreover he would often bring other talent to assist her.
+He shared that strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and
+without ambition--the trick of going about with his mental inferiors.
+There was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same
+boarding-house, a man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused
+Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar,
+like the owner of a performing monkey.
+
+The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew
+clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven.
+One felt one might at last find something lighter than light.
+In the fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their
+colours again:  the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold.
+One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another,
+and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.
+
+"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird,
+"have you any friends?"
+
+Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad
+beaming face, said,--
+
+"Oh yes, I go out a great deal."
+
+Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant,
+who spoke a moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young,
+as coming out of that brown and even dusty interior.
+
+"Really," answered Inglewood, "I'm afraid I've lost touch with
+my old friends.  The greatest friend I ever had was at school,
+a fellow named Smith.  It's odd you should mention it, because I
+was thinking of him to-day, though I haven't seen him for seven
+or eight years.  He was on the science side with me at school--
+a clever fellow though queer; and he went up to Oxford when I
+went to Germany.  The fact is, it's rather a sad story.
+I often asked him to come and see me, and when I heard nothing I
+made inquiries, you know.  I was shocked to learn that poor Smith
+had gone off his head.  The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course,
+some saying that he had recovered again; but they always say that.
+About a year ago I got a telegram from him myself.  The telegram,
+I'm sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt."
+
+"Quite so," assented Dr. Warner stolidly; "insanity is generally incurable."
+
+"So is sanity," said the Irishman, and studied him with a dreary eye.
+
+"Symptoms?" asked the doctor.  "What was this telegram?"
+
+"It's a shame to joke about such things," said Inglewood, in his honest,
+embarrassed way; "the telegram was Smith's illness, not Smith.  The actual
+words were, `Man found alive with two legs.'"
+
+"Alive with two legs," repeated Michael, frowning.  "Perhaps a version
+of alive and kicking?  I don't know much about people out of their senses;
+but I suppose they ought to be kicking."
+
+"And people in their senses?" asked Warner, smiling.
+
+"Oh, they ought to be kicked," said Michael with sudden heartiness.
+
+"The message is clearly insane," continued the impenetrable Warner.
+"The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type.
+Even a baby does not expect to find a man with three legs."
+
+"Three legs," said Michael Moon, "would be very convenient in this wind."
+
+A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them
+off their balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden.
+Beyond, all sorts of accidental objects could be seen scouring
+the wind-scoured sky--straws, sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance,
+a disappearing hat.  Its disappearance, however, was not final;
+after an interval of minutes they saw it again, much larger and closer,
+like a white panama, towering up into the heavens like a balloon,
+staggering to and fro for an instant like a stricken kite,
+and then settling in the centre of their own lawn as falteringly
+as a fallen leaf.
+
+"Somebody's lost a good hat," said Dr. Warner shortly.
+
+Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall,
+flying after the fluttering panama.  It was a big green umbrella.
+After that came hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone bag,
+and after that came a figure like a flying wheel of legs,
+as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
+
+But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs,
+it alighted upon two, like the man in the queer telegram.
+It took the form of a large light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes.
+He had bright blonde hair that the wind brushed back like a German's,
+a flushed eager face like a cherub's, and a prominent pointing nose,
+a little like a dog's. His head, however, was by no means cherubic
+in the sense of being without a body.  On the contrary, on his vast
+shoulders and shape generally gigantesque, his head looked oddly
+and unnaturally small.  This have rise to a scientific theory
+(which his conduct fully supported) that he was an idiot.
+
+Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward.
+His life was full of arrested half gestures of assistance.
+And even this prodigy of a big man in green, leaping the wall
+like a bright green grasshopper, did not paralyze that small
+altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost hat.
+He was stepping forward to recover the green gentleman's
+head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar like a bull's.
+
+"Unsportsmanlike!" bellowed the big man.  "Give it fair play,
+give it fair play!"  And he came after his own hat quickly
+but cautiously, with burning eyes.  The hat had seemed at first
+to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn;
+but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down
+the garden with the devilry of a ~pas de quatre~. The eccentric went
+bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech,
+of which it was not always easy to pick up the thread:
+"Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns...
+quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats... old
+English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at bay...
+mangled hounds... Got him!"
+
+As the winds rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky
+on his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat,
+missed it, and pitched sprawling face foremost on the grass.
+The hat rose over him like a bird in triumph.  But its triumph
+was premature; for the lunatic, flung forward on his hands,
+threw up his boots behind, waved his two legs in the air
+like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought again
+of the telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet.
+A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end.
+The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible blast,
+as by a strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between
+them and all objects about them.  But as the large man fell back
+in a sitting posture and solemnly crowned himself with the hat,
+Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, that he had been
+holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.
+
+While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy,
+another short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending
+very quick, swallowed in abrupt silence.  The shiny black cylinder
+of Dr. Warner's official hat sailed off his head in the long,
+smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost cresting a garden
+tree was caught in the topmost branches.  Another hat was gone.
+Those in that garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy
+of things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away next.
+Before they could speculate, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter
+was already halfway up the tree, swinging himself from fork to fork
+with his strong, bent, grasshopper legs, and still giving forth
+his gasping, mysterious comments.
+
+"Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls nesting
+in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers... gone
+to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs
+to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it up!"
+
+The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering
+wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire.
+The green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold,
+was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did
+not break with the weight of his big body.  He was up there among the last
+tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still talking
+to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps.
+He might well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had
+gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a football,
+swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the tree like a rocket.
+The other three men seemed buried under incident piled on incident--
+a wild world where one thing began before another thing left off.
+All three had the first thought.  The tree had been there for the five years
+they had known the boarding-house. Each one of them was active and strong.
+No one of them had even thought of climbing it.  Beyond that,
+Inglewood felt first the mere fact of colour.  The bright brisk leaves,
+the bleak blue sky, the wild green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally
+of something glowing in his infancy, something akin to a gaudy man
+on a golden tree; perhaps it was only painted monkey on a stick.
+Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more of a humourist, was touched on
+a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old, young theatricals with Rosamund,
+and was amused to find himself almost quoting Shakespeare--
+
+        "For valour.  Is not love a Hercules,
+         Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?"
+
+
+Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation
+that the Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward
+with rather rattling rapidity.
+
+He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next.
+The man in green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky
+broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of twigs.
+It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage,
+a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it in every direction,
+a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it like a concertina; nor can it
+be said that the obliging gentleman with the sharp nose showed any adequate
+tenderness for its structure when he finally unhooked it from its place.
+When he had found it, however, his proceedings were by some counted singular.
+He waved it with a loud whoop of triumph, and then immediately appeared
+to fall backwards off the tree, to which, however, he remained
+attached by his long strong legs, like a monkey swung by his tail.
+Hanging thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely proceeded
+to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his brows.  "Every man a king,"
+explained the inverted philosopher, "every hat (consequently) a crown.
+But this is a crown out of heaven."
+
+And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved away
+with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming, strangely enough,
+to wish for his former decoration in its present state.
+
+"Wrong, wrong!" cried the obliging person hilariously.
+"Always wear uniform, even if it's shabby uniform!
+Ritualists may always be untidy.  Go to a dance with soot on
+your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front. Huntsman wears old coat,
+but old pink coat.  Wear a topper, even if it's got no top.
+It's the symbol that counts, old cock.  Take your hat,
+because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all off
+by the bark, dears, and its brim not the least bit curled;
+but for old sakes' sake it is still, dears, the nobbiest tile
+in the world."
+
+Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed
+the shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician,
+and fell on his feet among the other men, still talking,
+beaming and breathless.
+
+"Why don't they make more games out of wind?" he asked in some excitement.
+"Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites?  Why, I thought
+of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing that tree.
+Here's one of them:  you take a lot of pepper--"
+
+"I think," interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness,
+"that your games are already sufficiently interesting.
+Are you, may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour,
+or a travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim?  How and why do you
+display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing trees
+in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?"
+
+The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it,
+appeared to grow confidential.
+
+"Well, it's a trick of my own," he confessed candidly.
+"I do it by having two legs."
+
+Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of folly,
+started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes screwed up
+and his high colour slightly heightened.
+
+"Why, I believe you're Smith," he cried with his fresh, almost boyish voice;
+and then after an instant's stare, "and yet I'm not sure."
+
+"I have a card, I think," said the unknown, with baffling solemnity--"a card
+with my real name, my titles, offices, and true purpose on this earth."
+
+He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet
+card-case, and as slowly produced a very large card.
+Even in the instant of its production, they fancied it was
+of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary gentlemen.
+But it was there only for an instant; for as it passed from
+his fingers to Arthur's, one or another slipped his hold.
+The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away
+the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the universe;
+and that great western wind shook the whole house and passed.
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter II
+
+                 The Luggage of an Optimist
+
+
+We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
+with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion
+of small ones.  If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could
+(I suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight
+trumpeting upon Primrose Hill.  If a whale could leap from the sea
+like a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above
+Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa.  Such natural energy,
+though sublime, might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this
+inconvenience attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green.
+He was too large for everything, because he was lively as well as large.
+By a fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures
+are also reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser
+parts of London are not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable
+as a kitten.
+
+When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house,
+he found him talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately)
+to the helpless Mrs. Duke.  That fat, faint lady could only
+goggle up like a dying fish at the enormous new gentleman,
+who politely offered himself as a lodger, with vast gestures
+of the wide white hat in one hand, and the yellow Gladstone bag
+in the other.  Fortunately, Mrs. Duke's more efficient niece
+and partner was there to complete the contract; for, indeed,
+all the people of the house had somehow collected in the room.
+This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode.
+The visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from
+the time he came into the house to the time he left it, he somehow
+got the company to gather and even follow (though in derision)
+as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy.  An hour ago,
+and for four years previously, these people had avoided
+each other, even when they had really liked each other.
+They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in search
+of particular newspapers or private needlework.  Even now they
+all came casually, as with varying interests; but they all came.
+There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow;
+there was the unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance.
+There was Michael Moon offering like a riddle the contrast
+of the horsy crudeness of his clothes and the sombre sagacity
+of his visage.  He was now joined by his yet more comic crony,
+Moses Gould.  Swaggering on short legs with a prosperous
+purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs;
+but like a dog also in this, that however he danced and
+wagged with delight, the two dark eyes on each side of his
+protuberant nose glistened gloomily like black buttons.
+There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still with the find white hat
+framing her square, good-looking face, and still with her native
+air of being dressed for some party that never came off.
+She also, like Mr. Moon, had a new companion, new so far as this
+narrative goes, but in reality an old friend and a protegee.
+This was a slight young woman in dark gray, and in no way
+notable but for a load of dull red hair, of which the shape
+somehow gave her pale face that triangular, almost peaked,
+appearance which was given by the lowering headdress and deep rich
+ruff of the Elizabethan beauties.  Her surname seemed to be Gray,
+and Miss Hunt called her Mary, in that indescribable tone
+applied to a dependent who has practically become a friend.
+She wore a small silver cross on her very business-like
+gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who went
+to church.  Last, but the reverse of least, there as Diana Duke,
+studying the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening
+carefully to every idiotic word he said.  As for Mrs. Duke,
+she smiled up at him, but never dreamed of listening to him.
+She had never really listened to any one in her life; which, some said,
+was why she had survived.
+
+Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest's
+concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke
+seriously to her any more than she listened seriously to any one.
+And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet wider and almost
+whirling gestures of explanation with his huge hat and bag,
+apologized for having entered by the wall instead of the front door.
+He was understood to put it down to an unfortunate family tradition
+of neatness and care of his clothes.
+
+"My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,"
+he said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke.  "She never liked
+me to lose my cap at school.  And when a man's been taught
+to be tidy and neat it sticks to him."
+
+Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good mother;
+but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.
+
+"You've got a funny idea of neatness," she said, "if it's
+jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees.
+A man can't very well climb a tree tidily."
+
+"He can clear a wall neatly," said Michael Moon; "I saw him do it."
+
+Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment.
+"My dear young lady," he said, "I was tidying the tree.  You don't want
+last year's hats there, do you, any more than last year's leaves?
+The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn't manage the hat; that wind,
+I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that tidiness
+is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants.
+You can't tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.
+Don't you know that?  Haven't you ever had a spring cleaning?"
+
+"Oh yes, sir," said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly.  "You will find
+everything of that sort quite nice."  For the first time she
+had heard two words that she could understand.
+
+Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm
+of calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said
+that he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked:
+and the silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through
+these cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room.
+Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his head
+against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that the tall
+house was much shorter than it used to be.
+
+Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend--or his new friend,
+for he did not very clearly know which he was.  The face looked
+very like his old schoolfellow's at one second and very unlike
+at another.  And when Inglewood broke through his native
+politeness so far as to say suddenly, "Is your name Smith?"
+he received only the unenlightening reply, "Quite right;
+quite right.  Very good.  Excellent!"  Which appeared to Inglewood,
+on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe accepting
+a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.
+
+Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood
+watched the other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all
+the impotent attitudes of the male friend.  Mr. Smith unpacked
+with the same kind of whirling accuracy with which he climbed
+a tree--throwing things out of his bag as if they were rubbish,
+yet managing to distribute quite a regular pattern all round
+him on the floor.
+
+As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner
+(he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style
+of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still
+a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.
+
+"Like the day of judgement," he said, throwing a bottle
+so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end.
+"People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy;
+not sure... I think things are too close together... packed up;
+for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's
+a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star,
+too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
+ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
+feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag
+is unpacked... may all be put in our right places then."
+
+Here he stopped, literally for breath--throwing a shirt to the other end
+of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly beyond it.
+Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with
+an increasing doubt.
+
+In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's holiday luggage,
+the less one could make anything of it.  One peculiarity of it
+was that almost everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason;
+what is secondary with every one else was primary with him.
+He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the unthinking
+assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary,
+and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious.
+He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained
+with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
+but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork.
+He also exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
+and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent,
+supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages.
+He was therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham
+claret from the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice)
+do not drink.  It was only then that he observed that all six
+bottles had those bright metallic seals of various tints,
+and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the three
+primary and three secondary colours:  red, blue, and yellow;
+green, violet and orange.  There grew upon Inglewood an almost
+creepy sense of the real childishness of this creature.
+For Smith was really, so far as human psychology can be, innocent.
+He had the sensualities of innocence:  he loved the stickiness of gum,
+and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake.
+To this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced;
+it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window.
+He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation;
+but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play.
+He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party.
+He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to manhood,
+and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.
+
+As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials
+I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had
+been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as a formal
+Christian name or a moral description he could not remember.
+He was just about to venture another question, when there was a knock
+at the door, and the short figure of Mr. Gould offered itself,
+with the melancholy Moon, standing like his tall crooked shadow,
+behind him.  They had drifted up the stairs after the other two
+men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.
+
+"Hope there's no intrusion," said the beaming Moses with a glow
+of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
+
+"The truth is," said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy,
+"we thought we might see if they had made you comfortable.
+Miss Duke is rather--"
+
+"I know," cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag;
+"magnificent, isn't she?  Go close to her--hear military music going by,
+like Joan of Arc."
+
+Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has
+just heard a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains
+one small and forgotten fact.  For he remembered how he had
+himself thought of Jeanne d'Arc years ago, when, hardly more
+than a schoolboy, he had first come to the boarding-house. Long
+since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr. Warner had
+crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams.
+Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless
+human types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as
+a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type, who would never marry;
+to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant;
+and to regard his first fancy for her as the small,
+dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady's daughter.
+And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly,
+as if he had heard those distant drums.
+
+"She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural," said Moon,
+glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling,
+like the conical hood of a dwarf.
+
+"Rather a small box for you, sir," said the waggish Mr. Gould.
+
+"Splendid room, though," answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
+head inside his Gladstone bag.  "I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
+like Gothic.  By the way," he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way,
+"where does that door lead to?"
+
+"To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon, staring up at
+a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
+"I don't think there's a loft there; and I don't know what else it could
+lead to."  Long before he had finished his sentence the man at the door
+in the ceiling, swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it,
+wrenched it open after a struggle, and clambered through it.
+For a moment they saw the two symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue;
+then they vanished.  Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared
+the empty and lucid sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud
+sailing across it like a whole county upside down.
+
+"Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
+apparently from some remote pinnacle.  "Come up here;
+and bring some of my things to eat and drink.  It's just the spot
+for a picnic."
+
+With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
+bottles of wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
+as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger.
+The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture,
+like a giant's in a fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them
+off to the eyrie; then they both hoisted themselves out of the window.
+They were both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
+concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was
+not quite so idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman.
+Also they both had a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when
+the door was burst in the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky,
+and they could climb out on to the very roof of the universe.
+They were both men who had long been unconsciously imprisoned in
+the commonplace, though one took it comically, and the other seriously.
+They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died.
+But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics
+and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed
+at the thing with the shameless rationality of another race.
+
+When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould
+was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature
+forced him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade;
+and Inglewood and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green
+ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters and their
+backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other.
+Their first feeling was that they had come out into eternity,
+and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom. One definition
+occurred to both of them--that he had come out into the light
+of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun.
+The sky above them was full of mythology.  Heaven seemed deep
+enough to hold all the gods.  The round of the ether turned
+from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
+All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east
+it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage;
+but the whole had still he emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy
+of dusk.  Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green
+were shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed
+falling towards the earth in every kind of colossal perspective.
+One of them really had the character of some many-mitred, many-bearded,
+many-winged Assyrian image, huge head downwards, hurled out of heaven--
+a sort of false Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan.  All the other clouds
+had preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god's palaces had been
+flung after him.
+
+And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the height
+of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a tiny trivial
+noise that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below
+a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel.  They could also hear
+talk out of the garden below; and realized that the irrepressible Smith
+must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents
+could be heard, followed by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke
+and the full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt.  The air had
+that cold kindness that comes after a storm.  Michael Moon drank it in with
+as serious a relish as he had drunk the little bottle of cheap claret,
+which he had emptied almost at a draught.  Inglewood went on eating ginger
+very slowly and with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him.
+There was still enough stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to make them
+almost fancy they could smell the garden soil and the last roses of autumn.
+Suddenly there came from the darkening room a silvery ping and pong which
+told them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline.
+After the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like laughter.
+
+"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, "have you ever heard that I
+am a blackguard?"
+
+"I haven't heard it, and I don't believe it," answered Inglewood,
+after an odd pause.  "But I have heard you were--what they
+call rather wild."
+
+"If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,"
+said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; "I am tame.
+I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls.
+I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time
+every night.  I even drink about the same amount too much.
+I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned
+women with mauve faces.  I hear the same number of dirty stories--
+generally the same dirty stories.  You may assure my friends,
+Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization
+has thoroughly tamed."
+
+Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly
+fall off the roof, for indeed the Irishman's face, always sinister,
+was now almost demoniacal.
+
+"Christ confound it!" cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the empty
+claret bottle, "this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine
+I ever uncorked, and it's the only drink I have really enjoyed
+for nine years.  I was never wild until just ten minutes ago."
+And he sent the bottle whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond
+the garden into the road, where, in the profound evening silence,
+they could even hear it break and part upon the stones.
+
+"Moon," said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, "you mustn't be
+so bitter about it.  Everyone has to take the world as he finds it;
+of course one often finds it a bit dull--"
+
+"That fellow doesn't," said Michael decisively; "I mean that
+fellow Smith.  I have a fancy there's some method in his madness.
+It looks as if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute by taking
+one step out of the plain road.  Who would have thought of that trapdoor?
+Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste quite
+nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of fairyland.
+Perhaps Nosey Gould's beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought only to
+be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort.  Perhaps Mrs. Duke's
+cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree.
+Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill Whisky--"
+
+"Don't be so rough on yourself," said Inglewood, in serious distress.
+"The dullness isn't your fault or the whisky's. Fellows who don't--
+fellows like me I mean--have just the same feeling that it's all rather
+flat and a failure.  But the world's made like that; it's all survival.
+Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and some people are
+made to stick quiet, like me.  You can't help your temperament.
+I know you're much cleverer than I am; but you can't help having
+all the loose ways of a poor literary chap, and I can't help
+having all the doubts and helplessness of a small scientific chap,
+any more than a fish can help floating or a fern can help curling up.
+Humanity, as Warner said so well in that lecture, really consists
+of quite different tribes of animals all disguised as men."
+
+In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken
+by Miss Hunt's musical instrument banging with the abruptness
+of artillery into a vulgar but spirited tune.
+
+Rosamund's voice came up rich and strong in the words of some fatuous,
+fashionable coon song--
+
+        "Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
+         Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by."
+
+
+Inglewood's brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he continued
+his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic tune.
+But the blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a light
+that Inglewood did not understand.  Many centuries, and many villages
+and valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood's countrymen
+had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first blink that it
+was the battle star of Ireland.
+
+"Nothing can ever alter it; it's in the wheels of the universe,"
+went on Inglewood, in a low voice:  "some men are weak and some strong,
+and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak.
+I have been in love lots of times, but I could not do anything,
+for I remembered my own fickleness.  I have formed opinions, but I
+haven't the cheek to push them, because I've so often changed them.
+That's the upshot, old fellow.  We can't trust ourselves--
+and we can't help it."
+
+Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position
+at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.
+Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly
+topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven.  Their gyration made
+the dark figure seem yet dizzier.
+
+"Let us..." he said, and was suddenly silent.
+
+"Let us what?" asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though somewhat
+more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty in speech.
+
+"Let us go and do some of these things we can't do," said Michael.
+
+At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them
+the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to
+them that they must come down as the "concert" was in full swing,
+and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite "Young Lochinvar."
+
+As they dropped into Innocent's attic they nearly tumbled over its
+entertaining impedimenta again.  Inglewood, staring at the littered floor,
+thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery.
+He was therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell
+on a large well-polished American revolver.
+
+"Hullo!" he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step back
+from a serpent; "are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do you deal
+death out of that machine gun?"
+
+"Oh, that!" said Smith, throwing it a single glance; "I deal life
+out of that," and he went bounding down the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter III
+
+                    The Banner of Beacon
+
+
+All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
+everybody's birthday.  It is the fashion to talk of institutions
+as cold and cramping things.  The truth is that when people are in
+exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention,
+they always must, and they always do, create institutions.
+When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay
+and vigorous they invariably make rules.  This, which is true of all
+the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most
+trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp.
+We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty
+cannot exist till it is declared by authority.  Even the wild
+authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it
+produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions.
+He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not
+expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction.
+Each person with a hobby found it turning into an institution.
+Rosamund's songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of opera;
+Michael's jests and paragraphs into a magazine.  His pipe and her
+mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of smoking concert.
+The bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his
+own growing importance.  He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
+were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana.
+But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and offices,
+for they followed each other in wild succession like the topics
+of a rambling talker.
+
+Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of
+pleasant obstacles.  Out of any homely and trivial object he could
+drag reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer.  Nothing could
+be more shy and impersonal than poor Arthur's photography.
+Yet the preposterous Smith was seen assisting him eagerly through
+sunny morning hours, and an indefensible sequence described
+as "Moral Photography" began to unroll about the boarding-house.
+It was only a version of the old photographer's joke which
+produces the same figure twice on one plate, making a man
+play chess with himself, dine with himself, and so on.
+But these plates were more hysterical and ambitious--as, "Miss Hunt
+forgets Herself," showing that lady answering her own too
+rapturous recognition with a most appalling stare of ignorance;
+or "Mr. Moon questions Himself," in which Mr. Moon appeared as one
+driven to madness under his own legal cross-examination, which was
+conducted with a long forefinger and an air of ferocious waggery.
+One highly successful trilogy--representing Inglewood recognizing
+Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before Inglewood,
+and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with a stick--
+Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall,
+like a sort of fresco, with the inscription,--
+
+        "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control--
+         These three alone will make a man a prig."
+
+                                                -- Tennyson.
+
+
+Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than
+the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke.  But Innocent had somehow
+blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went
+with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing
+that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith
+pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously)
+that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would
+draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them
+off again.  He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company,"
+with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons;
+and Miss Diana actually threw him an abandoned black overall
+or working dress on which to exercise the talents of a modiste.
+He promptly produced for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers;
+she held it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress.
+And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle
+(with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up;
+and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one
+flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green
+and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden
+in the "Arabian Nights."  A pang too swift to be named pain
+or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
+He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was
+ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering
+a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence.
+At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it)
+the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly
+in her working clothes.
+
+As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
+actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
+But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
+liked it.  For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all
+men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
+And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or
+inexplicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers
+than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches
+of Moon.  Courtesy, on the other hand, is a thing that anybody
+can understand, and Smith's manners were as courteous as they
+were unconventional.  She said he was "a real gentleman," by which she
+simply meant a kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.
+She would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands and a fat,
+folded smile for hours and hours, while every one else was talking at once.
+At least, the only other exception was Rosamund's companion,
+Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more eager sort.  Though she
+never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute.
+Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.  Innocent Smith
+seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the adventure
+of making her talk.  He never succeeded, yet he was never snubbed;
+if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this quiet figure,
+and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery.
+But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh
+and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in spring.
+Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls,
+she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth,
+which Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money,
+and Diana in the mere guarding of it.  Smith looked at her again and again.
+Her eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way--which was really
+the right way.  She had the knack of saying everything with her face:
+her silence was a sort of steady applause.
+
+But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday
+(which seemed more like a week's holiday than a day's)
+one experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier
+or more successful than the others, but because out of this
+particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to follow.
+All the other practical jokes exploded of themselves, and left vacancy;
+all the other fictions returned upon themselves, and were finished
+like a song.  But the string of solid and startling events--
+which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol,
+and a marriage licence--were all made primarily possible
+by the joke about the High Court of Beacon.
+
+It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon.  He was
+in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly;
+yet he had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman.
+He used his old useless knowledge as a barrister to talk
+entertainingly of a tribunal that was a parody on the pompous
+anomalies of English law.  The High Court of Beacon, he declared,
+was a splendid example of our free and sensible constitution.
+It had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna Carta,
+and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and spirit licences,
+ladies traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing
+and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened in the town of
+Market Bosworth.  The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High Court
+of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in the intervals
+(as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the institution were vested
+in Mrs. Duke.  Tossed about among the rest of the company, however,
+the High Court did not retain its historical and legal seriousness,
+but was used somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail.
+If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the tablecloth, he was quite
+sure it was a rite without which the sittings and findings of the Court
+would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a window to remain shut,
+he would suddenly remember that none but the third son of the lord
+of the manor of Penge had the right to open it.  They even went
+to the length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
+The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
+above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal;
+but the trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic libel,
+and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity, were admitted
+to be in the best tradition of the Court.
+
+But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not more and
+more flippant like Michael Moon.  This proposal of a private court of justice,
+which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a political humourist,
+Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of an abstract philosopher.
+It was by far the best thing they could do, he declared, to claim sovereign
+powers even for the individual household.
+
+"You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule for homes,"
+he cried eagerly to Michael.  "It would be better if every father
+COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans; it would be better,
+because nobody would be killed.  Let's issue a Declaration
+of Independence from Beacon House.  We could grow enough greens
+in that garden to support us, and when the tax-collector comes let's
+tell him we're self-supporting, and play on him with the hose.
+...Well, perhaps, as you say, we couldn't very well have a hose,
+as that comes from the main; but we could sink a well in this chalk,
+and a lot could be done with water-jugs... Let this really be
+Beacon House.  Let's light a bonfire of independence on the roof,
+and see house after house answering it across the valley of
+the Thames!  Let us begin the League of the Free Families!  Away with
+Local Government!  A fig for Local Patriotism!  Let every house
+be a sovereign state as this is, and judge its own children by its
+own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon.  Let us cut the painter,
+and begin to be happy together, as if we were on a desert island."
+
+"I know that desert island," said Michael Moon; "it only
+exists in the `Swiss Family Robinson.'  A man feels a strange
+desire for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash comes down
+some unexpected cocoa-nut from some undiscovered monkey.
+A literary man feels inclined to pen a sonnet, and at once
+an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and shoots out
+one of his quills."
+
+"Don't you say a word against the `Swiss Family Robinson,'"
+cried Innocent with great warmth.  "It mayn't be
+exact science, but it's dead accurate philosophy.
+When you're really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want.
+When you're really on a desert island, you never find it a desert.
+If we were really besieged in this garden, we'd find a hundred
+English birds and English berries that we never knew were here.
+If we were snowed up in this room, we'd be the better for reading
+scores of books in that bookcase that we don't even know are there;
+we'd have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall
+go to the grave without guessing; we'd find materials for everything--
+christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation--
+if we didn't decide to be a republic."
+
+"A coronation on `Swiss Family' lines, I suppose," said Michael, laughing.
+"Oh, I know you would find everything in that atmosphere.  If we wanted
+such a simple thing, for instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we should
+walk down beyond the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full bloom.
+If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
+digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under the lawn.
+And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a great storm
+would wash everything on shore, and we should find there was a Whale
+on the premises."
+
+"And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,"
+asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion.
+"I bet you've never examined the premises!  I bet you've
+never been round at the back as I was this morning--
+for I found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
+There's an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin;
+it's got three holes in the canvas, and a pole's broken,
+so it's not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy--" And his
+voice quite failed him to express its shining adequacy;
+then he went on with controversial eagerness:  "You see I
+take every challenge as you make it.  I believe every blessed
+thing you say couldn't be here has been here all the time.
+You say you want a whale washed up for oil.  Why, there's oil
+in that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don't believe
+anybody has touched it or thought of it for years.
+And as for your gold crown, we're none of us wealthy here,
+but we could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own
+pockets to string round a man's head for half an hour;
+or one of Miss Hunt's gold bangles is nearly big enough to--"
+
+The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter.
+"All is not gold that glitters," she said, "and besides--"
+
+"What a mistake that is!" cried Innocent Smith,
+leaping up in great excitement.  "All is gold that glitters--
+especially now we are a Sovereign State.  What's the good
+of a Sovereign State if you can't define a sovereign?
+We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning
+of the world.  They didn't choose gold because it was rare;
+your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer.
+They chose gold because it was bright--because it was
+a hard thing to find, but pretty when you've found it.
+You can't fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits;
+you can only look at it--an you can look at it out here."
+
+With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open
+the doors into the garden.  At the same time also, with one of his
+gestures that never seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were,
+he stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn
+as if for a dance.
+
+The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier than that
+of the day before.  The west was swimming with sanguine colours, and a sort
+of sleepy flame lay along the lawn.  The twisted shadows of the one or two
+garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as in common daylight,
+but like arabesques written in vivid violet ink on some page of Eastern gold.
+The sunset was one of those festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in
+which common things by their colours remind us of costly or curious things.
+The slates upon the sloping roof burned like the plumes of a vast peacock,
+in every mysterious blend of blue and green.  The red-brown bricks of
+the wall glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines.
+The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame,
+like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent's hair, which was of a rather
+colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode
+across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.
+
+"What would be the good of gold," he was saying, "if it did not glitter?
+Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a
+black sun at noon?  A black button would do just as well.
+Don't you see that everything in this garden looks like a jewel?
+And will you kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel
+except that it looks like a jewel?  Leave off buying and selling,
+and start looking!  Open your eyes, and you'll wake up in
+the New Jerusalem.
+
+        "All is gold that glitters--
+           Tree and tower of brass;
+         Rolls the golden evening air
+           Down the golden grass.
+         Kick the cry to Jericho,
+           How yellow mud is sold,
+         All is gold that glitters,
+           For the glitter is the gold."
+
+
+"And who wrote that?" asked Rosamund, amused.
+
+"No one will ever write it," answered Smith, and cleared the rockery
+with a flying leap.
+
+"Really," said Rosamund to Michael Moon, "he ought to be sent to an asylum.
+Don't you think so?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long,
+swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or mood,
+he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the social
+extravagance of the garden.
+
+"I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum," repeated the lady.
+
+The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was
+unmistakably sneering.  "No," he said; "I don't think it's
+at all necessary."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Rosamund quickly.  "Why not?"
+
+"Because he is in one now," answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly voice.
+"Why, didn't you know?"
+
+"What?" cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice;
+for the Irishman's face and voice were really almost creepy.
+With his dark figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine
+he looked like the devil in paradise.
+
+"I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh humility.
+"Of course we don't talk about it much... but I thought we
+all really knew."
+
+"Knew what?"
+
+"Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain rather singular
+sort of house--a house with the tiles loose, shall we say?  Innocent Smith
+is only the doctor that visits us; hadn't you come when he called before?
+As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery.
+Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us.
+Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree--that's his bedside manner."
+
+"You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a rage.
+"You daren't suggest that I--"
+
+"Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more than the rest of us.
+Haven't you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still--a notorious sign?
+Haven't you ever observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands--
+a known mark of mental disease?  I, of course, am a dipsomaniac."
+
+"I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not without agitation.
+"I've heard you had some bad habits--"
+
+"All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly calm.
+"Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down
+in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
+YOU went mad about money, because you're an heiress."
+
+"It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously.  "I never was mean about money."
+
+"You were worse," said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently.
+"You thought that other people were.  You thought every man who came near
+you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
+and now you're mad and I'm mad, and serve us right."
+
+"You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white.  "And is this true?"
+
+With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable
+when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for
+some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow.
+"Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true.
+An allegory, shall we say? a social satire."
+
+"And I hate and despise your satires," cried Rosamund Hunt,
+letting loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone,
+and speaking every word to wound.  "I despise it as I despise
+your rank tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling,
+and your Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty
+little newspaper, and your rotten failure at everything.
+I don't care whether you call it snobbishness or not, I like
+life and success, and jolly things to look at, and action.
+You won't frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander."
+
+"Victrix causa deae--" said Michael gloomily; and this angered
+her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it
+to be witty.
+
+"Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she said, with cheerful inaccuracy;
+"you haven't done much with that either."  And she crossed the garden,
+pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.
+
+In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house slowly,
+and with a thought-clouded brow.  He was one of those men who are
+quite clever, but quite the reverse of quick.  As he came back
+out of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke
+slipped swiftly to her feet and began putting away the tea things.
+But it was not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique
+that he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting camera.
+For Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her chin
+on her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.
+
+"You are busy," said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen,
+and wishing to ignore it.
+
+"There's no time for dreaming in this world," answered the young lady
+with her back to him.
+
+"I have been thinking lately," said Inglewood in a low voice,
+"that there's no time for waking up."
+
+She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the garden.
+
+"I don't smoke or drink, you know," he said irrelevantly,
+"because I think they're drugs.  And yet I fancy all hobbies,
+like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too.  Getting under a
+black hood, getting into a dark room--getting into a hole anyhow.
+Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air.
+Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself.
+That's the matter with all of us.  We're too busy to wake up."
+
+"Well," said the girl solidly, "what is there to wake up to?"
+
+"There must be!" cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
+excitement--"there must be something to wake up to!
+All we do is preparations--your cleanliness, and my healthiness,
+and Warner's scientific appliances.  We're always preparing
+for something--something that never comes off.  I ventilate
+the house, and you sweep the house; but what is going to HAPPEN
+in the house?"
+
+She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes,
+and seemed to be searching for some form of words which she
+could not find.
+
+Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt,
+in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the doorway.
+She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of
+the most infantile astonishment.
+
+"Well, here's a fine game!" she said, panting.  "What am I to do now,
+I wonder?  I've wired for Dr. Warner; that's all I can think of doing."
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving
+forward like one used to be called upon for assistance.
+
+"It's Mary," said the heiress, "my companion Mary Gray:
+that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her
+in the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and he wants
+to go off with her now for a special licence."
+
+Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked
+out on the garden, still golden with evening light.
+Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and twittering;
+but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road outside
+the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow
+Gladstone bag on top of it.
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter IV
+
+                    The Garden of the God
+
+
+Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance
+and utterance of the other girl.
+
+"Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she
+doesn't want to marry him."
+
+"But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in exasperation.
+"She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be parted from her."
+
+"Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what we can do."
+
+"But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her friend angrily.
+"I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's balmy!
+You or somebody MUST stop it!--Mr. Inglewood, you're a man;
+go and tell them they simply can't."
+
+"Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said Inglewood,
+with a depressed air.  "I have far less right of intervention
+than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral
+force than she."
+
+"You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund,
+the last stays of her formidable temper giving way;
+"I think I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck.
+I think I know some one who will help me more than you do,
+at any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man,
+and has a mind, and knows it..." And she flung out into the garden,
+with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.
+
+She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over
+the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down
+his long blue chin.  The very hardness of his expression pleased her,
+after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying
+of her other friends.
+
+"I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly.  "I hated you
+for being a cynic; but I've been well punished, for I want a cynic
+just now.  I've had my fill of sentiment--I'm fed up with it.
+The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon--all except the cynics, I think.
+That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she--
+and she--doesn't seem to mind."
+
+Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly,
+"I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab outside.  He swears he'll
+take her off now to his aunt's, and go for a special licence.
+Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon."
+
+Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand
+for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side
+of the garden.  "My practical advice to you is this," he said:
+"Let him go for his special licence, and ask him to get another
+one for you and me."
+
+"Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady.
+"Do say what you really mean."
+
+"I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,"
+said Moon with ponderous precision--"a plain, practical man:
+a man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight.
+He has let down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly
+on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up.
+We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this
+very sunlight.  We have had a little nap for five years or so,
+but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't see
+why that cab..."
+
+"Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you mean."
+
+"What a lie! cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes.
+"I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but don't you see that to-night
+they won't do?  We've wandered into a world of facts, old girl.
+That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door,
+are facts.  You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I
+was after your money, and didn't really love you.  But if I stood
+here now and told you I didn't love you--you wouldn't believe me:
+for truth is in this garden to-night."
+
+"Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
+
+He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face.
+"Is my name Moon?" he asked.  "Is your name Hunt?  On my honour,
+they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names.
+It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name was `Sunrise.' But our
+real names are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep."
+
+"It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes;
+"one can never go back."
+
+"I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can carry
+you on my shoulder."
+
+"But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!"
+cried the girl earnestly.  "You could carry me off my feet, I dare say,
+soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that.
+These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith's, they--
+they do attract women, I don't deny it.  As you say, we're all
+telling the truth to-night. They've attracted poor Mary, for one.
+They attract me, Michael.  But the cold fact remains:
+imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment--
+you've got used to your drinks and things--I shan't be
+pretty much longer--"
+
+"Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael.  "And pray where in earth
+or heaven are there any prudent marriages?  Might as well talk
+about prudent suicides.  You and I have dawdled round each other
+long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray,
+who met last night?  You never know a husband till you marry him.
+Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy.  Who the devil are you
+that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
+Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed.  I, for one,
+don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute--
+a tower with all the trumpets shouting."
+
+"You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face,
+"and do you really want to marry me?"
+
+"My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman.  "What other
+occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to
+marry you?  What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep?
+It's not liberty, Rosamund.  Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland,
+you must marry Man--that is Me.  The only third thing is to marry yourself--
+yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied--
+and never satisfactory."
+
+"Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you won't talk so much,
+I'll marry you."
+
+"It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; singing is the only thing.
+Can't you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?"
+
+"Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp authority.
+
+The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished;
+then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered
+shoes out of the Greek fairy tale.  He cleared three yards
+and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily levity;
+but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows,
+his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead;
+he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling.  The events
+of that enchanted evening were not at an end.
+
+Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious
+thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit
+of Rosamund.  It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour,
+seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels,
+the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor.  No words can express
+how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens.
+Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of
+paper or a sheet of steel.  It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.
+The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the most
+effeminate man can grow a beard.  It is a separate sexual power,
+and proves nothing one way or the other about force of character.
+But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke
+crying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.
+
+He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it)
+any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent.  He acted
+as men do when a theatre catches fire--very differently from how they
+would have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse.
+He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress
+was the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs
+(in consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own
+conduct except by the protests it evoked.
+
+"Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood--leave me alone; that's not the way to help."
+
+"But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding certainty;
+"I can, I can, I can..."
+
+"Why, you said," cried the girl, "that you were much weaker than me."
+
+"So I am weaker than you," said Arthur, in a voice that went
+vibrating through everything, "but not just now."
+
+"Let go my hands!" cried Diana.  "I won't be bullied."
+
+In one element he was much stronger than she--the matter of humour.
+This leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying:  "Well, you are mean.
+You know quite well you'll bully me all the rest of my life.
+You might allow a man the one minute of his life when he's allowed to bully."
+
+It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry,
+and for the first time since her childhood Diana was entirely
+off her guard.
+
+"Do you mean you want to marry me?" she said.
+
+"Why, there's a cab at the door!" cried Inglewood, springing up
+with an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors
+that led into the garden.
+
+As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time
+that the house and garden were on a steep height over London.  And yet,
+though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret:
+it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of the
+turrets of heaven.
+
+Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring
+all sorts of details with a senseless delight.  He noticed for
+the first time that the railings of the gate beyond the garden
+bushes were moulded like little spearheads and painted blue.
+He noticed that one of the blue spears was loosened in its place,
+and hung sideways; and this almost made him laugh.  He thought it
+somehow exquisitely harmless and funny that the railing should
+be crooked; he thought he should like to know how it happened,
+who did it, and how the man was getting on.
+
+When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass realized
+that they were not alone.  Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric
+Mr. Moon, both of whom they had last seen in the blackest
+temper of detachment, were standing together on the lawn.
+They were standing in quite an ordinary manner, and yet they
+looked somehow like people in a book.
+
+"Oh," said Diana, "what lovely air!"
+
+"I know," called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive
+that it rang out like a complaint.  "It's just like that horrid,
+beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me feel happy."
+
+"Oh, it isn't like anything but itself!" answered Diana, breathing deeply.
+"Why, it's all cold, and yet it feels like fire."
+
+"Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,"
+said Mr. Moon.  "Balmy--especially on the crumpet."
+And he fanned himself quite unnecessarily with his straw hat.
+They were all full of little leaps and pulsations of objectless
+and airy energy.  Diana stirred and stretched her long arms rigidly,
+as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating restfulness;
+Michael stood still for long intervals, with gathered muscles,
+then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still again;
+Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip, except when they
+fall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her foot
+as she moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood,
+leaning quite quietly against a tree, had unconsciously
+clutched a branch and shaken it with a creative violence.
+Those giant gestures of Man, that made the high statues
+and the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their limbs.
+Silently as they strolled and stood they were bursting like
+batteries with an animal magnetism.
+
+"And now," cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each side,
+"let's dance round that bush!"
+
+"Why, what bush do you mean?" asked Rosamund, looking round with a sort
+of radiant rudeness.
+
+"The bush that isn't there," said Michael--"the Mulberry Bush."
+
+They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and quite ritually;
+and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round,
+like a demon spinning the world for a top.  Diana felt, as the circle of
+the horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring
+of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a child;
+she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate,
+or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
+
+The circle broke--as all such perfect circles of levity must break--
+and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away
+against the blue rails of the gate.  When reeling there he suddenly
+raised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
+
+"Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms.  "It's jolly old Warner--
+with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!"
+
+"Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a
+burst of memory, amusement, and distress.  "Oh, I'm so sorry!
+Oh, do tell him it's all right!"
+
+"Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon.  For indeed,
+while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind
+the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion
+in the cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.
+
+Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by
+an heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when,
+as you come in through the garden to the house, the heiress
+and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders join hands
+and dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's all right! it's
+all right!" you are apt to be flustered and even displeased.
+Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.
+The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained
+to him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure,
+was just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round
+by a ring of laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore--
+even then he seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
+
+"Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare,
+"are you mad?"
+
+Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered,
+easily and quietly enough, "Not now.  The truth is, Warner, I've just
+made a rather important medical discovery--quite in your line."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly--"what discovery?"
+
+"I've discovered that health really is catching, like disease,"
+answered Arthur.
+
+"Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said Michael,
+performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful expression.
+"Twenty thousand more cases taken to the hospitals;
+nurses employed night and day."
+
+Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly moving
+legs with an unfathomed wonder.  "And is THIS, may I ask,"
+he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"
+
+"You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt heartily.
+"I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake.
+I was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now
+it all seems like a dream--and and Mr. Smith is the sweetest,
+most sensible, most delightful old thing that ever existed,
+and he may marry any one he likes--except me."
+
+"I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.
+
+The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased.  He took a slip
+of pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale
+blue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.
+He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.
+
+"Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very reassuring.
+You sent me this wire only half an hour ago:  `Come at once,
+if possible, with another doctor.  Man--Innocent Smith--gone mad
+on premises, and doing dreadful things.  Do you know anything of him?'
+I went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor
+who is also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy;
+he has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab.  Now you calmly
+tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing,
+with accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity.
+I hardly comprehend the change."
+
+"Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody's soul?"
+cried Rosamund, in despair.  "Must I confess we had got so morbid
+as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that we
+didn't even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves?
+We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we're happy enough."
+
+"Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.
+
+Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their farce,
+who had not been visible for an hour or more.
+
+"I--I think he's on the other side of the house, by the dustbin," he said.
+
+"He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he must be found."
+And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house
+by the sunflowers.
+
+"I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with Mr. Smith."
+
+"Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort.
+"A man can't be locked up for falling in love--at least
+I hope not."
+
+"No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of him.
+He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you know?
+I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well.  I believe Innocent Smith
+is simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary."
+
+It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass
+with the point of her white shoe.
+
+"I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not extraordinary at all.
+He's comic just because he's so startlingly commonplace.
+Don't you know what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts
+and uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays?
+That bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.
+This tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any
+schoolboy would have climbed.  Yes, that's the thing that has
+haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.
+Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my
+old schoolfellows.  He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
+animal that we have all been."
+
+"That is only you absurd boys," said Diana.  "I don't believe
+any girl was ever so silly, and I'm sure no girl was ever
+so happy, except--" and she stopped.
+
+"I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith," said Michael Moon in a
+low voice.  "Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain.  He is not there.
+Haven't you noticed that we never saw him since we found ourselves?
+He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only our own
+youth returned.  Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab,
+the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn.
+Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing,
+but the man we shall never see.  In a spring garden before breakfast
+we shall smell the smell called Smith.  In the snapping of brisk twigs
+in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith.  Everything insatiable
+and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like at a bun feast,
+in the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white firwood,
+we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity;
+but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate things
+not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and heavens; he--"
+
+He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.
+Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,
+leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road.  He clutched the blue railings
+of the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise.
+He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face that seemed
+made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and resplendent
+as Warner's, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder part of his head.
+
+"Murder!" he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating voice.
+"Stop that murderer there!"
+
+Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows
+of the house, and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came
+flying round the corner like a leaping rabbit.  Yet before
+he had reached the group a third discharge had deafened them,
+and they saw with their own eyes two spots of white sky drilled
+through the second of the unhappy Herbert's high hats.
+The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot,
+and came down on all floors, staring like a cow.  The hat with
+the two shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him,
+and Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway train.
+He was looking twice his proper size--a giant clad in green,
+the big revolver still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine
+and in shadow, his eyes blazing like all stars, and his yellow
+hair standing out all ways like Struwelpeter's.
+
+Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness,
+Inglewood had time to feel once more what he had felt when
+he saw the other lovers standing on the lawn--the sensation
+of a certain cut and coloured clearness that belongs rather
+to the things of art than to the things of experience.
+The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the green
+bulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked
+railings behind, clutched by the stranger's yellow vulture
+claws and peered over by his long vulture neck, the silk hat
+on the gravel, and the little cloudlet of smoke floating
+across the garden as innocently as the puff of a cigarette--
+all these seemed unnaturally distinct and definite.
+They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation.
+Indeed, every object grew more and more particular
+and precious because the whole picture was breaking up.
+Things look so bright just before they burst.
+
+Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased,
+Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith's arms.
+Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and taken
+the other.  Smith went into peals of laughter, and surrendered
+his pistol with perfect willingness.  Moon raised the doctor
+to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly on the garden gate.
+The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women mostly
+are in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that,
+somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the sky.
+The doctor himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits,
+and dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to
+them in brief apology.  He was very white with his recent panic,
+but he spoke with perfect self-control.
+
+"You will excuse us, ladies," he said; "my friend and
+Mr. Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways.
+I think we had better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate
+with you later."
+
+And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed Smith
+was led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.
+
+From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant
+boom of mirth could again be heard through the half-open window;
+but there came no echo of the quiet voices of the physicians.
+The girls walked about the garden together, rubbing up each other's
+spirits as best they might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against
+the gate.  Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner
+came out of the house with a face less pale but even more stern,
+and the little man with the fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear.
+And if the face of Warner in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge,
+the face of the little man behind was more like a death's head.
+
+"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner, "I only wish to offer you my warm
+thanks and admiration.  By your prompt courage and wisdom in sending
+for us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put out
+of mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity--
+a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been before
+combined in flesh."
+
+Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking eyes.
+"What do you mean?" she asked.  "You can't mean Mr. Smith?"
+
+"He has gone by many other names," said the doctor gravely,
+"and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind him.  That man,
+Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and tears across the world.
+Whether he is mad as well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests
+of science, to discover.  In any case, we shall have to take him
+to a magistrate first, even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum.
+But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will have to be
+sealed with wall within wall, and ringed with guns like a fortress,
+or he will break out again to bring forth carnage and darkness
+on the earth."
+
+Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler.
+Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate;
+but he continued to lean on it without moving, with his face turned
+away towards the darkening road.
+
+
+
+
+                          Chapter V
+
+               The Allegorical Practical Joker
+
+
+The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat more
+urbane and even dapper figure than he had appeared when clutching the railings
+and craning his neck into the garden.  He even looked comparatively young
+when he took his hat off, having fair hair parted in the middle and carefully
+curled on each side, and lively movements, especially of the hands.
+He had a dandified monocle slung round his neck by a broad black ribbon,
+and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had alighted on him.
+His dress and gestures were bright enough for a boy's; it was only when you
+looked at the fish-bone face that you beheld something acrid and old.
+His manners were excellent, though hardly English, and he had two
+half-conscious tricks by which people who only met him once remembered him.
+One was a trick of closing his eyes when he wished to be particularly polite;
+the other was one of lifting his joined thumb and forefinger in the air as if
+holding a pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering over a word.
+But hose who were longer in his company tended to forget these oddities
+in the stream of his quaint and solemn conversation and really singular views.
+
+"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Warner, "this is Dr. Cyrus Pym."
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he were
+"playing fair" in some child's game, and gave a prompt little bow,
+which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United States.
+
+"Dr. Cyrus Pym," continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes again), "is perhaps
+the first criminological expert of America.  We are very fortunate to be able
+to consult with him in this extraordinary case--"
+
+"I can't make head or tail of anything," said Rosamund.  "How can
+poor Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?"
+
+"Or by your telegram," said Herbert Warner, smiling.
+
+"Oh, you don't understand," cried the girl impatiently.
+"Why, he's done us all more good than going to church."
+
+"I think I can explain to the young lady," said Dr. Cyrus Pym.  "This criminal
+or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method of his own,
+a method of the most daring ingenuity.  He is popular wherever he goes,
+for he invades every house as an uproarious child.  People are
+getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel;
+so he always uses the disguise of--what shall I say--the Bohemian,
+the blameless Bohemian.  He always carries people off their feet.
+People are used to the mask of conventional good conduct.
+He goes in for eccentric good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress
+up as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant; but you're not prepared
+when he dresses up as Don Quixote.  You expect a humbug to behave like
+Sir Charles Grandison; because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep,
+tear-moving tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison
+so often behaved like a humbug.  But no real red-blooded citizen is quite
+ready for a humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison
+but on Sir Roger de Coverly.  Setting up to be a good man a little cracked
+is a new criminal incognito, Miss Hunt.  It's been a great notion,
+and uncommonly successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel.
+I can forgive Dick Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can't forgive
+him when he impersonates Dr. Johnson.  The saint with a tile loose
+is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be parodied."
+
+"But how do you know," cried Rosamund desperately, "that Mr. Smith
+is a known criminal?"
+
+"I collated all the documents," said the American, "when my friend Warner
+knocked me up on receipt of your cable.  It is my professional affair
+to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there's no more doubt about them
+than about the Bradshaw down at the depot.  This man has hitherto escaped
+the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or insanity.
+But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated notes
+of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this manner.
+He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a grand popularity.
+He makes things go.  They do go; when he's gone the things are gone.
+Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man's life or a man's spoons, or more often a woman.
+I assure you I have all the memoranda."
+
+"I have seen them," said Warner solidly, "I can assure you
+that all this is correct."
+
+"The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings," went on the American
+doctor, "is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a wild simulation
+of innocence.  From almost every house where this great imaginative devil
+has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him; some say he's got
+a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and that they go like automata.
+What's become of all those poor girls nobody knows.  Murdered, I dare say;
+for we've lots of instances, besides this one, of his turning his hand
+to murder, though none ever brought him under the law.  Anyhow, our most
+modern methods of research can't find any trace of the wretched women.
+It's when I think of them that I am really moved, Miss Hunt.  And I've
+really nothing else to say just now except what Dr. Warner has said."
+
+"Quite so," said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in marble--"that
+we all have to thank you very much for that telegram."
+
+The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident
+sincerity that one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner--
+the falling eyelids, the rising intonation, and the poised
+finger and thumb--which were at other times a little comic.
+It was not so much that he was cleverer than Warner;
+perhaps he was not so clever, though he was more celebrated.
+But he had what Warner never had, a fresh and unaffected seriousness--
+the great American virtue of simplicity.  Rosamund knitted
+her brows and looked gloomily toward the darkening house
+that contained the dark prodigy.
+
+Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to silver,
+and was changing from silver to gray.  The long plumy shadows of the one or
+two trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead background of dusk.
+In the sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the entrance to the house
+by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a hurried consultation
+between Inglewood (who was still left in charge of the mysterious captive)
+and Diana, who had moved to his assistance from without.  After a few minutes
+and gestures they went inside, shutting the glass doors upon the garden;
+and the garden seemed to grow grayer still.
+
+The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move
+in the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with a
+flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish vanity,
+and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult,
+pedantic as he was, to call him a pedant.
+
+"I'm vurry sorry, Miss Hunt," he said; "but Dr. Warner and I,
+as two quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith
+away in that cab, and the less said about it the better.
+Don't you agitate yourself, Miss Hunt.  You've just got to think
+that we're taking away a monstrosity, something that oughtn't to be
+at all--something like one of those gods in your Britannic Museum,
+all wings, and beards, and legs, and eyes, and no shape.
+That's what Smith is, and you shall soon be quit of him."
+
+He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about
+to follow him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke
+came out with more than her usual quickness across the lawn.
+Her face was aquiver with worry and excitement, and her dark earnest
+eyes fixed only on the other girl.
+
+"Rosamund," she cried in despair, "what shall I do with her?"
+
+"With her?" cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump.  "O lord,
+he isn't a woman too, is he?"
+
+"No, no, no," said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common fairness.
+"A woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that."
+
+"I mean your friend Mary Gray," retorted Diana with equal tartness.
+"What on earth am I to do with her?"
+
+"How can we tell her about Smith, you mean," answered Rosamund, her face
+at once clouded and softening.  "Yes, it will be pretty painful."
+
+"But I HAVE told her," exploded Diana, with more than her
+congenital exasperation.  "I have told her, and she doesn't seem to mind.
+She still says she's going away with Smith in that cab."
+
+"But it's impossible!" ejaculated Rosamund.  "Why, Mary is
+really religious.  She--"
+
+She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively
+close to her on the lawn.  Her quiet companion had come down very
+quietly into the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel.
+She had a neat but very ancient blue tam-o'-shanter on her head,
+and was pulling some rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands.
+Yet the two tints fitted excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair;
+the more excellently for the touch of shabbiness:  for a woman's clothes
+never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her by accident.
+
+But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and attractive.
+In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are
+already sad, it will often happen that one reflection at some
+occasional angle will cause to linger the last of the light.
+A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a scrap of looking-glass,
+will be full of the fire that is lost to all the rest of the earth.
+The quaint, almost triangular face of Mary Gray was like some
+triangular piece of mirror that could still repeat the splendour
+of hours before.  Mary, though she was always graceful,
+could never before have properly been called beautiful; and yet
+her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful as to make
+a man catch his breath.
+
+"O Diana," cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
+"but how did you tell her?"
+
+"It is quite easy to tell her," answered Diana sombrely;
+"it makes no impression at all."
+
+"I'm afraid I've kept everything waiting," said Mary Gray apologetically,
+"and now we must really say good-bye. Innocent is taking me to his aunt's
+over at Hampstead, and I'm afraid she goes to bed early."
+
+Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort
+of sleepy light in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness;
+she was like one speaking absently with her eye on some
+very distant object.
+
+"Mary, Mary," cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, "I'm so sorry about it,
+but the thing can't be at all.  We--we have found out all about Mr. Smith."
+
+"All?" repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation;
+"why, that must be awfully exciting."
+
+There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that
+the silent Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head,
+as it might be to listen.  Then Rosamund remaining speechless,
+Dr. Pym came to her rescue in a definite way.
+
+"To begin with," he said, "this man Smith is constantly attempting murder.
+The Warden of Brakespeare College--"
+
+"I know," said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile.
+"Innocent told me."
+
+"I can't say what he told you," replied Pym quickly, "but I'm very much
+afraid it wasn't true.  The plain truth is that the man's stained
+with every known human crime.  I assure you I have all the documents.
+I have evidence of his committing burglary, signed by a most eminent
+English curate.  I have--"
+
+"Oh, but there were two curates," cried Mary, with a certain gentle eagerness;
+"that was what made it so much funnier."
+
+The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more,
+and Inglewood appeared for an instant, making a sort of signal.
+The American doctor bowed, the English doctor did not,
+but they both set out stolidly towards the house.
+No one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the gate;
+but the back of his head and shoulders had still an indescribable
+indication that he was listening to every word.
+
+"But don't you understand, Mary," cried Rosamund in despair; "don't you
+know that awful things have happened even before our very eyes.
+I should have thought you would have heard the revolver shots upstairs."
+
+"Yes, I heard the shots," said Mary almost brightly; "but I was busy packing
+just then.  And Innocent had told me he was going to shoot at Dr. Warner;
+so it wasn't worth while to come down."
+
+"Oh, I don't understand what you mean," cried Rosamund Hunt,
+stamping, "but you must and shall understand what I mean.
+I don't care how cruelly I put it, if only I can save you.
+I mean that your Innocent Smith is the most awfully wicked
+man in the world.  He has sent bullets at lots of other men
+and gone off in cabs with lots of other women.  And he seems
+to have killed the women too, for nobody can find them."
+
+"He is really rather naughty sometimes," said Mary Gray,
+laughing softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.
+
+"Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something," said Rosamund,
+and burst into tears.
+
+At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out
+of the house with their great green-clad captive between them.
+He made no resistance, but was still laughing in a groggy
+and half-witted style.  Arthur Inglewood followed in the rear,
+a dark and red study in the last shades of distress and shame.
+In this black, funereal, and painfully realistic style the exit
+from Beacon House was made by a man whose entrance a day before
+had been effected by the happy leaping of a wall and the hilarious
+climbing of a tree.  No one moved of the groups in the garden
+except Mary Gray, who stepped forward quite naturally,
+calling out, "Are you ready, Innocent?  Our cab's been waiting
+such a long time."
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," said Dr. Warner firmly, "I must insist on asking
+this lady to stand aside.  We shall have trouble enough as it is,
+with the three of us in a cab."
+
+"But it IS our cab," persisted Mary.  "Why, there's Innocent's yellow
+bag on the top of it."
+
+"Stand aside," repeated Warner roughly.  "And you, Mr. Moon,
+please be so obliging as to move a moment.  Come, come! the sooner
+this ugly business is over the better--and how can we open the gate
+if you will keep leaning on it?"
+
+Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed
+to consider and reconsider this argument.  "Yes, he said at last;
+"but how can I lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?"
+
+"Oh, get out of the way!" cried Warner, almost good-humouredly.
+"You can lean on the gate any time."
+
+"No," said Moon reflectively.  "Seldom the time and the place
+and the blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you
+come of an old country family.  My ancestors leaned on gates
+before any one had discovered how to open them."
+
+"Michael!" cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, "are you going to get
+out of the way?"
+
+"Why, no; I think not," said Michael, after some meditation,
+and swung himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company,
+while still, in a lounging attitude, occupying the path.
+
+"Hullo!" he called out suddenly; "what are you doing to Mr. Smith?"
+
+"Taking him away," answered Warner shortly, "to be examined."
+
+"Matriculation?" asked Moon brightly.
+
+"By a magistrate," said the other curtly.
+
+"And what other magistrate," cried Michael, raising his voice,
+"dares to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient
+and independent Dukes of Beacon?  What other court dares to try
+one of our company, save only the High Court of Beacon?  Have you
+forgotten that only this afternoon we flew the flag of independence
+and severed ourselves from all the nations of the earth?"
+
+"Michael," cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, "how can you stand
+there talking nonsense?  Why, you saw the dreadful thing yourself.
+You were there when he went mad.  It was you that helped the doctor
+up when he fell over the flower-pot."
+
+"And the High Court of Beacon," replied Moon with hauteur,
+"has special powers in all cases concerning lunatics,
+flower-pots, and doctors who fall down in gardens.
+It's in our very first charter from Edward I:  `Si medicus
+quisquam in horto prostratus--'"
+
+"Out of the way!" cried Warner with sudden fury, "or we will force
+you out of it."
+
+"What!" cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious fierceness.
+"Shall I die in defence of this sacred pale?  Will you paint
+these blue railings red with my gore?" and he laid hold of one
+of the blue spikes behind him.  As Inglewood had noticed earlier
+in the evening, the railing was loose and crooked at this place,
+and the painted iron staff and spearhead came away in Michael's
+hand as he shook it.
+
+"See!" he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air,
+"the very lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend it.
+Ah, in such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!"
+And in a voice like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard--
+
+"Ou pour l'honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince, Navre,
+poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province."
+
+
+"Sakes alive!" said the American gentleman, almost in an awed tone.
+Then he added, "Are there two maniacs here?"
+
+"No; there are five," thundered Moon.  "Smith and I are the only
+sane people left."
+
+"Michael!" cried Rosamund; "Michael, what does it mean?"
+
+"It means bosh!" roared Michael, and slung his painted spear
+hurtling to the other end of the garden.  "It means that doctors
+are bosh, and criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh--
+much more bosh than our Court of Beacon.  It means, you fatheads,
+that Innocent Smith is no more mad or bad than the bird
+on that tree."
+
+"But, my dear Moon," began Inglewood in his modest manner, "these gentlemen--"
+
+"On the word of two doctors," exploded Moon again,
+without listening to anybody else, "shut up in a private hell
+on the word of two doctors!  And such doctors!  Oh, my hat!
+Look at 'em!--do just look at 'em!  Would you read a book,
+or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty such?
+My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics.  What would
+you say if I called a man wicked on the word of two priests?"
+
+"But it isn't only their word, Michael," reasoned Rosamund;
+"they've got evidence too."
+
+"Have you looked at it?" asked Moon.
+
+"No," said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; "these gentlemen
+are in charge of it."
+
+"And of everything else, it seems to me," said Michael.  "Why, you
+haven't even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke."
+
+"Oh, that's no use," said Diana in an undertone to Rosamund; "Auntie can't
+say `Bo!' to a goose."
+
+"I am glad to hear it," answered Michael, "for with such a flock of geese
+to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on her lips.
+For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light
+and airy style.  I appeal to Mrs. Duke--it's her house."
+
+"Mrs. Duke?" repeated Inglewood doubtfully.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Duke," said Michael firmly, "commonly called the Iron Duke."
+
+"If you ask Auntie," said Diana quietly, "she'll only be for doing nothing
+at all.  Her only idea is to hush things up or to let things slide.
+That just suits her."
+
+"Yes," replied Michael Moon; "and, as it happens, it just suits
+all of us.  You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke;
+but when you are as old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew--
+that half one's letters answer themselves if you can only refrain
+from the fleshly appetite of answering them."
+
+He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow
+on the grate, but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time;
+just as it had changed from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant,
+it now changed to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer giving
+good legal advice.
+
+"It isn't only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if
+she can," he said; "we all want to keep it quiet if we can.
+Look at the large facts--the big bones of the case.  I believe
+those scientific gentlemen have made a highly scientific mistake.
+I believe Smith is as blameless as a buttercup.  I admit
+buttercups don't often let off loaded pistols in private houses;
+I admit there is something demanding explanation.
+But I am morally certain there's some blunder, or some joke,
+or some allegory, or some accident behind all this.
+Well, suppose I'm wrong.  We've disarmed him; we're five men
+to hold him; he may as well go to a lock-up later on as now.
+But suppose there's even a chance of my being right.
+Is it anybody's interest here to wash this linen in public?
+
+"Come, I'll take each of you in order.  Once take Smith outside that gate,
+and you take him into the front page of the evening papers.  I know;
+I've written the front page myself.  Miss Duke, do you or your aunt want
+a sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house--`Doctors shot here.'
+No, no--doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you don't want the rubbish
+shot here.  Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I am wrong.
+Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours.  Mark my words,
+if he's proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you
+introduced him.  If he's proved innocent, they will say you helped
+to collar him.  Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong.
+If he's proved guilty, they'll say you engaged your companion to him.
+If he's proved innocent, they'll print that telegram.
+I know the Organs, damn them."
+
+He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more
+breathless than had either his theatrical or his real denunciation.
+But he was plainly in earnest, as well as positive and lucid;
+as was proved by his proceeding quickly the moment he had
+found his breath.
+
+"It is just the same," he cried, "with our medical friends.
+You will say that Dr. Warner has a grievance.  I agree.
+But does he want specially to be snapshotted by all the
+journalists ~prostratus in horto~? It was no fault of his,
+but the scene was not very dignified even for him.
+He must have justice; but does he want to ask for justice,
+not only on his knees, but on his hands and knees?
+Does he want to enter the court of justice on all fours?
+Doctors are not allowed to advertise; and I'm sure no
+doctor wants to advertise himself as looking like that.
+And even for our American guest the interest is the same.
+Let us suppose that he has conclusive documents.
+Let us assume that he has revelations really worth reading.
+Well, in a legal inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that matter)
+ten to one he won't be allowed to read them.  He'll be tripped
+up every two or three minutes with some tangle of old rules.
+A man can't tell the truth in public nowadays.  But he can
+still tell it in private; he can tell it inside that house."
+
+"It is quite true," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened throughout
+the speech with a seriousness which only an American could have retained
+through such a scene.  "It is true that I have been per-ceptibly less
+hampered in private inquiries."
+
+"Dr. Pym!" cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger.
+"Dr. Pym! you aren't really going to admit--"
+
+"Smith may be mad," went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue
+that seemed as heavy as a hatchet, "but there was something
+after all in what he said about Home Rule for every home.
+Yes, there is something, when all's said and done, in the High Court
+of Beacon.  It is really true that human beings might often get
+some sort of domestic justice where just now they can only get
+legal injustice--oh, I am a lawyer too, and I know that as well.
+It is true that there's too much official and indirect power.
+Often and often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing
+a family could settle.  Scores of young criminals have been fined
+and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.
+Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell when they
+only wanted a week at Brighton.  There IS something in Smith's
+notion of domestic self-government; and I propose that we put it
+into practice.  You have the prisoner; you have the documents.
+Come, we are a company of free, white, Christian people,
+such as might be besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island.
+Let us do this thing ourselves.  Let us go into that house there
+and sit down and find out with our own eyes and ears whether this
+thing is true or not; whether this Smith is a man or a monster.
+If we can't do a little thing like that, what right have we to put
+crosses on ballot papers?"
+
+Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool,
+saw in that glance that Moon was gaining ground.  The motives that led
+Arthur to think of surrender were indeed very different from those
+which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym.  All Arthur's instincts were on the side
+of privacy and polite settlement; he was very English and would often
+endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric.
+To play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend,
+would have been absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official
+part he had played that afternoon was very painful.  He was not likely
+to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
+sleeping dogs lie.
+
+On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
+possible that seem crazy to the English.  Regulations and authorities exactly
+like one of Innocent's pranks or one of Michael's satires really exist,
+propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men.
+Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and fanciful;
+each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village, and as
+unexpected as an apple-pie bed.  States where no man may have a cigarette,
+States where any man may have ten wives, very strict prohibition States,
+very lax divorce States--all these large local vagaries had prepared
+Cyrus Pym's mind for small local vagaries in a smaller country.
+Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or Italian,
+utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions are,
+he could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon.  It is
+firmly believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very
+end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be
+some Britannic institution.
+
+Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached
+through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk
+apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.
+Something at once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this
+being moved Michael to even heartier outbursts of a healthy
+and humane flippancy.
+
+"Why, here's little Nosey Gould," he exclaimed.  "Isn't the mere
+sight of him enough to banish all your morbid reflections?"
+
+"Really," replied Dr. Warner," I really fail to see how Mr. Gould
+affects the question; and I once more demand--"
+
+"Hello! what's the funeral, gents?" inquired the newcomer with the air
+of an uproarious umpire.  "Doctor demandin' something?  Always the way
+at a boarding-house, you know.  Always lots of demand.  No supply."
+
+As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his position,
+and indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain dangerous
+and dubious acts, and that there had even arisen an allegation that
+he was insane.
+
+"Well, of course he is," said Moses Gould equably; "it don't
+need old 'Olmes to see that.  The 'awk-like face of 'Olmes,"
+he added with abstract relish, "showed a shide of disappointment,
+the sleuth-like Gould 'avin' got there before 'im."
+
+"If he is mad," began Inglewood.
+
+"Well," said Moses, "when a cove gets out on the tile the first night
+there's generally a tile loose."
+
+"You never objected before," said Diana Duke rather stiffly,
+"and you're generally pretty free with your complaints."
+
+"I don't compline of him," said Moses magnanimously, "the poor chap's
+'armless enough; you might tie 'im up in the garden her and 'e'd make
+noises at the burglars."
+
+"Moses," said Moon with solemn fervour, "you are the incarnation
+of Common Sense.  You think Mr. Innocent is mad.  Let me introduce you
+to the incarnation of Scientific Theory.  He also thinks Mr. Innocent
+is mad.--Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.--Moses, this is the celebrated
+Dr. Pym."  The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and bowed.
+He also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice, which sounded
+like "Pleased to meet you."
+
+"Now you two people," said Michael cheerfully, "who both think our poor
+friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there and prove him mad.
+What could be more powerful than the combination of Scientific Theory
+with Common Sense?  United you stand; divided you fall.  I will not be
+so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I confine myself
+to recording the chronological accident that he has not shown us any so far.
+I take the freedom of an old friend in staking my shirt that Moses has no
+scientific theory.  Yet against this strong coalition I am ready to appear,
+armed with nothing but an intuition--which is American for a guess."
+
+"Distinguished by Mr. Gould's assistance," said Pym, opening his
+eyes suddenly.  "I gather that though he and I are identical
+in primary di-agnosis there is yet between us something that
+cannot be called a disagreement, something which we may perhaps
+call a--" He put the points of thumb and forefinger together,
+spreading the other fingers exquisitely in the air, and seemed
+to be waiting for somebody else to tell him what to say.
+
+"Catchin' flies?" inquired the affable Moses.
+
+"A divergence," said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief; "a divergence.
+Granted that the man in question is deranged, he would not necessarily
+be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac--"
+
+"Has it occurred to you," observed Moon, who was leaning on the gate again,
+and did not turn round, "that if he were a homicidal maniac he might have
+killed us all here while we were talking."
+
+Something exploded silently in all their minds, like sealed
+dynamite in some forgotten cellars.  They all remembered
+for the first time for some hour or two that the monster
+of whom they were talking was standing quietly among them.
+They had left him in the garden like a garden statue; there might
+have been a dolphin coiling round his legs, or a fountain
+pouring out of his mouth, for all the notice they had taken
+of Innocent Smith.  He stood with his crest of blonde, blown hair
+thrust somewhat forward, his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted
+face looking patiently downwards at nothing in particular,
+his huge shoulders humped, and his hands in his trousers pockets.
+So far as they could guess he had not moved at all.
+His green coat might have been cut out of the green turf
+on which he stood.  In his shadow Pym had expounded and
+Rosamund expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged.
+He had remained like a thing graven; the god of the garden.
+A sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and then,
+after correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.
+
+"Why," cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, "the Court of Beacon
+has opened--and shut up again too.  You all know now I am right.
+Your buried common sense has told you what my buried common sense has
+told me.  Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol,
+and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is harmless.
+Back we all go to the house and clear a room for discussion.
+For the High Court of Beacon, which has already arrived at its decision,
+is just about to begin its inquiry."
+
+"Just a goin' to begin!" cried little Mr. Moses in an extraordinary
+sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal during music
+or a thunderstorm.  "Follow on to the 'Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon;
+'ave a kipper from the old firm!  'Is Lordship complimented
+Mr. Gould on the 'igh professional delicacy 'e had shown,
+and which was worthy of the best traditions of the Saloon Bar--
+and three of Scotch hot, miss!  Oh, chase me, girls!"
+
+The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a
+sort of waddling dance of pure excitement; and has made a circuit
+of the garden before he reappeared, breathless but still beaming.
+Moon had known his man when he realized that no people presented
+to Moses Gould could be quite serious, even if they were
+quite furious.  The glass doors stood open on the side nearest
+to Mr. Moses Gould; and as the feet of that festive idiot were
+evidently turned in the same direction, everybody else went
+that way with the unanimity of some uproarious procession.
+Only Diana Duke retained enough rigidity to say the thing that had
+been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few hours.
+Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as unsympathetic.
+"In that case," she said sharply, "these cabs can be sent away."
+
+"Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know," said Mary with a smile.
+"I dare say the cabman would get it down for us."
+
+"I'll get the bag," said Smith, speaking for the first time in hours;
+his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.
+
+Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility
+were left breathless by his precipitance.  With a run and spring
+he was out of the garden into the street; with a spring and
+one quivering kick he was actually on the roof of the cab.
+The cabman happened to be standing by the horse's head, having just
+removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith seemed for an instant to be
+rolling about on the cab's back in the embraces of his Gladstone bag.
+The next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a royal luck,
+into the high seat behind, and with a shriek of piercing and
+appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying and scampering
+down the street.
+
+His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it
+was all the other people who were turned into garden statues.
+Mr. Moses Gould, however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally
+for the purposes of permanent sculpture, came to life some time before
+the rest, and, turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily
+with a stranger on an omnibus, "Tile loose, eh?  Cab loose anyhow."
+There followed a fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer
+like a club of stone,--
+
+"This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon.  You have let
+loose a maniac on the whole metropolis."
+
+Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent
+of continuous houses.  The little garden that shut it in ran out into
+a sharp point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets.
+Smith and his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly
+most of those standing inside of it never expected to see him again.
+At the apex, however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal
+violence up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the group.
+With a common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him,
+but they soon had reason to duck and recoil.  Even as he vanished up
+street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly from his hand,
+so that it fell in the centre of the garden, scattering the company
+like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner's hat for the third time.
+Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot away with a
+shriek that went into a whisper.
+
+"Well," said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice;
+"you may as well all go inside anyhow.  We've got two relics
+of Mr. Smith at least; his fiancee and his trunk."
+
+"Why do you want us to go inside?" asked Arthur Inglewood,
+in whose red brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed
+to have reached its limit.
+
+"I want the rest to go in," said Michael in a clear voice,
+"because I want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you."
+
+There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting colder,
+and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the twilight.
+Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.
+
+"I refuse to listen to any such proposal," he said; "you have lost
+this ruffian, and I must find him."
+
+"I don't ask you to listen to any proposal," answered Moon quietly;
+"I only ask you to listen."
+
+He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately
+the whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side
+of the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
+Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
+rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had
+swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
+Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness,
+and coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine
+attitude as before.
+
+"Get inside! get inside!" cried Moon hilariously, with the air
+of one shooing a company of cats.  "Come, come, be quick about it!
+Didn't I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?"
+
+How they were all really driven into the house again it would
+have been difficult afterwards to say.  They had reached the point
+of being exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce
+are ill with laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among
+the trees seemed like a final gesture of things in general.
+Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain amicable
+exasperation, "I say, do you really want to speak to me?"
+
+"I do," said Michael, "very much."
+
+Nigh had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed
+to promise.  While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very
+large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees,
+proved by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray indeed.
+A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds across
+the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and yet laborious wind.
+
+"Arthur," said Michael, "I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
+You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed Court
+of Beacon, and to clear him too--clear him of both crime and lunacy.
+Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit."  They walked up
+and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
+
+"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of those queer old
+hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot countries.
+How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
+Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red,
+or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's
+ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it
+up at all."
+
+Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend
+had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless
+a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was
+asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly
+suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels.
+How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could
+not conceive.  Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.
+
+"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon abruptly,
+"even if they've forgotten the answers?  Riddles are easy to remember
+because they are hard to guess.  So were those stiff old symbols
+in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard
+to guess.  Their colours were plain.  Their shapes were plain.
+Everything was plain except the meaning."
+
+Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon
+went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking
+faster and faster.  "Dances, too," he said; "dances were not frivolous.
+Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts.
+The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent.
+Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?"
+
+"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour,
+"have I noticed anything else?"
+
+"Have you noticed this about him," asked Moon, with unshaken persistency,
+"that he has done so much and said so little?  When first he came he talked,
+but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he wasn't used to it.
+All he really did was actions--painting red flowers on black gowns or throwing
+yellow bags on to the grass.  I tell you that big green figure is figurative--
+like any green figure capering on some white Eastern wall."
+
+"My dear Michael," cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation which increased
+with the rising wind, "you are getting absurdly fanciful."
+
+"I think of what has just happened," said Michael steadily.
+"The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking
+all the time.  He fired three shots from a six-shooter and then
+gave it up to us, when he might have shot us dead in our boots.
+How could he express his trust in us better than that?
+He wanted to be tried by us.  How could he have shown it better
+than by standing quite still and letting us discuss it?
+He wanted to show that he stood there willingly,
+and could escape if he liked.  How could he have shown it
+better than by escaping in the cab and coming back again?
+Innocent Smith is not a madman--he is a ritualist.  He wants to
+express himself, not with his tongue, but with his arms and legs--
+with my body I thee worship, as it says in the marriage service.
+I begin to understand the old plays and pageants.  I see why
+the mutes at a funeral were mute.  I see why the mummers were mum.
+They MEANT something; and Smith means something too.
+All other jokes have to be noisy--like little Nosey Gould's jokes,
+for instance.  The only silent jokes are the practical jokes.
+Poor Smith, properly considered, is an allegorical practical joker.
+What he has really done in this house has been as frantic
+as a war-dance, but as silent as a picture."
+
+"I suppose you mean," said the other dubiously, "that we have got to find out
+what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many coloured picture-puzzles.
+But even supposing that they do mean something--why, Lord bless my soul!--"
+
+Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted
+his eyes to the moon, by this time risen big and luminous,
+and had seen a huge, half-human figure sitting on the garden wall.
+It was outlined so sharply against the moon that for the first flash
+it was hard to be certain even that it was human:  the hunched
+shoulders and outstanding hair had rather the air of a colossal cat.
+It resembled a cat also in the fact that when first startled it
+sprang up and ran with easy activity along the top of the wall.
+As it ran, however, its heavy shoulders and small stooping head
+rather suggested a baboon.  The instant it came within reach
+of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was lost in the branches.
+The gale, which by this time was shaking every shrub in the garden,
+made the identification yet more difficult, since it melted
+the moving limbs of the fugitive in the multitudinous moving
+limbs of the tree.
+
+"Who is there?" shouted Arthur.  "Who are you?  Are you Innocent?"
+
+"Not quite," answered an obscure voice among the leaves.
+"I cheated you once about a penknife."
+
+The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
+backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it
+had on the gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.
+
+"But are you Smith?" asked Inglewood as in an agony.
+
+"Very nearly," said the voice out of the tossing tree.
+
+"But you must have some real names," shrieked Inglewood in despair.
+"You must call yourself something."
+
+"Call myself something," thundered the obscure voice, shaking the tree
+so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once.
+"I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand
+Homer Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare--"
+
+"But, manalive!" began Inglewood in exasperation.
+
+"That's right! that's right!" came with a roar out of the rocking tree;
+"that's my real name."  And he broke a branch, and one or two autumn
+leaves fluttered away across the moon.
+
+
+
+
+                           Part II
+
+             The Explanations of Innocent Smith
+
+
+
+
+                          Chapter I
+
+                      The Eye of Death;
+                    or, the Murder Charge
+
+
+The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court
+of Beacon with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow
+to increase its cosiness.  The big room was, as it were,
+cut up into small rooms, with walls only waist high--the sort
+of separation that children make when they are playing at shops.
+This had been done by Moses Gould and Michael Moon
+(the two most active members of this remarkable inquiry)
+with the ordinary furniture of the place.  At one end of the long
+mahogany table was set the one enormous garden chair, which was
+surmounted by the old torn tent or umbrella which Smith himself
+had suggested as a coronation canopy.  Inside this erection
+could be perceived the dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions
+and a form of countenance that already threatened slumber.
+At the other end sat the accused Smith, in a kind of dock;
+for he was carefully fenced in with a quadrilateral of light
+bedroom chairs, any of which he could have tossed out the window
+with his big toe.  He had been provided with pens and paper,
+out of the latter of which he made paper boats, paper darts,
+and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings.
+He never spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious
+as a child on the floor of an empty nursery.
+
+On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat
+the three young ladies with their backs up against the window,
+and Mary Gray in the middle; it was something between a jury
+box and the stall of the Queen of Beauty at a tournament.
+Down the centre of the long table Moon had built a low barrier
+out of eight bound volumes of "Good Words" to express the moral
+wall that divided the conflicting parties.  On the right side
+sat the two advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould;
+behind a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the case
+of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology.  On the other side,
+Moon and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified
+with books and papers; but as these included several old yellow
+volumes by Ouida and Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon
+seemed to have been somewhat careless and comprehensive.
+As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr. Warner, Moon wanted at first
+to have him kept entirely behind a high screen in the court,
+urging the indelicacy of his appearance in court, but privately
+assuring him of an unofficial permission to peep over the top
+now and then.  Dr. Warner, however, failed to rise to the chivalry
+of such a course, and after some little disturbance and discussion
+he was accommodated with a seat on the right side of the table
+in a line with his legal advisers.
+
+It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym,
+after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear,
+rose to open the case.  His statement was clear and even restrained,
+and such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention
+by a certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers
+of American speech.
+
+He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany,
+closed his eyes, and opened his mouth.  "The time has gone by,"
+he said, "when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act,
+important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered.
+Science has profoundly..." here he paused, poising his compressed
+finger and thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea
+very tight by its tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said
+"modified," and let it go--"has profoundly Modified our view of death.
+In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life,
+catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity.
+Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal
+and inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding
+average which we call for convenience the order of nature.
+In the same way we have come to consider murder socially.
+Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly
+deprived of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole,
+to see the rich rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings
+the golden harvests and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return
+for ever of the slayers and the slain."
+
+He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed slightly,
+putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent manners
+of Boston, and continued:  "There is but one result of this happier
+and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us.
+It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor,
+our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work,
+`The Destructive Type.'  We do not denounce Smith as a murderer,
+but rather as a murderous man.  The type is such that its very life--
+I might say its very health--is in killing.  Some hold that it is
+not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature.
+My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets--" (here Moon
+suddenly ejaculated a loud "hurrah!" but so instantaneously
+resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere
+else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly--"who,
+in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the creature's
+ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an end in itself.
+However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so with the prisoner.
+In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of the maniac;
+but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity.
+But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements--a cruel,
+an evil sanity.  As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin
+West as stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay.
+No environment, however scientific, could have softened him.
+Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest cloister,
+and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb.
+Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy,
+and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope
+or brain with the brick.  Circumstances may be favourable,
+training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental
+hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed season
+burst like a well-timed bomb."
+
+Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature
+at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat,
+and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.
+
+"It only remains for us," he said, "to bring forward actual evidence
+of his previous attempts.  By an agreement already made with the Court
+and the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence authentic
+letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is free to examine.
+Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided to select one--
+the clearest and most scandalous.  I will therefore, without further delay,
+call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two letters--one from the Sub-Warden and
+the other from the porter of Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University."
+
+Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking
+paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face.
+He began in a loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt
+as a cock-crow:--
+
+
+"Sir,--Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge--"
+
+
+"Lord have mercy on us," muttered Moon, making a backward movement as men
+do when a gun goes off.
+
+
+"Sir,--Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,"
+proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, "and I can endorse the description
+you gave of the un'appy Smith.  It was not alone my unfortunate duty
+to rebuke many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period,
+but I was actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated
+that period.  Hi happened to passing under the house of my friend
+the Warden of Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College
+and connected with it by two or three very ancient arches or props,
+like bridges, across a small strip of water connected with the river.
+To my grave astonishment I be'eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air
+and clinging to one of these pieces of masonry, his appearance and
+attitude indicatin' that he suffered from the grivest apprehensions.
+After a short time I heard two very loud shots, and distinctly perceived
+the unfortunate undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the Warden's
+window and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver.
+Upon seeing me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which
+impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared to desist.
+I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he succeeded in detaching
+the Warden from his painful position.  Smith was sent down.
+The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle Club
+prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.--Hi am,
+your obedient servant, Amos Boulter."
+
+
+"The other letter," continued Gould in a glow of triumph, "is from the porter,
+and won't take long to read.
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare College,
+and that I 'elped the Warden down when the young man was shooting at him,
+as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter.  The young man who was shooting at
+him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the photograph Mr. Boulter sends.--
+Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker."
+
+
+Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them.
+But for the vocal divergences in the matter of h's and a's,
+the Sub-Warden's letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it;
+and both that and the porter's letter were plainly genuine.
+Moon handed them to Inglewood, who handed them back in silence
+to Moses Gould.
+
+"So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is concerned,"
+said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, "that is my case."
+
+Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave
+little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner.
+He did not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into doctor
+into the abstract questions.  "I do not know enough to be
+an agnostic," he said, rather wearily, "and I can only master
+the known and admitted elements in such controversies.
+As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts
+are plain enough.  All that the parsons say is unproved.
+All that the doctors say is disproved.  That's the only difference
+between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.
+Yet these new discoveries touch me, somehow," he said,
+looking down sorrowfully at his boots.  "They remind me of a dear
+old great-aunt of mine who used to enjoy them in her youth.
+It brings tears to my eyes.  I can see the old bucket by the garden
+fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind--"
+
+"Hi! here, stop the 'bus a bit," cried Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a sort
+of perspiration.  "We want to give the defence a fair run--like gents,
+you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering poplars."
+
+"Well, hang it all," said Moon, in an injured manner, "if Dr. Pym
+may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn't I have an old
+aunt with poplars?"
+
+"I am sure," said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost
+like a shaky authority, "Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes."
+
+"Why, as to liking her," began Moon, "I--but perhaps,
+as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question.
+I repeat that I do not mean to follow the abstract speculation.
+For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is simple and severely concrete.
+Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the psychology of murder.
+If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a natural
+tendency to murder, is it not equally true"--here he lowered
+his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness--"is
+it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has
+a natural tendency to get murdered?  Is it not at least
+a hypothesis holding the field that Dr. Warner is such a man?
+I do not speak without the book, any more than my learned friend.
+The whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein's monumental work,
+`The Destructible Doctor,' with diagrams, showing the various ways
+in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be resolved into his elements.
+In the light of these facts--"
+
+"Hi, stop the 'bus! stop the 'bus!" cried Moses, jumping up and down and
+gesticulating in great excitement.  "My principal's got something to say!
+My principal wants to do a bit of talkin'."
+
+Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious.
+"I have strictly CON-fined myself," he said nasally,
+"to books to which immediate reference can be made.
+I have Sonnenschein's `Destructive Type' here on the table,
+if the defence wish to see it.  Where is this wonderful work
+on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about?  Does it exist?
+Can he produce it?"
+
+"Produce it!" cried the Irishman with a rich scorn.
+"I'll produce it in a week if you'll pay for the ink and paper."
+
+"Would it have much authority?" asked Pym, sitting down.
+
+"Oh, authority!" said Moon lightly; "that depends on a fellow's religion."
+
+Dr. Pym jumped up again.  "Our authority is based on masses
+of accurate detail," he said.  "It deals with a region in which
+things can be handled and tested.  My opponent will at least
+admit that death is a fact of experience."
+
+"Not of mine," said Moon mournfully, shaking his head.
+"I've never experienced such a thing in all my life."
+
+"Well, really," said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a crackle of papers.
+
+"So we see," resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice, "that a
+man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution,
+doomed to such attacks.  My client's onslaught, even if it occurred,
+was not unique.  I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance
+of Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way.
+Following the example of my learned friends I will read only two of them.
+The first is from an honest and laborious matron living off the Harrow Road.
+
+
+"Mr. Moon, Sir,--Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him.  Wot then?
+It was all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned,
+and if your Docter Warner doesn't like having sorsepans thrown at him,
+don't let him wear his hat in a respectable woman's parler, and tell
+him to leave orf smiling or tell us the joke.--Yours respectfully,
+                                               Hannah Miles.
+
+
+"The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin,
+with whom Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation.
+He writes as follows:--
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--The incident to which you refer is one which I regret,
+and which, moreover, I have never been able to explain.
+My own branch of medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have
+the view of a mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed
+almost automatic action.  To say that I `pulled Dr. Warner's nose,'
+is, however, inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important.
+That I punched his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with
+what regret); but pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective
+with which I cannot reproach myself.  In comparison with this, the act
+of punching was an outward, instantaneous, and even natural gesture.--
+Believe me, yours faithfully, Burton Lestrange.
+
+
+"I have numberless other letters," continued Moon, "all bearing witness
+to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I therefore think
+that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the question in his survey.
+We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a natural force.
+As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as stay
+the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
+Place that man in a Quakers' meeting, among the most peaceful of Christians,
+and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of chocolate.
+Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be stoned
+to death with precious stones.  Circumstances may be beautiful and wonderful,
+the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be golden-bearded,
+the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be iris-leapt,
+the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and above
+all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to get
+murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and triumphantly
+succeeds at last."
+
+He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion.
+But even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other
+side of the table.  Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across
+the little figure of Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers
+to Dr. Pym.  That expert nodded a great many times and finally started
+to his feet with a sincere expression of sternness.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried indignantly, "as my colleague has said,
+we should be delighted to give any latitude to the defence--if there
+were a defence.  But Mr. Moon seems to think he is there to make jokes--
+very good jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to assist his client.
+He picks holes in science.  He picks holes in my client's social popularity.
+He picks holes in my literary style, which doesn't seem to suit his high-toned
+European taste.  But how does this picking of holes affect the issue?
+This Smith has picked two holes in my client's hat, and with an inch better
+aim would have picked two holes in his head.  All the jokes in the world
+won't unpick those holes or be any use for the defence."
+
+Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the evident
+fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a dreamy way.
+"The defence?" he said vaguely--"oh, I haven't begun that yet."
+
+"You certainly have not," said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of applause
+from his side, which the other side found it impossible to answer.
+"Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful from
+the very beginning--"
+
+"While you're standing up," said Moon, in the same almost sleepy style,
+"perhaps I might ask you a question."
+
+"A question?  Certainly," said Pym stiffly.  "It was distinctly
+arranged between us that as we could not cross-examine
+the witnesses, we might vicariously cross-examine each other.
+We are in a position to invite all such inquiry."
+
+"I think you said," observed Moon absently, "that none of the prisoner's
+shots really hit the doctor."
+
+"For the cause of science," cried the complacent Pym, "fortunately not."
+
+"Yet they were fired from a few feet away."
+
+"Yes; about four feet."
+
+"And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close
+to him too?" asked Moon.
+
+"That is so," said the witness gravely.
+
+"I think," said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, "that your Sub-Warden
+mentioned that Smith was one of the University's record men for shooting."
+
+"Why, as to that--" began Pym, after an instant of stillness.
+
+"A second question," continued Moon, comparatively curtly.
+"You said there were other cases of the accused trying to kill people.
+Why have you not got evidence of them?"
+
+The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again.
+"In those cases," he said precisely, "there was no evidence from outsiders,
+as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual victims."
+
+"Why didn't you get their evidence?"
+
+"In the case of the actual victims," said Pym, "there was some difficulty
+and reluctance, and--"
+
+"Do you mean," asked Moon, "that none of the actual victims would
+appear against the prisoner?"
+
+"That would be exaggerative," began the other.
+
+"A third question," said Moon, so sharply that every one jumped.
+"You've got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard some shots;
+where's the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot at?
+The Warden of Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman."
+
+"We did ask for a statement from him," said Pym a little nervously;
+"but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it out
+of deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science
+have been great."
+
+Moon leaned forward.  "You mean, I suppose," he said, "that his statement
+was favourable to the prisoner."
+
+"It might be understood so," replied the American doctor;
+"but, really, it was difficult to understand at all.
+In fact, we sent it back to him."
+
+"You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of Brakespeare."
+
+"No."
+
+"I only ask," said Michael quietly, "because we have.
+To conclude my case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood,
+to read a statement of the true story--a statement attested
+as true by the signature of the Warden himself."
+
+Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though
+he looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did,
+the spectators were surprised to feel that his presence was,
+upon the whole, more efficient and sufficing than his leader's. He was,
+in truth, one of those modest men who cannot speak until they are told
+to speak; and then can speak well.  Moon was entirely the opposite.
+His own impudences amused him in private, but they slightly
+embarrassed him in public; he felt a fool while he was speaking,
+whereas Inglewood felt a fool only because he could not speak.
+The moment he had anything to say he could speak;
+and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite natural.
+Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.
+
+"As my colleague has just explained," said Inglewood, "there are
+two enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence.
+The first is a plain physical fact.  By the admission of everybody,
+by the very evidence adduced by the prosecution, it is clear
+that the accused was celebrated as a specially good shot.
+Yet on both the occasions complained of he shot from a distance of four
+or five feet, and shot at him four or five times, and never hit him once.
+That is the first startling circumstance on which we base our argument.
+The second, as my colleague has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot
+find a single victim of these alleged outrages to speak for himself.
+Subordinates speak for him.  Porters climb up ladders to him.
+But he himself is silent.  Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain
+on the spot both the riddle of the shots and the riddle of the silence.
+I will first of all read the covering letter in which the true account
+of the Cambridge incident is contained, and then that document itself.
+When you have heard both, there will be no doubt about your decision.
+The covering letter runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--The following is a very exact and even vivid account of the
+incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College.  We, the undersigned,
+do not see any particular reason why we should refer it to any
+isolated authorship.  The truth is, it has been a composite production;
+and we have even had some difference of opinion about the adjectives.
+But every word of it is true.--We are, yours faithfully,
+
+                                     "Wilfred Emerson Eames,
+                  "Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+                                            "Innocent Smith.
+
+
+"The enclosed statement," continued Inglewood, "runs as follows:--
+
+
+"A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river,
+that it has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched
+with all sorts of bridges and semi-detached buildings.
+The river splits itself into several small streams and canals,
+so that in one or two corners the place has almost the look
+of Venice.  It was so especially in the case with which we
+are concerned, in which a few flying buttresses or airy ribs of stone
+sprang across a strip of water to connect Brakespeare College
+with the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.
+
+"The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not
+seem flat when one is thus in the midst of the colleges.
+For in these flat fens there are always wandering lakes and lingering
+rivers of water.  And these always change what might have been
+a scheme of horizontal lines into a scheme of vertical lines.
+Wherever there is water the height of high buildings is doubled,
+and a British brick house becomes a Babylonian tower.
+In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head
+downwards exactly to their highest or lowest chimney.
+The coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far
+below the world as its original appears above it.
+Every scrap of water is not only a window but a skylight.
+Earth splits under men's feet into precipitous aerial perspectives,
+into which a bird could as easily wing its way as--"
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest.  The documents he had put
+in evidence had been confined to cold affirmation of fact.
+The defence, in a general way, had an indubitable right to put
+their case in their own way, but all this landscape gardening
+seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the business.
+"Will the leader of the defence tell me," he asked, "how it can
+possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor'l-coloured,
+or that a bird could have winged itself anywhere?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Michael, lifting himself lazily;
+"you see, you don't know yet what our defence is.
+Till you know that, don't you see, anything may be relevant.
+Why, suppose," he said suddenly, as if an idea had struck him,
+"suppose we wanted to prove the old Warden colour-blind.
+Suppose he was shot by a black man with white hair, when he
+thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair!
+To ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-coloured
+might be of the most massive importance."
+
+He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared,
+and continued with the same fluence:  "Or suppose we wanted to
+maintain that the Warden committed suicide--that he just got Smith
+to hold the pistol as Brutus's slave held the sword.  Why, it would
+make all the difference whether the Warden could see himself plain
+in still water.  Still water has made hundreds of suicides:
+one sees oneself so very--well, so very plain."
+
+"Do you, perhaps," inquired Pym with austere irony, "maintain that your client
+was a bird of some sort--say, a flamingo?"
+
+"In the matter of his being a flamingo," said Moon with sudden severity,
+"my client reserves his defence."
+
+No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat
+and Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:--
+
+
+"There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors.
+For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one.
+In the highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.
+
+"This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best.
+Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own
+thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able
+to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle.
+This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat)
+the inmost thing of human philosophy.  There is a mystical, even a
+monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are better than one.
+But they ought both to grow on the same body.'"
+
+
+"I know it's a little transcendental at first," interposed Inglewood,
+beaming round with a broad apology, "but you see this document was written
+in collaboration by a don and a--"
+
+"Drunkard, eh?" suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy himself.
+
+"I rather think," proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled
+and critical air, "that this part was written by the don.
+I merely warn the Court that the statement, though indubitably accurate,
+bears here and there the trace of coming from two authors."
+
+"In that case," said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing,
+"I cannot agree with them that two heads are better than one."
+
+
+"The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred
+problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform:
+the question of whether dons see double because they are drunk,
+or get drunk because they see double.  It is enough for them
+(the undersigned persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar
+and profitable theme--which is puddles.  What (the undersigned
+persons ask themselves) is a puddle?  A puddle repeats infinity,
+and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively,
+a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
+The two great historic universities of England have all this large
+and level and reflective brilliance.  Nevertheless, or, rather, on the
+other hand, they are puddles--puddles, puddles, puddles, puddles.
+The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis inseparable
+from strong conviction."
+
+
+Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some present,
+and continued with eminent cheerfulness:--
+
+
+"Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of
+the undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes
+of canal and the glittering rainy gutters into which the water
+broke up round the back of Brakespeare College.  Had these thoughts
+crossed his mind he would have been much happier than he was.
+Unfortunately he did not know that his puzzles were puddles.
+He did not know that the academic mind reflects infinity and is full
+of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
+In his case, therefore, there was something solemn, and even evil
+about the infinity implied.  It was half-way through a starry
+night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above and below.
+To young Smith's sullen fancy the skies below seemed even hollower
+than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he counted
+the stars he would find one too many in the pool.
+
+"In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping
+on the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower.  For to him,
+and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things.
+Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous
+and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse
+of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes.  For the young men
+of that sad time thought that the god always comes from the machine.
+They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god.
+IN short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them--
+atrocious because it was true.  All their universe was black with white spots.
+
+"Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below
+to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college.
+The only light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green
+curtain in the upper part of the building, marking where
+Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and received
+his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night.
+Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound.
+Smith had been at Dr. Eames's lecture for the first half of the morning,
+and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second half.
+He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon
+and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
+He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating
+club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy
+Smith was melancholy still.  Then, as he was going home to his
+diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master,
+the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn
+in to that gentleman's private house.
+
+"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne
+in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence;
+the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover,
+a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough
+to make them a part of the British Constitution.  The bad habits
+of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student
+of Schopenhauer.  Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man,
+with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his
+pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries
+in the two essential respects of having a European reputation
+and a bald head.
+
+"`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,' said Smith, who was
+nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small,
+`because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten.
+I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise--bishops,
+and agnostics, and those sort of people.  And knowing you were the greatest
+living authority on the pessimist thinkers--'
+
+"`All thinkers,' said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.'
+
+"After a patch of pause, not the first--for this depressing conversation
+had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence--
+the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy:  `It's all a question
+of wrong calculation.  The most flies into the candle because he doesn't
+happen to know that the game is not worth the candle.  The wasp gets
+into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him.
+IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want
+to enjoy gin--because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big
+a price for it.  That they never find happiness--that they don't even know
+how to look for it--is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness
+of everything they do.  Their discordant colours are cries of pain.
+Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river.
+There's one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!'
+
+"`Of course,' he went on dreamily, `one or two men see the sober
+fact a long way off--they go mad.  Do you notice that maniacs mostly
+try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful)
+to destroy themselves?  The madman is the man behind the scenes,
+like the man that wanders about the coulisse of a theater.
+He has only opened the wrong door and come into the right place.
+He sees things at the right angle.  But the common world--'
+
+"`Oh, hang the common world!' said the sullen Smith, letting his fist
+fall on the table in an idle despair.
+
+"`Let's give it a bad name first,' said the Professor calmly,
+`and then hang it.  A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle
+for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it.
+So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain.
+He would strike us dead.'
+
+"`Why doesn't he strike us dead?' asked the undergraduate abstractedly,
+plunging his hands into his pockets.
+
+"`He is dead himself,' said the philosopher; `that is where
+he is really enviable.'
+
+"`To any one who thinks,' proceeded Eames, `the pleasures of life,
+trivial and soon tasteless, and bribes to bring us into a torture chamber.
+We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the... What
+are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.'
+
+"Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder,
+and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a
+six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top.
+It fixed him like an iron eye.  Through those eternal instants during
+which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was.
+Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of
+a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith,
+apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.
+
+"`I'll help you out of your hole, old man,' said Smith,
+with rough tenderness.  `I'll put the puppy out of his pain.'
+
+"Emerson Eames retreated towards the window.  `Do you mean
+to kill me?' he cried.
+
+"`It's not a thing I'd do for every one,' said Smith with emotion;
+`but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow.
+I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.'
+
+"`Put that thing down,' shouted the Warden.
+
+"`It'll soon be over, you know,' said Smith with the air of a
+sympathetic dentist.  And as the Warden made a run for the window
+and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step
+and a compassionate expression.
+
+"Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white
+of early daybreak had already come.  One of them, however,
+had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise.  Brakespeare College
+was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament,
+and just beneath Dr. Eames's balcony there ran out what had perhaps
+been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts
+and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.
+With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this
+antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac.
+He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his
+long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.
+The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that
+impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little
+lakes round Brakespeare.  Looking down and seeing the spires
+and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.
+They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole
+and seeing the South Pole below.
+
+"`Hang the world, we said,' observed Smith, `and the world is hanged.
+"He has hanged the world upon nothing," says the Bible.  Do you like being
+hanged upon nothing?  I'm going to be hanged upon something myself.
+I'm going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,' he murmured;
+`never true till this moment.  I am going to swing for you.
+For you, dear friend.  For your sake.  At your express desire.'
+
+"`Help!' cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!'
+
+"`The puppy struggles,' said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity,
+`the poor puppy struggles.  How fortunate it is that I am wiser
+and kinder than he,' and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover
+the upper part of Eames's bald head.
+
+"`Smith,' said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort
+of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.'
+
+"`And so look at things from the right angle,' observed Smith,
+sighing gently.  `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best,
+a drug.  The only cure is an operation--an operation that is
+always successful:  death.'
+
+"As he spoke the sun rose.  It seemed to put colour into everything,
+with the rapidity of a lightning artist.  A fleet of little
+clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink.
+All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings
+took on different tints:  here the sun would pick out the green
+enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa;
+here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there
+the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof.
+All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly
+individual and significant about them, like crests of famous
+knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield:  they each
+arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames
+as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last.
+Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big
+gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the
+sunshine set on fire.  He stared at it as though hypnotized;
+and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply.
+As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry:
+all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow.
+The birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college.
+The sun rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep
+skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed golden
+and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the gods.
+Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his crazy perch,
+were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa
+with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night.
+He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.
+
+"Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority,
+as he might have called to a student to shut a door.
+
+"`Let me come off this place,' he cried; `I can't bear it.'
+
+"`I rather doubt if it will bear you,' said Smith critically;
+`but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains,
+or let you back into this room (on which complex points I
+am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up.
+Do I understand that you want to get back to life?'
+
+"`I'd give anything to get back,' replied the unhappy professor.
+
+"`Give anything!' cried Smith; `then, blast your impudence,
+give us a song!'
+
+"`What song do you mean?' demanded the exasperated Eames; `what song?'
+
+"`A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,' answered the other gravely.
+`I'll let you off if you'll repeat after me the words--
+
+        "`I thank the goodness and the grace
+            That on my birth have smiled.
+          And perched me on this curious place,
+            A happy English child.'
+
+
+"Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly
+told him to hold his hands up in the air.  Vaguely connecting this
+proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers,
+Mr. Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise.
+A bird alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him
+than of a comic statue.
+
+"`You are now engaged in public worship,' remarked Smith severely,
+`and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks
+on the pond.'
+
+"`The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
+readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.
+
+"`Not forgetting the drakes,' said Smith sternly.
+(Eames weakly conceded the drakes.) `Not forgetting anything, please.
+You shall thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas
+and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and sticks
+and rags and bones and spotted blinds.'
+
+"`All right, all right,' repeated the victim in despair;
+`sticks and rags and bones and blinds.'
+
+"`Spotted blinds, I think we said,' remarked Smith with a
+rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him
+like a long metallic finger.
+
+"`Spotted blinds,' said Emerson Eames faintly.
+
+"`You can't say fairer than that,' admitted the younger man,
+`and now I'll just tell you this to wind up with.
+If you really were what you profess to be, I don't see that it
+would matter to snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff
+neck and dashed out all your drivelling devil-worshipping brains.
+But in strict biographical fact you are a very nice fellow,
+addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you like a brother.
+I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your head
+so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear),
+and then we will go in and have some breakfast.'
+
+"He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor
+endured with singular firmness, and then said, `But don't fire
+them all off.'
+
+"`Why not' asked the other buoyantly.
+
+"`Keep them,' asked his companion, `for the next man you meet
+who talks as we were talking.'
+
+"It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic
+terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek
+with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.
+
+"It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from
+the ladder,and some little time longer to disentangle himself
+from the Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively,
+he rejoined his companion in the late extraordinary scene.
+He was astonished to find the gigantic Smith heavily shaken,
+and sitting with his shaggy head on his hands.  When addressed,
+he lifted a very pale face.
+
+"`Why, what is the matter?' asked Eames, whose own nerves had by this
+time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.
+
+"`I must ask your indulgence,' said Smith, rather brokenly.
+`I must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.'
+
+"`YOU have had an escape from death?' repeated the Professor
+in not unpardonable irritation.  `Well, of all the cheek--'
+
+"`Oh, don't you understand, don't you understand?' cried the pale young
+man impatiently.  `I had to do it, Eames,; I had to prove you wrong or die.
+When a man's young, he nearly always has some one whom he thinks the top-water
+mark of the mind of man--some one who knows all about it, if anybody knows.
+
+"`Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority,
+and not as the scribes.  Nobody could comfort me if YOU
+said there was no comfort.  If you really thought there was
+nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see.
+Don't you see that I HAD to prove you didn't really mean it?--
+or else drown myself in the canal.'
+
+"`Well,' said Eames hesitatingly, `I think perhaps you confuse--'
+
+"`Oh, don't tell me that!' cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance
+of mental pain; `don't tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence
+with the Will to Live!  That's German, and German is High Dutch,
+and High Dutch is Double Dutch.  The thing I saw shining in your
+eyes when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life "the
+Will to Live."  What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle
+was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and
+beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute.
+I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack
+between the houses.  It was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life,
+whatever that is.  Eames, we've been to the brink of death together;
+won't you admit I'm right?'
+
+"`Yes, said Eames very slowly, `I think you are right.
+You shall have a First!'
+
+"`Right!' cried Smith, springing up reanimated.  `I've passed with honours,
+and now let me go and see about being sent down.'
+
+"`You needn't be sent down,' said Eames with the quiet
+confidence of twelve years of intrigue.  `Everything with us
+comes from the man on top to the people just round him:
+I am the man on top, and I shall tell the people round
+me the truth.'
+
+"`The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window,
+but he spoke with equal firmness.  `I must be sent down,'
+he said, `and the people must not be told the truth.'
+
+"`And why not' asked the other.
+
+"`Because I mean to follow your advice,' answered the massive youth,
+`I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state
+you and I were in last night--I wish we could even plead drunkenness.
+I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists--pills for pale people.
+And in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful surprise--
+to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as the sunrise;
+not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be
+recalled any more than the dying breeze.  I don't want people to
+anticipate me as a well-known practical joke.  I want both my gifts
+to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death.
+I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man.  But I
+shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to life.
+I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast.'
+
+"`You could scarcely be called a skeleton,' said Dr. Eames, smiling.
+
+"`That comes of being so much at the feast,' answered the massive youth.
+`No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out.
+But that is not quite what I meant:  what I mean is that I caught
+a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that--the skull
+and cross-bones, the ~memento mori~. It isn't only meant to remind
+us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too.
+With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity if we were not kept
+young by death.  Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us,
+as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.'
+
+"Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality,
+`But I know something now, Eames.  I knew it when I saw
+the clouds turn pink.'
+
+"`What do you mean?' asked Eames.  `What did you know?'
+
+"`I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.'
+
+"He gripped Dr. Eames's hand and groped his way somewhat unsteadily
+to the door.  Before he had vanished through it he had added,
+`It's very dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second
+that he understands death.'
+
+"Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his
+late assailant had left.  Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella,
+and went for a brisk if rotatory walk.  Several times,
+however, he stood outside the villa with the spotted blinds,
+studying them intently with his head slightly on one side.
+Some took him for a lunatic and some for an intending purchaser.
+He is not yet sure that the two characters would be widely different.
+
+"The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is,
+in the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters.
+Each of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other.
+But the undersigned persons absolutely guarantee the exactitude
+of the story; and if their version of the thing be questioned, they,
+the undersigned persons, would deucedly well like to know who does
+know about it if they don't.
+
+"The undersigned persons will now adjourn to `The Spotted Dog'
+for beer.  Farewell.
+
+                              "(Signed) James Emerson Eames,
+                  "Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+                                           "Innocent Smith."
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter II
+
+                      The Two Curates;
+                   or, the Burglary Charge
+
+
+Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders
+of the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together.
+Both the Jew and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks,
+and they revealed by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the
+yellow that nothing could be done in the way of denial of the document.
+The letter from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
+Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and social tone.
+
+"Very few words," said Inglewood, "are required to conclude
+our case in this matter.  Surely it is now plain that our client
+carried his pistol about with the eccentric but innocent
+purpose of giving a wholesome scare to those whom he regarded
+as blasphemers.  In each case the scare was so wholesome
+that the victim himself has dated from it as from a new birth.
+Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor--
+he walks the world curing frenzies and not distributing them.
+That is the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I
+put to the prosecutors.  That is why they dared not produce
+a line by any one who had actually confronted the pistol.
+All who had actually confronted the pistol confessed that they
+had profited by it.  That was why Smith, though a good shot,
+never hit anybody.  He never hit anybody because he was a good shot.
+His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of blood.
+This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts
+and of all the other facts.  No one can possibly explain
+the Warden's conduct except by believing the Warden's story.
+Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of ingenious theories,
+could find no other theory to cover the case."
+
+"There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual personality,"
+said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; "the science of criminology is in
+its infancy, and--"
+
+"Infancy!" cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a gesture
+of enlightenment; "why, that explains it!"
+
+"I repeat," proceeded Inglewood, "that neither Dr. Pym nor any one else
+can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden's signature,
+for the shots missed and the witnesses missing."
+
+The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return
+of a cock-fighting coolness.  "The defence," he said,
+"omits a coldly colossal fact.  They say we produce none of
+the actual victims.  Wal, here is one victim--England's celebrated
+and stricken Warner.  I reckon he is pretty well produced.
+And they suggest that all the outrages were followed
+by reconciliation.  Wal, there's no flies on England's Warner;
+and he isn't reconciliated much."
+
+"My learned friend," said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet,
+"must remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy.
+Dr. Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially difficult to startle
+into any recognition of the glory of God.  We admit that our client,
+in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not successful.
+But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a proposal
+for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest convenience,
+and without further fees."
+
+"'Ang it all, Michael," cried Gould, quite serious for the first time
+in his life, "you might give us a bit of bally sense for a chinge."
+
+"What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?"
+asked Moon sharply.
+
+"The creature," said Dr. Warner superciliously, "asked me,
+with characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday."
+
+"And you answered, with characteristic swank," cried Moon, shooting out
+a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith,
+"that you didn't keep your birthday."
+
+"Something like that," assented the doctor.
+
+"Then," continued Moon, "he asked you why not, and you said it was because you
+didn't see that birth was anything to rejoice over.  Agreed?  Now is there
+any one who doubts that our tale is true?"
+
+There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, "Pax populi
+vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of God.  Or in
+Dr. Pym's more civilized language, it is up to him to open the next charge.
+On this we claim an acquittal."
+
+
+It was about an hour later.  Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an unprecedented
+time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the air.
+It almost seemed as if he had been "struck so," as the nurses say;
+and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve
+the strain with some remark.  For the last half-hour or so the eminent
+criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view
+of offences against property as id did of offences against life.
+"Most murder," he had said, "is a variation of homicidal mania,
+and in the same way most theft is a version of kleptomania.
+I cannot entertain any doubt that my learned friends opposite
+adequately con-ceive how this must involve a scheme of punishment
+more tol'rant and humane than the cruel methods of ancient codes.
+They will doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning,
+so thought-arresting, so--" It was here that he paused and indulged
+in the delicate gesture to which allusion has been made; and Michael
+could bear it no longer.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said impatiently, "we admit the chasm.
+The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him
+to prison for ten years.  The tolerant and humane ticket
+accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for ever.
+We pass the chasm."
+
+It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances
+of verbal fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only
+of his opponent's interruption, but even of his own pause.
+
+"So stock-improving," continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, "so fraught
+with real high hopes of the future.  Science therefore
+regards thieves, in the abstract, just as it regards murderers.
+It regards them not as sinners to be punished for an arbitrary period,
+but as patients to be detained and cared for," (his first two digits
+closed again as he hesitated)--"in short, for the required period.
+But there is something special in the case we investigate here.
+Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself--"
+
+"I beg pardon," said Michael; "I did not ask just now because,
+to tell the truth, I really though Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical,
+was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers
+of scentless and delicate dust.  But now that things are moving
+a little more, there is something I should really like to know.
+I have hung on Dr. Pym's lips, of course, with an interest that it
+were weak to call rapture, but I have so far been unable to form
+any conjecture about what the accused, in the present instance,
+is supposed to have been and gone and done."
+
+"If Mr. Moon will have patience," said Pym with dignity, "he will find
+that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.
+Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction
+to certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man
+than Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict
+specialism and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals.
+One will have an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl
+sleeve-links, while he passes over the most elegant and celebrated
+diamond sleeve-links, placed about in the most conspicuous locations.
+Another will impede his flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots,
+while elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic.
+The specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity
+than of any brightness of business habits; but there is one kind
+of depredator to whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply.
+I allude to our fellow-citizen the housebreaker.
+
+"It has been maintained by some of our boldest young
+truth-seekers, that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden
+wall could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a fork
+that is insulated in a locked box under the butler's bed.
+They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science on this point.
+They declare that diamond links are not left about in conspicuous
+locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as they were
+in the great test experiment of Calypso College.  We hope this
+experiment here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge,
+and will bring the burglar once more into line and union
+with his fellow criminals."
+
+Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment
+for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table
+in explosive enlightenment.
+
+"Oh, I see!" he cried; "you mean that Smith is a burglar."
+
+"I thought I made it quite ad'quately lucid," said Mr. Pym,
+folding up his eyelids.  It was typical of this topsy-turvy private
+trial that all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression
+on either side, was exasperating and unintelligible to the other.
+Moon could not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization.
+Pym could not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.
+
+"All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,"
+continued the American doctor, "are cases of burglary.
+Pursuing the same course as in the previous case, we select
+the indubitable instance from the rest, and we take the most
+correct cast-iron evidence.  I will now call on my colleague,
+Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from the earnest,
+unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins."
+
+Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from
+the earnest and unspotted Hawkins.  Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard well,
+Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the
+new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists.
+But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing; indeed, the sense
+of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his
+pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when,
+a little later, it was handed across the table.
+
+
+"Dear Sir,--I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident
+you mention, private as it was, should have filtered through
+our omnivorous journals to the mere populace; for the position
+I have since attained makes me, I conceive, a public character,
+and this was certainly the most extraordinary incident
+in a not uneventful and perhaps not an unimportant career.
+I am by no means without experience in scenes of civil tumult.
+I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose League
+days at Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set,
+have spent many a night at the Christian Social Union.  But this
+other experience was quite inconceivable.  I can only describe
+it as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me,
+as a clergyman, to mention.
+
+"It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period,
+a curate at Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague,
+induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must say
+profanely described, as calculated to promote the kingdom
+of God.  I found, on the contrary, that it consisted entirely
+of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse
+and their opinions extreme.
+
+"Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest
+respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say little.
+No one can be more convinced than I of the evil of politic
+in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation any advice
+about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly that they
+are likely to make an erroneous selection.  But, while I do
+not mean to touch at all upon political or social problems,
+I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest,
+such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism
+or Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal
+of a sacred trust.  Far be it from me to say a word against
+the Reverend Raymond Percy, the colleague in question.
+He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some apparently fascinating;
+but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist, wears his hair
+like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person,
+will never rise in his profession, or even obtain the admiration
+of the good and wise.  Nor is it for me to utter my personal
+judgements of the appearance of the people in the hall.
+Yet a glance round the room, revealing ranks of debased
+and envious faces--"
+
+"Adopting," said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive--"adopting
+the reverend gentleman's favourite figure of logic, may I say that
+while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect,
+he is a blasted old jackass."
+
+"Really!" said Dr. Pym; "I protest."
+
+"You must keep quiet, Michael," said Inglewood; "they have a right
+to read their story."
+
+"Chair!  Chair!  Chair!" cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in his own;
+and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all
+the authority of the Court of Beacon.
+
+"Oh, don't wake the old lady," said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody
+good-humour. "I apologize.  I won't interrupt again."
+
+Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading
+of the clergyman's letter was already continuing.
+
+"The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
+will say nothing.  It was deplorable.  Many of the audience
+were Irish, and showed the weakness of that impetuous people.
+When gathered together into gangs and conspiracies they seem
+to lose altogether that lovable good-nature and readiness to accept
+anything one tells them which distinguishes them as individuals."
+
+
+With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly,
+and sat down again.
+
+
+"These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the speech
+of Mr. Percy.  He descended to their level with witticisms about rent
+and a reserve of labour.  Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such
+words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly.  Some hours
+afterward the storm broke.  I had been addressing the meeting for some time,
+pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes, their insufficient
+attendance at evening service, their neglect of the Harvest Festival, and of
+many other things that might materially help them to improve their lot.
+It was, I think, about this time that an extraordinary interruption occurred.
+An enormous, powerful man, partly concealed with white plaster,
+arose in the middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud, roaring voice,
+like a bull's) some observations which seemed to be in a foreign language.
+Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, descended to his level by entering into
+a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be the victor.  The meeting
+began to behave more respectfully for a little; yet before I had said twelve
+sentences more the rush was made for the platform.  The enormous plasterer,
+in particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like an elephant;
+and I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally large,
+but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
+This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was shoving
+them back.  I don't know what he said, but, what with shouting and shoving
+and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the wretched people
+went roaring down another passage.
+
+"Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story.  When he had got
+us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
+with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as follows:
+`You are well out of that, sir; now you'd better come along with me.
+I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we've all
+been talking about.  Come along!'  And turning his big back abruptly,
+he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old lamp-post,
+we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him.  He had certainly
+helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I could
+not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds.
+Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with all
+his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also.  In fact,
+he comes of the Staffordshire Percies, a branch of the old house,
+and has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family.
+I cannot but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal
+advantages with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation,
+and certainly--but I digress.
+
+"A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post
+faded behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind.
+The large man in front of us looked larger and larger in the haze.
+He did not turn round, but he said with his huge back to us,
+`All that talking's no good; we want a little practical Socialism.'
+
+"`I quite agree,' said Percy; `but I always like to understand things
+in theory before I put them into practice.'
+
+"`Oh, you just leave that to me,' said the practical Socialist,
+or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness.
+`I have a way with me.  I'm a Permeator.'
+
+"`I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed,
+so I was sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey
+for the present.  It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane,
+where we were already rather cramped, into a paved passage,
+at the end of which we passed through a wooden gate left open.
+We then found ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour,
+crossing what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden.
+I called out to the enormous person going on in front, but he answered
+obscurely that it was a short cut.
+
+"I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
+when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading
+to a higher level of road.  My thoughtless companion ran up it so
+quickly that I could not do otherwise than follow as best I could.
+The path on which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow.
+I had never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous.
+Along one side of it grew what, in the dark and density of air,
+I first took to be some short, strong thicket of shrubs.  Then I saw
+that they were not short shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees.
+I, an English gentleman and clergyman of the Church of England--I was
+walking along the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.
+
+"I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps,
+and let loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I
+could all the time.
+
+"`It's a right-of-way,"' declared my indefensible informant.
+`It's closed to traffic once in a hundred years.'
+
+"`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!'  I called out; `you are not going
+on with this blackguard?'
+
+"`Why, I think so,' answered my unhappy colleague flippantly.
+`I think you and I are bigger blackguards than he is,
+whatever he is.'
+
+"`I am a burglar,' explained the big creature quite calmly.
+`I am a member of the Fabian Society.  I take back the wealth stolen
+by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform
+fitted to the special occasion--here a little and there a little.
+Do you see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof?
+I'm permeating that one to-night.'
+
+"`Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I cried, `I desire to be quit of it.'
+
+"`The ladder is just behind you,' answered the creature
+with horrible courtesy; `and, before you go, do let me give
+you my card.'
+
+"If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I
+should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind
+would have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall.
+As it was, in the wildness of the moment, I put it in my
+waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and ladder,
+landed in the respectable streets once more.  Not before, however,
+I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts--
+that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards
+the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and,
+what was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him.
+I have never seen either of them since that day.
+
+"In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed
+my connection with the wild set.  I am far from saying that
+every member of the Christian Social Union must necessarily
+be a burglar.  I have no right to bring any such charge.
+But it gave me a hint of what courses may lead to in many cases;
+and I saw them no more.
+
+"I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a
+Mr. Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question.
+When I got home that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed
+there under the name of Innocent Smith.--Yours faithfully,
+                                     "John Clement Hawkins."
+
+
+Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper.  He knew that
+the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that Moses Gould
+(for one) could no more write like a canon than he could read like one.
+After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary charge.
+
+"We wish," said Michael, "to give all reasonable facilities to
+the prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court.
+The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all
+those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym.  I know how they
+are made.  Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say
+one thing instead of another.  Forgery is a kind of writer's cramp,
+forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of his own.
+Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is
+unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny.
+Innocent Smith never did commit burglary at all.
+
+"I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement,
+and ask the prosecution two or three questions."
+
+Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.
+
+"In the first place," continued Moon, "have you the date of Canon Hawkins's
+last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and roofs?"
+
+"Ho, yus!" called out Gould smartly.  "November thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."
+
+"Have you," continued Moon, "identified the houses in Hoxton up
+which they climbed?"
+
+"Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,"
+answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.
+
+"Well," said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, "was there any burglary
+in that terrace that night?  Surely you could find that out."
+
+"There may well have been," said the doctor primly, after a pause,
+"an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities."
+
+"Another question," proceeded Michael.  "Canon Hawkins, in his
+blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment.
+Why don't you produce the evidence of the other clergyman,
+who actually followed the burglar and presumably was present
+at the crime?"
+
+Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table,
+as he did when he was specially confident of the clearness
+of his reply.
+
+"We have entirely failed," he said, "to track the other clergyman,
+who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had
+seen him as-cending the gutters and the leads.  I am fully aware
+that this may strike many as sing'lar; yet, upon reflection,
+I think it will appear pretty natural to a bright thinker.
+This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the canon's evidence,
+a minister of eccentric ways.  His con-nection with England's proudest
+and fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society
+of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith is,
+by general agreement, a man of irr'sistible fascination.
+I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into the crime
+and forced him to hide his head in the real crim'nal class.
+That would fully account for his non-appearance, and the failure
+of all attempts to trace him."
+
+"It is impossible, then, to trace him?" asked Moon.
+
+"Impossible," repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
+
+"You are sure it's impossible?"
+
+"Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould, irritably.  "We'd 'have
+found 'im if we could, for you bet 'e saw the burglary.
+Look for your own 'ead in the dustbin.  You'll find that--
+after a bit," and his voice died away in grumbling.
+
+"Arthur," directed Michael Moon, sitting down, "kindly read
+Mr. Raymond Percy's letter to the court."
+
+"Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much
+as possible," began Inglewood, "I will not read the first part
+of the letter sent to us.  It is only fair to the prosecution
+to admit the account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies,
+as far as the facts are concerned, that given by the first clergyman.
+We concede, then, the canon's story so far as it goes.  This must
+necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient to the court.
+I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then, at the point when all three men
+were standing on the garden wall:--
+
+
+"As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind
+not to waver.  A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud
+of copper fog on the houses and gardens round.  My decision was
+violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so
+complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now.
+I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have
+given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road.
+That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--
+rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
+
+"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly;
+and artists love to be limited.  I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
+discipline was mere decoration.  I delighted in mere divisions of time;
+I liked eating fish on Friday.  But then I like fish; and the fast
+was made for men who like meat.  Then I came to Hoxton and found men
+who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because
+they could not get meat--and fish-bones when they could not get fish.
+As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated
+the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant.  Hoxton cures that.
+Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant
+had not been a pageant, but a riot--and a suppressed riot.
+There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom
+the tremendous promises had been made.  In the face of that I had
+to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.
+In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist--
+and a pessimist.  Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.
+
+"On the top of all this comes Hawkins.  If he had cursed all the Hoxton men,
+excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should
+have rather admired him.  If he had ordered them all to be burned
+in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
+good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people.
+But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins--nor any other kind of craft.
+He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter
+or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer.  He is a perfect gentleman;
+that is his complaint.  He does not impose his creed, but simply his class.
+He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address.
+He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said.
+A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this
+brother is a major.
+
+"When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body
+and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body
+and soul together, the stampede against our platform began.
+I took part in his undeserved rescue, I followed his
+obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we stood together
+on the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog.
+Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and decided, in a spasm
+of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of the two.
+The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was--
+and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.
+I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to
+it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class,
+for I had lived with it a long time.  Many old texts about
+the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought
+that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class.
+About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was crawling
+up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
+leaping in front of me like a gorilla.
+
+"This upward scramble was short, and we soon found
+ourselves tramping along a broad road of flat roofs,
+broader than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here
+and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts.
+The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat
+swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body laboured.
+The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed
+overpowered by sinister spirits.  Tall spectres with turbans of vapour
+seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both.
+I thought dimly of illustrations to the `Arabian Nights'
+on brown paper with rich but sombre tints, showing genii
+gathering round the Seal of Solomon.  By the way, what was
+the Seal of Solomon?  Nothing to do with sealing-wax really,
+I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
+of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour,
+poured out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
+
+"The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
+look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak.
+But the scene grew subtler with familiarity.  We stood above the average
+of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in
+great cities creates the strange thing called fog.  Beneath us rose
+a forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it
+were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.
+The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from
+firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.
+And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural,
+like fumes from a witch's pot.  It was as if the shameful and ugly
+shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate
+spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed.
+Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift
+from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
+like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another
+place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might
+be the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images.
+But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green,
+as clear and crooked as Arabic--"
+
+Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the 'bus.
+He was understood to suggest that the reader should shorten
+the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.  Mrs. Duke,
+who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice,
+and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue,
+and by Michael with a red, pencil.  Inglewood then resumed
+the reading of the document.
+
+
+"Then I read the writing of the smoke.  Smoke was like the modern
+city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always
+wicked and vain.
+
+"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry
+all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain.  It was our
+weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.
+These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.
+We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it,
+and seen it as a whirlpool.  And then we had used it as a sink.
+It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.
+Only our worst things were going to heaven.  Only our criminals
+could still ascend like angels.
+
+"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped
+by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals
+like lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway.
+He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was
+merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.
+So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side,
+and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
+them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
+consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be
+found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
+of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
+Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
+only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old
+emptied palaces of Italy.  Indeed, some little time later,
+when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
+were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
+below us into one flat square or wide street below another,
+like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric
+building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.
+But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.
+
+"My speculation about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
+by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
+Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney
+he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole
+chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an inkstand.
+I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt
+sure he had arranged his criminal approach long before.
+
+"The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
+of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden sense
+of comedy and even of comfort.  I could not recall what connected this
+abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies.
+Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys
+in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally
+comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses
+were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled
+in and out of by policemen and pantaloons.  The law-breaking of my companion
+seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable.
+Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their
+foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they
+should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them?
+One would suppose that property was a serious thing.  I had reached,
+as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions,
+the heaven of a higher levity.
+
+"My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced
+chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower, for,
+tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible.
+Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way
+of invading the houses of men.  I thought of little chimney-sweeps,
+and `The Water Babies;' but I decided that it was not that.
+Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy
+trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.
+Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
+
+"Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black hole;
+but I heard a voice calling to me from below.  A second or two afterwards,
+the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the fog,
+and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me
+to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends.
+I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking
+of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.
+
+"In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected, there was
+the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen;
+but there was also the top door for the gods.  The chimney is,
+so to speak, the underground passage between earth and heaven.
+By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages--like the skylark--
+to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
+Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack
+of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.
+But Santa Claus's door was really the front door:
+it was the door fronting the universe.
+
+"I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below
+the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet
+larger loft below.  Yet it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I
+suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps,
+as my companion had retraced them from the beginning of the garden wall.
+The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses.
+I remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.
+
+"I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all
+their horror of offences against property.  I had heard all
+the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong;
+I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times.
+And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way
+down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar,
+I saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all,
+is really wrong.
+
+"It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed
+the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across
+the lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part
+of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts,
+lifted a sort of trapdoor.  This released a light from below,
+and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room,
+of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom,
+and is an adjunct to it.  Light thus breaking from beneath
+our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor
+just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless
+been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend.
+But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the shining
+room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness.
+To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle,
+by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one's psychology.
+It was like having found a fourth dimension.
+
+"My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly
+and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him;
+though, for lack of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless.
+Before the echo of my boots had died away, the big burglar
+had gone quickly to the door, half opened it, and stood looking
+down the staircase and listening.  Then, leaving the door
+still half open, he came back into the middle of the room,
+and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.
+The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human
+way that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full,
+but slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked
+for the purposes of reading in bed.  One of those stunted
+German stoves that look like red goblins stood in a corner,
+and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part.
+There were three windows, high but narrow.  After another glance round,
+my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged inside.
+He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely
+handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like port.
+Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little
+luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation
+and revulsion I had felt above.
+
+"`Don't do it!'  I cried quite incoherently, `Santa Claus--'
+
+"`Ah,' said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table
+and stood looking at me, `you've thought about that, too.'
+
+"`I can't express a millionth part of what I've thought of,' I cried,
+`but it's something like this... oh, can't you see it?  Why are children
+not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?
+He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treachery--because there are
+more toys where he has been.  What should we feel if there were less?
+Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take
+away the children's balls and dolls while they slept?  Could a Greek
+tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening?
+Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer--can you think of anything
+so base as a toy-stealer?'
+
+"The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid
+it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes
+fixed on my face.
+
+"`Man!' I said, `all stealing is toy-stealing. That's why
+it's really wrong.  The goods of the unhappy children of men
+should be really respected because of their worthlessness.
+I know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark.  I know
+Nathan's ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand.
+That is why I could not take them away.  I did not mind so much,
+as long as I thought of men's things as their valuables;
+but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.'
+
+"After a moment I added abruptly, `Only saints and sages ought to be robbed.
+They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people
+of the things that are their poor little pride.'
+
+"He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both,
+and lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.
+
+"`Don't do it!'  I cried.  `It might be the last bottle of some rotten
+vintage or other.  The master of this house may be quite proud of it.
+Don't you see there's something sacred in the silliness of such things?'
+
+"`It's not the last bottle,' answered my criminal calmly;
+`there's plenty more in the cellar.'
+
+"`You know the house, then?'  I said.
+
+"`Too well,' he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have
+something eerie about it.  `I am always trying to forget what I know--
+and to find what I don't know.'  He drained his glass.
+`Besides,' he added, `it will do him good.'
+
+"`What will do him good?'
+
+"`The wine I'm drinking,' said the strange person.
+
+"`Does he drink too much, then?'  I inquired.
+
+"`No,' he answered, `not unless I do.'
+
+"`Do you mean,' I demanded, `that the owner of this house approves
+of all you do?'
+
+"`God forbid,' he answered; `but he has to do the same.'
+
+"The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows
+unreasonable increased a sense of riddle, and even terror,
+about this tall, narrow house we had entered out of the sky.
+I had once more the notion about the gigantic genii--
+I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds
+and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our
+little lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes.
+My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of him,
+and talking with the same rather creepy confidentialness.
+
+"`I am always trying to find him--to catch him unawares.
+I come in through skylights and trapdoors to find him;
+but whenever I find him--he is doing what I am doing.'
+
+"I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear.  `There is some one coming,'
+I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it.  "Not from
+the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber
+(which seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were
+coming nearer.  I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster,
+or double, I expected to see when the door was pushed open from within.
+I am only quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.
+
+"Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity,
+a rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic--
+her dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves,
+with a face which, though still comparatively young,
+conveyed experience as well as intelligence.  All she said was,
+`I didn't hear you come in.'
+
+"`I came in another way,' said the Permeator, somewhat vaguely.
+`I'd left my latchkey at home.'
+
+"I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania.
+`I'm really very sorry,' I cried.  `I know my position is irregular.
+Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is.?'
+
+"`Mine,' said the burglar, `May I present you to my wife?'
+
+"I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat;
+and I did not get out of it till nearly morning.  Mrs. Smith
+(such was the prosaic name of this far from prosaic household)
+lingered a little, talking slightly and pleasantly.
+She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd mixture
+of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well,
+but was still a little harmlessly afraid of it.
+Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a husband
+had left her a little nervous.  Anyhow, when she had retired
+to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary man poured
+forth his apologia and autobiography over the dwindling wine.
+
+"He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical
+and scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career.
+A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools;
+and it bred in him a war between the members and the spirit,
+but one in which the members were right.  While his brain
+accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it.
+As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things.
+As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately,
+it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded
+firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving
+him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout.
+He had done it solely because the poor don had professed
+in theory a preference for non-existence. For this
+very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down.
+Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had
+quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic
+of the joy of life.  He cut across all the associations
+of serious-minded men.  He was gay, but by no means careless.
+His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones.
+Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that
+life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain
+that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it.
+`What is more immortal,' he would cry, `than love and war?
+Type of all desire and joy--beer.  Type of all battle
+and conquest--skittles.'
+
+"There was something in him of what the old world called
+the solemnity of revels--when they spoke of `solemnizing'
+a mere masquerade or wedding banquet.  Nevertheless he was not
+a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical joker.
+His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith,
+in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.
+
+"`I don't deny,' he said, `that there should be priests to remind
+men that they will one day die.  I only say that at certain
+strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests,
+called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
+The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough
+to fear death.  They hadn't enough blood in them to be cowards.
+Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never
+even knew they had been born.  For ages looking up an eternal
+perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die.
+But for these little white rats it was just as true that death
+was their only chance of learning to live.'
+
+"His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt
+it continually slipping from himself as much as from others.
+He had the same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger.
+He continually ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong
+speed to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive.
+He treasured up trivial and yet insane details that had once
+reminded him of the awful subconscious reality.  When the don
+had hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs,
+vibrating in the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire
+of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers.
+The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head,
+which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved
+by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and neglect.
+Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording this,
+except to send a telegram to an old friend (by this time a
+total stranger) to say that he had just seen a man with two legs;
+and that the man was alive.
+
+"The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket
+when he suddenly fell in love.  He happened to be shooting a high
+and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself
+that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt
+about the continuance of the fact.  What was worse, he found he had
+equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one
+who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation.
+He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring
+her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have
+proposed to her on the bank.  Anyhow, with the same impetuosity
+with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her;
+and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently and `good-night.'
+
+"They had settled down in these high narrow houses
+near Highbury.  Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word.
+One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very
+happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman
+but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home;
+but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down.
+`I am a very domestic fellow,' he explained with gravity,
+`and have often come in through a broken window rather than be
+late for tea.'
+
+"He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.
+He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at
+the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there
+and what kind of a man he was.  The London general servant is not
+used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies.
+And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order
+to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt
+in other people's.
+
+"`I know there's a fellow called Smith,' he said in his rather
+weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace.
+I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.'
+
+"Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed
+politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight.
+Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture;
+would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase
+as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton
+of reality.  Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.
+And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense,
+and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.
+He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
+It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence
+of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep
+the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway
+of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.
+
+"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.
+What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being?
+A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married!
+A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor's! On
+this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it,
+though no one understands.  I believe the maniac was one of those who
+do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships
+by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire.
+This, at least, I know for certain.  Whether such men have laughed
+or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping.
+Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it.
+It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist
+as if from the sting of an adder.  But it is equally true that men flee
+from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.
+Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.
+For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things,
+is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.
+We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than
+the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations,
+the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates
+and loves the world.--I am, yours faithfully,
+                                            "Raymond Percy."
+
+
+"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Mr. Moses Gould.
+
+The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been
+in an almost religious state of submission and assent.
+Something had bound them together; something in the sacred tradition
+of the last two words of the letter; something also in the touching
+and boyish embarrassment with which Inglewood had read them--
+for he had all the thin-skinned reverence of the agnostic.
+Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way as ever lived;
+far kinder to his family than more refined men of pleasure,
+simple and steadfast in his admiration, a thoroughly wholesome
+animal and a thoroughly genuine character.  But wherever there
+is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial,
+unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces.
+English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism,
+looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile.
+It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin
+for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval towns.
+
+"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Moses Gould.
+
+Finding that this was not well received, he explained further,
+exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant features.
+
+"Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when 'e's corfin' up a fly,"
+he said pleasantly.  "Don't you see you've bunged up old Smith anyhow.
+If this parson's tale's O.K.--why, Smith is 'ot.  'E's pretty 'ot.
+We find him elopin' with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab.
+Well, what abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her
+blarsted shyness--transmigogrified into a blighted sharpness?
+Miss Gray ain't been very sharp, but I reckon she'll be pretty shy."
+
+"Don't be a brute," growled Michael Moon.
+
+None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance
+along the table at Innocent Smith.  He was still bowed above his paper toys,
+and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or shame.
+He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and tucked it
+in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved.
+
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter III
+
+                       The Round Road;
+                  or, the Desertion Charge
+
+
+Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American,
+and his respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.
+
+"Ignoring," he said, "the delicate and considerable knightly protests
+that have been called forth by my colleague's native sense of oration,
+and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable
+to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my colleague's question
+by no means devoid of rel'vancy. The last charge against the accused was
+one of burglary; the next charge on the paper is of bigamy and desertion.
+It does without question appear that the defence, in aspiring to rebut
+this last charge, have really admitted the next.  Either Innocent Smith
+is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else that is exploded;
+but he is pretty well fixed for attempted bigamy.  It all depends on
+what view we take of the alleged letter from Curate Percy.  Under these
+conditions I feel justified in claiming my right to questions.
+May I ask how the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy?  Did it
+come direct from the prisoner?"
+
+"We have had nothing direct from the prisoner," said Moon quietly.
+"The few documents which the defence guarantees came to us
+from another quarter."
+
+"From what quarter?" asked Dr. Pym.
+
+"If you insist," answered Moon, "we had them from Miss Gray.
+
+"Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead,
+opened them very wide.
+
+"Do you really mean to say," he said, "that Miss Gray was in possession
+of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?"
+
+"Quite so," said Inglewood, and sat down.
+
+The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice,
+and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.
+
+"Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy's narrative
+is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents
+in our own possession.  Of these the principal and most certain is
+the testimony of Innocent Smith's gardener, who was present at the most
+dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity.
+Mr. Gould, the gardener, please."
+
+Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the gardener.
+That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith when
+they had a little house on the edge of Croydon.  From the gardener's tale,
+with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain he had seen the place.
+It was one of those corners of town or country that one does not forget,
+for it looked like a frontier.  The garden hung very high above
+the lane, and its end was steep and sharp, like a fortress.
+Beyond was a roll of real country, with a white path sprawling across it,
+and the roots, boles, and branches of great gray trees writhing and twisting
+against the sky.  But as if to assert that the lane itself was suburban,
+were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing upland a lamp-post
+that stood exactly at the corner.  Inglewood was sure of the place;
+he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle;
+he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might occur.
+But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his frightful friend
+or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared over the garden bushes above.
+The gardener's account, unlike like the curate's, was quite free
+from decorative adjectives, however many he may have uttered privately
+when writing it.  He simply said that on a particular morning Mr. Smith
+came out and began to play about with a rake, as he often did.
+Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children);
+sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree,
+and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of
+a giant frog in its final agony.  Never, apparently, did he think
+of putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener,
+in consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity.
+But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he
+(the gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying the hose,
+had seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped red and white jacket
+(which might have been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part
+of his pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his wife,
+who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the garden, these decisive
+and very loud expressions--
+
+"I won't stay here any longer.  I've got another wife and much
+better children a long way from here.  My other wife's got redder
+hair than yours, and my other garden's got a much finer situation;
+and I'm going off to them."
+
+With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky,
+higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again.
+Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down
+in the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat.
+Much of the picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental
+memory of the place.  He could see with his mind's eye that big
+bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked
+woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind.
+But the gardener, on his own account, was quite prepared to swear
+to the public confession of bigamy, to the temporary disappearance
+of the rake in the sky, and the final disappearance of the man up
+the road.  Moreover, being a local man, he could swear that, beyond some
+local rumours that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast,
+nothing was known of him again.
+
+This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few
+but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge.
+So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on
+the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account.
+"I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect
+the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener.
+By Mr. Inglewood's favour we will hear the French innkeeper."
+
+Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
+reading the account in question.  It was in French.  It seemed to them
+to run something like this:--
+
+
+"Sir,--Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
+rather north of Dunquerque.  I am willing to write all I know
+of the stranger out of the sea.
+
+"I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets.  A man of sense
+looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful,
+such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette.  One does not permit
+beauty to pervade one's whole life, just as one does not pave
+all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums.
+My faith, but we should miss the onions!
+
+"But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there
+are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot
+as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening
+I felt like a poet--like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe
+in the mad Montmartre.
+
+"Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter
+and poisonous.  I had never known it look so unfamiliar before.
+In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to
+the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk
+where they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore.
+There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from
+the sea.  It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man
+of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up
+to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men.
+He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him
+look like a Triton.  Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging
+to him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside,
+asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded.
+Then the monster, with great politeness, invited me to partake
+of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation.
+He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private
+bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an
+easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats.
+He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house.  When I
+naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not know;
+it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed
+it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, `over there.'
+
+"I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when he
+saw it.  Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly minute.
+He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an auctioneer.
+I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last two, which were
+that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red pillar-box
+at the corner.
+
+"`A red pillar-box!' I cried in astonishment.  `Why, the place must
+be in England!'
+
+"`I had forgotten,' he said, nodding heavily.  `That is the island's name.'
+
+"`But, ~nom du nom~,' I cried testily, `you've just come
+from England, my boy.'
+
+"`They SAID it was England,' said my imbecile, conspiratorially.
+`They said it was Kent.  But Kentish men are such liars one can't
+believe anything they say.'
+
+"`Monsieur,' I said, `you must pardon me.  I am elderly,
+and the ~fumisteries~ of the young men are beyond me.
+I go by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension
+of applied common sense called science.'
+
+"`Science!' cried the stranger.  `There is only one good things
+science ever discovered--a good thing, good tidings of great joy--
+that the world is round.'
+
+"I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression
+to my intelligence.  `I mean,' he said, `that going right round
+the world is the shortest way to where you are already.'
+
+"`Is it not even shorter,' I asked, `to stop where you are?'
+
+"`No, no, no!' he cried emphatically.  `That way is long and very weary.
+At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find
+the wife I really married and the house that is really mine.
+And that house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box.
+Do you,' he asked with a sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush
+out of your house in order to find it?'
+
+"`No, I think not,' I replied; `reason tells a man from
+the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life.
+I remain here, content to fulfil the life of man.
+All my interests are here, and most of my friends, and--'
+
+"`And yet,' he cried, starting to his almost terrific height,
+`you made the French Revolution!'
+
+"`Pardon me," I said, `I am not quite so elderly.
+A relative perhaps.'
+
+"`I mean your sort did!' exclaimed this personage.
+`Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made
+the French Revolution.  Oh!  I know some say it was no good,
+and you're just back where you were before.  Why, blast it all,
+that's just where we all want to be--back where we were before!
+That is revolution--going right round!  Every revolution,
+like a repentance, is a return.'
+
+"He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again,
+and then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck
+the tiny table with his colossal fist and went on.
+
+"`I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
+English Revolution.  God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny.
+The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman
+marches to the outskirts of the town, and alone.  But I am going to turn
+the world upside down, too.  I'm going to turn myself upside down.
+I'm going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes,
+where trees and men hang head downward in the sky.  But my revolution,
+like yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy place--
+the celestial, incredible place--the place where we were before.'
+
+"With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason,
+he leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight,
+swinging his pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment,
+which also pointed to some loss of mental balance.
+This is all I know of the episode of the man landed from the
+fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of justice.--
+Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high consideration,
+with which I have the honour to be your obedient servant,
+                                            "Jules Durobin."
+
+
+"The next document in our dossier," continued Inglewood,
+"comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia,
+and runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Sir,--My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch:  I am the stationmaster
+at the station near Crazok.  The great trains go by across
+the plains taking people to China, but very few people get
+down at the platform where I have to watch.  This makes my life
+rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon the books I have.
+But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbours,
+for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia
+so much as in other parts.  Many of the peasants round here
+have never heard of Bernard Shaw.
+
+"I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since
+the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult.
+The revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles
+of humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books,
+they were ill acquainted.  I did not approve of these cruel acts,
+though provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there
+is a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them.
+This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.
+
+"It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains
+came through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching
+a train that had come in.  Only one person got out of the train,
+far away up at the other end of it, for it was a very long train.
+It was evening, with a cold, greenish sky.  A little snow had fallen,
+but not enough to whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort
+of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops
+of some distant tablelands caught the evening light like lakes.
+As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the train
+he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen so large a man.
+But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because his
+shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little.
+From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull
+red and dirty white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested
+on a huge pole such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.
+
+"Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled in one
+of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution,
+though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government side.
+I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and laid
+out right and left with such energy that he came through them without scathe
+and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and really astonished.
+
+"Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim,
+he could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.
+
+"`There are not many houses to be had round here,' I answered
+in the same language, `the district has been very disturbed.
+A revolution, as you know, has recently been suppressed.
+Any further building--'
+
+"`Oh! I don't mean that,' he cried; `I mean a real house--a live house.
+It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.'
+
+"`I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture
+moved me profoundly.  We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere
+of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can still be seen
+in the bright colours of the children's dolls and of the ikons.
+For an instant the idea of a house running away from a man gave
+me pleasure, for the enlightenment of man moves slowly.
+
+"`Have you no other house of your own?'  I asked.
+
+"`I have left it,' he said very sadly.  `It was not the house that grew dull,
+but I that grew dull in it.  My wife was better than all women, and yet I
+could not feel it.'
+
+"`And so,' I said with sympathy, `you walked straight out of the front door,
+like a masculine Nora.'
+
+"`Nora?' he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian word.
+
+"`I mean Nora in "The Doll's House,"' I replied.
+
+"At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an Englishman;
+for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but `ukases.'
+
+"`"The Doll's House"?' he cried vehemently; `why, that is just where Ibsen
+was so wrong!  Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll's house.
+Don't you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows
+WERE windows, while the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house,
+and shrieks when a front door opens inwards.  A banker has a real house,
+yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest shriek
+when their real front doors open inwards.'
+
+"Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly silent;
+and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and was saying
+in a sort of loud whisper, `I have found out how to make a big thing small.
+I have found out how to turn a house into a doll's house.  Get a long
+way off it:  God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift
+of distance.  Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite
+little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again.
+I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against the gate,
+and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the window.
+For the windows really open in my doll's house.'
+
+"`But why?'  I asked, `should you wish to return to that particular
+doll's house?  Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against convention,
+having made yourself in the conventional sense disreputable, having dared
+to be free, why should you not take advantage of your freedom?
+As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your
+marriage was only your mood.  You have a right to leave it all behind,
+like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails.
+Having once escaped, you have the world before you.  Though the words
+may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.'
+
+"He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains,
+where the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke
+out of the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline,
+the one hot and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.
+
+"`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia.  You are right.
+I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again,
+and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could
+ever find me.  Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'
+
+"His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask
+him what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.
+
+"`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy eye,
+`why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away
+from his wife.'
+
+"`And why is it dangerous?'  I inquired.
+
+"`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd person,
+`and we all want to be found.'
+
+"`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked,
+`Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we
+want most is to be lost:  to find ourselves in untrodden paths,
+and to do unprecedented things:  to break with the past and belong
+to the future.'
+
+"He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
+what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene--the dark purple plains,
+the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents.
+`I shall not find the house here,' he said.  `It is still eastward--
+further and further eastward.'
+
+"Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot
+of his pole upon the frozen earth.
+
+"`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be locked up in a
+madhouse before I reach my own house.  I have been a bit unconventional
+in my time!  Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the silly old
+Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs;
+but the things I do are unprecedented things.  This round road I
+am treading is an untrodden path.  I do believe in breaking out;
+I am a revolutionist.  But don't you see that all these real leaps
+and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden--
+to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?
+Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order
+to get HOME?'
+
+"`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I should accept that.'
+
+"`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have explained a second
+thing to me.'
+
+"`What do you mean?'  I asked; `what thing?'
+
+"`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking across quite
+suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at last.
+And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening flats.
+
+"I saw no more of him.  But though his views were adverse to the best
+advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person:  I should
+like to find out if he has produced any literary works.--Yours, etc.,
+                                      "Paul Nickolaiovitch."
+
+
+There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which kept
+the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again
+without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile.
+"The Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks the special
+ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own way:--
+
+
+"The Celestial Principles are permanent:  Greeting.--I am Wong-Hi,
+and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest
+of Fu.  The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it
+must be very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought.
+I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this
+temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall doubtless die.
+But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place changes.
+The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees,
+like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas.  But the skies
+are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade,
+and sometimes red like garnet.  But the night is always ebony
+and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
+
+"The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly
+seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look
+as over a sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning.
+And yet when he came, it was as if an elephant had strayed
+from the armies of the great kings of India.  For palms snapped,
+and bamboos broke, and there came forth in the sunshine before
+the temple one taller than the sons of men.
+
+"Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival,
+and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon.
+His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners,
+so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke
+our speech brokenly.
+
+"He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.'
+And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his house
+was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
+
+"`I have not seen your house nor any houses,' I answered.
+`I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.'
+
+"`Do you believe in the gods?' he asked with hunger in his eyes,
+like the hunger of dogs.  And this seemed to me a strange question
+to ask, for what should a man do except what men have done?
+
+"`My Lord,' I said, `it must be good for men to hold up their hands even
+if the skies are empty.  For if there are gods, they will be pleased,
+and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
+Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes
+ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all.
+So the great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things
+with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our
+heads we may think many things:  yes, my Lord, and doubt many things.
+So long as men offer rice at the right season, and kindle lanterns
+at the right hour, it matters little whether there be gods or no.
+For these things are not to appease gods, but to appease men.'
+
+"He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous;
+yet his look was very gentle.
+
+"`Break your temple,' he said, `and your gods will be freed.'
+
+"And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered:  `And so, if there be no gods,
+I shall have nothing but a broken temple.'
+
+"And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was
+withheld threw out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him.
+And when I asked him for what he should be forgiven he answered:
+`For being right.'
+
+"`Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying,'
+he cried, `it is a shame that they should be wrong.
+We are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so many iniquities--
+it is a shame we should be right after all.'
+
+"And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought
+that he and his people were right.
+
+"And he answered:  `We are right because we are bound where
+men should be bound, and free where men should be free.
+We are right because we doubt and destroy laws and customs--
+but we do not doubt our own right to destroy them.  For you live
+by customs, but we live by creeds.  Behold me!  In my country I
+am called Smip.  My country is abandoned, my name is defiled,
+because I pursue around the world what really belongs to me.
+You are steadfast as the trees because you do not believe.
+I am as fickle as the tempest because I do believe.
+I do believe in my own house, which I shall find again.
+And at the last remaineth the green lantern and the red post.'
+
+"I said to him:  `At the last remaineth only wisdom.'
+
+"But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout,
+and rushing forward disappeared among the trees.
+I have not seen this man again nor any other man.
+The virtues of the wise are of fine brass.
+                                                  "Wong-Hi."
+
+
+"The next letter I have to read," proceeded Arthur Inglewood, "will probably
+make clear the nature of our client's curious but innocent experiment.
+It is dated from a mountain village in California, and runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Sir,--A person answering to the rather extraordinary
+description required certainly went, some time ago,
+over the high pass of the Sierras on which I live and
+of which I am probably the sole stationary inhabitant.
+I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut,
+on the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass.
+My name is Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you
+about my nationality.  Well, it puzzles me a great deal.
+When one has been for fifteen years without society it is hard
+to have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it
+is difficult to invent a nation.  My father was an Irishman of
+the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian kind.
+My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old
+Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that
+of some admixture of Red Indian blood.  I was well educated
+and fond of music and books.  But, like many other hybrids,
+I was too good or too bad for the world; and after attempting
+many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though
+a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains.
+In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage.
+Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore
+in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a
+great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun.
+I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm;
+and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few
+peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place.
+But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did.
+Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.
+
+"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
+effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks
+coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.
+Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles;
+cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as
+sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous.  These terraces and towers
+of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world.
+Rather they seem to be its awful beginning:  its huge foundations.
+We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree
+of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.
+For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far,
+so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.
+The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth
+than planets circling placidly about it.
+
+"All this may have driven me mad:  I am not sure.  I know there is one
+angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little,
+and on window nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks--
+yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.
+It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass.
+Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass.
+But I had never seen one like this one before.
+
+"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated
+garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses,
+so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.
+His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down
+below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him
+were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air
+of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves.
+The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes
+as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon.
+I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had,
+and afterwards showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket.
+`But THAT,' he said, `I use only for peaceful purposes.'
+I have no notion what he meant.
+
+"He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine
+from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one
+who had travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last
+something that he knew.  Then he sat staring rather foolishly at
+the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door.
+It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago:
+she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a crude
+picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.  He seemed
+so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady's blue gown and
+the big gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing,
+which I had not done for fourteen years.
+
+"Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward
+where the road fell away below us.  The sunset sky was a vault
+of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges
+of the dark mountain ampitheatre; and between us and the ravine below
+rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight
+solitary rock we call Green Finger.  Of a queer volcanic colour,
+and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing,
+it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
+
+"The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction,
+and before he spoke I knew what he meant.  Beyond the great green
+rock in the purple sky hung a single star.
+
+"`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of our
+ancient eagles'. `The wise men followed the star and found the house.
+But if I followed the star, should I find the house?'
+
+"`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you are a wise man.'
+I refrained from adding that he certainly didn't look it.
+
+"`You may judge for yourself,' he answered.  `I am a man who left his own
+house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.'
+
+"`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.
+
+"`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving
+about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I knew
+they were walking and talking in another house thousands
+of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond
+the series of the seas.  I loved them with a devouring love,
+because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
+Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable:
+but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off
+their dust from my feet for a testimony.  Nay, I did more.
+I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle
+like a treadmill.'
+
+"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right round the world?
+Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.'
+
+"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied sadly.
+`I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.'
+
+"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
+of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
+felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
+I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
+not looked for fourteen years.
+
+"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said that we
+were all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
+home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
+
+"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift
+out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
+
+"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and stood up
+leaning on his grassy pole.  `I think that must be the reason,'
+he said--`the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
+But I think there is more to be said.  I think God has given us
+the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land,
+for a good reason.'
+
+"`I dare say,' I said.  `What reason?'
+
+"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss,
+`we might worship that.'
+
+"`What do you mean?'  I demanded.
+
+"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of the idols--
+the mightiest of the rivals of God.'
+
+"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I suggested.
+
+"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if there be a house
+for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge,
+or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post
+and a hedge.  I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it,
+and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot
+might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries,
+that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything.
+And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had
+a real green lamp-post after all.'
+
+"With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down
+the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the eagles.
+But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me.
+I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have
+never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.--
+Yours faithfully, Louis Hara."
+
+
+After a short silence Inglewood said:  "And, finally, we desire
+to put in as evidence the following document:--
+
+
+"This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to
+Mrs. I. Smith at `The Laurels' in Croydon for the last six months.
+When I came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow,
+but her husband was away.  She was left with plenty of money and did not
+seem disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon.
+She said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good.
+One evening last week I was bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn
+when I nearly dropped them.  The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck
+over the hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge,
+just like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all hairy
+and ragged like Robinson Crusoe.  I screamed out, but my mistress didn't
+even get out of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted shaving.
+Then he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup
+of tea, and then I realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself.
+He has stopped here ever since and does not really give much trouble,
+though I sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head.
+                                                "Ruth Davis.
+
+"P.S.--I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and said,
+very loud and strong:  `Oh, what a lovely place you've got;'
+just as if he'd never seen it before."
+
+
+The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one
+heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible
+solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women
+had left the court before the more recent of the investigations.
+Mrs. Duke was still asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a large
+hunchback in the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper toys.
+But the five men really engaged in the controversy, and concerned not
+to convince the tribunal but to convince each other, still sat round
+the table like the Committee of Public Safety.
+
+Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another,
+cocked his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair
+backwards so far as to be in direct danger of falling over,
+emitted a startling and prolonged whistle like a steam engine,
+and asserted that it was all his eye.
+
+When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind
+the books again and answered with considerable excitement,
+throwing his papers about.  "All those fairy-tales you've
+been reading out," he said.  "Oh! don't talk to me!
+I ain't littery and that, but I know fairy-tales when I hear 'em.
+I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical bits
+and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we're living
+in West 'Ampstead and not in 'Ell; and the long and the short
+of it is that some things 'appen and some things don't 'appen.
+Those are the things that don't 'appen."
+
+"I thought," said Moon gravely, "that we quite clearly explained--"
+
+"Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained," assented Mr. Gould
+with extraordinary volubility.  "You'd explain an elephant
+off the doorstep, you would.  I ain't a clever chap like you;
+but I ain't a born natural, Michael Moon, and when there's
+an elephant on my doorstep I don't listen to no explanations.
+`It's got a trunk,' I says.--`My trunk,' you says:
+`I'm fond of travellin', and a change does me good.'--`But
+the blasted thing's got tusks,' I says.--`Don't look a gift 'orse
+in the mouth,' you says, `but thank the goodness and the graice
+that on your birth 'as smiled.'--`But it's nearly as big as
+the 'ouse,' I says.--`That's the bloomin' perspective,' you says,
+`and the sacred magic of distance.'--`Why, the elephant's trumpetin'
+like the Day of Judgement,' I says.--`That's your own conscience
+a-talking to you, Moses Gould,' you says in a grive and
+tender voice.  Well, I 'ave got a conscience as much as you.
+I don't believe most of the things they tell you in church
+on Sundays; and I don't believe these 'ere things any more
+because you goes on about 'em as if you was in church.
+I believe an elephant's a great big ugly dingerous beast--
+and I believe Smith's another."
+
+"Do you mean to say," asked Inglewood, "that you still doubt the evidence
+of exculpation we have brought forward?"
+
+"Yes, I do still doubt it," said Gould warmly.  "It's all
+a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off.
+'Ow can we test all those tales?  'Ow can we drop in and buy
+the `Pink 'Un' at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or whatever
+it was?  'Ow can we go and do a gargle at the saloon-bar on top
+of the Sierra Mountains?  But anybody can go and see Bunting's
+boarding-house at Worthing."
+
+Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.
+
+"Any one," continued Gould, "can call on Mr. Trip."
+
+"It is a comforting thought," replied Michael with restraint;
+"but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?"
+
+"For just exactly the sime reason," cried the excited Moses,
+hammering on the table with both hands, "for just exactly the sime
+reason that he should communicate with Messrs.  'Anbury and Bootle
+of Paternoster Row and with Miss Gridley's 'igh class Academy
+at 'Endon, and with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge."
+
+"Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life," said Michael,
+"why is it among the duties of man to communicate with old
+Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge?"
+
+"It ain't one of the duties of man," said Gould, "nor one of his pleasures,
+either, I can tell you.  She takes the crumpet, does Lady Bullingdon
+at Penge.  But it's one of the duties of a prosecutor pursuin'
+the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend Smith,
+and it's the sime with all the others I mentioned."
+
+"But why do you bring in these people here?" asked Inglewood.
+
+"Why!  Because we've got proof enough to sink a steamboat,"
+roared Moses; "because I've got the papers in my very 'and;
+because your precious Innocent is a blackguard and 'ome smasher,
+and these are the 'omes he's smashed.  I don't set up for a 'oly man;
+but I wouldn't 'ave all those poor girls on my conscience for something.
+And I think a chap that's capable of deserting and perhaps
+killing 'em all is about capable of cracking a crib or shootin'
+an old schoolmaster--so I don't care much about the other yarns
+one way or another."
+
+"I think," said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough,
+"that we are approaching this matter rather irregularly.
+This is really the fourth charge on the charge sheet,
+and perhaps I had better put it before you in an ordered
+and scientific manner."
+
+Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence
+of the darkening room.
+
+
+
+
+                         Chapter IV
+
+                     The Wild Weddings;
+                   or, the Polygamy Charge
+
+
+"A modern man," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, "must, if he be thoughtful,
+approach the problem of marriage with some caution.
+Marriage is a stage--doubtless a suitable stage--in the long
+advance of mankind towards a goal which we cannot as yet conceive;
+which we are not, perhaps, as yet fitted even to desire.
+What, gentlemen, is the ethical position of marriage?
+Have we outlived it?"
+
+"Outlived it?" broke out Moon; "why, nobody's ever survived it!
+Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve--and all
+as dead as mutton."
+
+"This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc'lar in its character,"
+said Dr. Pym frigidly.  "I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon's
+matured and ethical view of marriage--"
+
+"I can tell," said Michael savagely, out of the gloom.  "Marriage is a duel
+to the death, which no man of honour should decline."
+
+"Michael," said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, "you MUST keep quiet."
+
+"Mr. Moon," said Pym with exquisite good temper, "probably regards
+the institution in a more antiquated manner.  Probably he would make
+it stringent and uniform.  He would treat divorce in some great soul
+of steel--the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson--
+exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who
+scoots from his wife.  Science has views broader and more humane.
+Just as murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction,
+just as theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition,
+so polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct
+for variety.  A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy.
+Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower--
+as there is, doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears
+to afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment.  Our own world-scorning
+Winterbottom has even dared to say, `For a certain rare and fine
+physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of females,
+as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.'
+In any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all
+authoritative inquirers.  Such a type, if the widower of a negress,
+does in many ascertained cases espouse ~en seconde noces~ an albino;
+such a type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian,
+will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the consoling figure of
+an Eskimo.  To such a type there can be no doubt that the prisoner belongs.
+If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute any slight excuse
+for a man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses.
+
+"Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric
+ideality in admitting half of our story without further dispute.
+We should like to acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted
+a style by conceding also that the story told by Curate Percy about
+the canoe, the weir, and the young wife seems to be substantially true.
+Apparently Smith did marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat;
+it only remains to be considered whether it would not have been
+kinder of him to have murdered her instead of marrying her.
+In confirmation of this fact I can now con-cede to the defence
+an unquestionable record of such a marriage."
+
+So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the
+"Maidenhead Gazette" which distinctly recorded the marriage
+of the daughter of a "coach," a tutor well known in the place,
+to Mr. Innocent Smith, late of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
+
+When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown
+at once both tragic and triumphant.
+
+"I pause upon this pre-liminary fact," he said seriously,
+"because this fact alone would give us the victory,
+were we aspiring after victory and not after truth.
+As far as the personal and domestic problem holds us,
+that problem is solved.  Dr. Warner and I entered this house at
+an instant of highly emotional diff'culty. England's Warner has
+entered many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time
+he entered to save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence.
+Smith was just about to carry away a young girl from this house;
+his cab and bag were at the very door.  He had told her she was
+going to await the marriage license at the house of his aunt.
+That aunt," continued Cyrus Pym, his face darkening grandly--"that
+visionary aunt had been the dancing will-o'-the-wisp
+who had led many a high-souled maiden to her doom.
+Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word?
+When he said `aunt' there glowed about her all the merriment
+and high morality of the Anglo-Saxon home.  Kettles began to hum,
+pussy cats to purr, in that very wild cab that was being
+driven to destruction."
+
+Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another
+denizen of the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was
+not only perfectly serious, but was really eloquent and affecting--
+when the difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.
+
+"It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at
+least represented himself to one innocent female of this house
+as an eligible bachelor, being, in fact, a married man.  I agree with
+my colleague, Mr. Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this.
+As to whether what our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical
+value indeed, science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation.
+But what hesitation can there be about the baseness of a citizen
+who ventures, by brutal experiments upon living females, to anticipate
+the verdict of science on such a point?
+
+"The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith
+in Highbury may or may not be the same as the lady he married
+in Maidenhead.  If one short sweet spell of constancy and heart
+repose interrupted the plunging torrent of his profligate life,
+we will not deprive him of that long past possibility.
+After that conjectural date, alas, he seems to have plunged deeper
+and deeper into the shaking quagmires of infidelity and shame."
+
+Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no more
+light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral effect.
+After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer, he continued.
+
+"The first instance of the accused's repeated and irregular nuptials,"
+he exclaimed, "comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses herself
+with the high haughtiness which must be excused in those who look
+out upon all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep.
+The communication she has sent to us runs as follows:--
+
+
+"Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference
+is made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail.
+The girl Polly Green was a perfectly adequate dressmaker,
+and lived in the village for about two years.  Her unattached
+condition was bad for her as well as for the general morality
+of the village.  Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it to be
+understood that she favoured the marriage of the young woman.
+The villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon,
+came forward in several cases; and all would have been well had it
+not been for the deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl
+Green herself.  Lady Bullingdon supposes that where there is
+a village there must be a village idiot, and in her village,
+it seems, there was one of these wretched creatures.
+Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite aware
+that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual
+idiots and the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes.
+She noticed, however, the startling smallness of his head
+in comparison to the rest of his body; and, indeed, the fact
+of his having appeared upon election day wearing the rosette
+of both the two opposing parties appears to Lady Bullingdon
+to put the matter quite beyond doubt.  Lady Bullingdon was
+astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself
+forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question.
+Lady Bullingdon's nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point,
+telling him that he was a `donkey' to dream of such a thing,
+and actually received, along with an imbecile grin,
+the answer that donkeys generally go after carrots.
+But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy
+girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she
+was actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man
+in a far superior position to her own.  Lady Bullingdon could not,
+of course, countenance such an arrangement for a moment,
+and the two unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine marriage.
+Lady Bullingdon cannot exactly recall the man's name,
+but thinks it was Smith.  He was always called in the village
+the Innocent.  Later, Lady Bullingdon believes he murdered
+Green in a mental outbreak."
+
+
+"The next communication," proceeded Pym, "is more conspicuous for brevity,
+but I am of the opinion that it will adequately convey the upshot.
+It is dated from the offices of Messrs.  Hanbury and Bootle, publishers,
+and is as follows:--
+
+
+"Sir,--Yrs.  rcd.  and conts.  noted.  Rumour re typewriter possibly refers
+to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago to marry an
+organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police attention.
+Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when apparently went mad.
+Record was written at the time, part of which I enclose.--
+Yrs., etc., W. Trip."
+
+
+"The fuller statement runs as follows:--
+
+
+"On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs.
+Bernard and Juke, bookbinders.  Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found
+to contain the following:  `Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3,
+as we wish to know whether it is really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.'
+To this Mr. Juke, a person of a playful mind, returned the answer:
+`Sir, I am in a position to give it as my most decided opinion
+that it is not really decided that 00000073bb!!!!!xy.' Yrs., etc.,
+                                                  `J. Juke.'
+
+
+"On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the original
+letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed substituted
+these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated to her.
+Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she was in an
+unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely remarked
+that she always went like that when she heard the barrel organ.
+Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series of most
+improbable statements--as, that she was engaged to the barrel-organ man,
+that he was in the habit of serenading her on that instrument,
+that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the typewriter
+(in the style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the organ man's
+musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself so ardent
+that he could detect the note of the different letters on the machine,
+and was enraptured by them as by a melody.  To all these statements
+of course our Mr. Trip and the rest of us only paid that sort of assent
+that is paid to persons who must as quickly as possible be put in the
+charge of their relations.  But on our conducting the lady downstairs,
+her story received the most startling and even exasperating confirmation;
+for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with a small head and manifestly
+a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the office doors
+like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding his alleged fiancee.
+When I myself came on the scene he was flinging his great, ape-like arms about
+and reciting a poem to her.  But we were used to lunatics coming and reciting
+poems in our office, and we were not quite prepared for what followed.
+The actual verse he uttered began, I think,
+
+        `O vivid, inviolate head,
+         Ringed --'
+
+but he never got any further.  Mr. Trip made a sharp
+movement towards him, and the next moment the giant picked
+up the poor lady typewriter like a doll, sat her on top
+of the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office doors,
+and raced away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow.
+I put the police upon the matter; but no trace of the amazing
+pair could be found.  I was sorry myself; for the lady was
+not only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position.
+As I am leaving the service of Messrs.  Hanbury and Bootle, I put
+these things in a record and leave it with them.
+                                    "(Signed) Aubrey Clarke,
+                                        Publishers' reader."
+
+
+"And the last document," said Dr. Pym complacently, "is from
+one of those high-souled women who have in this age introduced
+your English girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics,
+and every form of ideality.
+
+
+"Dear Sir (she writes),--I have no objection to telling you
+the facts about the absurd incident you mention; though I would
+ask you to communicate them with some caution, for such things,
+however entertaining in the abstract, are not always auxiliary
+to the success of a girls' school.  The truth is this:
+I wanted some one to deliver a lecture on a philological
+or historical question--a lecture which, while containing
+solid educational matter, should be a little more popular and
+entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term.
+I remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere
+or other an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name--
+an essay which showed considerable knowledge of genealogy
+and topography.  I wrote to him, asking if he would come and
+give us a bright address upon English surnames; and he did.
+It was very bright, almost too bright.  To put the matter otherwise,
+by the time that he was halfway through it became apparent
+to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally
+and entirely off his head.  He began rationally enough by dealing
+with the two departments of place names and trade names, and he said
+(quite rightly, I dare say) that the loss of all significance
+in names was an instance of the deadening of civilization.
+But then he went on calmly to maintain that every man who had
+a place name ought to go to live in that place, and that every
+man who had a trade name ought instantly to adopt that trade;
+that people named after colours should always dress in those colours,
+and that people named after trees or plants (such as Beech or Rose)
+ought to surround and decorate themselves with these vegetables.
+In a slight discussion that arose afterwards among the elder girls
+the difficulties of the proposal were clearly, and even eagerly,
+pointed out.  It was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband
+that it was substantially impossible for her to play the part
+assigned to her; Miss Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which
+no modern views on the sexes could apparently extricate her;
+and some young ladies, whose surnames happened to be Low, Coward,
+and Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the idea.
+But all this happened afterwards.  What happened at the crucial
+moment was that the lecturer produced several horseshoes and a
+large iron hammer from his bag, announced his immediate intention
+of setting up a smithy in the neighbourhood, and called on every
+one to rise in the same cause as for a heroic revolution.
+The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched man,
+but I must confess that by an accident this very intercession
+produced the worst explosion of his insanity.  He was waving
+the hammer, and wildly demanding the names of everybody;
+and it so happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers,
+was wearing a brown dress--a reddish-brown dress that went quietly
+enough with the warmer colour of her hair, as well she knew.
+She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know about those things.
+But when our maniac discovered that we really had a Miss Brown
+who WAS brown, his ~idee fixe~ blew up like a powder magazine,
+and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls,
+he publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress.
+You can imagine the effect of such a scene at a girls' school.
+At least, if you fail to imagine it, I certainly fail
+to describe it.
+
+"Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can
+think of it now as a joke.  There was only one curious detail,
+which I will tell you, as you say your inquiry is vital; but I should
+desire you to consider it a little more confidential than the rest.
+Miss Brown, who was an excellent girl in every way, did quite
+suddenly and surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards.
+I should never have thought that her head would be the one
+to be really turned by so absurd an excitement.--Believe me,
+yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.
+
+
+"I think," said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and seriousness,
+"that these letters speak for themselves."
+
+Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint
+of whether his native gravity was mixed with his native irony.
+
+"Throughout this inquiry," he said, "but especially in this its
+closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument;
+I mean the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy
+women apparently seduced by Smith.  There is no sort of proof
+that they were murdered, but that implication is perpetually made
+when the question is asked as to how they died.  Now I am not
+interested in how they died, or when they died, or whether they died.
+But I am interested in another analogous question--that of how they
+were born, and when they were born, and whether they were born.
+Do not misunderstand me.  I do not dispute the existence of
+these women, or the veracity of those who have witnessed to them.
+I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of these victims,
+the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or parents.
+All the rest are boarders or birds of passage--a guest, a solitary
+dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting.  Lady Bullingdon,
+looking from her turrets, which she bought from the Whartons with
+the old soap-boiler's money when she jumped at marrying an unsuccessful
+gentleman from Ulster--Lady Bullingdon, looking out from those turrets,
+did really see an object which she describes as Green.  Mr. Trip,
+of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed
+to Smith.  Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest.
+She did house, feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded
+in decoying away.  We admit that all these women really lived.
+But we still ask whether they were ever born?"
+
+"Oh, crikey!" said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.
+
+"There could hardly," interposed Pym with a quiet smile,
+"be a better instance of the neglect of true scientific process.
+The scientist, when once convinced of the fact of vitality
+and consciousness, would infer from these the previous
+process of generation."
+
+"If these gals," said Gould impatiently--"if these gals were all alive
+(all alive O!) I'd chance a fiver they were all born."
+
+"You'd lose your fiver," said Michael, speaking gravely out of the gloom.
+"All those admirable ladies were alive.  They were more alive for having
+come into contact with Smith.  They were all quite definitely alive,
+but only one of them was ever born."
+
+"Are you asking us to believe--" began Dr. Pym.
+
+"I am asking you a second question," said Moon sternly.  "Can the court
+now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance?
+Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe,
+the relations of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave
+of a lust for variety which would lead a man first to a negress
+and then to an albino, first to a Patagonian giantess and then
+to a tiny Eskimo.  But is there any evidence of such variety here?
+Is there any trace of a gigantic Patagonian in the story?
+Was the typewriter an Eskimo?  So picturesque a circumstance would not
+surely have escaped remark.  Was Lady Bullingdon's dressmaker a negress?
+A voice in my bosom answers, `No!' Lady Bullingdon, I am sure,
+would think a negress so conspicuous as to be almost Socialistic,
+and would feel something a little rakish even about an albino.
+
+"But was there in Smith's taste any such variety as the learned
+doctor describes?  So far as our slight materials go,
+the very opposite seems to be the case.  We have only
+one actual description of any of the prisoner's wives--
+the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic curate.
+`Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn leaves.'
+Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours, some of
+which would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance);
+but I think such an expression would be most naturally used of
+the shades from red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their
+coppery-coloured hair do frequently wear light artistic greens.
+Now when we come to the next wife, we find the eccentric lover,
+when told he is a donkey, answering that donkeys always go
+after carrots; a remark which Lady Bullingdon evidently
+regarded as pointless and part of the natural table-talk of a
+village idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we suppose
+that Polly's hair was red.  Passing to the next wife, the one
+he took from the girls' school, we find Miss Gridley noticing
+that the schoolgirl in question wore `a reddish-brown dress,
+that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of her hair.'
+In other words, the colour of the girl's hair was something redder
+than red-brown. Lastly, the romantic organ-grinder declaimed
+in the office some poetry that only got as far as the words,--
+
+        `O vivid, inviolate head,
+         Ringed --'
+
+But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets
+will enable us to guess that `ringed with a glory of red,'
+or `ringed with its passionate red,' was the line that rhymed
+to `head.' In this case once more, therefore, there is good
+reason to suppose that Smith fell in love with a girl with
+some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair--rather," he said,
+looking down at the table, "rather like Miss Gray's hair."
+
+Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids,
+ready with one of his more pedantic interpellations;
+but Moses Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose,
+with an expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence
+in his brilliant eyes.
+
+"Mr. Moon's contention at present," interposed Pym, "is not,
+even if veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view
+of I. Smith, which we have nailed to the mast.  Science has
+long anticipated such a complication.  An incurable attraction
+to a particular type of physical woman is one of the commonest
+of criminal per-versities, and when not considered narrowly,
+but in the light of induction and evolution--"
+
+"At this late stage," said Michael Moon very quietly, "I may perhaps
+relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me
+throughout the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution
+may go and boil themselves.  The Missing Link and all that is
+well enough for kids, but I'm talking about things we know here.
+All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing--and he won't
+be missed either.  I know all about his human head and his horrid tail;
+they belong to a very old game called `Heads I win, tails you lose.'
+If you do find a fellow's bones, it proves he lived a long while ago;
+if you don't find his bones, it proves how long ago he lived.
+That is the game you've been playing with this Smith affair.
+Because Smith's head is small for his shoulders you call
+him microcephalous; if it had been large, you'd have called it
+water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith's seraglio seemed
+pretty various, variety was the sign of madness:  now, because it's
+turning out to be a bit monochrome--now monotony is the sign of madness.
+I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person,
+and I'm jolly well going to get some of the advantages too;
+and with all politeness I propose not to be bullied with long words
+instead of short reasons, or consider your business a triumphant
+progress merely because you're always finding out that you were wrong.
+Having relieved myself of these feelings, I have merely to add
+that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more beautiful
+than the Parthenon, or the monument on Bunker's Hill, and that I
+propose to resume and conclude my remarks on the many marriages
+of Mr. Innocent Smith.
+
+"Besides this red hair, thee is another unifying thread that
+runs through these scattered incidents.  There is something
+very peculiar and suggestive about the names of these women.
+Mr. Trip, you will remember, said he thought the typewriter's
+name was Blake, but could not remember exactly.
+I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that case we
+have a curious series:  Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon's village;
+Miss Brown at the Hendon School; Miss Black at the publishers.
+A chord of colours, as it were, which ends up with Miss Gray
+at Beacon House, West Hampstead."
+
+Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition.
+"What is the meaning of this queer coincidence about colours?
+Personally I cannot doubt for a moment that these names are purely
+arbitrary names, assumed as part of some general scheme or joke.
+I think it very probably that they were taken from a series of costumes--
+that Polly Green only meant Polly (or Mary) when in green,
+and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when in gray.
+This would explain--"
+
+Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid.
+"Do you actually mean to suggest--" he cried.
+
+"Yes," said Michael; "I do mean to suggest that.  Innocent Smith has had
+many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one wife.
+She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke
+in the garden.
+
+"Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of
+other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle.
+It is odd and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
+principle plainly applied in the modern world would be.  His principle
+can be quite simply stated:  he refuses to die while he is still alive.
+He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
+that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world.
+For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason
+he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
+for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his
+own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman
+whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak)
+at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might
+recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement.
+He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive
+the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run
+for her sake.
+
+"So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are
+not quite so clear.  I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom
+of all this.  I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
+quite sure that it is worth a man's uttering and defending.
+
+"The idea that Smith is attacking is this.  Living in an entangled
+civilization, he have come to think certain things wrong which are
+not wrong at all.  We have come to think outbreak and exuberance,
+banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong.  In themselves they
+are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable.  There is nothing
+wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not
+mean to hit him and know you won't. It is no more wrong than throwing
+a pebble at the sea--less, for you do occasionally hit the sea.
+There is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking
+through a roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or property
+of other men.  It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from
+the top than to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom.
+There is nothing wicked about walking round the world and coming back
+to your own house; it is no more wicked than walking round the garden
+and coming back to your own house.  And there is nothing wicked
+about picking up your wife here, there, and everywhere, if, forsaking
+all others, you keep only to her so long as you both shall live.
+It is as innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.
+You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association,
+as you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being
+seen going) into a pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think there
+is something squalid and commonplace about such a connection.
+You are mistaken.
+
+"This man's spiritual power has been precisely this,
+that he has distinguished between custom and creed.
+He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
+It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell,
+and you found that he only played for trouser buttons.
+It is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment
+with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it
+was his grandmother.  Everything is ugly and discreditable,
+except the facts; everything is wrong about him, except that
+he has done no wrong.
+
+"It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith continued far into his
+middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false charges?'
+To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is happy,
+because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive.
+He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly
+practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all.
+And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed
+with such inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that,
+though it is one that will not be approved.
+
+"There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it.
+If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent.  If he can defy
+the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.
+It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life
+that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy.
+It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet
+his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all
+long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods.  It is just because
+he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex;
+it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
+If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman,
+he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song--
+at least, not a comic song."
+
+"Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy
+to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies.
+I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either
+of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed itself.
+Speaking singly, I feel as if a man was tied to tragedy,
+and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt.
+But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick,
+this is the way out.  If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog,
+it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.
+Barely and brutally to be good--that may be the road,
+and he may have found it.  Well, well, well, I see a look
+of skepticism on the face of my old friend Moses.  Mr. Gould
+does not believe that being perfectly good in all respects
+would make a man merry."
+
+"No," said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity;
+"I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects
+would make a man merry."
+
+"Well," said Michael quietly, "will you tell me one thing?
+Which of us has ever tried it?"
+
+A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological
+epoch which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type;
+for there rose at last in the stillness a massive figure
+that the other men had almost completely forgotten.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," said Dr. Warner cheerfully, "I've been pretty
+well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery
+for a couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin,
+and I'm engaged for a city dinner.  Among the hundred flowers
+of futility on both sides I was unable to detect any sort of reason
+why a lunatic should be allowed to shoot me in the back garden."
+
+He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly to
+the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:
+"But really the bullet missed you by several feet."  And another voice added:
+"The bullet missed him by several years."
+
+There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then
+Moon said suddenly, "We have been sitting with a ghost.
+Dr. Herbert Warner died years ago."
+
+
+
+
+
+                          Chapter V
+
+                   How the Great Wind Went
+                      from Beacon House
+
+
+Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the garden;
+they were silent, and the sun had set.  Such spaces of daylight as remained
+open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be compared
+to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran
+across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke.
+All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like gray,
+and seemed to melt and mount into Mary's dark-gray figure until she seemed
+clothed with the garden and the skies.  There was something in these last
+quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy; and the twilight,
+which concealed Diana's statelier figure and Rosamund's braver array,
+exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the lady of the garden, and alone.
+
+When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long
+fallen silent was being revived.
+
+"But where is your husband taking you?" asked Diana in her practical voice.
+
+"To an aunt," said Mary; "that's just the joke.  There really
+is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged
+to be turned out of the other boarding-house down the road.
+We never take more than a week of this kind of holiday,
+but sometimes we take two of them together."
+
+"Does the aunt mind much?" asked Rosamund innocently.  "Of course,
+I dare say it's very narrow-minded and--what's that other word?--
+you know, what Goliath was--but I've known many aunts who would
+think it--well, silly."
+
+"Silly?" cried Mary with great heartiness.  "Oh, my Sunday hat!
+I should think it was silly!  But what do you expect?
+He really is a good man, and it might have been snakes or something."
+
+"Snakes?" inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.
+
+"Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him," replied Mary
+with perfect simplicity.  "Auntie let him have them in his pockets,
+but not in the bedroom."
+
+"And you--" began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.
+
+"Oh, I do as auntie did," said Mary; "as long as we're not away
+from the children more than a fortnight together I play the game.
+He calls me `Manalive;' and you must write it all one word,
+or he's quite flustered."
+
+"But if men want things like that," began Diana.
+
+"Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary impatiently;
+"why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing.
+There aren't any men.  There are no such people.  There's a man;
+and whoever he is he's quite different."
+
+"So there is no safety," said Diana in a low voice.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," answered Mary, lightly enough;
+"there's only two things generally true of them.
+At certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us,
+and they're never fit to take care of themselves."
+
+"There is a gale getting up," said Rosamund suddenly.
+"Look at those trees over there, a long way off, and the
+clouds going quicker."
+
+"I know what you're thinking about," said Mary; "and don't
+you be silly fools.  Don't you listen to the lady novelists.
+You go down the king's highway; for God's truth, it is
+God's. Yes, my dear Michael will often be extremely untidy.
+Arthur Inglewood will be worse--he'll be untidy.  But what else
+are all the trees and clouds for, you silly kittens?"
+
+"The clouds and trees are all waving about," said Rosamund.  "There is
+a storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow.  Michael is
+really rather like a storm:  he frightens me and makes me happy."
+
+"Don't you be frightened," said Mary.  "All over, these men
+have one advantage; they are the sort that go out."
+
+A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves along
+the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.
+
+"I mean," said Mary, "they are the kind that look outwards and get interested
+in the world.  It doesn't matter a bit whether it's arguing, or bicycling,
+or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old Innocent does.  Stick to
+the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world.
+Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.
+When poor old Adam had gone out gardening (Arthur will go out gardening),
+the other sort came along and wormed himself in, nasty old snake."
+
+"You agree with your aunt," said Rosamund, smiling:  "no snakes
+in the bedroom."
+
+"I didn't agree with my aunt very much," replied Mary simply,
+"but I think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons
+and griffins, so long as it got him out of the house."
+
+Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
+turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold.
+The golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had
+sat like a clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
+cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, "Acquitted! acquitted!"
+Echoing the cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and
+wildly swung her into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz.
+But the company knew Innocent and Michael by this time,
+and their extravagances were gaily taken for granted; it was far
+more extraordinary that Arthur Inglewood walked straight up to Diana
+and kissed her as if it had been his sister's birthday.  Even Dr. Pym,
+though he refrained from dancing, looked on with real benevolence;
+for indeed the whole of the absurd revelation had disturbed him
+less than the others; he half supposed that such irresponsible
+tribunals and insane discussions were part of the mediaeval mummeries
+of the Old Land.
+
+While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window was
+lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with laughter
+and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the house again,
+they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had clambered
+out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again, "Beacon House!"
+whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the wood fire below,
+of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke drove out on
+the deafening air.
+
+He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties;
+but when the wind died down, and the party, at the top of
+their evening's merriment, looked again for Mary and for him,
+they were not to be found.
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton
+
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