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Title: The Club of Queer Trades

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release date: April 1, 1999 [eBook #1696]
Most recently updated: February 26, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLUB OF
QUEER TRADES ***

THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES

by G. K. Chesterton

Contents
Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent
Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd
Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major
Brown
Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something
to do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America.
There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising space by
piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos and
complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen,
and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of
the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name
would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in
these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only looking for his own
melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London
office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as
one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a
Strangers' Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk
Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries
would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice
hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.
The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is
soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the
absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have
invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely
new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two
principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an
existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance
agent simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being burnt
in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad
dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock Burnaby-Bradcock, in the
extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to the club on the occasion of
the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and
keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial
source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not
receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken

sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick
made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick's
own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.
The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to
realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the
first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he
was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon
so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular,
for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be
said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of
specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At
some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to
which I have belonged. I will recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes
Society (that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I
will explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which
has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last
why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of
the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my
revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades,
which, as I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound
to come across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild
youth of the metropolis call me facetiously 'The King of Clubs'. They also
call me 'The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I
have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the better
world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer
Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it
is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil
Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.
Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the
need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset
clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth.
He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to the
slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour—the whole dust-

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

“O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.”
He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.
I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that
gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he
was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the great
swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck his square
features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of
dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily, when the door was
flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a huge furred overcoat,
swung himself panting into the room.
“Sorry to bother you, Basil,” he gasped. “I took a liberty—made an
appointment here with a man—a client—in five minutes—I beg your
pardon, sir,” and he gave me a bow of apology.
Basil smiled at me. “You didn't know,” he said, “that I had a practical
brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to be
done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I
remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a
publisher, a schoolmaster, a—what are you now, Rupert?”
“I am and have been for some time,” said Rupert, with some dignity, “a
private detective, and there's my client.”
A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being given,
the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked swiftly
into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and said, “Good
evening, gentlemen,” with a stress on the last syllable that somehow marked
him out as a martinet, military, literary and social. He had a large head
streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black moustache, which gave
him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by his sad sea-blue eyes.
Basil immediately said to me, “Let us come into the next room, Gully,”
and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
“Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.”
The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain
Major Brown I had met years before in Basil's society. I had forgotten
altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a

quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do not
know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.
Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he
was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who
recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes of
an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was
precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm he
had, which was of the nature of a religion—the cultivation of pansies. And
when he talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered like a child's at a
new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when the troops were
roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.
“Well, Major,” said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
himself into a chair, “what is the matter with you?”
“Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover,” said the Major, with
righteous indignation.
We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
“I beg your pardon.”
“Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me.
Something. Preposterous.”
We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major's
fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the
reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major Brown in
my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes of Basil
closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert and myself
getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the most astounding
stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt
upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.
Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay, it was
with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's house, and
devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles
were over when he had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along
with two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken himself

instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to him like
having come into a harbour in heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his
taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like
soldiers. He was one of those men who are capable of putting four
umbrellas in the stand rather than three, so that two may lean one way and
two another; he saw life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And
assuredly he would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had
told him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be
caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or
dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.
One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing from
one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass along one
of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden walls of a
row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured appearance give
one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean
and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not
altogether so in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was
coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a religious procession
is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes and a ring of
irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a barrow, which was ablaze
with incomparable flowers. There were splendid specimens of almost every
order, but the Major's own favourite pansies predominated. The Major
stopped and fell into conversation, and then into bargaining. He treated the
man after the manner of collectors and other mad men, that is to say, he
carefully and with a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less
excellent, praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging
from a thrilling worth and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then
bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped
and came close to the Major.
“I'll tell you what, sir,” he said. “If you're interested in them things, you
just get on to that wall.”
“On the wall!” cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.
“Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,”
hissed the tempter. “I'll help you up, sir.”

How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of
the Major's life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with an easy
leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical assistance,
he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The second after, the
flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool.
But the next instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up by the
most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in all his bold
and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and there across a
large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were
splendid flowers, but for once it was not their horticultural aspects that
Major Brown beheld, for the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital
letters so as to form the sentence:
DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them.
Brown looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the
barrow had suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its
incredible inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad,
but Brown did not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his
military exploits, he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person,
but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again,
might have thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown
could not easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the
garden arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it
extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money like water for
a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to offer, he admitted
the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and waited as he would have
done in the presence of a man with six legs.
At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and the
watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the gravel
path.
“Who on earth are you?” he gasped, trembling violently.
“I am Major Brown,” said that individual, who was always cool in the
hour of action.
The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
stammered wildly, “Come down—come down here!”

“At your service,” said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass
beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.
The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run
towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide led
him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed
house, until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man
turned with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.
“For heaven's sake,” he said, “don't mention jackals.”
Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran
downstairs with a clatter.
The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and
peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in the
world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to see that
the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking out.
“Madam,” he said, bowing simply, “I am Major Brown.”
“Sit down,” said the lady; but she did not turn her head.
She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour of
Bedford Park. “You have come, I suppose,” she said mournfully, “to tax me
about the hateful title-deeds.”
“I have come, madam,” he said, “to know what is the matter. To know
why my name is written across your garden. Not amicably either.”
He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe
the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene, the
frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was still, and
the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he studied cried to
heaven for his blood.
“You know I must not turn round,” said the lady; “every afternoon till the
stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.”
Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to
accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.
“It is almost six,” he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper clock
upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the lady
sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most

attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising, the
face of an elf.
“That makes the third year I have waited,” she cried. “This is an
anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would
happen once and for all.”
And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From
low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a
voice cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:
“Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?”
Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door and
looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the street,
where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon sparks. On
returning, he found the lady in green trembling.
“It is the end,” she cried, with shaking lips; “it may be death for both of
us. Whenever—”
But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse
proclamation from the dark street, again horribly articulate.
“Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?”
Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too long and
empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational Major was a little
shaken as he returned in a certain time to the drawing-room. Scarcely had
he done so than the terrific voice came:
“Major Brown, Major Brown, where did—”
Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time—in time
to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries appeared to
come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.
The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man
thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again, it had
vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. “Where's your coal-cellar?”
he said, and stepped out into the passage.
She looked at him with wild grey eyes. “You will not go down,” she
cried, “alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?”

“Is this the way?” replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three
at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in, feeling in
his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied, a pair of great
slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly belonging to a man of
gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of the head. They forced him
down, down in the suffocating darkness, a brutal image of destiny. But the
Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly clear and intellectual. He
gave quietly under the pressure until he had slid down almost to his hands
and knees. Then finding the knees of the invisible monster within a foot of
him, he simply put out one of his long, bony, and skilful hands, and
gripping the leg by a muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge
living man, with a crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was
on top like a cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had
evidently now no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and thither to
get past the Major to the door, but that tenacious person had him hard by the
coat collar and hung with the other hand to a beam. At length there came a
strain in holding back this human bull, a strain under which Brown
expected his hand to rend and part from the arm. But something else rent
and parted; and the dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the cellar,
leaving the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his adventure and
the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out at the front door,
the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole equipment of the house had
disappeared. It had only bare boards and whitewashed walls.
“The lady was in the conspiracy, of course,” said Rupert, nodding. Major
Brown turned brick red. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I think not.”
Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
nothing. When next he spoke he asked:
“Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?”
“There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,” said
the Major carefully; “there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string, and this
letter,” and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:
Dear Mr Plover,
I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re
Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow.
The coal-cellar, of course.
Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.

Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut
in:
“Is it dated from anywhere?”
“No—oh, yes!” replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; “14 Tanner's
Court, North—”
Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.
“Then why are we hanging here? Let's get along. Basil, lend me your
revolver.”
Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was some
time before he answered:
“I don't think you'll need it.”
“Perhaps not,” said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. “One never knows.
But going down a dark court to see criminals—”
“Do you think they are criminals?” asked his brother.
Rupert laughed stoutly. “Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a
harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless
experiment, but—”
“Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?” asked Basil, in the
same distant and monotonous voice.
“My dear fellow, you've been asleep. Look at the letter.”
“I am looking at the letter,” said the mad judge calmly; though, as a
matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. “I don't think it's the sort of letter
one criminal would write to another.”
“My dear boy, you are glorious,” cried Rupert, turning round, with
laughter in his blue bright eyes. “Your methods amaze me. Why, there is the
letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You might as well
say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of thing that was likely to
be set up in Trafalgar Square.”
Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not
otherwise move.
“That's rather good,” he said; “but, of course, logic like that's not what is
really wanted. It's a question of spiritual atmosphere. It's not a criminal
letter.”
“It is. It's a matter of fact,” cried the other in an agony of reasonableness.

“Facts,” murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
animals, “how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly—in fact, I'm off my
head—but I never could believe in that man—what's his name, in those
capital stories?—Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something,
certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it
seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. It's only the life of the
tree that has unity and goes up—only the green blood that springs, like a
fountain, at the stars.”
“But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?”
“We have eternity to stretch our legs in,” replied the mystic. “It can be an
infinity of things. I haven't seen any of them—I've only seen the letter. I
look at that, and say it's not criminal.”
“Then what's the origin of it?”
“I haven't the vaguest idea.”
“Then why don't you accept the ordinary explanation?”
Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed collecting his
thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:
“Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through
silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and deserted
space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as a ballet
girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and saw it was
a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was Lord
Kitchener. What would you think?”
He paused a moment, and went on:
“You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation
of putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would not
think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of ordinary
personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that he inherited a
dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a
seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if he refused the ordeal.
With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet—but not with Kitchener. I should
know all that, because in my public days I knew him quite well. So I know
that letter quite well, and criminals quite well. It's not a criminal's letter. It's
all atmospheres.” And he closed his eyes and passed his hand over his
forehead.

Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and
pity. The former said,
“Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think—until your
spiritual mystery turns up—that a man who sends a note recommending a
crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at least
tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral tastes. Can I have
that revolver?”
“Certainly,” said Basil, getting up. “But I am coming with you.” And he
flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the
corner.
“You!” said Rupert, with some surprise, “you scarcely ever leave your
hole to look at anything on the face of the earth.”
Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.
“I scarcely ever,” he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance,
“hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at once,
without going to see it.”
And he led the way out into the purple night.
We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet
Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major
Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop and
flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike
delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest among
his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and poetry of
London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars,
had the look of a somnambulist.
Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight at
danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat pocket.
“Shall we go in now?” he asked.
“Not get police?” asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the
street.
“I am not sure,” answered Rupert, knitting his brows. “Of course, it's
quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of us, and—”

“I shouldn't get the police,” said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert glanced at
him and stared hard.
“Basil,” he cried, “you're trembling. What's the matter—are you afraid?”
“Cold, perhaps,” said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he
was shaking.
At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.
“You're laughing,” he cried. “I know that confounded, silent, shaky laugh
of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all three of
us, within a yard of a den of ruffians—”
“But I shouldn't call the police,” said Basil. “We four heroes are quite
equal to a host,” and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.
Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the rest
of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned abruptly, the
revolver glittering in his hand.
“Stand close,” he said in the voice of a commander. “The scoundrel may
be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and
rush in.”
The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the
old judge and his convulsion of merriment.
“Now,” hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
suddenly over his shoulder, “when I say 'Four', follow me with a rush. If I
say 'Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say 'Stop', stop.
I shall say that if there are more than three. If they attack us I shall empty
my revolver on them. Basil, have your sword-stick ready. Now—one, two,
three, four!”
With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the room
like an invasion, only to stop dead.
The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared,
at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful glance, we
saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and drawers of
bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed moustache, and
the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked up as we came to a
standstill.

“Did you knock?” he asked pleasantly. “I am sorry if I did not hear. What
can I do for you?”
There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.
The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.
“Is your name P. G. Northover?” he asked.
“That is my name,” replied the other, smiling.
“I think,” said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his
face, “that this letter was written by you.” And with a loud clap he struck
open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man called Northover
looked at it with unaffected interest and merely nodded.
“Well, sir,” said the Major, breathing hard, “what about that?”
“What about it, precisely,” said the man with the moustache.
“I am Major Brown,” said that gentleman sternly.
Northover bowed. “Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to
me?”
“Say!” cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; “why, I want this
confounded thing settled. I want—”
“Certainly, sir,” said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of the
eyebrows. “Will you take a chair for a moment.” And he pressed an electric
bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room beyond. The Major
put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but stood chafing and
beating the floor with his polished boot.
The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy,
young man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.
“Mr Hopson,” said Northover, “this is Major Brown. Will you please
finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?”
“Yes, sir,” said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.
“You will excuse me, gentlemen,” said the egregious Northover, with his
radiant smile, “if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have some
books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday tomorrow.
And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we? Ha! ha!”
The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence ensued;
a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G. Northover; a raging silence

on the part of everybody else.
At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled
with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the
handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity, placed
a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.
The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few
moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him. He took
up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered something,
muttering—“Careless.” Then he read it again with the same impenetrable
reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown, whose hand was
beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.
“I think you will find that all right, Major,” he said briefly.
The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear
later, but he found it like this:

Major Brown to P. G. Northover. £ s. d.
January 1, to account rendered 5 6 0
May 9, to potting and embedding of 200 pansies 2 0 0
To cost of trolley with flowers 0 15 0
To hiring of man with trolley 0 5 0
To hire of house and garden for one day 1 0 0
To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3 0 0
To salary of Miss Jameson 1 0 0
To salary of Mr Plover 1 0 0
—————
Total £14 6 0
A Remittance will oblige.

“What,” said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed
slowly rising out of his head, “What in heaven's name is this?”
“What is it?” repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement.
“It's your account, of course.”
“My account!” The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede.
“My account! And what have I got to do with it?”
“Well,” said Northover, laughing outright, “naturally I prefer you to pay
it.”
The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words
came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into the
air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's head.

The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on
the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the
united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the empty
floor.
“Let me go, you scamps,” he shouted. “Let me—”
“Stand still,” cried Rupert authoritatively. “Major Brown's action is
excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted—”
“A customer has a perfect right,” said Northover hotly, “to question an
alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture.”
“What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and
overcharges?” shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady
in pain or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and
exasperating mystery. “Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent
tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me—”
“Mad,” said Northover, gazing blankly round; “all of them mad. I didn't
know they travelled in quartettes.”
“Enough of this prevarication,” said Rupert; “your crimes are discovered.
A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though only a private
detective myself, I will take the responsibility of telling you that anything
you say—”
“Mad,” repeated Northover, with a weary air.
And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the
strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.
“Major Brown,” he said, “may I ask you a question?”
The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.
“You?” he cried; “certainly, Mr Grant.”
“Can you tell me,” said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow,
as he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, “can you tell me what
was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?”
The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and
futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:
“Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something—a name with a hyphen
—Gurney-Brown; that was it.”

“And when did the house change hands?” said Basil, looking up sharply.
His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.
“I came in last month,” said the Major.
And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great
office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.
“Oh! it's too perfect—it's too exquisite,” he gasped, beating the arms with
his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing
voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like
weathercocks in a whirlwind.
“Confound it, Basil,” said Rupert, stamping. “If you don't want me to go
mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means.”
Northover rose.
“Permit me, sir, to explain,” he said. “And, first of all, permit me to
apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable
blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you
will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and
dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand the
loss.” And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the waste-
paper basket and bowed.
Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. “But I don't even
begin to understand,” he cried. “What bill? what blunder? what loss?”
Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and
with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration, there
were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,
especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn
intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.
“Do you know where you are, Major?” he said.
“God knows I don't,” said the warrior, with fervour.
“You are standing,” replied Northover, “in the office of the Adventure
and Romance Agency, Limited.”
“And what's that?” blankly inquired Brown.
The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark
eyes on the other's face.

“Major,” said he, “did you ever, as you walked along the empty street
upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen—
something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious
and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something
unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and
driving free.' Did you ever feel that?”
“Certainly not,” said the Major shortly.
“Then I must explain with more elaboration,” said Mr Northover, with a
sigh. “The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great
modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear of
the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us and lead
us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for a varied life
pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in
return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him
with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an
excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he
gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious
telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A
very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of the staff of
distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining
room. Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I consider
peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did not see the end of
it. I need scarcely explain further the monstrous mistake. Your predecessor
in your present house, Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber to our agency,
and our foolish clerks, ignoring alike the dignity of the hyphen and the
glory of military rank, positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr
Gurney-Brown were the same person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into
the middle of another man's story.”
“How on earth does the thing work?” asked Rupert Grant, with bright
and fascinated eyes.
“We believe that we are doing a noble work,” said Northover warmly. “It
has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is more
lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic
existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a
book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he
wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the

banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him
exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of
fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from pursuers—
all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great
morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game
was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that
godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same
instant dance and dream.”
Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery
had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased speaking
he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.
Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and
good humour.
“Of course; awfully dense, sir,” he said. “No doubt at all, the scheme
excellent. But I don't think—” He paused a moment, and looked dreamily
out of the window. “I don't think you will find me in it. Somehow, when
one's seen—seen the thing itself, you know—blood and men screaming,
one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you
know, 'There remaineth a rest'.”
Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:
“Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire, at
any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown's view of the
matter—”
“I should be obliged for your card, sir,” said the Major, in his abrupt but
courteous voice. “Pay for chair.”
The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.
It ran, “P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency,
14 Tanner's Court, Fleet Street.”
“What on earth is 'C.Q.T.'?” asked Rupert Grant, looking over the
Major's shoulder.
“Don't you know?” returned Northover. “Haven't you ever heard of the
Club of Queer Trades?”
“There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't heard
of,” said the little Major reflectively. “What's this one?”

“The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people
who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one
of the earliest members.”
“You deserve to be,” said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a
smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.
When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a
queer smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. “A fine chap,
that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance of
being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all people
getting into the nets of one of Grigsby's tales,” and he laughed out aloud in
the silence.
Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An
owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and
somewhat absurd inquiry.
“What! back again, Major?” cried Northover in surprise. “What can I do
for you?”
The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.
“It's horribly absurd,” he said. “Something must have got started in me
that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate desire
to know the end of it all.”
“The end of it all?”
“Yes,” said the Major. “'Jackals', and the title-deeds, and 'Death to Major
Brown'.”
The agent's face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.
“I am terribly sorry, Major,” said he, “but what you ask is impossible. I
don't know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules of the
agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an outsider; I am
not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you
understand—”
“There is no one,” said Brown, “who understands discipline better than I
do. Thank you very much. Good night.”
And the little man withdrew for the last time.
He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the

Romance Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some
stir in her languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly
that she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades
provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who
went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a
murderer.
The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa, and
the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged—except,
perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine unselfishness
as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his wife
recognizes with a concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that
he is wondering what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to
mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and
believes that he will realize the rest of those purple adventures in a better
world.

Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation
Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth—the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar.
To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is
a fairy tale.
The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave
us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of
London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the
sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy
houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den
of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But the
horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that there was order,
but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony.
No one would say, in going through a criminal slum, “I see no statues. I
notice no cathedrals.” But here there were public buildings; only they were
mostly lunatic asylums. Here there were statues; only they were mostly
statues of railway engineers and philanthropists—two dingy classes of men
united by their common contempt for the people. Here there were churches;
only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or
Irvingites. Here, above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and
tramway lines and hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But
though one never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was
one thing we knew we should not see—anything really great, central, of the
first class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion
indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and
crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which
lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility
remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of
Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.
“But you must always remember also,” said Grant to me, in his heavy
abstracted way, when I had urged this view, “that the very vileness of the
life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the

human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something
worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization. But yet
I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good people.
And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing
round the world. Besides—”
“Go on,” I said.
No answer came.
“Go on,” I said, looking up.
The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he
was paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of the tram.
“What is the matter?” I asked, peering over also.
“It is very odd,” said Grant at last, grimly, “that I should have been
caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these
people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England.”
“Where?” I asked, leaning over further, “where?”
“Oh, I was right enough,” he went on, in that strange continuous and
sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, “I was
right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes; they
are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two; they may
beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the same; they are
angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings and haloes—at any
rate compared to that man.”
“Which man?” I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which
Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.
He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly
passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to attract
a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious consideration
when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black top-hat, but there was
enough in it of those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the
eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan
vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of one
who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The rest of his face
was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental; he had two black tufts of
moustache.
“What has he done?” I asked.

“I am not sure of the details,” said Grant, “but his besetting sin is a desire
to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has adopted some
imposture or other to effect his plan.”
“What plan?” I asked. “If you know all about him, why don't you tell me
why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?”
Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.
“I think you've made a mistake in my meaning,” he said. “I don't know
his name. I never saw him before in my life.”
“Never saw him before!” I cried, with a kind of anger; “then what in
heaven's name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in
England?”
“I meant what I said,” said Basil Grant calmly. “The moment I saw that
man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid innocence. I
saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being themselves,
he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in these slums, cadgers,
pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good. And
I saw that that man was trying to be evil.”
“But if you never saw him before—” I began.
“In God's name, look at his face,” cried out Basil in a voice that startled
the driver. “Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal pride which
made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one of the
first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to insult
humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at his hair. In the name of
God and the stars, look at his hat.”
I stirred uncomfortably.
“But, after all,” I said, “this is very fanciful—perfectly absurd. Look at
the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you—”
“Oh, the mere facts,” he cried out in a kind of despair. “The mere facts!
Do you really admit—are you still so sunk in superstitions, so clinging to
dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an
immediate impression?”
“Well, an immediate impression may be,” I said, “a little less practical
than facts.”

“Bosh,” he said. “On what else is the whole world run but immediate
impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this
world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions
and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you measure his
skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook? Do you go
upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may save your
business—you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely upon those
immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce,
with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man walking in that
street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind.”
“You always put things well,” I said, “but, of course, such things cannot
immediately be put to the test.”
Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
“Let us get off and follow him,” he said. “I bet you five pounds it will
turn out as I say.”
And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.
The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked
along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him. Then
he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down an ill-
lit alley. We swung silently after him.
“This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take,” I said.
“A man of what kind?” asked my friend.
“Well,” I said, “a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I
thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part of the
world at all.”
“Ah, yes,” said Basil, and said no more.
We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like
the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the glare of
intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The intervals
between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the whole city. Our
pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts;
but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped also.
We had almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness in front
of us was the darkness of his body.

At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a
yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on a
very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas cut the
darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the interview was
short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could be. Our exquisite
friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card and said:
“At once. Take a cab.”
A heavy, deep voice from inside said:
“Right you are.”
And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the
striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just helping
us. It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it like
midnight.
“This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,” I
repeated.
“I don't know,” said Basil humbly. “It leads to Berkeley Square.”
As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and
tried to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I wondered
and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right. We were
coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London—more dreary, one
must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.
“This is very extraordinary!” said Basil Grant, as we turned into Berkeley
Square.
“What is extraordinary?” I asked. “I thought you said it was quite
natural.”
“I do not wonder,” answered Basil, “at his walking through nasty streets;
I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do wonder at his
going to the house of a very good man.”
“What very good man?” I asked with exasperation.
“The operation of time is a singular one,” he said with his imperturbable
irrelevancy. “It is not a true statement of the case to say that I have forgotten
my career when I was a judge and a public man. I remember it all vividly,
but it is like remembering some novel. But fifteen years ago I knew this

square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better
than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's house.”
“Who is old Beaumont?” I asked irritably.
“A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood—don't you know
his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more
work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't know what; anyhow, he's
a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight disadvantage of
being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that real disadvantage
which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he
thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and
proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you
put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap alternative to cremation.
So long as you progress fast enough it seems a matter of indifference to him
whether you are progressing to the stars or the devil. So his house is filled
with an endless succession of literary and political fashions; men who wear
long hair because it is romantic; men who wear short hair because it is
medical; men who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands; and men
who walk on their hands for fear of tiring their feet. But though the
inhabitants of his salons are generally fools, like himself, they are almost
always, like himself, good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter
there.”
“My good fellow,” I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, “the
truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language, you
have the 'slight disadvantage' of being off your head. You see a total
stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about his
eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an honest man's
door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come home
with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet with the distance we
have to go, we shall be late for dinner.”
Basil's eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.
“I thought,” he said, “that I had outlived vanity.”
“What do you want now?” I cried.
“I want,” he cried out, “what a girl wants when she wears her new frock;
I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a
monitor—I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right
about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say it

cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend Beaumont.
He is a delightful man to know.”
“Do you really mean—?” I began.
“I will apologize,” he said calmly, “for our not being dressed for a call,”
and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark stone steps
and rang at the bell.
A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving
my friend's name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to respect.
We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly but that our
host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet us.
“My dear fellow,” he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again, “I have
not seen you for years. Have you been—er—” he said, rather wildly, “have
you been in the country?”
“Not for all that time,” answered Basil, smiling. “I have long given up
my official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a deliberate
retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment.”
“An inopportune moment,” cried the ardent gentleman. “You come at the
most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?”
“I do not,” answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of
laughter came from the inner room.
“Basil,” said Lord Beaumont solemnly, “I have Wimpole here.”
“And who is Wimpole?”
“Basil,” cried the other, “you must have been in the country. You must
have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is
Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?”
“As to who Shakespeare was,” answered my friend placidly, “my views
go no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was
Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is—” and his speech also
was cloven with a roar of laughter from within.
“Wimpole!” cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. “Haven't you
heard of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation,
I do not say into an art—for that, perhaps, it always was but into a great art,
like the statuary of Michael Angelo—an art of masterpieces. His repartees,
my good friend, startle one like a man shot dead. They are final; they are—”

Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the
very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of the
inner house into the hall where we were standing.
“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.
“I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it,” exploded the large old
gentleman. “I won't be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like
that. I won't be made a guy. I won't—”
“Come, come,” said Beaumont feverishly. “Let me introduce you. This is
Mr Justice Grant—that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of Sir
Walter Cholmondeliegh.”
“Who has not?” asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet,
eyeing him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary
anger, but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of
his face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart
though corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent
courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show an
unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so
much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.
“I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,” he said gruffly, “to fail
in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in your
house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but that
flashy half-caste jackanapes—”
At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre
air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly enjoying
the intellectual banquet within.
“I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond,” said
Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, “even if you only remember him as a
schoolboy.”
“Perfectly,” said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and
respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter
Cholmondeliegh, he said:
“I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not
going yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you.”
The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal struggle;
then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of obeisance and a

vague utterance of, “If Lady Beaumont... a lady, of course,” he followed the
young man back into the salon. He had scarcely been deposited there half a
minute before another peal of laughter told that he had (in all probability)
been scored off again.
“Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh,” said Beaumont, as
he helped us off with our coats. “He has not the modern mind.”
“What is the modern mind?” asked Grant.
“Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressive—and faces the facts of
life seriously.” At this moment another roar of laughter came from within.
“I only ask,” said Basil, “because of the last two friends of yours who
had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon—this way, if I remember
right.”
“Do you know,” said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, “I can never quite
make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and
sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?”
“No,” said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
drawing-room.
This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon. Two
people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the house,
Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and with the
intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal amusement and
stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at him
with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the
window.
He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from
the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair suggesting
the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man—the
unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North
London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.
“What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole,” said Muriel Beaumont eagerly,
“is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite

philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm sure I
should laugh outright when the thought first came.”
“I agree with Miss Beaumont,” said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
indignation. “If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it difficult
to keep my countenance.”
“Difficult to keep your countenance,” cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
alarm; “oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum.”
Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:
“Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded
tomfooleries?”
“I never talk tomfooleries,” said the other, “without first knowing my
audience.”
Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary
on the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding the
whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very particular
gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house rapturously
listening to Wimpole.
“May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?” asked Grant. “It is
about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us.”
I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this
strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of side room out
of the hall.
“Drummond,” said Basil sharply, “there are a great many good people,
and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind
of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are
wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has also
some common sense. What do you make of Wimpole?”
Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face
became suddenly as red as his moustache.
“I am not a fair judge of him,” he said.
“Why not?” asked Grant.
“Because I hate him like hell,” said the other, after a long pause and
violently.

Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss
Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating. Grant said
quietly:
“But before—before you came to hate him, what did you really think of
him?”
“I am in a terrible difficulty,” said the young man, and his voice told us,
like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. “If I spoke about him as I feel
about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to be able to say
that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But again, the fact is I
didn't. I hate him, that is my private affair. But I also disapprove of him—
really I do believe I disapprove of him quite apart from my private feelings.
When first he came, I admit he was much quieter, but I did not like, so to
speak, the moral swell of him. Then that jolly old Sir Walter
Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this fellow, with his cheap-jack
wit, began to score off the old man in the way he does now. Then I felt that
he must be a bad lot; it must be bad to fight the old and the kindly. And he
fights the poor old chap savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and
kindliness. Take, if you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I
admit that I hate the man because a certain person admires him. But I
believe that apart from that I should hate the man because old Sir Walter
hates him.”
This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the
young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless
worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct
realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I was
sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could not help
referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however nobly disguised
from himself.
In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was
perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.
“In the name of God, let's get away.”
I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected
me. I only know that for some reason or other he so affected me that I was,
within a few minutes, in the street outside.
“This,” he said, “is a beastly but amusing affair.”

“What is?” I asked, baldly enough.
“This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have
just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very night, at which Mr
Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very extraordinary
about that. The extraordinary thing is that we are not going.”
“Well, really,” I said, “it is already six o'clock and I doubt if we could get
home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the fact that we are not
going.”
“Don't you?” said Grant. “I'll bet you'll see something extraordinary in
what we're doing instead.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Doing instead?” I asked. “What are we doing instead?”
“Why,” said he, “we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house
on a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is only to
show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this cigar, wait
until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole have left this
house?”
“Certainly,” I said. “But I do not know which is likely to leave first. Have
you any notion?”
“No,” he said. “Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again, Mr
Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is a thing to be flung
behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some time to
analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will both have to leave within
reasonable time, for they will both have to get dressed and come back to
dinner here tonight.”
As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house
drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened that we really
had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh came out at
the same moment.
They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt;
then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of them, made Sir
Walter smile and say: “The night is foggy. Pray take my cab.”
Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with
both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had hissed in my
ear:

“Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog—run.”
We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but we are
running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at the fork
of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away rejoicing,
having just come in contact with the more generous among the rich. Then
the two men talked together as men do talk together after giving and
receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to forgiveness or a duel—
at least so it seemed as we watched it from ten yards off. Then the two men
shook hands heartily, and one went down one fork of the road and one
down another.
Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.
“Run after that scoundrel,” he cried; “let us catch him now.”
We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.
“Stop!” I shouted wildly to Grant. “That's the wrong turning.”
He ran on.
“Idiot!” I howled. “Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has slipped
us. He's half a mile down the other road. You're wrong... Are you deaf?
You're wrong!”
“I don't think I am,” he panted, and ran on.
“But I saw him!” I cried. “Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It's the
old man... What are you doing? What are we to do?”
“Keep running,” said Grant.
Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old
baronet, whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain
was utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.
“Charlie,” said Basil hoarsely, “can you believe in my common sense for
four minutes?”
“Of course,” I said, panting.
“Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at
once when I say 'Now'. Now!”
We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we got
him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and full-

blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him; when
he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil's
arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street side and
waited. As I say, I had no notion why.
“I am sorry to incommode you,” said Basil calmly out of the darkness;
“but I have made an appointment here.”
“An appointment!” I said blankly.
“Yes,” he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged on
the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. “I have
made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow. An old
friend. Jasper Drummond his name is—you may have met him this
afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the
Beaumonts' dinner is over.”
For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the
darkness. By the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my
mind that the same thing had happened which had happened long ago on
the bench of a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could
imagine no other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old
country gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of wood.
After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the
court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white face of
Jasper Drummond.
“Mr Grant,” he said blankly, “the thing is incredible. You were right; but
what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where dukes and
duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him, that
extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn't say a funny thing. He
didn't say anything at all. What does it mean?”
Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.
“That is what it means,” he said.
Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the
place, jumped back, as from a mouse.
“What?” he said weakly, “... what?”
Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's
breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered state, seemed
to make some effort to retain.

It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As far as
he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or at
least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism. The
greater part of the document had been torn and obliterated in the struggle,
but the termination remained. It ran as follows:
C. Says... Keep countenance.
W. Keep... British Museum.
C. Know whom talk... absurdities.
W. Never talk absurdities without...
“What is it?” cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of final
fury.
“What is it?” replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid chant.
“What is it? It is a great new profession. A great new trade. A trifle
immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy.”
“A new profession!” said the young man with the red moustache vaguely;
“a new trade!”
“A new trade,” repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, “a new
profession! What a pity it is immoral.”
“But what the deuce is it?” cried Drummond and I in a breath of
blasphemy.
“It is,” said Grant calmly, “the great new trade of the Organizer of
Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I have
no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character. He is, like
ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really at all fat; all that
is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and his name is not Cholmondeliegh.
He is a swindler, and a swindler of a perfectly delightful and novel kind. He
hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead up to other people's repartees.
According to a preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of
paper), he says the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client
says the clever things arranged for him. In short, he allows himself to be
scored off for a guinea a night.”
“And this fellow Wimpole—” began Drummond with indignation.

“This fellow Wimpole,” said Basil Grant, smiling, “will not be an
intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and
silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the floor.”
“That fellow,” cried Drummond furiously, “that fellow ought to be in
gaol.”
“Not at all,” said Basil indulgently; “he ought to be in the Club of Queer
Trades.”

Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit
The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been
reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the large
things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of the
last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no
longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell
over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small
things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I
was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections,
was one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when a loud
knock came at the door.
My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me. He
and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in the act of
dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head to come my way,
though we had arranged to go separately. It was a small and confidential
affair at the table of a good but unconventional political lady, an old friend
of his. She had asked us both to meet a third guest, a Captain Fraser, who
had made something of a name and was an authority on chimpanzees. As
Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never seen her, I felt that it
was quite possible that he (with his usual social sagacity) might have
decided to take me along in order to break the ice. The theory, like all my
theories, was complete; but as a fact it was not Basil.
I was handed a visiting card inscribed: “Rev. Ellis Shorter”, and
underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry could
not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, “Asking the favour of
a few moments' conversation on a most urgent matter.”
I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of
God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on my
dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at my
entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He flapped a
plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black gloves; he
flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he flapped his

eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired, white-whiskered
old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type. He said:
“I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come—I can
only say—I can only say in my defence, that I come—upon an important
matter. Pray forgive me.”
I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.
“What I have to say,” he said brokenly, “is so dreadful—it is so dreadful
—I have lived a quiet life.”
I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in
time for dinner. But there was something about the old man's honest air of
bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger and more
tragic than my own.
I said gently: “Pray go on.”
Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old, noticed
my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.
“I'm so sorry,” he said meekly; “I wouldn't have come—but for—your
friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.”
“Major Brown!” I said, with some interest.
“Yes,” said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid shawl
about. “He told me you helped him in a great difficulty—and my difficulty!
Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death.”
I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. “Will it take long, Mr Shorter?” I
asked. “I have to go out to dinner almost at once.”
He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his
moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.
“I have no right, Mr Swinburne—I have no right at all,” he said. “If you
have to go out to dinner, you have of course—a perfect right—of course a
perfect right. But when you come back—a man will be dead.”
And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.
The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and
drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and a
captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this dear,
doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.
“Will you have a cigar?” I said.

“No, thank you,” he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not
smoking cigars was a social disgrace.
“A glass of wine?” I said.
“No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now,” he repeated with that
hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often try to
convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all night
drinking rum-punch. “Not just now, thank you.”
“Nothing else I can get for you?” I said, feeling genuinely sorry for the
well-mannered old donkey. “A cup of tea?”
I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he
drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:
“I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these
excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex”—he threw this in with an
indescribable airiness of vanity—“I have never known such things happen.”
“What things happen?” I asked.
He straightened himself with sudden dignity.
“As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex,” he said, “I have never been forcibly
dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the
character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It
may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before.”
“I have never heard of it,” I said, “as among the duties of a clergyman.
But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
follow you correctly. Dressed up—as what?”
“As an old woman,” said the vicar solemnly, “as an old woman.”
I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make an
old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic, and
I said respectfully:
“May I ask how it occurred?”
“I will begin at the beginning,” said Mr Shorter, “and I will tell my story
with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past eleven this
morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and pay certain
visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the treasurer of our
League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded some business
touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the matter of the rolling

of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very earnest churchwoman,
but permanently bedridden. She is the author of several small works of
devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled (unless my memory misleads me)
Eglantine.”
He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that can
only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation. He had, I
think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the detective stories,
who always sternly require that nothing should be kept back.
“I then proceeded,” he went on, with the same maddening
conscientiousness of manner, “to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course;
Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having
consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I cannot
as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ pipes), I
finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The
Dorcas meetings are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell,
Miss Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in church work, had
very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is entirely under
my wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss Brett, who, as I say, is
very active, I scarcely know any members of it. I had, however, promised to
drop in on them, and I did so.
“When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of course, for
any person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in these matters
of full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and repeat the actual
details of a conversation, particularly a conversation which (though inspired
with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one which did
not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was in fact—er—
mostly about socks. I can, however, remember distinctly that one of the
spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a woollen shawl, who appeared
to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she was introduced to me as Miss
James) remarked that the weather was very changeable. Miss Brett then
offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted, I cannot recall in what words.
Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with white hair. The only other figure in
the group that caught my attention was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat
lady of aristocratic manners, silver hair, and a high voice and colour. She
was the most emphatic member of the party; and her views on the subject of

pinafores, though expressed with a natural deference to myself, were in
themselves strong and advanced. Beside her (although all five ladies were
dressed simply in black) it could not be denied that the others looked in
some way what you men of the world would call dowdy.
“After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did so I
heard something which—I cannot describe it—something which seemed to
—but I really cannot describe it.”
“What did you hear?” I asked, with some impatience.
“I heard,” said the vicar solemnly, “I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with
the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl), the
following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the spot,
and as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them down on a
piece of paper. I believe I have it here.” He fumbled in his breast-pocket,
bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and programmes of village
concerts. “I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James, the following words:
'Now's your time, Bill.'”
He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement,
gravely and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about
his facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.
“This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand
it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should address
another maiden lady as 'Bill'. My experience, as I have said, may be
incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in exclusively
spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But it seemed to me
odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand the
phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time that
the words, 'Now's your time, Bill', were by no means pronounced with that
upper-class intonation which, as I have already said, had up to now
characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation. In fact, the words, 'Now's your
time, Bill', would have been, I fancy, unsuitable if pronounced with that
upper-class intonation.
“I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against the
door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still knitting,

and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was only an
eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended departure.
“I said genially, 'I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
really be going. I have—er—' I stopped here, for the words she had uttered
in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely business-like, were
such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I think, natural and excusable. I
have these words also noted down. I have not the least idea of their
meaning; so I have only been able to render them phonetically. But she
said,” and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly at his papers, “she said: 'Chuck
it, fat 'ead,' and she added something that sounded like 'It's a kop', or
(possibly) 'a kopt'. And then the last cord, either of my sanity or the sanity
of the universe, snapped suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss
Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said: 'Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and
tie 'im up before you start jawin'. You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these
days with this way of doin' things, har lar theater.'
“My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but now,
alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange
female freemasonry. I remembered the witches' Sabbaths. I was just, in my
absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana's
nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The
moment it held me I knew it was not a woman's arm.
“Miss Brett—or what I had called Miss Brett—was standing in front of
me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face. Miss James
was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an attitude so totally
new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a shock. She was kicking
her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her cap on one side. She was a
man. I mean he was a wo—no, that is I saw that instead of being a woman
she—he, I mean—that is, it was a man.”
Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring
to arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed
with a higher fever of nervousness:
“As for Miss Mowbray, she—he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her
arm—that is she had his arm—round her neck—my neck I mean—and I

could not cry out. Miss Brett—that is, Mr Brett, at least Mr something who
was not Miss Brett—had the revolver pointed at me. The other two ladies—
or er—gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag in the background. It was
all clear at last: they were criminals dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To
kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex. But why? Was it to be
Nonconformists?
“The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ''Urry up, 'Arry.
Show the old bloke what the game is, and let's get off.'
“'Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss Brett—I mean the man with the revolver
—'why should we show 'im the game?'
“'If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at the door,
whom they called Bill. 'A man wot knows wot 'e's doin' is worth ten wot
don't, even if 'e's a potty old parson.'
“'Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it
had been Miss Mowbray's). 'Bring out the picture, 'Arry.'
“The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other
two women—I mean men—were turning over baggage, and asked them for
something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room and
held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that display, all
the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.
“It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands of
these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise; but no
more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely
good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional
photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and was relieved
against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no
snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was
that I had never sat for such a photograph. It was a photograph that I had
never had taken.
“I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good
deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the
details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,
my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never
posed so for any photographer.

“'Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver, with ill-
timed facetiousness. 'Parson, prepare to meet your God.' And with this he
slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that part of the
picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair of white whiskers
and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait of an old lady in a quiet
black dress, leaning her head on her hand against the woodland landscape.
The old lady was as like me as one pin is like another. It had required only
the whiskers and the collar to make it me in every hair.
“'Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he shot the
glass back again. 'Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin' to the lady.
Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin' to us, as bein' the
probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the
man who's come to live in these parts, don't you?'
“I nodded.
“'Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, 'that's 'is mother. 'Oo
ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She did,' and he flung his fingers in a general
gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who was exactly like me.
“'Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke out Bill
from the door. 'Look 'ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain't goin' to do you no
'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as for the old
woman's clothes—why, you'll look lovely in 'em.'
“'You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man behind me.
'Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got to see this man Hawker tonight. Maybe
'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne when 'e sees us. Maybe on the
other 'and—'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be dead when we goes away. Maybe not.
But we've got to see 'im. Now as you know, 'e shuts 'isself up and never
opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why and we does. The only
one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded funny
coincidence,' he said, accenting the penultimate, 'it's a very unusual piece of
good luck, but you're 'is mother.'
“'When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his head in a
ruminant manner, 'when I first saw it I said—old Shorter. Those were my
exact words—old Shorter.'
“'What do you mean, you wild creatures?' I gasped. 'What am I to do?'

“'That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver, good-
humouredly; 'you've got to put on those clothes,' and he pointed to a poke-
bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.
“I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I had
no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a loaded pistol. In
five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an old woman—as
somebody else's mother, if you please—and was dragged out of the house
to take part in a crime.
“It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were
closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out towards the
lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that ever
straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every external,
we were six very respectable old ladies of small means, in black dresses and
refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really five criminals and a
clergyman.
“I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as I
walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To cry out, so long as we
were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for the
ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the other
hand, to attempt to stop strangers and explain the situation was impossible,
because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long before I had
persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a story, my
companions would certainly have got off themselves, and in all probability
would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had the misfortune to
be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an inspiration; though a
very terrible one. Had it come to this, that the Vicar of Chuntsey must
pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.
“I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and keeping
pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like step, until at length
I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing under it. I had made up my
mind. Until we reached them we were all equally demure and silent and
swift. When we reached them I suddenly flung myself against the railings
and roared out: 'Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Rule Britannia! Get your 'air cut.
Hoop-la! Boo!' It was a condition of no little novelty for a man in my
position.

“The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled,
drunken old woman that was my travesty. 'Now then, mum,' he began
gruffly.
“'Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear hoarsely.
'Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was frightful to hear the words and see the neatly
shawled old spinster who whispered them.
“I yelled, and yelled—I was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains that
vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our village concerts; I rolled to
and fro like a ninepin about to fall.
“'If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the policeman, 'I shall
have to take 'er up. Drunk and disorderly she is right enough.'
“I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of thing;
but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I had ever heard
of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.
“'When we get you past,' whispered Bill, 'you'll howl louder; you'll howl
louder when we're burning your feet off.'
“I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares
that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting and
horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their poke-bonnets;
the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is
anything so heart-breaking in hell.
“For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions and
the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome the policeman
and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one can describe
anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched suddenly forward
and ran my head into his chest, calling out (if I remember correctly), 'Oh,
crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was at that moment that I remembered most dearly
that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex.
“My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back
of the neck.
“'You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect
imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.
“'Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor friend. We
will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but she is quite a lady
—only eccentric.'

“'She butted me in the stomach,' said the policeman briefly.
“'Eccentricities of genius,' said Sam earnestly.
“'Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed character of
Miss James, 'she wants looking after.' 'She does,' said the policeman, 'but I'll
look after her.'
“'That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. 'She wants her friends. She wants
a particular medicine we've got.'
“'Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, 'no other medicine any
good, constable. Complaint quite unique.'
“'I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal shame, the
Vicar of Chuntsey.
“'Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, 'I don't like the
eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er songs, or 'er 'ead in my
stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the looks of you, I've
seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong 'uns. Who are you?'
“'We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable
dignity. 'Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office
who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If you
choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend, no
doubt you are legally entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have any
legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'
“The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment.
Under cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned for an instant on
me faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the darkness.
When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions on to them, I
had seen the telegraphic look flash from face to face saying that only retreat
was possible now.
“By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute
reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not quit the role of
drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the real case, the
officer would merely have thought that I was slightly recovered and would
have put me in charge of my friends. Now, however, if I liked I might safely
undeceive him.
“But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of the

Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but such
necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many improbable.
Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be drunk. Suppose
people did not all think it was pretence!
“I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that I was
too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly and easily
enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four turnings, he
trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure. At the fourth
turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the street like a
maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was dark. I ran
and ran and ran, and in five minutes' running, found I was gaining. In half
an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and blessed stars, where I tore
off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried them in clean earth.”
The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair. Both
the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on, impressed
me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind these things he
was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed courage and a
sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told his story with many
quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing realism.
“And now—” I began.
“And now,” said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like
servile energy, “and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man
Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said was
real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for reasons that
you perceive. Among other things, they wouldn't believe me. What is to be
done?”
I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.
“My friend Basil Grant,” I said, “is the best man we can go to. He and I
were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?”
“Not at all,” he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd plaid
shawl.
A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's
flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden

staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and scrappy
interior, the white gleam of Basil's shirt-front and the lustre of his fur coat
flung on the wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He was drinking a glass
of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come back from the dinner-
party.
He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter with the
genuine simplicity and respect which he never failed to exhibit in dealing
with any human being. When it was over he said simply:
“Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?”
I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy collector
of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening, that I
glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at Mr Shorter. I
only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, “No.”
Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer
or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the old
clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more and
more from his head.
“You are quite sure, Mr Shorter,” he repeated, “that you don't know
Captain Fraser?”
“Quite,” answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him
returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his tone
when he first entered my presence.
Basil sprang smartly to his feet.
“Then our course is clear,” he said. “You have not even begun your
investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go
together to see Captain Fraser.”
“When?” asked the clergyman, stammering.
“Now,” said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.
The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.
“I really do not think that it is necessary,” he said.
Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again, and
put his hands in his pockets.
“Oh,” he said, with emphasis. “Oh—you don't think it necessary; then,”
and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation, “then, Mr

Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you without your
whiskers.”
And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my life
had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact with an
intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that splendour and
excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived perpetually near the
vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason. And I felt
of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart disease. It
might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a sunset,
smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very moment of delivering a
judgement for the salvation of a fellow creature, Basil Grant had gone mad.
“Your whiskers,” he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. “Give me your
whiskers. And your bald head.”
The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.
“Sit down, Basil,” I implored, “you're a little excited. Finish your wine.”
“Whiskers,” he answered sternly, “whiskers.”
And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for
the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was the quiet
room was turned into something between a pantomime and a pandemonium
by those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables were vaulted with
a noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery scattered in
smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed after the Rev. Ellis
Shorter.
And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last half-
witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in
Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed him to
behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have expected him
to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting would have been
amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old vicar looked like a
sort of farcical fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not seem to be so much
astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of something like
enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the
unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.
At length Shorter was cornered.

“Come, come, Mr Grant,” he panted, “you can't do anything to me. It's
quite legal. And it doesn't do any one the least harm. It's only a social
fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant.”
“I don't blame you, my man,” said Basil coolly. “But I want your
whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?”
“No, no,” said Mr Shorter, laughing, “we provide them ourselves. They
don't belong to Captain Fraser.”
“What the deuce does all this mean?” I almost screamed. “Are you all in
an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter's bald head belong to
Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do
with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.”
“No,” said Grant, “I didn't.”
“Didn't you go to Mrs Thornton's dinner-party?” I asked, staring. “Why
not?”
“Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was
detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”
“In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that
point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.
Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner, and by
the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers
and a plaid shawl.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. “Sit down
all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm in it, and if
Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him from
dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that, eh?”
The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly pulled
off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
“Basil,” I said, “if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?”
He laughed again.
“Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades.
These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking)

are Professional Detainers.”
“And what on earth's that?” I asked.
“It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne,” began he who had once been the
Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no longer
its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of a young
city man. “It is really nothing very important. We are paid by our clients to
detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people whom they want
out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser—” and with that he
hesitated and smiled.
Basil smiled also. He intervened.
“The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted us
both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa, and the
lady with whom we were all to have dined is—er—what is I believe
described as 'the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours with her,
and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our houses so as
to let him have the field to himself.”
“And of course,” said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, “as I had
to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady, I
had to come with something rather hot and strong—rather urgent. It
wouldn't have done to be tame.”
“Oh,” I said, “I acquit you of tameness.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the man respectfully, “always very grateful for any
recommendation, sir.”
The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close
red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil's
admirable Burgundy.
“It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy
from morning till night. I've no doubt you've often knocked up against us
before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you with
hunting stories, when you're burning to be introduced to somebody, he's
from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours, just
when you wanted to go to the Robinsons', she's from our bureau. The
Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.”

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

Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-
Agent
Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation
always burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose
from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who
wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he
was lean and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.
He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a
degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of the
unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There are
inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial civilization,
humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that restless
interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant officer in the
loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in his time, to judge
from his conversation, from partridges to elephants, but his slangier
acquaintances were of opinion that “the moon” had been not unfrequently
amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is a fine one, and
suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.
He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which
consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed spears,
tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a green
umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle,
and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into
every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite undisguised,
tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic gutter boys in
the little grey streets.
I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental
sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as
he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey,
though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness, and
his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged
man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and

not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this fact, like
his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no good.
Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man
admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good
man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells;
they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange smoke
from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which discredit a
person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If Keith's tales were
false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at any rate, every
opportunity of being a scamp.
He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his brother
Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was invariably the case,
we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was a clever young fellow, but
he had that tendency which youth and cleverness, when sharply combined,
so often produce, a somewhat extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and
guilt everywhere, and it was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated
with this boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am
bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at
Basil's opposing him, however banteringly.
I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I could
not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.
“You don't seriously mean, Basil,” I said, “that you think that that fellow
really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad Mullah
and—”
“He has one fault,” said Basil thoughtfully, “or virtue, as you may happen
to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style; he is too
veracious.”
“Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,” said Rupert contemptuously,
“be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all his life in
one ancestral manor.”
“No, he's extremely fond of change of scene,” replied Basil
dispassionately, “and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his chief
trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is that
telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort of
things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they are too

absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if he were
sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.”
“So far from paradox,” said his brother, with something rather like a
sneer, “you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe that
truth is stranger than fiction?”
“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” said Basil placidly.
“For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to
it.”
“Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than anything I ever
heard of,” said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. “Do you, on your soul,
believe in all that about the shark and the camera?”
“I believe Keith's words,” answered the other. “He is an honest man.”
“I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,” said Rupert
cynically.
“I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely
in himself,” I said mildly; “his mode of life—”
Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and
Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his
head.
“I say, Grant,” he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the door,
“I've got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me a
hundred pounds? There's a good chap.”
Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was
sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked up a
quill-pen.
“Shall I cross it?” he asked, opening a cheque-book.
“Really,” began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, “since
Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before his
family, I—”
“Here you are, Ugly,” said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction of
the quite nonchalant officer. “Are you in a hurry?”
“Yes,” replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. “As a matter of fact I want it
now. I want to see my—er—business man.”

Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on the tip
of his tongue to say, inquiringly, “Receiver of stolen goods, perhaps.” What
he did say was:
“A business man? That's rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith.”
Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like ill-
temper:
“He's a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I'm going to see him.”
“Oh, you're going to see a house-agent, are you?” said Rupert Grant
grimly. “Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to go with
you?”
Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a little;
his brow blackened sharply.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “What did you say?”
Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony,
and he answered:
“I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling
along with you to this house-agent's.”
The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.
“Oh, in God's name, come to my house-agent's! Come to my bedroom.
Look under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!” And with a
furious energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of the
room.
Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the
disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation was
certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable unrest,
annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil and I
tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other that we
had both noticed this.
Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets grew
closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser with

mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the figure of
Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a gigantic swagger of
success. At length, at the end of the fourth or fifth lean grey street in that
sterile district, we came suddenly to a halt, the mysterious lieutenant
looking once more about him with a sort of sulky desperation. Above a row
of shutters and a door, all indescribably dingy in appearance and in size
scarce sufficient even for a penny toyshop, ran the inscription: “P.
Montmorency, House-Agent.”
“This is the office of which I spoke,” said Keith, in a cutting voice. “Will
you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about my
welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
business adviser?”
Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.
“If you will excuse me,” he said, clenching his hands behind his back, “I
think I should feel myself justified in—”
“Oh! Come along in,” exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture
of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at his
heels.
P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting
behind a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a
grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black frock-coat,
a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical angle, and looked,
generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as anything could look,
short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch Highlander.
We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he was, did we
look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon something
that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was a ferret.
The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and
steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised for hours
together in his bedroom. He said:
“Mr Montmorency, I think?”

The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment,
picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive into his trousers pocket,
smiled apologetically, and said:
“Sir.”
“You are a house-agent, are you not?” asked Rupert.
To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes
wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present that he
knew.
“A house-agent,” cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were
“burglar”.
“Yes... oh, yes,” said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish
smile. “I am a house-agent... oh, yes.”
“Well, I think,” said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, “that Lieutenant
Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his request.”
Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.
“I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine.”
“Yes, sir,” said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter.
“It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all your suggestions er—about the br—”
“Right,” cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness of
a gunshot. “We needn't bother about all that. If you've done what I told you,
all right.”
And he turned sharply towards the door.
Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
stammering a moment he said: “Excuse me... Mr Keith... there was another
matter... about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried to get all the heating
apparatus possible under the circumstances ... but in winter... at that
elevation...”
“Can't expect much, eh?” said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same
sudden skill. “No, of course not. That's all right, Montmorency. There can't
be any more difficulties,” and he put his hand on the handle of the door.
“I think,” said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, “that Mr
Montmorency has something further to say to you, lieutenant.”
“Only,” said the house-agent, in desperation, “what about the birds?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Rupert, in a general blank.

“What about the birds?” said the house-agent doggedly.
Basil, who had remained throughout the proceedings in a state of
Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a state of
Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.
“Before you go, Lieutenant Keith,” he said. “Come now. Really, what
about the birds?”
“I'll take care of them,” said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long back
turned to us; “they shan't suffer.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you,” cried the incomprehensible house-agent,
with an air of ecstasy. “You'll excuse my concern, sir. You know I'm wild on
wild animals. I'm as wild as any of them on that. Thank you, sir. But there's
another thing...”
The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an indescribable
laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh, the purport of which was
direct and essential, and yet which one cannot exactly express. As near as it
said anything, verbally speaking, it said: “Well, if you must spoil it, you
must. But you don't know what you're spoiling.”
“There is another thing,” continued Mr Montmorency weakly. “Of
course, if you don't want to be visited you'll paint the house green, but—”
“Green!” shouted Keith. “Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won't have
a house of another colour. Green!” and before we could realize anything the
door had banged between us and the street.
Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he spoke
before the echoes of the door died away.
“Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited,” he said.
“What is the matter with him? Is he unwell?”
“Oh, I should think not,” said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. “The
negotiations have been somewhat difficult—the house is rather—”
“Green,” said Rupert calmly. “That appears to be a very important point.
It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin
my companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for
houses by their colour? Do clients write to a house-agent asking for a pink
house or a blue house? Or, to take another instance, for a green house?”
“Only,” said Montmorency, trembling, “only to be inconspicuous.”

Rupert had his ruthless smile. “Can you tell me any place on earth in
which a green house would be inconspicuous?”
The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing
out a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the counter, he said:
“No; I can't.”
“You can't suggest an explanation?”
“No,” said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to
suggest a sudden situation, “I can't. And may I, as a busy man, be excused if
I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in connection
with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to get for you,
sir?”
He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
answered:
“I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has
unduly delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my apparent
impertinence.”
“Not at all, sir,” said the house-agent, taking a South American spider
idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the slope of his desk.
“Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again.”
Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious to face
Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was deserted.
“What do you say now?” cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said
nothing now.
We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself
dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey street
after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely meeting
anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three.
In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly to
thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then into a
crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a knowledge
of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a crowd stirs ever so
slightly it means that there is madness in the heart and core of the mob. It
soon became evident that something really important had happened in the
centre of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front, with the

cunning which is known only to cockneys, and once there we soon learned
the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl concerned with some six
men, and one of them lay almost dead on the stones of the street. Of the
other four, all interesting matters were, as far as we were concerned,
swallowed up in one stupendous fact. One of the four survivors of the brutal
and perhaps fatal scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes
torn to ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other thing,
however, pointed at him in a worse manner. A short sword, or very long
knife, had been drawn out of his elegant walking-stick, and lay in front of
him upon the stones. It did not, however, appear to be bloody.
The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with his
incontrollable and intolerable secret.
“That is the man, constable,” he shouted, pointing at the battered
lieutenant. “He is a suspicious character. He did the murder.”
“There's been no murder done, sir,” said the policeman, with his
automatic civility. “The poor man's only hurt. I shall only be able to take the
names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good eye kept on
them.”
“Have a good eye kept on that one,” said Rupert, pale to the lips, and
pointing to the ragged Keith.
“All right, sir,” said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round of
the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had completed his
task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately connected
with the examination had gone away. He still found, however, one eager-
faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It was Rupert Grant.
“Constable,” he said, “I have a very particular reason for asking you a
question. Would you mind telling me whether that military fellow who
dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address or not?”
“Yes, sir,” said the policeman, after a reflective pause; “yes, he gave me
his address.”
“My name is Rupert Grant,” said that individual, with some pomp. “I
have assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder whether you
would tell me, as a special favour, what address?”
The constable looked at him.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton
Common, near Purley, Surrey.”
“Thank you,” said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as
fast as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to himself.
Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to
breakfast; he contrived, I don't know how, to achieve always the attitude of
the indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when Basil and I
came down we found him ready and restless.
“Well,” he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the
meal. “What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?”
“What do I think of him?” inquired Basil slowly. “I don't think anything
of him.”
“I'm glad to hear it,” said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy that
was somewhat exultant. “I thought you'd come round to my view, but I own
I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man is a
translucent liar and knave.”
“I think,” said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, “that I did
not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of him I meant
grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that he
did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of him,
since you think him a knave. I should say he was glaringly good myself.”
“I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake,” said Rupert,
breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. “What the deuce is the sense
of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our common agreement,
dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who doesn't conceal
his acquaintance with all the blackest and bloodiest scenes on earth. We
take the trouble to follow him to one of his appointments, and if ever two
human beings were plotting together and lying to every one else, he and
that impossible house-agent were doing it. We followed him home, and the
very same night he is in the thick of a fatal, or nearly fatal, brawl, in which
he is the only man armed. Really, if this is being glaringly good, I must
confess that the glare does not dazzle me.”
Basil was quite unmoved. “I admit his moral goodness is of a certain
kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of change and
experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are

mere coincidence or special pleading. It's true he didn't want to talk about
his house business in front of us. No man would. It's true that he carries a
sword-stick. Any man might. It's true he drew it in the shock of a street
fight. Any man would. But there's nothing really dubious in all this. There's
nothing to confirm—”
As he spoke a knock came at the door.
“If you please, sir,” said the landlady, with an alarmed air, “there's a
policeman wants to see you.”
“Show him in,” said Basil, amid the blank silence.
The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost
as soon as he appeared there.
“I think one of you gentlemen,” he said, curtly but respectfully, “was
present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew my attention very
strongly to a particular man.”
Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.
“A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn
in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith.”
“This is amusing,” said Basil, laughing. “I was in the very act of clearing
that poor officer's character of rather fanciful aspersions. What about him?”
“Well, sir,” said the constable, “I took all the men's addresses and had
them all watched. It wasn't serious enough to do more than that. All the
other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address. The
place doesn't exist.”
The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping
both his thighs.
“Well, by all that's good,” he cried. “This is a sign from heaven.”
“It's certainly very extraordinary,” said Basil quietly, with knitted brows.
“It's odd the fellow should have given a false address, considering he was
perfectly innocent in the—”
“Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer,” cried Rupert, in a sort of
rapture, “I don't wonder you couldn't be a judge. You think every one as
good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful
acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean streets, a

concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false address. That's
what we call glaring goodness.”
“It's certainly very extraordinary,” repeated Basil. And he strolled
moodily about the room. Then he said: “You are quite sure, constable, that
there's no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have really
gone to it and found it was a fraud?”
“It was very simple, sir,” said the policeman, chuckling. “The place he
named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were
down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no such
house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is so near
London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to say nothing of
Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right enough. He was a
clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost England that people
know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a
particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there
isn't.”
Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and
darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered almost for the first
time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather wondered at the
almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his original prejudice
in favour of the wildly questionable lieutenant. At length he said:
“You really searched the common? And the address was really not known
in the district—by the way, what was the address?”
The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but
before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the window in a
perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with the
sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.
“Why, I can tell you that, Basil,” he said graciously as he idly plucked
leaves from a plant in the window. “I took the precaution to get this man's
address from the constable last night.”
“And what was it?” asked his brother gruffly.
“The constable will correct me if I am wrong,” said Rupert, looking
sweetly at the ceiling. “It was: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley,
Surrey.”
“Right, sir,” said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers.

There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few
seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair so suddenly that I
started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his lips had
flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic laughter
struck and shook the ceiling—laughter that shook the laughter, laughter
redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not stop.
Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with
laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this time ill almost
with terror.
“Excuse me,” said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet. “I am
awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also unpractical,
because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down to that place.
The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to know. It's quite out of
proportion to the comparatively small distance.”
“Get down to that place?” I repeated blankly. “Get down to what place?”
“I have forgotten its name,” said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his
pockets as he rose. “Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a
timetable?”
“You don't seriously mean,” cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort
of confusion of emotions. “You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton
Common, do you? You can't mean that!”
“Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?” asked Basil, smiling.
“Why should you?” said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the
plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
“To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,” said Basil Grant. “I
thought you wanted to find him?”
Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on
the floor. “And in order to find him,” he said, “you suggest the admirable
expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know
he can't be.”
The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting
laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on
with a reiterated gesture:
“He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of
St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be in the

Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store cupboard;
but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only one where he
has just been systematically looked for and where we know that he is not to
be found—and that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to
go.”
“Exactly,” said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; “I thought you
might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly here
till I come back.”
It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if they
really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I cannot say
why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished decisively with
his great-coat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with a considerable flurry
of rationality.
“My dear chap,” he cried, “do you really mean that you see any good in
going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten
tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that
came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying
reference in a scrape?”
“Yes,” said Basil, taking out his watch, “and, what's worse, we've lost the
train.”
He paused a moment and then added: “As a matter of fact, I think we
may just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and I
think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich
Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn't be in. But if we
get down by the 5.15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we shall just
catch him.”
“Catch him!” cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. “I wish we could.
Where the deuce shall we catch him now?”
“I keep forgetting the name of the common,” said Basil, as he buttoned
up his coat. “The Elms—what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That's
where we shall find him.”
“But there is no such place,” groaned Rupert; but he followed his brother
downstairs.
We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our
sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and

do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of
the fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was
that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared
the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from our
breakfast table and said: “I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails,”
we should have followed him to the end of the world.
I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this
occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the
strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense
twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the
London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But
if ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human
spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or
Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into
that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It seems to be one of
the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God—such a place was
Buxton Common, near Purley.
There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But it
was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our expedition.
The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional wind-stricken trees
looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless
turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for we
were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left men in bogs
from the beginning. We were three dazed men under the captaincy of a
madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not there in a house
that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at us with a sort of
sickly smile before it died.
Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the gloom
rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell of the windy
common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly Basil stopped
and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the dusk I could just
detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable success.
“Well,” he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
slapping them together, “here we are at last.”
The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms
rocked above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a

sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of
that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
innkeeper standing at an open door.
“How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilization. That notion that
civilization isn't poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till you've really lost
yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers.
Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man that he lights
on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the good red wine,
which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be
drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.”
Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
wind died in the dreary trees.
“You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own
house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth, and
again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good fellow. But
his greatest virtue remains what I said originally.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort
of sanity. “What is his greatest virtue?”
“His greatest virtue,” replied Basil, “is that he always tells the literal
truth.”
“Well, really,” cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger, and
slapping himself like a cabman, “he doesn't seem to have been very literal
or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have you
brought us out to this infernal place?”
“He was too truthful, I confess,” said Basil, leaning against the tree; “too
hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in a little
more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time we went
in. We shall be late for dinner.”
Rupert whispered to me with a white face:
“Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
house?”
“I suppose so,” I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a
cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as strange
as the wind:
“Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?”

“Why, up here,” cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above
our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
“Come up, all of you,” he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a
schoolboy. “Come up. You'll be late for dinner.”
The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a yard
anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them. Thus
occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of footholds
that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I supposed, have
been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.
Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the
waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly
mystical in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant's
staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious voice
above called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after him.
Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the
whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw three
modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible
suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how,
half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer and
all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all probability,
laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us
about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when I thought what
his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly let
go of the tree and fell.
“Swinburne,” said Rupert suddenly, from above, “what are we doing?
Let's get down again,” and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he
too felt the shock of wakening to reality.
“We can't leave poor Basil,” I said. “Can't you call to him or get hold of
him by the leg?”
“He's too far ahead,” answered Rupert; “he's nearly at the top of the
beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks' nests, I suppose.”
We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The
mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind. Then
I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far

from the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw
that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a little in
perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines taper towards the
sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me feel lost in space, like
a falling star.
“Can nothing be done to stop Basil?” I called out.
“No,” answered my fellow climber. “He's too far up. He must get to the
top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again.
Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself.”
“Perhaps he's talking to us,” I said.
“No,” said Rupert, “he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to talk to
himself before; I'm afraid he really is bad tonight; it's a known sign of the
brain going.”
“Yes,” I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was sounding
above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous tones in which he
had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now and
then, up there among the leaves and stars.
After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said,
“My God!” with a violent voice.
“What's the matter—are you hurt?” I cried, alarmed.
“No. Listen to Basil,” said the other in a very strange voice. “He's not
talking to himself.”
“Then he is talking to us,” I cried.
“No,” said Rupert simply, “he's talking to somebody else.”
Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a sudden
burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear the conversational
voice above. I could hear two voices.
Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as before:
“Come up, you fellows. Here's Lieutenant Keith.”
And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard in
our chambers more than once. It called out:
“Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.”
Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in the
branches like a wasps' nest, was protruding the pale face and fierce

moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly Southern air
that belonged to him.
Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily
into the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned, tiny
room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table, and a circular
seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was Basil, who, in the
instant after alighting there, had fallen into an attitude of marmoreal ease as
if he had been there from boyhood; he was smoking a cigar with a slow
pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who looked happy
also, but feverish and doubtful compared with his granite guest. The third
was the little bald-headed house-agent with the wild whiskers, who called
himself Montmorency. The spears, the green umbrella, and the cavalry
sword hung in parallels on the wall. The sealed jar of strange wine was on
the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle in the corner. In the middle of the table
was a magnum of champagne. Glasses were already set for us.
The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot of a
light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild sea.
Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then
Basil spoke.
“You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further
question about the cold veracity of our injured host.”
“I don't quite grasp it all,” said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden glare.
“Lieutenant Keith said his address was—”
“It's really quite right, sir,” said Keith, with an open smile. “The bobby
asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully, that I lived in the elms
on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr
Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses of
this kind. He has a special line in arboreal villas. It's being kept rather quiet
at present, because the people who want these houses don't want them to get
too common. But it's just the sort of thing a fellow like myself, racketing
about in all sorts of queer corners of London, naturally knocks up against.”
“Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?” asked Rupert eagerly,
recovering his ease with the romance of reality.
Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and
nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.

“W-well, yes, sir,” he said. “The fact was—er—my people wanted me
very much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared myself
for anything but natural history and botany and things like that. My poor
parents have been dead some years now, but—naturally I like to respect
their wishes. And I thought somehow that an arboreal villa agency was a
sort of—of compromise between being a botanist and being a house-agent.”
Rupert could not help laughing. “Do you have much custom?” he asked.
“N-not much,” replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith,
who was (I am convinced) his only client. “But what there is—very select.”
“My dear friends,” said Basil, puffing his cigar, “always remember two
facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about any one who is
sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing about any
one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the most likely. The
second is to remember that very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If
Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but
railings in front of it and had written 'The Elms' over it, you wouldn't have
thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply because it was a
great blaring, swaggering lie you would have believed it.”
“Drink your wine, gentlemen,” said Keith, laughing, “for this confounded
wind will upset it.”
We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.

Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor
Chadd
Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was the
reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and talk
not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for that
person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he were always
on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of these chance
acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his life. A few here
and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong
intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of them as if they were
windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goods train or
presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a veterinary
surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another, a mild prebendary with a
white beard and vague views; another, a young captain in the Lancers,
seemingly exactly like other captains in the Lancers; another, a small dentist
from Fulham, in all reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist
from Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these; Basil
had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloak-room about
the right hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of
masculine hysterics, the compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor and
the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and
then dined with each other twice a week until they died. I myself was
another. I had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the
National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about the weather. Then
we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for men always talk
about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total
stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by
resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.
One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was
Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest, if not
the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language. He was
known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man

with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an
unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went
to and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless tea-
shops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He was
never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by the
lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his little
brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There he lived with
three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister demeanour. His life was
happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical students, but one would not
have called it exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred when his
friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a tornado of
conversation.
Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly in
the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember vividly
(for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with them) the
gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange calamity fell
upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class
and type (the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a Radical of
a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical himself, but he was
that more discriminating and not uncommon type of Radical who passes
most of his time in abusing the Radical party. Chadd had just contributed to
a magazine an article called “Zulu Interests and the New Makango
Frontier”, in which a precise scientific report of his study of the customs of
the people of T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain
interferences with these customs both by the British and the Germans. He
was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the lamplight shining on his
spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead, not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil
Grant strode up and down the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high
spirits and his heavy tread.
“It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd,” he was
saying, “it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for all that
you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way of
cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but for all
that you don't understand them as well as I do, who don't know an assegai
from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is
it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always championed by

people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are
benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage. Live no
longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask your sisters. Consult
the librarian of the British Museum. Look at this umbrella.” And he held up
that sad but still respectable article. “Look at it. For ten mortal years to my
certain knowledge you have carried that object under your arm, and I have
no sort of doubt that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never
occurred to you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin—thus—”
And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head, so that
it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase rocking.
Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to the
lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.
“Your mental processes,” he said, “always go a little too fast. And they
are stated without method. There is no kind of inconsistency”—and no
words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the word—“between
valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their stage in the
evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial and requisite to do
so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this concession which I have
just described to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in question is,
nevertheless, so far as we can form any estimate of values in the variety of
cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an inferior evolutionary
stage.”
Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone
like two pallid moons.
Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.
“True,” he said, “there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear. But
there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I am very far from being
certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage, whatever the
blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything stupid or ignorant
about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils in the dark. It seems to
me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be thought a sort of idiot
because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself? Suppose, my dear
Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of
devils in the dark?”
Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paper-knife
and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.

“Beyond all question,” he said, “it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude to the
hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that our civilization is not
or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I apprehend you), is or may
be a retrogression from states identical with or analogous to the state of the
Zulus. Moreover, I shall be inclined to concede that such a proposition is of
the nature, in some degree at least, of a primary proposition, and cannot
adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean, that the primary
proposition of pessimism, or the primary proposition of the non-existence
of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do not conceive you to be
under the impression that you have demonstrated anything more concerning
this proposition than that it is tenable, which, after all, amounts to little
more than the statement that it is not a contradiction in terms.”
Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.
“You don't understand,” he said, “but, on the other hand, as a
compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why you don't object to that
disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I began it when I
began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was that
although you knew more about Zulus in the sense that you are a scientist, I
know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For instance, your
theory of the origin of language, something about its having come from the
formulated secret language of some individual creature, though you
knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its favour, still does not
convince me, because I have a feeling that that is not the way that things
happen. If you ask me why I think so I can only answer that I am a Zulu;
and if you ask me (as you most certainly will) what is my definition of a
Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has climbed a Sussex apple-tree
at seven and been afraid of a ghost in an English lane.”
“Your process of thought—” began the immovable Chadd, but his speech
was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which always in such
families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm and
said:
“James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again.”
The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in such
men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but practical
life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out of the room.

“I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,” said Basil
Grant, “but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the men
who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it not, that
Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper of Asiatic manuscripts?”
The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a great
deal of pathos also. “I believe it's true,” she said. “If it is, it will not only be
great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great deal, but great relief,
which they feel more; relief from worry from a lot of things. James' health
has never been good, and while we are as poor as we are he had to do
journalism and coaching, in addition to his own dreadful grinding notions
and discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or child. I have
often been afraid that unless something of this kind occurred we should
really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe it is practically settled.”
“I am delighted,” began Basil, but with a worried face, “but these red-
tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can't advise you to build
on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I've known men, and good
men like your brother, come nearer than this and be disappointed. Of
course, if it is true—”
“If it is true,” said the woman fiercely, “it means that people who have
never lived may make an attempt at living.”
Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed
look in his eyes.
“Is it true?” asked Basil, with burning eyes.
“Not a bit true,” answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment. “Your
argument was in three points fallacious.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Grant.
“Well,” said the professor slowly, “in saying that you could possess a
knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from—”
“Oh! confound Zulu life,” cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. “I mean,
have you got the post?”
“You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts,” he said,
opening his eye with childlike wonder. “Oh, yes, I got that. But the real
objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me since I
have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose a Zulu

truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it is absolutely
impeded by the facts.”
“I am crushed,” said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's
sister retired to her room, possibly to laugh, possibly not.
It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely
long and tiresome journey from Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may be
our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with Grant) got
down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point
of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very
lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at
table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt if he
would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the top that one
thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in being really urgent
and coercive—a telegram. This he opened with the same heavy distraction
with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he read it he did not
stir a hair or say a word, but something, I know not what, made me feel that
the motionless figure had been pulled together suddenly as strings are
tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I
knew that he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of
cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had drifted
sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under
him and came round to me in two strides.
“What do you make of that?” he said, and flattened out the wire in front
of me.
It ran: “Please come at once. James' mental state dangerous. Chadd.”
“What does the woman mean?” I said after a pause, irritably. “Those
women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he
was born.”
“You are mistaken,” said Grant composedly. “It is true that all sensible
women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that, all
women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don't put it in
telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or God all-
merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at that. If Miss
Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman in a post-office
that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she did it

because it was a matter of life and death, and she can think of no other way
of forcing us to come promptly.”
“It will force us of course,” I said, smiling.
“Oh, yes,” he replied; “there is a cab-rank near.”
Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge,
through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road. Only
as he was opening the gate he spoke.
“I think you will take my word for it, my friend,” he said; “this is one of
the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever
happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization.”
“I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't quite see
it,” I said. “Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a dreamy
somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of the
inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so very
extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul like a spider's
web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes?
Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits
from excitement?”
“It would not be extraordinary in the least,” answered Basil, with
placidity. “It would not be extraordinary in the least,” he repeated, “if the
professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary circumstance to
which I referred.”
“What,” I asked, stamping my foot, “was the extraordinary thing?”
“The extraordinary thing,” said Basil, ringing the bell, “is that he has not
gone mad from excitement.”
The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway
as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be
blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general
sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three black-
clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the catastrophe
from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.
“Sit down, won't you?” said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat
rigid with pain. “I think you had better be told first what has happened.”
Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she
continued, in an even and mechanical voice:

“I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This
morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both
somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out of
the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however, without
it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said, 'Were you
looking for anything I could get?' He did not answer, but this constantly
happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my question, and still he
did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that nothing
but a touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's presence, so I
came round the table towards him. I really do not know how to describe the
sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly, but at the moment it
seemed something enormous, upsetting one's brain. The fact is, James was
standing on one leg.”
Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.
“Standing on one leg?” I repeated.
“Yes,” replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. “He was standing on
the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the toe pointing
downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only answer was to shoot
the leg straight at right angles to the other, as if pointing to the other with
his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.
“'James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened.
James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the other, gave
three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a teetotum the other
way. 'Are you mad?' I cried. 'Why don't you answer me?' He had come to a
standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he always does, with his
lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he remained
a second or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift his left foot
slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the air. I rushed to the
door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on the dreadful hours that
followed. All three of us talked to him, implored him to speak to us with
appeals that might have brought back the dead, but he has done nothing but
hop and dance and kick with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs
belonged to some one else or were possessed by devils. He has never
spoken to us from that time to this.”

“Where is he now?” I said, getting up in some agitation. “We ought not to
leave him alone.”
“Doctor Colman is with him,” said Miss Chadd calmly. “They are in the
garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he can
scarcely go into the street.”
Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the
garden. It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower
beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this
shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of
something natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and
verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a
small, sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I
presume Dr Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a
nervous twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend,
listening with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong
sunlight gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the night
before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious decorum.
But for one thing the figure of this morning might have been the identical
figure of last night. That one thing was that while the face listened
reposefully the legs were industriously dancing like the legs of a
marionette. The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an
indescribable sharpness and incredibility to the prodigy—the prodigy of the
head of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always
happen in broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore
commonplace.
The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat
drearily to the window.
“You know, Adelaide,” she said, “that Mr Bingham from the Museum is
coming again at three.”
“I know,” said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. “I suppose we shall have to tell
him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to
us.”
Grant suddenly turned round. “What do you mean?” he said. “What will
you have to tell Mr Bingham?”
“You know what I shall have to tell him,” said the professor's sister,
almost fiercely. “I don't know that we need give it its wretched name. Do

you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to go on
like that?” And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the garden, the
shining, listening face and the unresting feet.
Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. “When did you
say the British Museum man was coming?” he said.
“Three o'clock,” said Miss Chadd briefly.
“Then I have an hour before me,” said Grant, and without another word
threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk
straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden path
drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood a couple
of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his trousers pocket,
but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.
Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a loud
familiar voice, “Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our inferiors?”
The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to
speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a
friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.
“Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?” Basil continued, still in
the same loud and lucid tone.
Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg, his
expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather sharply.
“Shall we go inside, professor?” he said. “Now you have shown me the
garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go in,” and he
tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the same time
whispering to Grant: “I must ask you not to trouble him with questions.
Most risky. He must be soothed.”
Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:
“Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will endeavour
to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if you will leave
me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour. I want to watch
him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very little to him, and that
little shall be as soothing as—as syrup.”
The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.
“It is rather dangerous for him,” he said, “to be long in the strong sun
without his hat. With his bald head, too.”

“That is soon settled,” said Basil composedly, and took off his own big
hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did not
turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.
The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for some
seconds, with his head on one side like a bird's, and then saying, shortly,
“All right,” strutted away into the house, where the three Misses Chadd
were all looking out from the parlour window on to the garden. They looked
out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without moving, and they saw a
sight which was more extraordinary than madness itself.
Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without
succeeding in making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he
had done this slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large
pencil out of another.
He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away
from him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again.
Thus they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of turf, the
one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a problem, the
other leaping and playing like a child.
After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put the
pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and walking
round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of him.
Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild
morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil in
front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and then drew
up his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his sister had described as
being the first of all his antics. And the moment he had done it Basil Grant
lifted his own leg and held it out rigid before him, confronting Chadd with
the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped his bent leg, and swinging
his weight on to it kicked out the other behind, like a man swimming. Basil
crossed his feet like a saltire cross, and then flung them apart again, giving
a leap into the air. Then before any of the spectators could say a word or
even entertain a thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort
of jig or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two
madmen instead of one.
They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that
they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the garden

with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor Chadd was
in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed about to turn a
cart-wheel, when they were frozen in their follies by the steely voice of
Adelaide Chadd saying, “Mr Bingham of the British Museum.”
Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly
effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable
manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was of
the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some credit
under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a
considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But
neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing
themselves about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.
The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant
stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny
black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them to
the other.
“Dr Colman,” said Basil, turning to him, “will you entertain Professor
Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham,
might I have the pleasure of a few moments' private conversation? My
name is Grant.”
Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was
respectful but a trifle bewildered.
“Miss Chadd will excuse me,” continued Basil easily, “if I know my way
about the house.” And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the back
door into the parlour.
“Mr Bingham,” said Basil, setting a chair for him, “I imagine that Miss
Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence.”
“She has, Mr Grant,” said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort of
compassionate nervousness. “I am more pained than I can say by this
dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should have
happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend a position
which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of course—really, I don't know
what to say. Professor Chadd may, of course, retain—I sincerely trust he
will—his extraordinarily valuable intellect. But I am afraid—I am really

afraid—that it would not do to have the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts
—er—dancing about.”
“I have a suggestion to make,” said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his
chair, drawing it up to the table.
“I am delighted, of course,” said the gentleman from the British Museum,
coughing and drawing up his chair also.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:
“My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd £800 a year until he
stops dancing.”
“Eight hundred a year!” said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted his
mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor—and he raised them with a mild
blue stare. “I think I have not quite understood you. Did I understand you to
say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his present state, in the
Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a year?”
Grant shook his head resolutely.
“No,” he said firmly. “No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought to take
on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely say that until
he stops dancing you ought to pay him £800 Surely you have some general
fund for the endowment of research.”
Mr Bingham looked bewildered.
“I really don't know,” he said, blinking his eyes, “what you are talking
about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a year
for life?”
“Not at all,” cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. “I never said for life.
Not at all.”
“What for, then?” asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct
meekly to tear his hair. “How long is this endowment to run? Not till his
death? Till the Judgement day?”

“No,” said Basil, beaming, “but just what I said. Till he has stopped
dancing.” And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his pockets.
Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and
kept them there.
“Come, Mr Grant,” he said. “Do I seriously understand you to suggest
that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary
simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he
should be paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he is
flinging his boots about in the back yard?”
“Precisely,” said Grant composedly.
“That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?”
“One must stop somewhere,” said Grant. “Of course.”
Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.
“There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant,” he said coldly.
“What you are trying to explain to me may be a joke—a slightly unfeeling
joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your pardon for the
former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite irrelevant to my duties.
The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is a thing
so painful to me that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But it is clear
there is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel went mad it
would sever his connection, I am sorry to say, with the British Museum
Library.”
He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in dramatic
warning, arrested him.
“Stop!” said Basil sternly. “Stop while there is yet time. Do you want to
take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help in the glory of
Europe—in the glory of science? Do you want to carry your head in the air
when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in a great
discovery? Do you want—”
Bingham cut in sharply:
“And if I do want this, Mr Grant—”
“Then,” said Basil lightly, “your task is easy. Get Chadd £800 a year till
he stops dancing.”

With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently to
the door, but in passing out of it found it blocked. Dr Colman was coming
in.
“Forgive me, gentlemen,” he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, “the
fact is, Mr Grant, I—er—have made a most disturbing discovery about Mr
Chadd.”
Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.
“I was afraid so,” he said. “Drink, I imagine.”
“Drink!” echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. “Oh, no,
it's not drink.”
Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and
vague. “Homicidal mania—” he began.
“No, no,” said the medical man impatiently.
“Thinks he's made of glass,” said Bingham feverishly, “or says he's God
—or—”
“No,” said Dr Colman sharply; “the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of
a different character. The awful thing about him is—”
“Oh, go on, sir,” cried Bingham, in agony.
“The awful thing about him is,” repeated Colman, with deliberation, “that
he isn't mad.”
“Not mad!”
“There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy,” said the doctor
shortly; “he hasn't got any of them.”
“But why does he dance?” cried the despairing Bingham. “Why doesn't
he answer us? Why hasn't he spoken to his family?”
“The devil knows,” said Dr Colman coolly. “I'm paid to judge of lunatics,
but not of fools. The man's not mad.”
“What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?” said Mr
Bingham. “Can none get into any kind of communication with him?”
Grant's voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:
“I shall be very happy,” he said, “to give him any message you like to
send.”
Both men stared at him.

“Give him a message?” they cried simultaneously. “How will you give
him a message?”
Basil smiled in his slow way.
“If you really want to know how I shall give him your message,” he
began, but Bingham cried:
“Of course, of course,” with a sort of frenzy.
“Well,” said Basil, “like this.” And he suddenly sprang a foot into the air,
coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on one leg.
His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact that
one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.
“You drive me to it,” he said. “You drive me to betray my friend. And I
will, for his own sake, betray him.”
The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as
of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure. “Anything painful, of
course—” he began.
Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck them all
rigid in their feeble attitudes.
“Idiots!” he cried. “Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James
Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to your miserable
library, with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never seen
that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck casually
behind his spectacles and above his seedy old collar, the face of a man who
might have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is all my
fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I argued against him on
the score of his famous theory about language—the theory that language
was complete in certain individuals and was picked up by others simply by
watching them. I also chaffed him about not understanding things in rough
and ready practice. What has this glorious bigot done? He has answered me.
He has worked out a system of language of his own (it would take too long
to explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own. And he has sworn
that till people understand it, till he can speak to us in this language, he will
not speak in any other. And he shall not. I have understood, by taking
careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others. This shall not be blown
upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall have £800 a year from

somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an infamous war
on a great idea. It is religious persecution.”
Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.
“I thank you, Mr Grant,” he said. “I hope I shall be able to answer for the
source of the £800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my cab?”
“No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham,” said Grant heartily. “I think I
will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden.”
The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
friendly. They were still dancing when I left.

Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old
Lady
The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of interest—
first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he was engaged,
and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of London. His brother
Basil said of him: “His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and
invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him
right.” Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was certainly
curiously supported by one story about him which I think worth telling.
We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight in
summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth were lit
suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had
already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert talking
excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk. Rupert
was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to me the nine
hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective theories. He would go
about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing a conspiracy in a cab
accident, and a special providence in a falling fusee. His suspicions at the
moment were fixed upon an unhappy milkman who walked in front of us.
So arresting were the incidents which afterwards overtook us that I am
really afraid that I have forgotten what were the main outlines of the
milkman's crime. I think it had something to do with the fact that he had
only one small can of milk to carry, and that of that he had left the lid loose
and walked so quickly that he spilled milk on the pavement. This showed
that he was not thinking of his small burden, and this again showed that he
anticipated some other than lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this
(taken in conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed
something else that I have entirely forgotten. I am afraid that I derided this
detailed revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that Rupert Grant, who,
though the best of fellows, had a good deal of the sensitiveness of the
artistic temperament, slightly resented my derision. He endeavoured to take

a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity which he associated with his
profession, but the cigar, I think, was nearly bitten through.
“My dear fellow,” he said acidly, “I'll bet you half a crown that wherever
that milkman comes to a real stop I'll find out something curious.”
“My resources are equal to that risk,” I said, laughing. “Done.”
We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of the
mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some ado
to keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of milk, silver
in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it, he disappeared
down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really believed that the
milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him as having
vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took no hold on
my mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared himself into
the area.
I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post in the
lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps without his can
and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more
elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet
laughing; a not uncommon contradiction in him, denoting excitement.
“My friend,” he said, rubbing his hands, “so much for all your
scepticism. So much for your philistine ignorance of the possibilities of a
romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your prosaic
good nature will have to express itself.”
“What?” I said incredulously, “do you mean to say that you really did
find anything the matter with the poor milkman?”
His face fell.
“Oh, the milkman,” he said, with a miserable affectation at having
misunderstood me. “No, I—I—didn't exactly bring anything home to the
milkman himself, I—”
“What did the milkman say and do?” I said, with inexorable sternness.
“Well, to tell the truth,” said Rupert, shifting restlessly from one foot to
another, “the milkman himself, as far as merely physical appearances went,
just said, 'Milk, Miss,' and handed in the can. That is not to say, of course,
that he did not make some secret sign or some—”

I broke into a violent laugh. “You idiot,” I said, “why don't you own
yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made a secret
sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did nothing
worth mentioning. You own that, don't you?”
His face grew grave.
“Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that the
milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that I was wrong about
him.”
“Then come along with you,” I said, with a certain amicable anger, “and
remember that you owe me half a crown.”
“As to that, I differ from you,” said Rupert coolly. “The milkman's
remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman may have been.
But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I think, as
follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came to a real
stop I should find out something curious.”
“Well?” I said.
“Well,” he answered, “I jolly well have. You just come with me,” and
before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked through the
blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost before I
made any decision.
When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally, as
the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a closed door, shuttered
windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous well in which I
found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me there, and who
stood there with dancing eyes. I was just about to turn back when Rupert
caught me by the elbow.
“Just listen to that,” he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right
hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters of the basement
window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined my head for
a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an
unmistakable human voice.
“Have you been talking to somebody inside?” I asked suddenly, turning
to Rupert.
“No, I haven't,” he replied, with a grim smile, “but I should very much
like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?”

“No, of course not,” I replied.
“Then I recommend you to listen,” said Rupert sharply.
In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a moment
and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which there was a long
lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which took the
form of the words: “When shall I get out? When shall I get out? Will they
ever let me out?” or words to that effect.
“Do you know anything about this?” I said, turning upon Rupert very
abruptly.
“Perhaps you think I am the criminal,” he said sardonically, “instead of
being in some small sense the detective. I came into this area two or three
minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something funny going
on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a woman) was
moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do not know anything
about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my disinherited daughter, or
a member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being wailing
that she can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman and beating
on the shutters with her fists, as she was doing two or three minutes ago, I
think it worth mentioning, that is all.”
“My dear fellow,” I said, “I apologize; this is no time for arguing. What is
to be done?”
Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.
“First of all,” he said, “house-breaking.” And he forced the blade into the
crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap and
glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely
unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead and
opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization which,
though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our breath. Two
large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window itself seemed
suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed against the glass
within, and with increased distinctness, with the increase of the opening
came the words:
“When shall I get out?”
“What can all this be?” I said.

Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing the
ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in it, smaller and
more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he had
done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and
querulous and clear, making the same demand for liberty.
“Can't you get out, madam?” I said, drawing near the hole in some
perturbation.
“Get out? Of course I can't,” moaned the unknown female bitterly. “They
won't let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them I'd call the police.
But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me as
long as they liked only—”
I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick,
incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held my arm hard,
held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to stop me,
but did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment, and in the act
swung slightly round, so that I was facing the supporting wall of the front
door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness like that of Rupert, for a
figure almost as motionless as the pillars of the portico, but unmistakably
human, had put his head out from between the doorposts and was gazing
down into the area. One of the lighted lamps of the street was just behind
his head, throwing it into abrupt darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever
could be seen of his face beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably
staring at us. I must say I thought Rupert's calmness magnificent. He rang
the area bell quite idly, and went on talking to me with the easy end of a
conversation which had never had any beginning. The black glaring figure
in the portico did not stir. I almost thought it was really a statue. In another
moment the grey area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was
opened suddenly and a small and decorous housemaid stood in it.
“Pray excuse me,” said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make
somehow or other at once affable and underbred, “but we thought perhaps
that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don't expect—”
“Not here,” said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of the
menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces.
“Very sad, very sad—the indifference of these people,” said the
philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As we did so
the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.

“Well, what do you make of that?” asked Rupert, slapping his gloves
together when we got into the street.
I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such conditions
I had but one thought.
“Don't you think,” I said a trifle timidly, “that we had better tell your
brother?”
“Oh, if you like,” said Rupert, in a lordly way. “He is quite near, as I
promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall we take a cab?
Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him.”
Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted
look. After a little looking about we discovered Basil Grant with his great
head and his great white hat blocking the ticket-office window. I thought at
first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly
long time about it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing religion with the
booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the hole in his
excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time before he would
talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental fatalism in modern thought,
which had been well typified by some of the official's ingenious but
perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get him to understand that we had
made an astounding discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively,
walking between us up and down the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a
rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington, of the
equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement, and the man
staring from the porch. At length he said:
“If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
careful what you do. It's no good you two going there. To go twice on the
same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would look
worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman who looked
at you looked thoroughly, and will wear, so to speak, your portraits next to
his heart. If you want to find out if there is anything in this without a police
raid I fancy you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see them.”
His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the
house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor of twilight. It
looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it was.
“Do you think it's safe, Basil,” said his brother, pausing, a little pale,
under the lamp, “to go into that place alone? Of course we shall be near

enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do something—something
sudden—or odd. I can't feel it's safe.”
“I know of nothing that is safe,” said Basil composedly, “except, possibly
—death,” and he went up the steps and rang at the bell. When the massive
respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of gaslight in the
gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying our friend inside, we
could not repress a shudder. It had been like the heavy gaping and closing
of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A freshening night breeze began to
blow up the street, and we turned up the collars of our coats. At the end of
twenty minutes, in which we had scarcely moved or spoken, we were as
cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from apprehension than the atmosphere.
Suddenly Rupert made an abrupt movement towards the house.
“I can't stand this,” he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into the
shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the black house front,
and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming out. He was
roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you could have heard every
syllable across the street. Another voice, or, possibly, two voices, were
laughing and talking back at him from within.
“No, no, no,” Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility.
“That's quite wrong. That's the most ghastly heresy of all. It's the soul, my
dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When you see a
cosmic force you don't like, trick it, my boy. But I must really be off.”
“Come and pitch into us again,” came the laughing voice from out of the
house. “We still have some bones unbroken.”
“Thanks very much, I will—good night,” shouted Grant, who had by this
time reached the street.
“Good night,” came the friendly call in reply, before the door closed.
“Basil,” said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, “what are we to do?”
The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.
“What is to be done, Basil?” I repeated in uncontrollable excitement.
“I'm not sure,” said Basil doubtfully. “What do you say to getting some
dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get
those fellows to come, but they couldn't.”
We stared blankly.

“Go to the Court Theatre?” repeated Rupert. “What would be the good of
that?”
“Good? What do you mean?” answered Basil, staring also. “Have you
turned Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of course.”
“But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!” cried
Rupert. “What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I go
for the police?”
Basil's face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.
“Oh, that,” he said. “I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some mistake,
possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I'm sorry those fellows
couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of these green omnibuses? There
is a restaurant in Sloane Square.”
“I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us,” I said irritably.
“How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a mere private
affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be
private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's drawing-room, would you
think it bad taste to talk about it just as if it was a confounded dado or an
infernal etching?”
Basil laughed heartily.
“That's very forcible,” he said. “As a matter of fact, though, I know it's
all right in this case. And there comes the green omnibus.”
“How do you know it's all right in this ease?” persisted his brother
angrily.
“My dear chap, the thing's obvious,” answered Basil, holding a return
ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. “Those
two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They're not the kind.
Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a paper before the
omnibus comes.”
“Oh, curse the paper!” cried Rupert, in a fury. “Do you mean to tell me,
Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch darkness
in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with the keepers
of it and thought them rather good men?”
“Good men do commit crimes sometimes,” said Basil, taking the ticket
out of his mouth. “But this kind of good man doesn't commit that kind of
crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?”

The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the
dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an
instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it and
been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.
“Basil,” I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, “I simply won't leave
this street and this house.”
“Nor will I,” said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers. “There's
some black work going on there. If I left it I should never sleep again.”
Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.
“Of course if you feel like that,” he said, “we'll investigate further. You'll
find it's all right, though. They're only two young Oxford fellows.
Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this pseudo-Darwinian
business. Ethics of evolution and all that.”
“I think,” said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, “that we shall enlighten
you further about their ethics.”
“And may I ask,” said Basil gloomily, “what it is that you propose to
do?”
“I propose, first of all,” said Rupert, “to get into this house; secondly, to
have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to knock them down,
bind them, gag them, and search the house.”
Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an
instant with one of his sudden laughs.
“Poor little boys,” he said. “But it almost serves them right for holding
such silly views, after all,” and he quaked again with amusement “there's
something confoundedly Darwinian about it.”
“I suppose you mean to help us?” said Rupert.
“Oh, yes, I'll be in it,” answered Basil, “if it's only to prevent your doing
the poor chaps any harm.”
He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking indifferent
and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door opened he
stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.
“So sorry to haunt you like this,” he said. “I met two friends outside who
very much want to know you. May I bring them in?”

“Delighted, of course,” said a young voice, the unmistakable voice of the
Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the decorous little
servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was a short, but shapely
young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a square, snub-nosed face. He
wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some incredible college purple.
“This way,” he said; “mind the steps by the staircase. This house is more
crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish exterior.
There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really.”
“That,” said Rupert, with a savage smile, “I can quite believe.”
We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young
inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines and
books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who stood
with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly, with dead
brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket. He was that particular
type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet
who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.
“Any more arguments?” he said, when introductions had been effected.
“I must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science
such as we. I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet.”
“Bosh,” answered Grant. “I never said a word against eminent men of
science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes
itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and
an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man they
knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand.
Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they think they do
understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an
elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian movement
has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking
unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about
science.”
“That is all very well,” said the big young man, whose name appeared to
be Burrows. “Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or the violin,
can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the rudiments may be
of public use. Greenwood here,” indicating the little man in the blazer,
“doesn't know one note of music from another. Still, he knows something.
He knows enough to take off his hat when they play 'God Save the King'.

He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play 'Oh, Dem Golden
Slippers'. Just in the same way science—”
Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.
Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his
throat, and bent the giant backwards.
“Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne,” he called out, and before I
knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple
blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but I
was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of his feet
from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and then we fell
with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.
My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's voice
finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the beginning.
“... wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and I need
not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one's old friends against the
most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying you up in this
antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be
while...”
I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty hands.
Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows;
how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by
Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave went over his whole frame. An instant
after his head plunged forward like a bull's, and Rupert Grant was slung
head over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him.
Simultaneously the bull's head butted Basil in the chest, bringing him also
to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar, leaped at
me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the waste-paper
basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang furiously to his feet. Basil did
the same. But they had the best of it now.
Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and before
Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments, could even lift
his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room. Defeated even when
we were in a majority, we were now outnumbered. Greenwood and one of

the footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me back into the corner
upon the wreck of the paper basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned
him against the wall. Rupert lifted himself on his elbow, but he was still
dazed.
In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil come
with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.
“Now this,” he said, “is what I call enjoying oneself.”
I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase,
from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To my astonishment
his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child heated by a
favourite game.
I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of me
so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to him. He turned
quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The latter's
head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship, as his
enemies pressed him down. He flung up one hand just as I thought him
falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I afterwards
discovered, of St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded
across the room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome
bodily out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air, so that
it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over like a rolling
ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness broke, and he sank, his enemies
closing over him.
Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he
could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each
other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert
certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor was a
sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense waste-
paper basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the knees in
them, as in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right
through a sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like
some fantastic trouser frill.
Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of Mr
Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in it as
if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad back

swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil, somehow, had
hold of the other. Burrows' huge fists and those of the footman were
battering Basil's sunken head like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant's
ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his own head was forced
slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor was
being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face. Then
suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook together, as the
colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the floor. Basil sprang up with
dancing eyes, and with three blows like battering-rams knocked the
footman into a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows, with one
antimacassar in his hand and another in his teeth, and bound him hand and
foot almost before he knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then
Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and
between them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let go
and turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and, to my
infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other footman, bleeding
at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the room. My late
captor, without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the battle was won.
Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the
pinioned Mr Burrows.
To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.
“And now, gentlemen,” he said, “since you have got your own way,
perhaps you wouldn't mind telling us what the deuce all this is?”
“This,” said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive, “this
is what we call the survival of the fittest.”
Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the end of
it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a handkerchief
round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he sang out quite
coolly:
“Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.”
“All right,” said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way in
an armchair. “Don't hurry for us,” he said, glancing round at the litter of the
room, “we have all the illustrated papers.”

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even
more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed through the
room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice continuing
conversationally:
“And now, Mr Burrows,” he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
“there's no reason why we shouldn't go on with that amusing argument. I'm
sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor, and,
as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there than the man in
the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be
seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were saying, if I
remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of
science might with advantage be made public.”
“Precisely,” said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. “I hold that
nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can
be...”
And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I
noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with
a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all philosophy
and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper
into the under-world of that mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to
us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of
its semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.
The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the
servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with indescribable
rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty apartments. The fifth
was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the
sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.
Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
abyss:
“Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you
captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to
deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are
free.”

For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.
“Has anybody got a match?” said Rupert grimly. “I fancy we have come
pretty near the end of this business.”
I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare, yellow-papered
apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window. An
instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It had,
however, revealed something more practical—an iron gas bracket just
above my head. I struck another match and lit the gas. And we found
ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.
At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room
sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver
hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of
Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of
the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
wood about an hour before.
“Madam,” said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, “permit me to
have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your complaints
happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have
therefore ventured to come to your rescue.”
The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a
moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said,
with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:
“Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say
you had rescued me?”
“Yes, madam,” said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. “We have
very satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have
settled affairs with them very satisfactorily.”
The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.
“What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?” she cried.

“We persuaded them, my dear madam,” said Rupert, laughing, “by
knocking them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?”
To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat
by the window.
“Do I understand,” she said, with the air of a person about to begin
knitting, “that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?”
“We have,” said Rupert proudly; “we have resisted their oppression and
conquered it.”
“Oh, thanks,” answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.
A considerable pause followed.
“The road is quite clear for you, madam,” said Rupert pleasantly.
The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us
for an instant.
“But what about Greenwood and Burrows?” she said. “What did I
understand you to say had become of them?”
“They are lying on the floor upstairs,” said Rupert, chuckling. “Tied hand
and foot.”
“Well, that settles it,” said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into
her seat again, “I must stop where I am.”
Rupert looked bewildered.
“Stop where you are?” he said. “Why should you stop any longer where
you are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?”
“The question rather is,” said the old lady, with composure, “what power
can force me to go anywhere else?”
We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.
At last I said, “Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you here?”
“I suppose you don't intend to tie me up,” she said, “and carry me off? I
certainly shall not go otherwise.”
“But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, “we
heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”
“Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive
grimly. “I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to
myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”

“Some sense of honour?” repeated Rupert, and the last light of
intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with rolling
eyes.
He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet
once more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. “Can we do nothing
for you, madam?” I said forlornly.
“Why,” said the lady, “if you are particularly anxious to do me a little
favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.”
Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague
violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the sitting-
room and scene of battle.
“Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,” Mr Burrows was saying,
lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; “but we must consider the
matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality...”
“Basil,” cried Rupert, gasping, “she won't come out.”
“Who won't come out?” asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in
an argument.
“The lady downstairs,” replied Rupert. “The lady who was locked up.
She won't come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these
fellows loose.”
“And a jolly sensible suggestion,” cried Basil, and with a bound he was
on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds
with hands and teeth.
“A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood.”
In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple
jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as particularly
sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other hand, was heaving
with herculean laughter.
“Well,” said Basil, in his cheeriest way, “I think we must be getting away.
We've so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to stand
on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we've made ourselves at home.
Good night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert.”
“Basil,” said Rupert desperately, “for God's sake come and see what you
can make of the woman downstairs. I can't get the discomfort out of my

mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these
gentlemen won't mind perhaps...”
“No, no,” cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. “No,
no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make a tour of
the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you.”
This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others
which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil Grant,
days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to have gone
mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the end of the day
and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the sky after rain, and a
luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me. But this day's
work was destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we left
that house, ten minutes afterwards, one half-witted touch was added which
rolled all our minds in cloud. If Rupert's head had suddenly fallen off on the
floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of Greenwood's shoulders, we could
scarcely have been more suddenly stricken. And yet of this we had no
explanation. We had to go to bed that night with the prodigy and get up next
morning with it and let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As
will be seen, it was not until months afterwards that by another accident and
in another way it was explained. For the present I only state what happened.
When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading,
the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison again
closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as pitch. The
old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she seemed to have a
weird preference for sitting in the dark.
Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady turned
her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong gaslight. Then,
with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up and swept a sort
of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked quickly at Greenwood and
Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this subservience had been
offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in this subservience, and desired
to see the faces of the tyrants as they received it. To my surprise they did
not seem to have seen it at all: Burrows was paring his nails with a small
penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the group and had hardly entered
the room. And then an amazing fact became apparent. It was Basil Grant
who stood foremost of the group, the golden gaslight lighting up his strong

face and figure. His face wore an expression indescribably conscious, with
the suspicion of a very grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a
restrained bow. It was he who had acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And
it was he, beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really
been directed.
“So I hear,” he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, “I hear,
madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without
success.”
“No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you,” answered the lady
with a high colour. “But you have not found me guilty of treachery.”
“I willingly attest it, madam,” replied Basil, in the same level tones, “and
the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of loyalty that I
permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large discretionary
powers. You would not leave this room at the request of these gentlemen.
But you know that you can safely leave it at mine.”
The captive made another reverence. “I have never complained of your
injustice,” she said. “I need scarcely say what I think of your generosity.”
And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room,
Basil holding the door open for her.
He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. “This will be a
relief to you,” he said.
“Yes, it will,” replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like a
sphinx.
We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as if
we had fallen into it from some high tower.
“Basil,” said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, “I always thought you were
my brother. But are you a man? I mean—are you only a man?”
“At present,” replied Basil, “my mere humanity is proved by one of the
most unmistakable symbols—hunger. We are too late for the theatre in
Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes the
green omnibus!” and he had leaped on it before we could speak.
——————————————————————————————
——————
As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my
room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having

jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the
latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less a thing
than the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and headquarters of
the source of all our joys and sorrows—the Club of Queer Trades. I should
expand this story for ever if I explained how ultimately we ran this strange
entity to its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting things. The
tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of roughs, the
lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below
the cellar, the finding of the subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of
Queer Trades.
I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger one
than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and seemingly
hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and hospitable
dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces that I knew.
There was Mr Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated between
the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who
invented the Dancing Language.
As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their chairs,
and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat gaped at us like
a missing tooth.
“The president's not here,” said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to
Professor Chadd.
“N-no,” said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness. “I
can't imagine where he is.”
“Good heavens,” said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, “I really feel a little
nervous. I'll go and see.” And he ran out of the room.
An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.
“He's there, gentlemen—he's there all right—he's coming in now,” he
cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the beginnings
of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who was the first
member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought indistinctly, could be
maddest in this world of madmen: what fantastic was it whose shadow
filled all these fantastics with so loyal an expectation?

Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled
and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and in
evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.
How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person
particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But on
this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses. Hors-
d'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort of ocean,
larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was over. The
cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon being made of
green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of the moon.
And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and eating and drinking, and
never threw one glance at us to tell us why he was there, the king of these
capering idiots.
At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us,
the time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his feet
amid a surge of songs and cheers.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is a custom in this society that the president for
the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast of sentiment, but by
calling upon each member to give a brief account of his trade. We then
drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It is my business, as the senior
member, to open by stating my claim to membership of this club. Years ago,
gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to do justice and to
administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in my work, as it
was, I was not touching even the fringe of justice. I was seated in the seat of
the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and ermine; nevertheless, I held a small
and lowly and futile post. I had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman,
and my red and gold was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before
me taut and passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend
to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the
time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have been
far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or
a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this grew on me, there
grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous frivolity. Every word
said in the court, a whisper or an oath, seemed more connected with life
than the words I had to say. Then came the time when I publicly

blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and melted from
public life.”
Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I
who were listening with intensity to this statement.
“Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself
privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral differences. Before
very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly secret) had spread
over the whole of society. People were tried before me not for the practical
trifles for which nobody cares, such as committing a murder, or keeping a
dog without a licence. My criminals were tried for the faults which really
make social life impossible. They were tried before me for selfishness, or
for an impossible vanity, or for scandalmongering, or for stinginess to
guests or dependents. Of course these courts had no sort of real coercive
powers. The fulfilment of their punishments rested entirely on the honour of
the ladies and gentlemen involved, including the honour of the culprits. But
you would be amazed to know how completely our orders were always
obeyed. Only lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South
Kensington whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the
means of breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely
refused to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had been
inopportune enough to rescue her.”
Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for
the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the explanation of the old
lady's strange discontent and her still stranger content with her lot. She was
one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court. She was one of the
clients of his Queer Trade.
We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health of
Basil's new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of everything having
been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the presence of
God. We dimly heard Basil say:
“Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance
Agency.”
And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had
made long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it had begun,
like a true cycle.

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