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Title: Four Faultless Felons
Author: G.K. Chesterton
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eBook No.:  0300781.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          May 2003
Date most recently updated: January 2006

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Title: Four Faultless Felons
Author: G.K. Chesterton



CLUE OF THE PRESSMAN

I PROLOGUE OF THE PRESSMAN

MR. ASA LEE PINION, of the Chicago Comet, had crossed half of America,
the whole of the Atlantic, and eventually even Piccadilly Circus, in
pursuit of the notable, if not notorious figure of Count Raoul de
Marillac. Mr. Pinion wanted to get what is called "a story"; a story to
put in his paper. He did get a story, but he did not put it in his paper.
It was too tall a story, even for the Comet. Perhaps the metaphor is true
in more ways than one, and the fable was tall like a church-spire or a
tower among the stars: beyond comprehension as well as belief. Anyhow,
Mr. Pinion decided not to risk his readers' comments. But that is no
reason why the present writer, writing for more exalted, spiritual and
divinely credulous readers, should imitate his silence.

Really, the anecdote he heard was quite incredible: and Mr. Pinion was
not intolerant. While the Count was painting the town red and himself
black, it was quite possible to believe that he was not so black as he
was painted. After all, his extravagance and luxury, however
ostentatious, did no particular harm to anybody but himself; and if he
associated with the dissipated and degraded, he had never been known to
interfere with the innocent or the reputable. But while it was credible
enough that the nobleman was not so black as he was painted, he certainly
could not be quite so white as he was painted, in the wild story that was
told that evening. The story came from a friend of the Count's, much too
friendly a friend, thought Mr. Pinion, friendly to the point of
feeble--mindedness. He supposed it must be a delusion or a hoax; anyhow
he did not put it into his paper. Yet it is because of this highly
improbable anecdote that the Count de Marillac stands at the opening of
this book, to introduce the four stories which were put forth as
parallels to his own.

But there was one fact which struck the journalist as odd even at the
beginning. He understood well enough that it would be difficult to catch
the Count anywhere, as he whirled from one social engagement to another,
in the manner appropriately called "fast". And he was not offended when
Marillac said he could only spare ten minutes at his London club before
going on to a theatrical first--night and other ensuing festivities.
During that ten minutes, however, Marillac was quite polite, answered the
rather superficial society questions which the Comet wanted answered, and
very genially introduced the journalist to three or four club companions
or cronies who were standing about him in the lounge, and who continued
to stand about after the Count himself had made his beaming and flashing
exit.

"I suppose," said one of them, "that the naughty old man has gone to see
the naughty new play with all the naughty new people."

"Yes," grunted a big man standing in front of the fire. "He's gone with
the naughtiest person of all, the author, Mrs. Prague. Authoress, I
suppose she'd call herself--being only cultured and not educated."

"He always goes to the first night of those plays," assented the other.
"P'raps he thinks there won't be a second night, if the police raid the
place."

"What play is it?" asked the American in a gentle voice. He was a quiet
little man with a very long head and a refined falcon profile; he was
much less loud and casual than the Englishmen.

"Naked Souls," said the first man with a faint groan. "Dramatized version
of the world-shaking novel Pan's Pipes. Grapples grimly with the facts of
life."

"Also bold, breezy and back to Nature," said the man by the fire. "We
hear a lot just now about Pan's Pipes. They seem to me a little too like
drain-pipes."

"You see," said the other, "Mrs. Prague is so very Modern, she has to go
back to Pan. She says she cannot bear to believe that Pan is dead."

"I think," said the large man, with a touch of heavy violence, "that Pan
is not only dead but rotting and stinking in the street."

It was the four friends of Marillac who puzzled Mr. Pinion. They were
obviously rather intimate friends, and yet they were not, on the whole,
of the sort likely to be even acquaintances. Marillac himself was much
what might have been expected, rather more restless and haggard than his
handsome portraits might have implied, a thing likely enough with his
late hours and his advancing years. His curly hair was still dark and
thick, but his pointed grey beard was whitening fast; his eyes were a
little hollow, and had a more anxious expression than could be inferred,
at a distance, from his buoyant gestures and rapid walk. All that was
quite in character, but the tone of the group was different. One figure
alone out of the four seemed in some sense of Marillac's world, having
something of the carriage of a military officer, with that fine shade
that suggests a foreign officer. He had a cleanshaven, regular and very
impassive face; he was sitting down when he bowed politely to the
stranger, but something in the bow suggested that, standing up, he would
have clicked his heels. The others were quite English and quite
different. One of them was the very big man, with big shoulders bowed but
powerful and a big head not yet bald but striped with rather thin brown
hair. But the arresting thing about him was that indescribable suggestion
of dust or cobwebs that belongs to a strong man leading a sedentary life,
possibly scientific or scholarly, but certainly obscure, in its method if
not its effect; the sort of middle-class man with a hobby, who seems to
have been dug out of it with a spade. It was hard to imagine a more
complete contradiction to such a meteor of fashion as the Count. The man
next him, though more alert, was equally solid and respectable and free
from fashionable pretensions; a short, square man with a square face and
spectacles, who looked like what he was, an ordinary busy suburban
general practitioner. The fourth of Marillac's incongruous intimates was
quite frankly shabby. Grey seedy clothes hung limply on his lean figure,
and his dark hair and rather ragged beard could, at the best, be only
excused as Bohemian. He had very remarkable eyes, sunk very deep in his
head and yet, by a paradox, standing out like signals. The visitor found
himself continually drawn to them, as if they were magnets.

But, all together, the group bothered and bewildered him. It was not
merely a difference of social class, it was an atmosphere of sobriety and
even of solid work and worth, which seemed to belong to another world.
The four men in question were friendly in a modest and even embarrassed
manner; they fell into conversation with the journalist as with any
ordinary equal in a tram or a tube, and when, about an hour later, they
asked him to share their dinner at the club, he had no such sense of
strain as he might have felt in facing one of the fabulous Luculline
banquets of their friend the Count de Marillac.

For however seriously Marillac might or might not be taking the serious
drama of Sex and Science, there was no doubt that he would take the
dinner even more seriously. He was famous as an epicure of almost the
classic and legendary sort, and all the gourmets of Europe reverenced his
reputation. The little man with the spectacles glanced at this fact,
indeed, as they sat down to dinner: "Hope you can put up with our simple
fare, Mr. Pinion," he said. "You'd have had a much more carefully
selected menu if Marillac had been here."

The American reassured him with polite expressions about the club dinner;
but added: "I suppose it is true that he does make rather an art of
dining?"

"Oh, yes," said the man in spectacles. "Always has all the right things
at the wrong times. That's the ideal, I suppose."

"I suppose he takes a lot of trouble?" said Pinion.

"Yes," said the other. "He chooses his meals very carefully. Not
carefully from my point of view. But then I'm a doctor."

Pinion could not keep his eyes off the magnetic eyes of the man with the
shabby clothes and shaggy hair. Just now the man was gazing across the
table with a curious intentness, and in the ensuing silence, he suddenly
intervened.

"Everybody knows he's very particular in choosing his dinner. But I bet
not one man in a million knows the principle on which he chooses it."

"You must remember," said Pinion, with his soft accent, "that I am a
journalist, and I should like to be the one man in a million."

The man opposite looked at him steadily and rather strangely for a
moment, and then said: "I have half a mind.... Look here, have you any
human curiosity as well as journalistic curiosity? I mean, would the one
man like to know, even if the million never knew?"

"Oh, yes," replied the journalist, "I have plenty of curiosity, even
about things I am told in confidence. But I can't quite see why
Marillac's taste in champagne and ortolans should be so very
confidential."

"Well," answered the other gravely, "why do you think he chooses them?"

"I guess I've got a bromide mind," said the American, "but I should
rather suspect him of choosing the things he likes."

"Au contraire, as the other gourmet said when asked if he lunched on the
boat."

The man with the peculiar eyes broke off from his flippant speech,
plunged for a few moments into profound silence, and then resumed in so
different a tone that it was like another man suddenly speaking at the
table.

"Every age has its bigotry, which is blind to some particular need of
human nature; the Puritans to the need for merriment, the Manchester
School to the need for beauty, and so on. There is a need in man, or at
least in many men, which it is not fashionable to admit or allow for in
these days. Most people have had a touch of it in the more serious
emotions of youth; in a few men it burns like a flame to the last, as it
does here. Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has been
blamed for imposing it, but in fact, it rather regulated and even
restrained the passion than forced it. It exists in all religions, to a
wild and frantic extent in some of the religions of Asia. There men hack
themselves with knives or hang themselves on hooks, or walk through life
with withered arms rigidly uplifted, crucified upon empty air. It is the
appetite for what one does not like. Marillac has it."

"What on earth--" began the startled journalist, but the other continued:
"In short, it is what people call Asceticism, and one of the modern
mistakes is not allowing for its real existence in rare but quite real
people. To live a life of incessant austerity and self-denial, as
Marillac does, is surrounded with extraordinary difficulties and
misunderstandings in modern society. Society can understand some
particular Puritan fad, like Prohibition, especially if it is imposed on
other people, above all, on poor people. But a man like Marillac,
imposing on himself, not abstinence from wine, but abstinence from
worldly pleasures of every sort. ..."

"Excuse me," said Pinion in his most courteous tones, "I trust I'd never
have the incivility to suggest that you have gone mad, so I must ask you
to tell me candidly whether I have."

"Most people," replied the other, "would answer that it is Marillac who
has gone mad. Perhaps he has; anyhow, if the truth were known, he would
certainly be thought so. But it isn't only to avoid being put in a
lunatic asylum that he hides his hermit's ideal by pretending to be a man
of pleasure. It's part of the whole idea, in its only tolerable form. The
worst of those Eastern fakirs hung on hooks is that they are too
conspicuous. It may make them just a little vain. I don't deny that
Stylites and some of the first hermits may have been touched with the
same danger. But our friend is a Christian anchorite; and understands the
advice, 'When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.' He is not
seen of men to fast. On the contrary, he is seen of men to feast. Only,
don't you see, he has invented a new kind of fasting."

Mr. Pinion of the Comet suddenly laughed, a curt and startled laugh, for
he was very quick and had already guessed the joke.

"You don't really mean--" he began.

"Well, it's quite simple, isn't it?" replied his informant. "He feasts on
all the most luxurious and expensive things that he doesn't like.
Especially on the things that he simply detests. Under that cover, nobody
can possibly accuse him of virtue. He remains impenetrably protected
behind a rampart of repulsive oysters and unwelcome aperitifs. In short,
the hermit must now hide anywhere but in the hermitage. He generally
hides in the latest luxurious gilded hotels, because that's where they
have the worst cooking."

"This is a very extraordinary tale," said the American, arching his
eyebrows.

"You begin to see the idea?" said the other. "If he has twenty different
hors-d'oeuvres brought to him and takes the olives, who is to know that
he hates olives? If he thoughtfully scans the whole wine-list and
eventually selects a rather recondite Hock, who will guess that his whole
soul rises in disgust at the very thought of Hock: and that he knows
that's the nastiest--even of Hocks? Whereas, if he were to demand dried
peas or a mouldy crust at the Ritz, he would probably attract attention."

"I never can quite see," said the man in spectacles restlessly, "what is
the good of it all."

The other man lowered his magnetic eyes and looked down with some
embarrassment. At last he said: "I think I can see it, but I don't think
I can say it. I had a touch of it myself once, only in one special
direction, and I found it almost impossible to explain to anybody. Only
there is one mark of the real mystic and ascetic of this sort; that he
only wants to do it to himself. He wants everybody else to have what wine
or smokes they want and will ransack the Ritz for it. The moment he wants
to dragoon the others, the mystic sinks into a mire of degradation and
becomes the moral reformer."

There was a pause, and then the journalist said suddenly: "But, look
here, this won't do. It isn't only wasting his money on wining and dining
that has got Marillac a bad name. It's the whole thing. Why is he such a
fan for these rotten erotic plays and things? Why does he go about with a
woman like Mrs. Prague? That doesn't seem like a hermit, anyhow."

The man facing Pinion smiled and the heavier man on his right half turned
with a sort of grunt of laughter.

"Well," he said, "it's pretty plain you've never been about with Mrs.
Prague."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Pinion; and this time there was something
like a general laugh.

"Some say she's his Maiden Aunt and it's his duty to be kind to her,"
began the first man, but the second man interrupted him gruffly: "Why do
you call her a Maiden Aunt when she looks like a--"

"Quite so, quite so," said the first man rather hastily, "and why 'looks
like'--if it comes to that?"

"But her conversation!" groaned his friend. "And Marillac stands it for
hours on end!"

"And her play!" assented the other. "Marillac sits through five mortal
acts of it. If that isn't being a martyr--"

"Don't you see?" cried the shabby man with something like excitement.
"The Count is a cultivated and even learned man; also he is a Latin and
logical to the point of impatience. And yet he sticks it. He endures five
or six acts of a Really Modern Intellectual Incisive Drama. The First Act
in which she says that Woman will no longer be put on a pedestal; the
Second Act in which Woman will no longer be put under a glass case; the
Third Act in which Woman will no longer be a plaything for man, and the
Fourth in which she will no longer be a chattel; all the cliches. And he
still has two acts before him, in which she will not be something else,
will not be a slave in the home or an outcast flung from the home. He's
seen it six times without turning a hair; you can't even see him grind
his teeth. And Mrs. Prague's conversation! How her first husband could
never understand, and her second husband seemed as if he might
understand, only her third husband carried her off as if there was real
understanding--and so on, as if there were anything to be understood. You
know what an utterly egotistical fool is like. And he suffers even those
fools gladly."

"In fact," put in the big man in his brooding manner, "you might say he
has invented the Modern Penance. The Penance of Boredom. Hair-shirts and
hermits' caves in a howling wilderness would not be so horrible to modern
nerves as that."

"By your account," ruminated Pinion, "I've been chasing a pleasure-seeker
tripping on the light fantastic toe and only found a hermit standing on
his head." After a silence he said abruptly, "Is this really true? How
did you find it out?"

"That's rather a long story," replied the man opposite. "The truth is
that Marillac allows himself one feast in the year, on Christmas Day, and
eats and drinks what he really likes. I found him drinking beer and
eating tripe and onions in a quiet pub in Hoxton, and somehow we were
forced into confidential conversation. You will understand, of course,
that this is a confidential conversation."

"I certainly shan't print it," answered the journalist. "I should be
regarded as a lunatic if I did. People don't understand that sort of
lunacy nowadays, and I rather wonder you take to it so much yourself."

"Well, I put my own case before him, you see," answered the other. "In a
small way it was a little like his own. And then I introduced him to my
friends, and so he became a sort of President of our little club."

"Oh," said Pinion rather blankly, "I didn't know you were a club."

"Well, we are four men with a common bond at least. We have all had
occasion, like Marillac, to look rather worse than we were."

"Yes," grunted the large man rather sourly, "we've all been
Misunderstood. Like Mrs. Prague."

"The Club of Men Misunderstood is rather more cheerful than that,
however," continued his friend. "We are all pretty jolly here,
considering that our reputations have been blasted by black and revolting
crimes. The truth is we have devoted ourselves to a new sort of detective
story--or detective service if you like. We do not hunt for crimes but
for concealed virtues. Sometimes, as in Marillac's case, they are very
artfully concealed. As you will doubtless be justified in retorting, we
conceal our own virtues with brilliant success."

The journalist's head began to go round a little, though he thought
himself pretty well accustomed both to crazy and criminal surroundings.
"But I thought you said," he objected, "that your reputations were
blasted with crime. What sort of crime?"

"Well, mine was murder," said the man next to him. "The people who
blasted me did it because they disapproved of murder, apparently. It's
true I was rather a failure at murder, as at everything else."

Pinion's gaze wandered in some bewilderment to the next man who answered
cheerfully: "Mine was only a common fraud. A professional fraud, too, the
sort that gets you kicked out of your profession sometimes. Rather like
Dr. Cook's sham discovery of the North Pole."

"What does all this mean?" asked Pinion; and he looked inquiringly at the
man opposite, who had done so much of the explaining so far.

"Oh, theft," said the man opposite, indifferently; "the charge on which I
was actually arrested was petty larceny."

There was a profound silence, which seemed to settle in a mysterious
manner, like a gathering cloud, on the figure of the fourth member, who
had not spoken so far a single word. He sat erect in his rather stiff,
foreign fashion; his wooden, handsome face was unchanged and his lips had
never moved even for so much as a murmur. But now, when the sudden and
deep silence seemed to challenge him, his face seemed to harden from wood
to stone and when he spoke at last, his foreign accent seemed something
more than alien, as if it were almost inhuman.

"I have committed the Unpardonable Sin," he said. "For what sin did Dante
reserve the last and lowest hell; the Circle of Ice?" Still no one spoke;
and he answered his own question in the same hollow tone: "Treason. I
betrayed the four companions of my party, and gave them up to the
Government for a bribe."

Something turned cold inside the sensitive stranger, and for the first
time he really felt the air around him sinister and strange. The
stillness continued for another half minute, and then all the four men
burst out into a great uproar of laughter.

The stories they told, to justify their boasts or confessions, are here
retold in a different fashion, as they appeared to those on the outskirts
rather than the centre of the events. But the journalist, who liked to
collect all the odd things of life, was interested enough to record them,
and then afterwards recast them. He felt he had really got something, if
not exactly what he had expected, out of his pursuit of the dashing and
extravagant Count Raoul de Marillac.



THE MODERATE MURDERER

I THE MAN WITH THE GREEN UMBRELLA

THE new Governor was Lord Tallboys, commonly called Top-hat Tallboys,
because of his attachment to that uncanny erection, which he continued to
carry balanced on his head as calmly among the palm-trees of Egypt as
among the lamp-posts of Westminster. Certainly he carried it calmly
enough in lands where few crowns were safe from toppling. The district he
had come out to govern may here be described, with diplomatic vagueness,
as a strip on the edge of Egypt and called for our convenience Polybia.
It is an old story now, but one which many people had reason to remember
for many years, and at the time it was an imperial event. One Governor
was killed, another Governor was nearly killed, but in this story we are
concerned only with one catastrophe, and that was rather a personal and
even private catastrophe.

Top-hat Tallboys was a bachelor and yet he brought a family with him. He
had a nephew and two nieces of whom one, as it happened, had married the
Deputy Governor of Polybia, the man who had been called to rule during
the interregnum after the murder of the previous ruler. The other niece
was unmarried; her name was Barbara Traill, and she may well be the first
figure to cross the stage of this story.

For indeed she was rather a solitary and striking figure, raven dark and
rich in colouring with a very beautiful but rather sullen profile, as she
crossed the sandy spaces and came under the cover of one long low wall
which alone threw a strip of shadow from the sun, which was sloping
towards the desert horizon. The wall itself was a quaint example of the
patchwork character of that borderland of East and West. It was actually
a line of little villas, built for clerks and small officials, and thrown
out as by a speculative builder whose speculations spread to the ends of
the earth. It was a strip of Streatham amid the ruins of Heliopolis. Such
oddities are not unknown, when the oldest countries are turned into the
newest colonies. But in this case the young woman, who was not without
imagination, was conscious of a quite fantastic contrast. Each of these
dolls' houses had its toy shrubs and plants and its narrow oblong of back
garden running down to the common and continuous garden wall; and it was
just outside this wall that there ran the rough path, fringed with a few
hoary and wrinkled olives. Outside the fringe there faded away into
infinity the monstrous solitude of sand. Only there could still be
detected on that last line of distance a faint triangular shape, a sort
of mathematical symbol whose unnatural simplicity has moved all poets and
pilgrims for five thousand years. Anyone seeing it really for the first
time, as the girl did, can hardly avoid uttering a cry: "The Pyramids!"

Almost as she said it a voice said in her ear, not loud but with alarming
clearness and very exact articulation: "The foundations were traced in
blood and in blood shall they be traced anew. These things are written
for our instruction."

It has been said that Barbara Traill was not without imagination; it
would be truer to say that she had rather too much. But she was quite
certain she had not imagined the voice, though she certainly could not
imagine where it came from. She appeared to be absolutely alone on the
little path which ran along the wall and led to the gardens round the
Governorate. Then she remembered the wall itself, and looking sharply
over her shoulder, she fancied she saw for one moment a head peering out
of the shadow of a sycamore, which was the only tree of any size for some
distance, since she had left the last of the low sprawling olives two
hundred yards behind. Whatever it was, it had instantly vanished, and
somehow she suddenly felt frightened, more frightened at its
disappearance than its appearance. She began to hurry along the path to
her uncle's residence at a pace that was a little like a run. It was
probably through this sudden acceleration of movement that she seemed to
become aware, rather abruptly, that a man was marching steadily in front
of her along the same track towards the gates of the Governorate.

He was a very large man, and seemed to take up the whole of the narrow
path. She had something of the sensation, with which she was already
slightly acquainted, of walking behind a camel through the narrow and
crooked cracks of the Eastern town. But this man planted his feet as
firmly as an elephant; he walked, one might say, even with a certain
pomp, as if he were in a procession. He wore a long frock-coat and his
head was surmounted by a tower of scarlet, a very tall red fez, rather
taller than the top-hat of Lord Tallboys. The combination of the red
Eastern cap and the black Western clothes is common enough among the
Effendi class in those countries. But somehow it seemed novel and
incongruous in this case, for the man was very fair and had a big blond
beard blown about in the breeze. He might have been a model for the
idiots who talk of the Nordic type of European, but somehow he did not
look like an Englishman. He carried hooked on one finger a rather
grotesque green umbrella or parasol, which he twirled idly like a
trinket. As he was walking slower and slower and Barbara was walking fast
and wanted to walk faster, she could hardly repress an exclamation of
impatience and something like a request for room to pass. The large man
with the beard immediately faced round and stared at her; then he lifted
a monocle and fixed it in his eye and instantly smiled his apologies. She
realized that he must be short-sighted and that she had been a mere blur
to him a moment before, but there was something else in the change of his
face and manner, something that she had seen before, but to which she
could not put a name.

He explained, with the most formal courtesy, that he was going to leave a
note for an official at the Governorate, and there was really no reason
for her to refuse him credence or conversation. They walked a little way
together, talking of things in general, and she had not exchanged more
than a few sentences before she realized that she was talking to a
remarkable man.

We hear much in these days about the dangers of innocence, much that is
false and a little that is true. But the argument is almost exclusively
applied to sexual innocence. There is a great deal that ought to be said
about the dangers of political innocence. That most necessary and most
noble virtue of patriotism is very often brought to despair and
destruction, quite needlessly and prematurely, by the folly of educating
the comfortable classes in a false optimism about the record and security
of the Empire. Young people like Barbara Traill have often never heard a
word about the other side of the story, as it would be told by Irishmen
or Indians or even French Canadians, and it is the fault of their parents
and their papers if they often pass abruptly from a stupid Britishism to
an equally stupid Bolshevism. The hour of Barbara Traill was come, though
she probably did not know it.

"If England keeps her promises," said the man with the beard, frowning,
"there is still a chance that things may be quiet."

And Barbara had answered, like a schoolboy: "England always keeps her
promises."

"The Waba have not noticed it," he answered with an air of triumph.

The omniscient are often ignorant. They are often especially ignorant of
ignorance. The stranger imagined that he was uttering a very crushing
repartee, as perhaps he was, to anybody who knew what he meant. But
Barbara had never heard of the Waba. The newspapers had seen to that.

"The British Government," he was saying, "definitely pledged itself two
years ago to a complete scheme of local autonomy. If it is a complete
scheme, all will be well. If Lord Tallboys has come out here with an
incomplete scheme, a compromise, it will be very far from well. I shall
be very sorry for everybody, but especially for my English friends."

She answered with a young and innocent sneer, "Oh yes-I suppose you are a
great friend of the English."

"Yes," he replied calmly. "A friend: but a candid friend."

"Oh, I know all about that sort," she said with hot sincerity. "I know
what they mean by a candid friend. I've always found it meant a nasty,
sneering, sneaking, treacherous friend."

He seemed stung for an instant and answered, "Your politicians have no
need to learn treachery from the Egyptians." Then he added abruptly: "Do
you know on Lord Jaffray's raid they shot a child? Do you know anything
at all? Do you even know how England tacked on Egypt to her Empire?"

"England has a glorious Empire," said the patriot stoutly.

"England had a glorious Empire," he said. "So had Egypt."

They had come, somewhat symbolically, to the end of their common path and
she turned away indignantly to the gate that led into the private gardens
of the Governor. As she did so he lifted his green umbrella and pointed
with a momentary gesture at the dark line of the desert and the distant
Pyramid. The afternoon had already reddened into evening, and the sunset
lay in long bands of burning crimson across the purple desolation of that
dry inland sea.

"A glorious Empire," he said. "An Empire on which the sun never sets.
Look . . the sun is setting in blood."

She went through the iron gate like the wind and let it clang behind her.
As she went up the avenue towards the inner gardens, she lost a little of
her impatient movement and began to trail along in the rather moody
manner which was more normal to her. The colours and shadows of that
quieter scene seemed to close about her; this place was for the present
her nearest approach to home, and at the end of the long perspective of
gaily coloured garden walks, she could see her sister Olive picking
flowers.

The sight soothed her; but she was a little puzzled about why she should
need any soothing. She had a deeply disquieting sense of having touched
something alien and terrible, something fierce and utterly foreign, as if
she had stroked some strange wild beast of the desert. But the gardens
about her and the house beyond had already taken on a tone or tint
indescribably English, in spite of the recent settlement and the African
sky. And Olive was so obviously choosing flowers to put into English
vases or to decorate English dinner-tables, with decanters and salted
almonds.

But as she drew nearer to that distant figure, it grew more puzzling. The
blossoms grasped in her sister's hand looked like mere ragged and random
handfuls, torn away as a man lying on the turf would idly tear out grass,
when he is abstracted or angry. A few loose stalks lay littered on the
path; it seemed as if the heads had been merely broken off as if by a
child. Barbara did not know why she took in all these details with a slow
and dazed eye, before she looked at the central figure they surrounded.
Then Olive looked up and her face was ghastly. It might have been the
face of Medea in the garden, gathering the poisonous flowers.

II THE BOY WHO MADE A SCENE

BARBARA TRAILL was a girl with a good deal of the boy about her. This is
very commonly said about modern heroines. None the less, the present
heroine would be a very disappointing modern heroine. For, unfortunately,
the novelists who call their heroines boyish obviously know nothing
whatever about boys. The girl they depict, whether we happen to regard
her as a bright young thing or a brazen little idiot, is at any rate in
every respect the complete contrary of a boy. She is sublimely candid;
she is slightly shallow; she is uniformly cheerful; she is entirely
unembarrassed; she is everything that a boy is not. But Barbara really
was rather like a boy. That is, she was rather shy, obscurely
imaginative, capable of intellectual friendships and at the same time of
emotional brooding over them; capable of being morbid and by no means
incapable of being secretive. She had that sense of misfit which
embarrasses so many boys, the sense of the soul being too big to be seen
or confessed, and the tendency to cover the undeveloped emotions with a
convention. One effect of it was that she was of the sort troubled by
Doubt. It might have been religious doubt, at the moment it was a sort of
patriotic doubt, though she would have furiously denied that there was
any doubt about the matter. She had been upset by her glimpse of the
alleged grievances of Egypt or the alleged crimes of England, and the
face of the stranger, the white face with the golden beard and the
glaring monocle, had come to stand for the tempter or the spirit that
denies. But the face of her sister suddenly banished all such merely
political problems. It brought her back with a shock to much more private
problems, indeed to much more secret problems, for she had never admitted
them to anyone but herself.

The Traills had a tragedy, or rather, perhaps, something that Barbara's
brooding spirit had come to regard as the dawn of a tragedy. Her younger
brother was still a boy; it might more truly be said that he was still a
child. His mind had never come to a normal maturity, and though opinions
differed about the nature of the deficiency, she was prone in her black
moods to take the darkest view and let it darken the whole house of
Tallboys. Thus it happened that she said quickly, at the sight of her
sister's strange expression: "Is anything wrong about Tom?"

Olive started slightly, and then said, rather crossly than otherwise:
"No, not particularly. . . . Uncle has put him with a tutor here, and
they say he's getting on better. . . . Why do you ask? There's nothing
special the matter with him."

"Then I suppose," said Barbara, "that there is something special the
matter with you."

"Well," answered the other, "isn't there something the matter with all of
us?"

With that she turned abruptly and went back towards the house, dropping
the flowers she had been making a pretence of gathering, and her sister
followed, still deeply disturbed in mind.

As they came near the portico and veranda, she heard the high voice of
her uncle Tallboys, who was leaning back in a garden chair and talking to
Olive's husband, the Deputy Governor. Tallboys was a lean figure with a
large nose and ears standing out from his stalk of a head; like many men
of that type he had a prominent Adam's apple and talked in a
full-throated gobbling fashion. But what he said was worth listening to,
though he had a trick of balancing one clause against another, with
alternate gestures of his large, loose hands, which some found a trifle
irritating. He was also annoyingly deaf. The Deputy Governor, Sir Harry
Smythe, was an amusing contrast, a square man with a rather congested
face, the colour high under the eyes, which were very light and clear,
and two parallel black bars of brow and moustache, which gave him rather
a look of Kitchener, until he stood up and looked stunted by the
comparison. It also gave him a rather misleading look of bad temper, for
he was an affectionate husband and a good-humoured comrade, if a rather
stubborn party man. For the rest the conversation was enough to show that
he had a military point of view, which is sufficiently common and even
commonplace.

"In short," the Governor was saying, "I believe the Government scheme is
admirably adapted to meet a somewhat difficult situation. Extremists of
both types will object to it, but extremists object to everything."

"Quite so," answered the other, "the question isn't so much whether they
object as whether they can make themselves objectionable."

Barbara, with her new and nervous political interests, found herself
interrupted in her attempt to listen to the political conversation by the
unwelcome discovery that there were other people present. There was a
very beautifully dressed young gentleman, with hair like black satin, who
seemed to be the local secretary of the Governor; his name was Arthur
Meade. There was an old man with a very obvious chestnut wig and a very
unobvious, not to say inscrutable yellow face, who was an eminent
financier known by the name of Morse. There were various ladies of the
official circle who were duly scattered among these gentlemen. It seemed
to be the tail-end of a sort of afternoon tea, which made all the more
odd and suspicious the strange behaviour of the only hostess, in straying
to the other garden and tearing up the flowers. Barbara found herself set
down beside a pleasant old clergyman with smooth, silver hair, and an
equally smooth, silver  voice, who talked to her about the Bible and the
Pyramids. She found herself committed to the highly uncomfortable
experience of pretending to conduct one conversation while trying to
listen to another.

This was the more difficult because the Rev. Ernest Snow, the clergyman
in question, had (for all his mildness) not a little gentle pertinacity.
She received a confused impression that he held very strong views on the
meaning of certain Prophecies in connection with the end of the world and
especially with the destiny of the British Empire. He had that habit of
suddenly asking questions which is so unkind to the inattentive listener.
Thus, she would manage to hear a scrap of the talk between the two rulers
of the province, the Governor would say, balancing his sentences with his
swaying hands: "There are two considerations and by this method we meet
them both. On the one hand, it is impossible entirely to repudiate our
pledge. On the other hand, it is absurd to suppose that the recent
atrocious crime does not necessarily modify the nature of that pledge. We
can still make sure that our proclamation is a proclamation of a
reasonable liberty. We have therefore decided--"

And then, at that particular moment, the poor clergyman would pierce her
consciousness with the pathetic question: "Now how many cubits do you
think that would be?"

A little while later she managed to hear Smythe, who talked much less
than his companion, say curtly: "For my part, I don't believe it makes
much difference what proclamations you make. There are rows here when we
haven't got sufficient forces, and there are no rows when we have got
sufficient forces. That's all."

"And what is our position at present?" asked the Governor gravely.

"Our position is damned bad, if you ask me," grumbled the other in a low
voice. "Nothing has been done to train the men; why, I found the rifle
practice consisted of a sort of parlour game with a pea-shooter about
twice a year. I've put up proper rifle butts beyond the olive walk there
now, but there are other things. The munitions are not--"

"But in that case," came the mild but penetrating voice of Mr. Snow, "in
that case what becomes of the Shunamites?"

Barbara had not the least idea what became of them, but in this case she
felt she could treat it as a rhetorical question. She forced herself to
listen a little more closely to the views of the venerable mystic, and
she only heard one more fragment of the political conversation.

"Shall we really want all these military preparations?" asked Lord
Tallboys rather anxiously. "When do you think we shall want them?"

"I can tell you," said Smythe with a certain grimness. "We shall want
them when you publish your proclamation of reasonable liberty."

Lord Tallboys made an abrupt movement in the garden chair, like one
breaking up a conference in some irritation; then he made a diversion by
lifting a finger and signalling to his secretary Mr. Meade, who slid up
to him and after a brief colloquy slid into the house. Released from the
strain of State affairs, Barbara fell once more under the spell of the
Church and the Prophetical Office. She still had only a confused idea of
what the old clergyman was saying, but she began to feel a vague element
of poetry in it. At least it was full of things that pleased her fancy
like the dark drawings of Blake, prehistoric cities and blind and stony
seers and kings who seemed clad in stone like their sepulchres the
Pyramids. In a dim way she understood why all that stony and starry
wilderness has been the playground of so many cranks. She softened a
little towards the clerical crank and even accepted an invitation to his
house on the day after the following, to see the documents and the
definite proof about the Shunamites. But she was still very vague about
what it was supposed to prove.

He thanked her and said gravely: "If the prophecy is fulfilled now, there
will be a grave calamity."

"I suppose," she said with a rather dreary flippancy, "if the prophecy
were not fulfilled, it would be an even greater calamity."

Even as she spoke there was a stir behind some of the garden palms and
the pale and slightly gaping face of her brother appeared above the
palm-leaves. The next moment she saw just behind him the secretary and
the tutor; it was evident that his uncle had sent for him. Tom Traill had
the look of being too big for his clothes, which is not uncommon in the
otherwise undeveloped; the gloomy good looks which he would otherwise
have shared with his branch of the family were marred by his dark,
straight hair being brushed crooked and his habit of looking out the
corner of his eye at the corner of the carpet. His tutor was a big man of
a dull and dusty exterior, apparently having the name of Hume. His broad
shoulders were a little bowed like those of a drudge, though he was as
yet hardly middle-aged. His plain and rugged face had a rather tired
expression, as well it might. Teaching the defective is not always a
hilarious parlour game.

Lord Tallboys had a brief and kindly conversation with the tutor. Lord
Tallboys asked a few simple questions. Lord Tallboys gave a little
lecture on education, still very kindly, but accompanied by the waving of
the hands in rotation. On the one hand, the power to work was a necessity
of life and could never be wholly evaded. On the other hand, without a
reasonable proportion of pleasure and repose even work would suffer. On
the one hand . . it was at this point that the Prophecy was apparently
fulfilled and a highly regrettable Calamity occurred at the Governor's
tea-party.

For the boy burst out abruptly into a sort of high, gurgling crow and
began to flap his hands about like the wings of a penguin, repeating over
and over again, "On the one hand. On the other hand. On the one hand. On
the other hand. On the one hand. On the other hand. . . . Golly!"

"Tom!" cried Olive on a sharp accent of agony and there was a ghastly
silence over all the garden.

"Well," said the tutor in a reasonable undertone, which was as clear as a
bell in that stillness, "you can't expect to have three hands, can you?"

"Three hands?" repeated the boy, and then after a long silence, "Why, how
could you?"

"One would have to be in the middle, like an elephant's trunk," went on
the tutor in the same colourless, conversational tone. "Wouldn't it be
nice to have a long nose like an elephant so that you could turn it this
way and that and pick up things on the breakfast-table, and never let go
of your knife and fork?"

"Oh, you're mad!" ejaculated Tom with a sort of explosion that had a
queer touch of exultation.

"I'm not the only mad person in the world, old boy," said Mr. Hume.

Barbara stood staring as she listened to this extraordinary conversation
in that deadly silence and that highly unsuitable social setting. The
most extraordinary thing about it was that the tutor said these crazy and
incongruous things with an absolutely blank face.

"Didn't I ever tell you," he said in the same heavy and indifferent
voice, "about the clever dentist who could pull out his own teeth with
his own nose? I'll tell you tomorrow."

He was still quite dull and serious; but he had done the trick. The boy
was distracted from his dislike of his uncle by the absurd image, just as
a child in a temper is distracted by a new toy. Tom was now only looking
at the tutor and followed him everywhere with his eyes. Perhaps he was
not the only member of his family who did so. For the tutor, Barbara
thought, was certainly a very odd person.

There was no more political talk that day, but there was not a little
political news on the next. On the following morning proclamations were
posted everywhere announcing the just, reasonable and even generous
compromise which His Majesty's Government was now offering as a fair and
final settlement of the serious social problems of Polybia and eastern
Egypt. And on the following evening the news went through the town in one
blast, like the wind of the desert, that Viscount Tallboys, Governor of
Polybia, had been shot down by the last of the line of olives, at the
corner of the wall.

III THE MAN WHO COULD NOT HATE

IMMEDIATELY after leaving the little garden-party, Tom and his tutor
parted for the evening, for the former lived at the Governorate, while
the latter had a sort of lodge or little bungalow higher up on the hill
behind amid the taller trees. The tutor said in private what everybody
had indignantly expected him to say in public, and remonstrated with the
youth for his display of imitative drama.

"Well, I won't like him," said Tom warningly. "I'd like to kill him. His
nose sticks out."

"You can hardly expect it to stick in," said Mr. Hume mildly. "I wonder
whether there's an old story about the man whose nose stuck in."

"Is there?" demanded the other in the literal spirit of infancy.

"There may be tomorrow," replied the tutor and began to climb the steep
path to his abode.

It was a lodge built mostly of bamboo and light timber with a gallery
running round outside, from which could be seen the whole district spread
out like a map. The grey and green squares of the Governorate building
and grounds; the path running straight under the low garden wall and
parallel to the line of villas; the solitary sycamore breaking the line
at one point and farther along the closer rank of the olive-trees, like a
broken cloister, and then another gap and then the corner of the wall,
beyond which spread brown slopes of desert, patched here and there with
green, where the ground was being turfed as part of some new public works
or the Deputy Governor's rapid reforms in military organization. The
whole hung under him like a vast coloured cloud in the brief afterglow of
the Eastern sunset; then it was rapidly rolled in the purple gloom in
which the strong stars stood out over his head and seemed nearer than the
things of earth.

He stood for some moments on the gallery looking down on the darkening
landscape, his blunt features knotted in a frown of curious reflection.
Then he went back into the room where he and his pupil had worked all
day, or where he had worked to induce his pupil to consider the idea of
working. It was a rather bare room and the few objects in it rather odd
and varied. A few bookshelves showed very large and gaily coloured books
containing the verses of Mr. Edward Lear, and very small and shabby books
containing the verses of the principal French and Latin poets. A rack of
pipes, all hanging crooked, gave the inevitable touch of the bachelor; a
fishing-rod and an old double-barrelled gun leaned dusty and disused in a
corner; for it was long ago that this man, in other ways so remote from
the sports of his countrymen, had indulged those two hobbies, chiefly
because they were unsociable. But what was perhaps most curious of all,
the desk and the floor were littered with geometrical diagrams treated in
a manner unusual among geometers, for the figures were adorned with
absurd faces or capering legs, such as a schoolboy adds to the squares
and triangles on the blackboard. But the diagrams were drawn very
precisely, as if the draughtsman had an exact eye and excelled in
anything depending on that organ.

John Hume sat down at his desk and began to draw more diagrams. A little
later he lit a pipe, and began to study those he had drawn, but he did
not leave his desk or his preoccupations. So the hours went by amid an
unfathomable stillness around that hillside hermitage, until the distant
strains of a more or less lively band floated up from below, as a signal
that a dance at the Governorate was already in progress. He knew there
was a dance that night and took no notice of it; he was not sentimental,
but some of the tunes stirred almost mechanical memories. The Tallboys
family was a little old-fashioned, even for this rather earlier time.
They were old-fashioned in not pretending to be any more democratic than
they were. Their dependents were dependents, decently treated; they did
not call themselves liberal because they dragged their sycophants into
society. It had therefore never crossed the mind of the secretary or the
tutor that the dance at the Governorate was any concern of theirs. They
were also old-fashioned in the arrangements of the dance itself, and the
date must also be allowed for. The new dances had only just begun to
pierce, and nobody had dreamed of the wild and varied freedom of our new
fashion, by which a person has to walk about all night with the same
partner to the same tune. All this sense of distance, material and moral,
in the old swaying waltzes moved through his subconsciousness and must be
allowed for in estimating what he suddenly looked up and saw.

It seems for one instant as if, in rising through the mist, the tune had
taken outline and colour and burst into his room with the bodily presence
of a song, for the blues and greens of her patterned dress were like
notes of music and her amazing face came to him like a cry, a cry out of
the old youth he had lost or never known. A princess flying out of
fairyland would not have seemed more impossible than that girl from that
ballroom, though he knew her well enough as the younger sister of his
charge, and the ball was a few hundred yards away. Her face was like a
pale face burning through a dream and itself as unconscious as a
dreamer's, for Barbara Traill was curiously unconscious of that mask of
beauty fixed on her brooding boyish soul. She had been counted less
attractive than her sisters and her sulks had marked her almost as the
ugly duckling. Nothing in the solid man before her told of the shock of
realization in his mind. She did not even smile. It was also
characteristic of her that she blurted out what she had to say at once,
almost as crudely as her brother: "I'm afraid Tom is very rude to you,"
she said. "I'm very sorry. How do you think he is getting on?"

"I think most people would say," he said slowly at last, "that I ought to
apologize for his schooling more than you for his family. I'm sorry about
his uncle, but it's always a choice of evils. Tallboys is a very
distinguished man and can look after his own dignity, but I've got to
look after my charge. And I know that is the right way with him. Don't
you be worried about him. He's perfectly all right if you understand him,
and it's only a matter of making up for lost time."

She was listening, or not listening, with her characteristic frown of
abstraction; she had taken the chair he offered her apparently without
noticing it and was staring at the comical diagrams, apparently without
seeing them. Indeed, it might well have been supposed that she was not
listening at all, for the next remark she made appeared to be about a
totally different subject. But she often had a habit of thus showing
fragments of her mind, and there was more plan in the jigsaw puzzle than
many people understood. Anyhow, she said suddenly, without lifting her
eyes from the ludicrous drawing in front of her: "I met a man going to
the Governorate today. A big man with a long, fair beard and a single
eyeglass. Do you know who he is? He said all sorts of horrid things
against England."

Hume got to his feet with his hands in his pockets and the expression of
one about to whistle. He stared at the girl and said softly: "Hullo! Has
he turned up again? I thought there was some trouble coming. Yes, I know
him-they call him Dr. Gregory, but I believe he comes from Germany,
though he often passes for English. He is a stormy petrel, anyhow; and
wherever he goes there's a row. Some say we ought to have used him
ourselves; I believe he once offered his talents to our Government. He's
a very clever fellow and knows a frightful lot of the facts about these
parts."

"Do you mean," she said sharply, "that I'm to believe that man and all
the things he said?"

"No," said Hume. "I shouldn't believe that man; not even if you believe
all the things he said."

"What do you mean?" she demanded.

"Frankly, I think he is a thoroughly bad egg," said the tutor. "He's got
a pretty rotten reputation about women; I won't go into details, but he'd
have gone to prison twice but for suborning perjury. I only say, whatever
you may come to believe, don't believe in him."

"He dared to say that our Government broke its word," said Barbara
indignantly.

John Hume was silent. Something in his silence affected her like a
strain, and she said quite irrationally: "Oh, for the Lord's sake say
something! Do you know he dared to say that somebody on Lord Jaffray's
expedition shot a child? I don't mind their saying England's cold and
hard and all that; I suppose that's natural prejudice. But can't we stop
these wild, wicked lies?"

"Well," replied Hume rather wearily, "nobody can say that Jaffray is cold
and hard. The excuse for the whole thing was that he was blind drunk."

"Then I am to take the word of that liar!" she said fiercely.

"He's a liar all right," said the tutor gloomily. "And it's a very
dangerous condition of the Press and the public, when only the liars tell
the truth."

Something of a massive gravity in his grim humour for the moment
overpowered her breathless resentment, and she said in a quieter tone:
"Do you believe in this demand for self-government?"

"I'm not very good at believing," he said. "I find it very hard to
believe that these people cannot live or breathe without votes, when they
lived contentedly without them for fifty centuries when they had the
whole country in their own hands. A Parliament may be a good thing; a
top-hat may be a good thing; your uncle certainly thinks so. We may like
or dislike our top-hats. But if a wild Turk tells me he has a natural
born right to a top-hat, I can't help answering: 'Then why the devil
didn't you make one for yourself?'"

"You don't seem to care much for the Nationalists either," she said.

"Their politicians are often frauds, but they're not alone in that.
That's why I find myself forced into an intermediate position, a sort of
benevolent neutrality. It simply seems to be a choice between a lot of
blasted blackguards and a lot of damned drivelling, doddering idiots. You
see I'm a Moderate."

He laughed a little for the first time, and his plain face was suddenly
altered for the better. She was moved to say in a more friendly tone:
"Well, we must prevent a real outbreak. You don't want all our people
murdered."

"Only a little murdered," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I think I should
like some of them rather murdered. Not too much, of course; it's a
question of a sense of proportion."

"Now you're talking nonsense," she said, "and people in our position
can't stand any nonsense. Harry says we may have to make an example."

"I know," he said. "He made several examples when he was in command here,
before Lord Tallboys came out. It was vigorous-very vigorous. But I think
I know what would be better than making an example."

"And what is that?"

"Setting an example," said Hume. "What about our own politicians?"

She said suddenly: "Well, why don't you do something yourself?"

There was a silence. Then he drew a deep breath. "Ah, there you have me.
I can't do anything myself. I am futile; naturally and inevitably futile.
I suffer from a deadly weakness."

She felt suddenly rather frightened; she had encountered his blank and
empty eyes.

"I cannot hate," he said. "I cannot be angry."

Something in his heavy voice seemed full of quality, like the fall of a
slab of stone on a sarcophagus; she did not protest, and in her
subconsciousness yawned a disappointment. She half realized the depth of
her strange reliance and felt like one who had dug in the desert and
found a very deep well, and found it dry.

When she went out on to the veranda the steep garden and plantation were
grey in the moon, and a certain greyness spread over her own spirit, a
mood of fatalism and of dull fear. For the first time she realized
something of what strikes a Western eye in Eastern places as the
unnaturalness of nature. The squat, limbless growth of the prickly pear
was not like the green growths of home, springing on light stalks to
lovely flowers like butterflies captured out of air. It was more like the
dead blind bubbling of some green, squalid slime: a world of plants that
were as plain and flat as stones. She hated the hairy surface of some of
the squat and swollen trees of that grotesque garden; the tufts here and
there irritated her fancy as they might have tickled her face. She felt
that even the big, folded flowers, if they opened, would have a foul
fragrance. She had a latent sense of the savour of faint horror, lying
over all as lightly as the faint moonshine. Just as it had chilled her
most deeply, she looked up and saw something that was neither plant nor
tree, though it hung as still in the stillness, but it had the unique
horror of a human face. It was a very white face, but bearded with gold
like the Greek statues of gold and ivory, and at the temples were two
golden curls, that might have been the horns of Pan.

For the moment that motionless head might indeed have been that of some
terminal god of gardens. But the next moment it had found legs and came
to life, springing out upon the pathway behind her. She had already gone
some distance from the hut and was not far from the illuminated grounds
of the Governorate, whence the music swelled louder as she went.
Nevertheless, she swung round and faced the other way, looking
desperately at the figure she recognized. He had abandoned his red fez
and black frock-coat and was clad completely in white, like many tropical
trippers, but it gave him in the moonlight something of the silver touch
of a spectral harlequin. As he advanced he screwed the shining disk into
his eye and it revealed in a flash the faint memory that had always
escaped her. His face in repose was calm and classic and might have been
the stone mask of Jove rather than Pan. But the monocle gathered up his
features into a sneer and seemed to draw his eyes closer together; and
she suddenly saw that he was no more a German than an Englishman. And
though she had no Anti-Semitic prejudice in particular, she felt somehow
that in that scene there was something sinister in a fair Jew, as in a
white negro.

"We meet under a yet more beautiful sky," he said; she hardly heard what
else he said. Broken phrases from what she had heard recently tumbled
through her mind, mere words like "reputation" and "prison", and she
stepped back to increase the distance, but moving in the opposite
direction from which she had come. Afterwards she hardly remembered what
had happened; he had said other things; he had tried to stop her, and an
instantaneous impression of crushing and startling strength, like a
chimpanzee, surprised her into a cry. Then she stumbled and ran, but not
in the direction of the house of her own people.

Mr. John Hume got out of his chair more quickly than was his wont and
went to meet someone who stumbled up the stair without.

"My dear child," he said, and put a hand on her shaking shoulder, giving
and receiving a queer thrill like a dull electric shock. Then he went,
moving quickly past her. He had seen something in the moonlight beyond
and without descending the steps, sprang over the rail to the ground
below, standing waist-high in the wild and tangled vegetation. There was
a screen of large leaves waving to and fro between Barbara and the rapid
drama that followed, but she saw, as in flashes of moonlight, the tutor
dart across the path of the figure in white and heard the shock of blows
and saw a kick like a catapult. There was a wheel of silver legs like the
arms of the Isle of Man, and then out of the dense depth of the lower
thicket a spout of curses in a tongue that was not English, nor wholly
German, but which shrieked and chattered in all the Ghettoes of the
world. But one strange thing remained even in her disordered memory; that
when the figure in white had risen tottering and turned to plunge down
the hill, the white face and the furious gesture of malediction were
turned, not towards the assailant, but towards the house of the Governor.

The tutor was frowning ponderously as he came again up the veranda steps,
as if over some of his geometrical problems. She asked him rather wildly
what he had done and he answered in his heavy voice: "I hope I half
killed him. You know I am in favour of half measures."

She laughed rather hysterically and cried: "You said you could not be
angry."

Then they suddenly became very stiff and silent and it was with an almost
fatuous formality that he escorted her down the slope to the very doors
of the dancing-rooms. The sky behind the green pergolas of foliage was a
vivid violet or some sort of blue that seemed warmer than any red; and
the furry filaments of the great tree-trunks seemed like the quaint
sea-beasts of childhood, which could be stroked and which unfolded their
fingers. There was something upon them both beyond speech or even
silence. He even went so far as to say it was a fine night.

"Yes," she answered, "it is a fine night"; and felt instantly as if she
had betrayed some secret.

They went through the inner gardens to the gate of the vestibule, which
was crowded with people in uniform and evening dress. They parted with
the utmost formality; and that night neither of them slept.


IV THE DETECTIVE AND THE PARSON

IT was not until the following evening, as already noted, that the news
came that the Governor had fallen by a shot from an unknown hand. And
Barbara Traill received the news later than most of her friends, because
she had departed rather abruptly that morning for a long ramble amid the
ruins and plantations of palm, in the immediate neighbourhood. She took a
sort of picnic basket with her, but light as was her visible luggage, it
would be true to say that she went away to unpack upon a large scale. She
went to unfold a sort of invisible impedimenta which had accumulated in
her memories, especially her memories of the night before. This sort of
impetuous solitude was characteristic of her, but it had an immediate
effect which was rather fortunate in her case. For the first news was the
worst, and when she returned the worst had been much modified. It was
first reported that her uncle was dead; then that he was dying; finally
that he had only been wounded and had every prospect of recovery. She
walked with her empty basket straight into the hubbub of discussion about
these things, and soon found that the police operations for the discovery
and pursuit of the criminal were already far advanced. The inquiry was in
the hands of a hard headed, hatchet-faced officer named Hayter, the chief
of the detective force; who was being actively seconded by young Meade,
the secretary of the Governor. But she was rather more surprised to find
her friend the tutor in the very centre of the group, being questioned
about his own recent experiences.

The next moment she felt a strange sort of surge of subconscious
annoyance, as she realized the subject-matter of the questions. The
questioners were Meade and Hayter; but it was significant that they had
just received the news that Sir Harry Smythe, with characteristic energy,
had arrested Dr. Paulus Gregory, the dubious foreigner with the big
beard. The tutor was being examined about his own last glimpse of that
questionable public character, and Barbara felt a secret fury at finding
the affair of the night before turned into a public problem of police.
She felt as if she had come down in the morning to find the whole
breakfast-table talking about some very intimate dream she had had in the
middle of the night. For though she had carried that picture with her as
she wandered among the tombs and the green thickets, she had felt it as
something as much peculiar to herself as if she had had a vision in the
wilderness. The bland, black-haired Mr. Meade was especially insinuating
in his curiosity. She told herself, in a highly unreasonable fashion,
that she had always hated Arthur Meade.

"I gather," the secretary was saying, "that you have excellent reasons of
your own for regarding this man as a dangerous character."

"I regard him as a rotter and I always did," replied Hume in a rather
sulky and reluctant manner. "I did have a bit of a kick up with him last
night, but it didn't make any difference to my views, nor to his either,
I should think."

"It seems to me it might make a considerable difference," persisted
Meade. "Isn't it true that he went away cursing not only you but
especially the Governor? And he went away down the hill towards the place
where the Governor was shot. It's true he wasn't shot till a good time
after, and nobody seems to have seen his assailant; but he might have
hung about in the woods and then crept out along the wall at dusk."

"Having helped himself to a gun from the gun-tree that grows wild in
these woods, I suppose," said the tutor sardonically. "I swear he had no
gun or pistol on him when I threw him into the prickly pear."

"You seem to be making the speech for the defence," said the secretary
with a faint sneer. "But you yourself said he was a pretty doubtful
character."

"I don't think he is in the least a doubtful character," replied the
tutor in his stolid way. "I haven't the least doubt about him myself. I
think he is a loose, lying, vicious braggart and humbug; a selfish,
sensual mountebank. So I'm pretty sure that he didn't shoot the Governor,
whoever else did."

Colonel Hayter cocked a shrewd eye at the speaker and spoke himself for
the first time.

"Ah-and what do you mean by that exactly?"

"I mean what I say," answered Hume. "It's exactly because he's that sort
of rascal that he didn't commit that sort of rascality. Agitators of his
type never do things themselves; they incite other people; they hold
meetings and send round the hat and then vanish, to do the same thing
somewhere else. It's a jolly different sort of person that's left to take
the risks of playing Brutus or Charlotte Corday. But I confess there are
two other little bits of evidence, which I think clear the fellow
completely."

He put two fingers in his waistcoat pocket and slowly and thoughtfully
drew out a round, flat piece of glass with a broken string.

"I picked this up on the spot where we struggled," he said. "It's
Gregory's eyeglass; and if you look through it you won't see anything,
except the fact that a man who wanted a lens as strong as that could see
next to nothing without it. He certainly couldn't see to shoot as far as
the end of the wall from the sycamore, which is whereabouts they think
the shot must have been fired from."

"There may be something in that," said Hayter, "though the man might have
had another glass, of course. You said you had a second reason for
thinking him innocent."

"The second reason," said Hume, "is that Sir Harry Smythe has just
arrested him."

"What on earth do you mean?" asked Meade sharply. "Why, you brought us
the message from Sir Harry yourself."

"I'm afraid I brought it rather imperfectly," said the other, in a dull
voice. "It's quite true Sir Harry has arrested the doctor, but he'd
arrested him before he heard of the attempt on Lord Tallboys. He had just
arrested him for holding a seditious meeting five miles away at
Pentapolis, at which he made an eloquent speech, which must have reached
its beautiful peroration about the time when Tallboys was being shot at,
here at the corner of the road."

"Good Lord!" cried Meade, staring, "you seem to know a lot about this
business."

The rather sullen tutor lifted his head and looked straight at the
secretary with a steady but rather baffling gaze.

"Perhaps I do know a little about it," he said. "Anyhow, I'm quite sure
Gregory's got a good alibi."

Barbara had listened to this curious conversation with a confused and
rather painful attention; but as the case against Gregory seemed to be
crumbling away, a new emotion of her own began to work its way to the
surface. She began to realize that she had wanted Gregory to be made
responsible, not out of any particular malice towards him, but because it
would explain and dispose of the whole incident, and dismiss it from her
mind along with another disturbing but hardly conscious thought. Now that
the criminal had again become a nameless shadow, he began to haunt her
mind with dreadful hints of identity and she had spasms of fear, in which
that shadowy figure was suddenly fitted with a face.

As has been already noted, Barbara Traill was a little morbid about her
brother and the tragedy of the Traills. She was an omnivorous reader; she
had been the sort of schoolgirl who is always found in a corner with a
book. And this means generally, under modern conditions, that she read
everything she could not understand some time before she read anything
that she could. Her mind was a hotch-potch of popular science about
heredity and psycho-analysis, and the whole trend of her culture tended
to make her pessimistic about everything. People in this mood never have
any difficulty in finding reasons for their worst fears. And it was
enough for her that, the very morning before her uncle was shot, he had
been publicly insulted, and even crazily threatened, by her brother.

That sort of psychological poison works itself deeper and deeper into the
brain. Barbara's broodings branched and thickened like a dark forest; and
did not stop with the thought that a dull, undeveloped schoolboy was
really a maniac and a murderer. The unnatural generalizations of the
books she had read pushed her farther and farther. If her brother, why
not her sister? If her sister, why not herself? Here memory exaggerated
and distorted the distracted demeanour of her sister in the
flower-garden, till she could almost fancy that Olive had torn up the
flowers with her teeth. As is always the case in such unbalanced worry,
all sorts of accidents took on a terrible significance. Her sister had
said, "Is there not something the matter with all of us?" What could that
mean but such a family curse? Hume himself had said he was not the only
mad person present. What else could that mean? Even Dr. Gregory had
declared after talking to her, that her race was degenerate; did he mean
that her family was degenerate? After all, he was a doctor, if he was a
wicked one. Each of these hateful coincidences gave her a spiritual
shock, so that she almost cried aloud when she thought of it. Meanwhile
the rest of her mind went round and round in the iron circle of all such
logic from hell. She told herself again and again that she was being
morbid, and then told herself again and again that she was only morbid
because she was mad. But she was not in the least mad, she was only
young, and thousands of young people go through such a phase of
nightmare, and nobody knows or helps.

But she was moved with a curious impulse in the search for help, and it
was the same impulse that had driven her back across the moonlit glade to
the wooden hut upon the hill. She was actually mounting that hill again,
when she met John Hume coming down.

She poured out all her domestic terrors and suspicions in a flood, as she
had poured out all her patriotic doubts and protests, with a confused
confidence which rested on no defined reason or relation and yet was sure
of itself.

"So there it is," she said at the end of her impetuous monologue. "I
began by being quite sure that poor Tom had done it. But by this time I
feel as if I might have done it myself."

"Well, that's logical enough," agreed Hume. "It's about as sensible to
say that you are guilty as that Tom is. And about as sensible to say the
Archbishop of Canterbury is guilty as either of you."

She attempted to explain her highly scientific guesses about heredity,
and their effect was more marked. They succeeded at least in arousing
this large and slow person to a sort of animation.

"Now the devil take all doctors and scientists," he cried, "or rather the
devil take all novelists and newspaper-men who talk about what even the
doctors don't understand! People abuse the old nurses for frightening
children with bogies which pretty soon became a joke. What about the new
nurses who let children frighten themselves with all the black bogies
they are supposed to take seriously? My dear girl, there is nothing the
matter with your brother, any more than with you. He's only what they
call a protected neurotic, which is their long-winded way of saying he
has an extra skin that the Public School varnish won't stick on, but runs
off like water off a duck's back. So much the better for him, as likely
as not, in the long run. But even suppose he did remain a little more
like a child than the rest of us. Is there anything particularly horrible
about a child? Do you shudder when you think of your dog, merely because
he's happy and fond of you and yet can't do the forty-eighth proposition
of Euclid? Being a dog is not a disease. Being a child is not a disease.
Even remaining a child is not a disease; don't you sometimes wish we
could all remain children?"

She was of the sort that grapples with notions and suggestions one after
another, as they come, and she stood silent, but her mind was busy like a
mill. It was he who spoke again, and more lightly.

"It's like what we were saying about making examples. I think the world
is much too solemn and severe about punishments, it would be far better
if it were ruled like a nursery. People don't want penal servitude and
execution and all the rest. What most people want is to have their ears
boxed or be sent to bed. What fun it would be to take an unscrupulous
millionaire and make him stand in the corner! Such an appropriate
penalty."

When she spoke again there was in her tones something of relief and a
renewed curiosity.

"What do you do with Tom?" she asked, "and what's the meaning of all
those funny triangles?"

"I play the fool," he replied gravely. "What he wants is to have his
attention aroused and fixed, and foolery always does that for children;
very obvious foolery. Don't you know how they have always liked such
images as the cow jumping over the moon? It's the educational effect of
riddles. Well, I have to be the riddle. I have to keep him wondering what
I mean or what I shall do next. It means being an ass, but it's the only
way."

"Yes," she answered slowly, "there's something awfully rousing about
riddles .. all sorts of riddles. Even that old parson with his riddles
out of Revelations makes you feel he has something to live for .. by the
way, I believe we promised to go to tea there this afternoon; I've been
in a state to forget everything."

Even as she spoke she saw her sister Olive coming up the path attired in
the unmistakable insignia of one paying calls, and accompanied by her
sturdy husband, the Deputy Governor, who did not often attend these
social functions.

They all went down the road together and Barbara was vaguely surprised to
see ahead of them on the same road, not only the sleek and varnished
figure of Mr. Meade the secretary, but also the more angular outline of
Colonel Hayter. The clergyman's invitation had evidently been a
comprehensive one.

The Rev. Ernest Snow lived in a very modest manner in one of the little
houses that had been erected in a row for the minor officials of the
Governorate. It was at the back of this line of villas that the path ran
along the garden wall and past the sycamore to the bunch of olives and
finally to the corner where the Governor had fallen by the mysterious
bullet. That path fringed the open desert and had all the character of a
rude, beaten path for the desert pilgrims. But walking on the other side,
in front of the row of houses, a traveller might well have imagined
himself in any London suburb, so regular were the ornamental railings and
so identical the porticos and the small front-garden plots. Nothing but a
number distinguished the house of the clergyman, and the entrance to it
was so prim and narrow that the group of guests from the Governorate had
some difficulty in squeezing through it.

Mr. Snow bowed over Olive's hand with a ceremony that seemed to make his
white hair a ghost of eighteenth-century powder, but also with something
else that seemed at first a shade more difficult to define. It was
something that went with the lowered voice and lifted hand of his
profession at certain moments. His face was composed, but it would almost
seem deliberately composed, and in spite of his grieved tone his eyes
were very bright and steady. Barbara suddenly realized that he was
conducting a funeral, and she was not far out.

"I need not tell you, Lady Smythe," he said in the same soft accents,
"what sympathy we all feel in this terrible hour. If only from a public
standpoint, the death of your distinguished uncle--"

Olive Smythe struck in with a rather wild stare.

"But my uncle isn't dead, Mr. Snow. I know they said so at first, but he
only got a shot in his leg and he is trying to limp about already."

A shock of transformation passed over the clergyman's face, too quick for
most eyes to follow; it seemed to Barbara that his jaw dropped and when
it readjusted itself, it was in a grin of utterly artificial
congratulation.

"My dear lady," he breathed, "for this relief--"

He looked round a little vacantly at the furniture. Whether the Rev.
Ernest Snow had remembered to prepare tea at tea-time, was not yet quite
clear, but the preparations he had made seemed to be of a less assuaging
sort. The little tables were loaded with large books, many of them lying
open, and these were mostly traced with sprawling plans and designs,
mostly architectural or generally archaeological, in some cases
apparently astronomical or astrological, but giving as a whole a hazy
impression of a magician's spells or a library of the black art.

"Apocalyptic studies," he stammered, "a hobby of mine. I believed that my
calculations . . . These things are written for our instruction."

And then Barbara felt a final stab of astonishment and alarm. For two
facts became instantly and simultaneously vivid to her consciousness. The
first was that the Rev. Ernest Snow had been reposing upon the fact of
the Governor's death with something very like a solemn satisfaction, and
had heard of his recovery with something quite other than relief. And the
second was that he spoke with the same voice that had once uttered the
same words, out of the shadow of the sycamore, that sounded in her ears
like a wild cry for blood.


V THE THEORY OF MODERATE MURDER

COLONEL HAYTER, the Chief of the Police, was moving towards the inner
rooms with a motion that was casual but not accidental. Barbara indeed
had rather wondered why such an official had accompanied them on a purely
social visit, and she now began to entertain dim and rather incredible
possibilities. The clergyman had turned away to one of the bookstands and
was turning over the leaves of a volume with feverish excitement; it
seemed almost that he was muttering to himself. He was a little like a
man looking up a quotation on which he has been challenged.

"I hear you have a very nice garden here, Mr. Snow," said Hayter. "I
should rather like to look at your garden."

Snow turned a startled face over his shoulder; he seemed at first unable
to detach his mind from his preoccupation; then he said sharply but a
little shakily, "There's nothing to see in my garden; nothing at all. I
was just wondering--"

"Do you mind if I have a squint at it?" asked Hayter indifferently, and
shouldered his way to the back door. There was something resolute about
his action that made the others trail vaguely after him, hardly knowing
what they did. Hume, who was just behind the detective, said to him in an
undertone: "What do you expect to find growing in the old man's garden?"

Hayter looked over his shoulder with a grim geniality.

"Only a particular sort of tree you were talking of lately," he said.

But when they went out into the neat and narrow strip of back garden, the
only tree in sight was the sycamore spreading over the desert path, and
Barbara remembered with another subconscious thrill that this was the
spot from which, as the experts calculated, the bullet had been fired.

Hayter strode across the lawn and was seen stooping over something in the
tangle of tropical plants under the wall. When he straightened himself
again he was seen to be holding a long and heavy cylindrical object.

"Here is something fallen from the gun-tree you said grew in these
parts," he said grimly. "Funny that the gun should be found in Mr. Snow's
back-garden, isn't it? Especially as it's a double-barrelled gun with one
barrel discharged."

Hume was staring at the big gun in the detective's hand, and for the
first time his usually stolid face wore an expression of amazement and
even consternation.

"Damn it all!" he said softly, "I forgot about that. What a rotten fool I
am!"

Few except Barbara even heard his strange whisper, and nobody could make
any sense of it. Suddenly he swung round and addressed the whole company
aloud, almost as if they were a public meeting.

"Look here," he said, "do you know what this means? This means that poor
old Snow, who is probably still fussing over his hieroglyphics, is going
to be charged with attempted murder."

"It's a bit premature," said Hayter, "and some would say you were
interfering in our job, Mr. Hume. But I owe you something for putting us
right about the other fellow, when I admit we were wrong."

"You were wrong about the other fellow and you are wrong about this
fellow," said Hume, frowning savagely. "But I happened to be able to
offer you evidence in the other case. What evidence can I give now?"

"Why should you have any evidence to give?" asked the other, very much
puzzled.

"Well, I have," said Hume, "and I jolly well don't want to give it." He
was silent for a moment and then broke out in a sort of fury: "Blast it
all, can't you see how silly it is to drag in that silly old man? Don't
you see he'd only fallen in love with his own prophecies of disaster, and
was a bit put off when they didn't come true after all?"

"There are a good many more suspicious circumstances," cut in Smythe
curtly. "There's the gun in the garden and the position of the sycamore."

There was a long silence during which Hume stood with huge hunched
shoulders frowning resentfully at his boots. Then he suddenly threw up
his head and spoke with a sort of explosive lightness.

"Oh, well then, I must give my evidence," he said, with a smile that was
almost gay: "I shot the Governor myself."

There was a stillness as if the place had been full of statues, and for a
few seconds nobody moved or spoke. Then Barbara heard her own voice in
the silence, crying out: "Oh, you didn't!"

A moment later the Chief of Police was speaking with a new and much more
official voice: "I should like to know whether you are joking," he said,
"or whether you really mean to give yourself up for the attempted murder
of Lord Tallboys."

Hume held up one hand in an arresting gesture, almost like a public
speaker. He was still smiling slightly, but his manner had grown more
grave.

"Pardon me," he said. "Pardon me. Let us distinguish. The distinction is
of great value to my self-esteem. I did not try to murder the Governor. I
tried to shoot him in the leg and I did shoot him in the leg."

"What is the sense of all this?" cried Smythe with impatience.

"I am sorry to appear punctilious," said Hume calmly. "Imputations on my
morals I must bear, like other members of the criminal class. But
imputations on my marksmanship I cannot tolerate; it is the only sport in
which I excel." He picked up the double-barrelled gun before they could
stop him and went on rapidly: "And may I draw attention to one technical
point? This gun has two barrels and one is still undischarged. If any
fool had shot Tallboys at that distance and not killed him, don't you
think even a fool would have shot again, if that was what he wanted to
do? Only, you see, it was not what I wanted to do."

"You seem to fancy yourself a lot as a marksman," said the Deputy
Governor rudely.

"Ah, you are sceptical," replied the tutor in the same airy tone. "Well,
Sir Harry, you have yourself provided the apparatus of demonstration, and
it will not take a moment. The targets which we owe to your patriotic
efficiency are already set up, I think, on the slope just beyond the end
of the wall." Before anybody could move he had hopped up on to the low
garden wall, just under the shadow of the sycamore. From that perch he
could see the long line of the butts stretching along the border of the
desert.

"Suppose we say," he said pleasantly, in the tone of a popular lecturer,
"that I put this bullet about an inch inside the white on the second
target."

The group awoke from its paralysis of surprise; Hayter ran forward and
Smythe burst out with: "Of all the damned tomfoolery--"

His sentence was drowned in the deafening explosion, and amid the echoes
of it the tutor dropped serenely from the wall.

"If anybody cares to go and look," he said, "I think he will find the
demonstration of my innocence-not indeed of shooting the Governor, but of
wanting to shoot him anywhere else but where I did shoot him."

There was another silence, and then this comedy of unexpected happenings
was crowned with another that was still more unexpected; coming from the
one person whom everybody had naturally forgotten.

Tom's high, crowing voice was suddenly heard above the crowd.

"Who's going to look?" he cried. "Well, why don't you go and look?"

It was almost as if a tree in the garden had spoken. And indeed the
excitement of events had worked upon that vegetating brain till it
unfolded rapidly, as do some vegetables at the touch of chemistry. Nor
was this all, for the next moment the vegetable had taken on a highly
animal energy and hurled itself across the garden. They saw a whirl of
lanky limbs against the sky as Tom Traill cleared the garden wall and
went plunging away through the sand towards the targets.

"Is this place a lunatic asylum?" cried Sir Harry Smythe, his face still
more congested with colour and a baleful light in his eyes, as if a big
but buried temper was working its way to the surface.

"Come, Mr. Hume," said Hayter in a cooler tone, "everybody regards you as
a very sensible man. Do you mean to tell me seriously that you put a
bullet in the Governor's leg for no reason at all, not even murder?"

"I did it for an excellent reason," answered the tutor, still beaming at
him in a rather baffling manner. "I did it because I am a sensible man.
In fact, I am a Moderate Murderer."

"And what the blazes may that be?"

"The philosophy of moderation in murder," continued the tutor blandly,
"is one to which I have given some little attention. I was saying only
the other day that what most people want is to be rather murdered,
especially persons in responsible political situations. As it is, the
punishments on both sides are far too severe. The merest touch or soupcon
of murder is all that is required for purposes of reform. The little more
and how much it is; the little less and the Governor of Polybia gets
clean away, as Browning said."

"Do you really ask me to believe," snorted the Chief of Police, "that you
make a practice of potting every public man in the left leg?"

"No, no," said Hume, with a sort of hasty solemnity. "The treatment, I
assure you, is marked with much more individual attention. Had it been
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I should perhaps have selected a portion
of the left ear. In the case of the Prime Minister the tip of the nose
would be indicated. But the point is the general principle that something
should happen to these people, to arouse their dormant faculties by a
little personal problem. Now if ever there was a man," he went on with
delicate emphasis, as if it were a scientific demonstration, "if ever
there was a man meant and marked out by nature to be rather murdered, it
is Lord Tallboys. Other eminent men, very often, are just murdered, and
everyone feels that the situation has been adequately met, that the
incident is terminated. One just murders them and thinks no more about
it. But Tallboys is a remarkable case; he is my employer and I know him
pretty well. He is a good fellow, really. He is a gentleman, he is a
patriot; what is more, he is really a liberal and reasonable man. But by
being perpetually in office he has let that pompous manner get worse and
worse, till it seems to grow on him, like his confounded top-hat. What is
needed in such a case? A few days in bed, I decided. A few healthful
weeks standing on one leg and meditating on that fine shade of
distinction between oneself and God Almighty, which is so easily
overlooked."

"Don't listen to any more of this rubbish," cried the Deputy-Governor.
"If he says he shot Tallboys, we've got to take him up for it, I suppose.
He ought to know."

"You've hit it at last, Sir Harry," said Hume heartily, "I'm arousing a
lot of dormant intellects this afternoon."

"We won't have any more of your joking," cried Smythe with sudden fury;
"I'm arresting you for attempted murder."

"I know," answered the smiling tutor, "that's the joke."

At this moment there was another leap and scurry by the sycamore and the
boy Tom hurled himself back into the garden, panting aloud: "It's quite
right. It's just where he said."

For the rest of the interview, and until that strange group had broken up
on the lawn, the boy continued to stare at Hume as only a boy can stare
at somebody who has done something rather remarkable in a game. But as he
and Barbara went back to the Governorate together, the latter
indescribably dazed and bewildered, she found her companion curiously
convinced of some view of his own, which he was hardly competent to
describe. It was not exactly as if he disbelieved Hume or his story. It
was rather as if he believed what Hume had not said, rather than what he
had.

"It's a riddle," repeated Tom with stubborn solemnity. "He's awfully fond
of riddles. He says silly things just to make you think. That's what
we've got to do. He doesn't like you to give it up."

"What we've got to do?" repeated Barbara.

"Think what it really means," said Tom.

There was some truth perhaps in the suggestion that Mr. John Hume was
fond of riddles, for he fired off one more of them at the Chief of
Police, even as that official took him into custody.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "you can only half hang me because I'm only
half a murderer. I suppose you have hanged people sometimes?"

"Occasionally, I'm sorry to say," replied Colonel Hayter.

"Did you ever hang somebody to prevent him being hanged?" asked the tutor
with interest.


VI THE THING THAT REALLY HAPPENED

IT is not true that Lord Tallboys wore his top-hat in bed, during his
brief indisposition. Nor is it true, as was more moderately alleged, that
he sent for it as soon as he could stand upright and wore it as a
finishing touch to a costume consisting of a green dressing-gown and red
slippers. But it was quite true that he resumed his hat and his high
official duties at the earliest possible opportunity; rather to the
annoyance, it was said, of his subordinate the Deputy-Governor, who found
himself for the second time checked in some of those vigorous military
measures which are always more easily effected after the shock of a
political outrage. In plain words, the Deputy-Governor was rather sulky.
He had relapsed into a red-faced and irritable silence, and when he broke
it his friends rather wished he would relapse into it again. At the
mention of the eccentric tutor, whom his department had taken into
custody, he exploded with a special impatience and disgust. "Oh, for
God's sake don't tell me about that beastly madman and mountebank!" he
cried, almost in the voice of one tortured and unable to tolerate a
moment more of human folly. "Why in the world we are cursed with such
filthy fools . . shooting him in the leg .. moderate murderer . . mouldy
swine!"

"He's not a mouldy swine," said Barbara Traill emphatically, as if it
were an exact point of natural history. "I don't believe a word of what
you people are saying against him."

"Do you believe what he is saying against himself?" asked her uncle,
looking at her with screwed-up eyes and a quizzical expression. Tallboys
was leaning on a crutch; in marked contrast to the sullenness of Sir
Harry Smythe, he carried his disablement in a very plucky and pleasant
fashion. The necessity of attending to the interrupted rhythm of his legs
had apparently arrested the oratorical rotation of his hands. His family
felt that they had never liked him so much before. It seemed almost as if
there were some truth in the theory of the Moderate Murderer.

On the other hand, Sir Harry Smythe, usually so much more good-humoured
with his family, seemed to be in an increasingly bad humour. The dark red
of his complexion deepened, until by contrast there was something almost
alarming about the light of his pale eyes.

"I tell you of all these measly, meddlesome blighters," he began.

"And I tell you you know nothing about it," retorted his sister-in-law.
"He isn't a bit like that; he--"

At this point, for some reason or other, it was Olive who intervened
swiftly and quietly: she looked a little wan and worried.

"Don't let's talk about all that now," she said hastily. "Harry has got
such a lot of things to do. . . ."

"I know what I'm going to do," said Barbara stubbornly. "I'm going to ask
Lord Tallboys, as Governor of this place, if he will let me visit Mr.
Hume and see if I can find out what it means."

She had become for some reason violently excited and her own voice
sounded strangely in her ears. She had a dizzy impression of Harry
Smythe's eyes standing out of his head in apoplectic anger and of Olive's
face in the background growing more and more unnaturally pale and
staring, and hovering over all, with something approaching to an elvish
mockery, the benevolent amusement of her uncle. She felt as if he had let
out too much, or that he had gained a new subtlety of perception.

Meanwhile John Hume was sitting in his place of detention, staring at a
blank wall with an equally blank face. Accustomed as he was to solitude,
he soon found something of a strain in two or three days and nights of
the dehumanized solitude of imprisonment. Perhaps the fact most vivid to
his immediate senses was being deprived of tobacco. But he had other and
what some could call graver grounds of depression. He did not know what
sort of sentence he would be likely to get for confessing to an attempt
to wound the Governor. But he knew enough of political conditions and
legal expedients to know that it would be easy to inflict heavy
punishment immediately after the public scandal of the crime. He had
lived in that outpost of civilization for the last ten years, till
Tallboys had picked him up in Cairo; he remembered the violent reaction
after the murder of the previous Governor, the way in which the
Deputy-Governor had been able to turn himself into a despot and sweep the
country with coercion acts and punitive expeditions, until his impulsive
militarism had been a little moderated by the arrival of Tallboys with a
compromise from the home Government. Tallboys was still alive and even,
in a modified manner, kicking. But he was probably still under doctor's
orders and could hardly be judge in his own cause; so that the autocratic
Smythe would probably have another chance of riding the whirlwind and
directing the storm. But the truth is that there was at the back of the
prisoner's mind something that he feared much more than prison. The tiny
point of panic, which had begun to worry and eat away even his rocky
stolidity of mind and body, was the fear that his fantastic explanation
had given his enemies another sort of opportunity. What he really feared
was their saying he was mad and putting him under more humane and
hygienic treatment.

And indeed, anyone watching his demeanour for the next hour or so might
be excused for entertaining doubts and fancies on the point. He was still
staring before him in a rather strange fashion. But he was no longer
staring as if he saw nothing, but rather as if he saw something. It
seemed to himself that, like a hermit in his cell, he was seeing visions.

"Well, I suppose I am, after all," he said aloud in a dead and distinct
voice. "Didn't St. Paul say something? . . . Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I
was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. ... I have seen that heavenly
one coming in at the door like that several times, and rather hoped it
was real. But real people can't come through prison doors like that. . .
. Once it came so that the room might have been full of trumpets and once
with a cry like the wind and there was a fight and I found out that I
could hate and that I could love. Two miracles on one night. Don't you
think that must have been a dream-that is supposing you weren't a dream
and could think anything? But I did rather hope you were real then."

"Don't!" said Barbara Trail, "I am real now."

"Do you mean to tell me in cold blood that I am not mad," asked Hume,
still staring at her, "and you are here?"

"You are the only sane person I ever knew," she replied.

"Good Lord," he said, "then I've said a good deal just now that ought
only to be said in lunatic asylums-or in heavenly visions."

"You have said so much," she said in a low voice, "that I want you to say
much more. I mean about the whole of this trouble. After what you have
said . . don't you think I might be allowed to know?"

He frowned at the table and then said rather more abruptly: "The trouble
was that I thought you were the last person who ought to know. You see,
there is your family, and you might be brought into it, and one might
have to hold one's tongue for the sake of someone you would care about."

"Well," she said steadily, "I have been brought into it for the sake of
someone I care about."

She paused a moment and went on: "The others never did anything for me.
They would have let me go raving mad in a respectable flat, and so long
as I was finished at a fashionable school, they wouldn't have cared if
I'd finished myself with laudanum. I never really talked to anybody
before. I don't want to talk to anybody else now."

He sprang to his feet; something like an earthquake had shaken him at
last out of his long petrified incredulity about happiness. He caught her
by both hands and words came out of him he had never dreamed were within.
And she, who was younger in years, only stared at him with a steady smile
and starry eyes, as if she were older and wiser; and at the end only
said: "You will tell me now."

"You must understand," he said at last more soberly, "that what I said
was true. I was not making up fairy-tales to shield my long-lost brother
from Australia, or any of that business in the novels. I really did put a
bullet in your uncle, and I meant to put it there."

"I know," she said, "but for all that I'm sure I don't know everything.
I'm sure there is some extraordinary story behind all this."

"No," he answered. "It isn't an extraordinary story, except an
extraordinarily ordinary story."

He paused a moment reflectively and then went on: "It's really a
particularly plain and simple story. I wonder it hasn't happened hundreds
of times before. I wonder it hasn't been told in hundreds of stories
before. It might so easily happen anywhere, given certain conditions.

"In this case you know some of the conditions. You know that sort of
balcony that runs round my bungalow, and how one looks down from it and
sees the whole landscape like a map. Well, I was looking down and saw all
that flat plan of the place; the row of villas and the wall and path
running behind it and the sycamore, and farther on the olives and the end
of the wall, and so out into the open slopes being laid out with turf and
all the rest. But I saw what surprised me; that the rifle-range was
already set up. It must have been a rush order; people must have worked
all night. And even as I stared, I saw in the distance a dot that was a
man standing by the nearest target, as if adding the last touches. Then
he made a sort of signal to somebody away on the other side and moved
very rapidly away from the place. Tiny as the figure looked, every
gesture told me something; he was quite obviously clearing out just
before the firing at the target was to begin. And almost at the same
moment I saw something else. Well, I saw one thing, anyhow. I saw why
Lady Smythe is worried, and wandered distracted in the garden."

Barbara stared, but he went on: "Travelling along the path from the
Governorate and towards the sycamore was a familiar shape. It just showed
above the long garden wall in sharp outline like a shape in a shadow
pantomime. It was the top-hat of Lord Tallboys. Then I remembered that he
always went for a constitutional along this path and out on to the slopes
beyond; and I felt an overwhelming suspicion that he did not know that
the space beyond was already a firing-ground. You know he is very deaf,
and I sometimes doubt whether he hears all the things officially told to
him; sometimes I fear they are told so that he cannot hear. Anyhow, he
had every appearance of marching straight across as usual, and there came
over me in a cataract a solid, an overwhelming and a most shocking
certainty.

"I will not say much about that now. I will say as little as I can for
the rest of my life. But there were things I knew and you probably don't
about the politics here and what had led up to that dreadful moment.
Enough that I had good reason for my dread. Feeling vaguely that if
things were interrupted there might be a fight, I snatched up my own gun
and dashed down the slope towards the path, waving wildly and trying to
hail or head him off. He didn't see me and couldn't hear me. I pounded
along after him along the path, but he had too long a start. By the time
I reached the sycamore, I knew I was too late. He was already half-way
down the grove of olives and no mortal runner could reach him before he
came to the corner.

"I felt a rage against the fool which a man looks against the background
of fate. I saw his lean, pompous figure with the absurd top-hat riding on
top of it; and the large ears standing out from his head . . the large,
useless ears. There was something agonizingly grotesque about that
unconscious back outlined against the plains of death. For I was certain
that the moment he passed the corner that field would be swept by the
fire, which would cut across at right angles to his progress. I could
think of only one thing to do and I did it. Hayter thought I was mad when
I asked him if he had ever hanged a man to prevent his being hanged. That
is the sort of practical joke I played. I shot a man to prevent his being
shot.

"I put a bullet in his calf and he dropped, about two yards from the
corner. I waited a moment and saw that people were coming out of the last
houses to pick him up. I did the only thing I really regret. I had a
vague idea the house by the sycamore was empty, so I threw the gun over
the wall into the garden, and nearly got that poor old ass of a parson
into trouble. Then I went home and waited till they summoned me to give
evidence about Gregory."

He concluded with all his normal composure, but the girl was still
staring at him with an abnormal attention and even alarm.

"But what was it all about?' she asked. "Who could have--?"

"It was one of the best planned things I ever knew," he said. "I don't
believe I could have proved anything. It would have looked just like an
accident."

"You mean," she said, "that it wouldn't have been."

"As I said before, I don't want to say much about that now, but . . .
Look here, you are the sort of person who likes to think about things.
I'll just ask you to take two things and think about them, and then you
can get used to the idea in your own way.

"The first thing is this. I am a Moderate, as I told you; I really am
against all the Extremists. But when journalists and jolly fellows in
clubs say that, they generally forget that there really are different
sorts of Extremists. In practice they think only of revolutionary
Extremists.

Believe me, the reactionary Extremists are quite as likely to go to
extremes. The history of faction fights will show acts of violence by
Patricians as well as Plebeians, by Ghibellines as well as Guelphs, by
Orangemen as well as Fenians, by Fascists as well as Bolshevists, by the
Ku-Klux-Klan as well as the Black Hand. And when a politician comes from
London with a compromise in his pocket-it is not only Nationalists who
see their plans frustrated.

"The other point is more personal, especially to you. You once told me
you feared for the family sanity, merely because you had bad dreams and
brooded over things of your own imagination. Believe me, it's not the
imaginative people who become insane. It's not they who are mad, even
when they are morbid. They can always be woken up from bad dreams by
broader prospects and brighter visions-because they are imaginative. The
men who go mad are unimaginative. The stubborn stoical men who had only
room for one idea and take it literally. The sort of man who seems to be
silent but stuffed to bursting, congested--"

"I know," she said hastily; "you needn't say it, because I believe I
understand everything now. Let me tell you two things also; they are
shorter, but they have to do with it. My uncle sent me here with an
officer who has an order for your release . . and the Deputy-Governor is
going home . . resignation on the grounds of ill-health."

"Tallboys is no fool," said John Hume; "he has guessed."

She laughed with a little air of embarrassment. "I'm afraid he has
guessed a good many things," she said.

What the other things were is no necessary part of this story, but Hume
proceeded to talk about them at considerable length during the rest of
the interview, until the lady herself was moved to a somewhat belated
protest. She said she did not believe that he could really be a Moderate
after all.



THE HONEST QUACK


I THE PROLOGUE OF THE TREE

MR. WALTER WINDRUSH, the eminent and eccentric painter and poet, lived in
London and had a curious tree in his back garden. This alone would not
have provoked the preposterous events narrated here. Many persons,
without the excuse of being poets, have planted peculiar vegetables in
their back gardens. The two curious facts about this curiosity were,
first that he thought it quite remarkable enough to bring crowds from the
ends of the earth to look at it, and, second, that if or when the crowds
did come to look at it, he would not let them look.

To begin with, he had not planted it at all. Oddly enough, it looked very
much as if he had tried to plant it and failed; or possibly tried to pull
it up again, and failed again. Cold classical critics said they could
understand the pulling up better than the putting in. For it was a
grotesque object; a nondescript thing looking stunted or pollarded in the
manner recalling Burnham Beeches, but not easily classifiable as
vegetation. It was so squat in the trunk that the boughs seemed to spring
out of the roots and the roots out of the boughs. The roots also rose
clear of the ground, so that light showed through them as through
branches, the earth being washed away by a natural spring just behind.
But the girth of the whole was very large, and the thing looked rather
like a polyp or cuttle-fish radiating in all directions. Sometimes it
looked as if some huge hand out of heaven, like the giant in Jack and the
Beanstalk, had tried to haul the tree out of the earth by the hair of its
head.

Nobody indeed had ever planted this particular garden tree. It had grown
like grass, and even like the wild grass of the wildest prairies. It was,
in all probability, by far the oldest thing in those parts: there was
nothing to prove it was not older than Stonehenge. It had never been
planted in anybody's garden. Everything else had been planted round it.
The garden and the garden wall and the house had been planted round it.
The street had been planted round it; the suburb had been planted round
it. London, in a manner of speaking, had been planted round it. For
though the suburb in question was now sunk so deep in the metropolis that
nobody ever thought of it as anything but metropolitan, it belonged to a
district where the urban expansion had been relatively recent and rapid,
and it was not really so very long ago that the strange tree had stood
alone on a windy and pathless heath.

The circumstances of its ultimate preservation or captivity were as
follows. Nearly half a lifetime before, it happened that Windrush, who
was then an art student, was crossing the open common with two
companions, one a student of his own age, but attached to the medical and
not the artistic section of his own college, the other a somewhat older
friend, a businessman whom the young men wished to consult upon a matter
of business. They proposed to discuss their business (which was not
unconnected with the general incapacity of young students to be
businesslike) at the inn of the Three Peacocks on the edge of the common;
and the elder man especially showed some impatience to reach its shelter,
as the wind was rising and dusk was falling over that rather desolate
landscape.

It was at this point that their progress was delayed by the highly
exasperating conduct of Walter Windrush. He was moving as rapidly as the
rest, when the strange outline of the tree seemed to bring him up all
standing. He even raised his hands, not only in a pantomime of amazement
unusual in the men of his race, but in gestures that might have been
taken for some sort of pagan worship. He spoke in a hushed voice, and
pointed, as if drawing their attention to a funeral or some occasion of
awe. His scientific friend admitted that the way in which the tree
straddled out of the earth was something of a botanical curiosity, but he
did not need to be very scientific to discover the cause in the brook or
fountain, that broke from the upper ground behind it and had forced its
way through the crannies of the roots. He had the curiosity to hop up on
one of the high roots and hoist himself up by one of the low branches,
and then, remarking that the tree seemed to be half hollow, turned as if
to resume his march. The commercial gentleman had already been waiting
with some impatience to do so. But Walter Windrush could not be awakened
from his trance of admiration. He continued to walk round and round the
tree, to stare down into the straggling pools of water and then up to the
wide cup or nest formed by the crown of boughs.

"At first," he said at last, "I did not know what had happened to me. Now
I understand."

"Can't say I do," said his friend shortly, "unless it's going dotty. How
long are you going to hang about here?"

Windrush did not answer immediately; then he said: "Don't you know that
all poets and painters and people like me are naturally Communists? And
don't you know that, for the same reason, we're all naturally vagabonds?"

"I confess," said their business adviser rather grimly, "that some of
your recent financial antics might appeal to the Communists. But as for
vagabonds, I imagine that vagabonds at least have the virtue of getting a
move on."

"You don't understand me," said Windrush with a strange sort of dreamy
patience; "I mean that I'm not a Communist now. I'm not a vagabond any
more."

There was a staring silence and then he said in the same tone: "I never
before in all my life saw anything that I wanted to possess."

"Do you really mean," expostulated the other, "that you would like to
possess this one rotten old tree?"

Windrush went on as if the other had not spoken. "I have never before
seen, in all my wanderings, any place where I wanted to stop and make my
home. There cannot be anywhere in the world anything like that fantasia
of earth and sky and water; built upon bridges like Venice, and letting
daylight peer through its caverns like hell in Milton's poem; cloven as
if by Alph the subterranean river and rising stark and clear of the
clinging earth like the dead at the trump of doom. I have never seen
anything like it. I do not really want to see anything else."

There was perhaps some excuse for his freak of imagination, in the
momentary conditions that added mystery to the freak of nature. The
stormy sky above the heath had changed from grey to purple, and from that
to a sort of sombre Indian red which only brightened at the horizon in a
single scarlet strip of sunset. Against this background the black and
bizarre outline of the tree had really the appearance of something more
mystical than a natural object; as if a tree were trying to walk or a
monster from the waters rising in a wild effort to fly. But even if
Windrush's companions had been more sympathetic with such moods than they
were, they would hardly have been prepared for the finality with which he
flung himself down on a clump of turf beside the brook and took out a
pipe and tobacco pouch, rather as if he had just sat down in an arm-chair
at the club.

"May I ask what you are doing?" asked his friend.

"I am acquiring squatter's rights," said the other.

They both besieged him with remonstrances, and it became more and more
apparent to the others that he was perfectly serious, even if he was not
perfectly sane. The businessman indicated to him in a brisk manner that,
if he was really and truly interested in this absurd scrap of wilderness,
he would be wiser to consult the agents of the estate of which it formed
a part, as he would not get any "squatter's rights" in half a century. To
the extreme astonishment of the adviser, the poet thanked him quite
gravely for the advice and took out a piece of paper to note down the
agent's name and address.

"Meanwhile," said the commercial gentleman with great decision, "as this
does not seem to me at all an agreeable place to squat in, you will have
to come and squat in the Three Peacocks if you want to do any further
business with me."

"Don't be a fool, Windrush," said his other companion sharply, "you can't
really want to be left here all night."

"That happens to be exactly what I do want," replied Windrush. "I have
seen the sun sink in my own private pool, and I want to see the moon rise
out of it. You can't blame a prospective purchaser for testing the
property under all conditions."

The business friend had already turned away, and his dark, sturdy figure,
expressing scorn in the very line of its back, had disappeared behind the
sprawling tree. The other man lingered a moment longer, but in the face
of the irrational rationality of the last remark, he also followed in the
same path. He had gone about six yards and was also turning round by the
tree, when the poet's whole manner suddenly altered. He threw down his
pipe with an apologetic word and pursued his friends with an entirely new
style and gesture, bowing with sweeping motions of courtesy.

"I beg your pardon," he said magnificently; "I do hope you will come down
to my little place again. I fear I have failed in hospitality."

After he had himself lingered a moment or two by the tree and then
resumed his seat on the bank, he sat gazing in a fascinated manner at the
pools before him which, in the last intensity of sunset, gleamed like
lakes of blood. He actually remained thus for many hours, seeing the red
pools turn black with night and white with moonlight; as if he were
indeed some Hindoo hermit who had gone into a stony ecstasy. But when he
first moved on the following morning, he seemed filled with a far more
novel and surprising practicality. He betook himself to the agents of the
estate; he explained and negotiated for several months, and at length
became the actual legal possessor of about two acres of ground
surrounding his favourite freak of vegetation, and proceeded to fence it
in with the most mathematical rigidity, like a settler staking out a
claim in a desert. The rest of his extraordinary enterprise was all the
more extraordinary for being comparatively ordinary. He built a small
house on the land; he betook himself to habits of literary industry and
respectability which soon enabled him to turn it into a very presentable
country dwelling. In due course he even completed his social
solidification by marrying a wife, who died after presenting him with one
child, a daughter. The daughter grew up happily enough in these rustic
but not rude conditions, and the life of Mr. Walter Windrush continued in
sufficient serenity, until the coming of the great tragedy of his later
life.

The name of that tragedy was London. The endless expansion of the city
came crawling over those hills and commons like a rising sea, and the
rest of his history, or of that part of his history, was entirely
concerned with his moods of defiance and measures of defence in the face
of so incongruous a deluge. He swore by all the Muses that if this
loathsome labyrinth of ugliness and vulgarity must indeed surround his
sacred tree and his secret garden, at least it should not touch them. He
erected a ridiculously high wall all round the spot; he observed the
utmost ceremony about admitting anyone into it, and indeed, towards the
end, the ceremony rather hardened into suspicion. Some unwary guests had
treated the garden as if it were a garden; nay, even the tree as if it
were a tree. And as it was his boast that this his hermitage was the last
free space of the earth left in England, and the refuge of a poetry
everywhere else conquered by prose, he fell latterly into a habit of
locking the door into the garden and putting the key in his pocket. In
every other aspect of life he was quite hospitable and humane; he gave
his daughter a very good time in every other direction, but he tended
more and more to treating this place as sacred to his own solitude, and
through long days and nights nothing ever stirred in that strange
enclosure but its lonely master walking round and round his tree.

II THE MAN WITH THE BLACK BAG

ENID WINDRUSH, a very good-looking young woman with a brilliant shock of
light hair and a profile of the eager and sanguine sort, had fallen
behind her companion in the walk up the steep street and stopped to make
a small purchase at a small confectioner's shop. In front of her the road
rose in an abrupt white curve across a hill and the open spaces of a
suburban park. The small white rim of what was obviously a colossal white
cloud barely showed above the ridge, producing one of those rare effects
that almost persuade the natural man, in spite of all the proofs adduced
for it, that the world is round. Against that background of blue sky,
white road and white rim of cloud, only two human figures happened at
that moment to appear. They appeared to be totally disconnected and
indeed were in every possible point dissimilar. And yet, a moment
afterwards, she stared and started hastily forward. For she saw enacted,
on that high place in the broad sunlight, what seemed to be one of the
most inexplicable cases of assault and battery in all the annals of
crime.

One of the men in question was tall and bearded, with rather long hair
under a wide hat; he wore loose clothes and was walking with loose
strides in the sunny centre of the thoroughfare. Just before he crested
the ridge he turned and looked idly backwards down the road he had
climbed. The other man was moving decorousy along the pavement and
appeared to be in every way a more decorous and even duller sort of
person. He wore a top-hat and his compact but not conspicuous figure was
clad neatly in dark clothes; he was walking briskly and rapidly, but very
quietly, and he carried a small black bag. He might have been a City
clerk who prided himself on being punctual, but feared he was a little
late. Anyhow, he seemed to look straight in front of him and to take no
interest in anything but his goal.

Quite suddenly he turned at right angles from the pavement, hurled
himself, bag and all, into the middle of the road and appeared to pin or
throttle the gentleman with the beard and the large hat. He was the
shorter man of the two, but his spring was like a black cat's and he had
all the advantage of youthful energy and the surprise. The tall man went
staggering backwards towards the opposite pavement, but the next moment
he had broken away from his mysterious enemy and started hitting back at
him with refreshing vigour. At this moment a car coming from over the
hill obscured for a moment the girl's view of the conflict, and when the
space was clear again, it underwent yet a third change. The man in black,
whose top-hat was now stuck somewhat askew on his head, but who still
feverishly clasped his bag, appeared to be trying to break contact, in
the military phrase, and to be disinclined to continue what he had so
wantonly begun. He retreated slightly, waving hand and bag in what not
even a girl, at such a distance, could mistake for motions of pugilism;
they appeared to be rather motions of expostulation. As, however, the
tall man, now hatless and with hair and beard flying, seemed bent on
pursuing his vengeance, the other suddenly hurled away his bag, tucked up
his neat cuff's and proceeded to slog into the other in an entirely new,
vigorous and scientific manner. All this had taken less than half a
minute to happen, but by this time the girl was running up the street as
fast as she could, leaving a staring confectioner with a small
brown-paper parcel dangling from his finger. For, as it happened, Miss
Enid Windrush took a certain interest in the tall man with the long
beard, an interest which many will rightly rebuke as antiquated and
superstitious, but from which she had never been able entirely to
emancipate herself. He was her father.

By the time she arrived on the scene, or possibly because she had arrived
on the scene, the violence of the pantomime had somewhat abated, but both
sides were still panting and snorting with the passions of war. The
wearer of the top-hat, on closer inspection, revealed himself as a young
man with dark hair, whose square face and square shoulders had a touch of
the Napoleonic; for the rest he looked quite respectable and rather
reticent than otherwise, and there was certainly nothing about him to
explain his antic of attack.

Nor indeed did he appear to think that the explanation was required from
him.

"Well!" he said, breathing hard, "of all the blasted old fools! ... Of
all the damned doddering old donkeys. ..."

"This man," declared Windrush with fiery hauteur, "criminally assaulted
me in the middle of the road for no reason whatever and--"

"That's what he says!" cried the young man in a sort of triumphant
derision. "For no reason whatever! And in the middle of the road! Oh, my
green-eyed grandmother!"

"Well, what reason?" began Miss Windrush, making an attempt to intervene.

"Why, because he was in the middle of the road, of course!" exploded the
young man. "He'd have been in the middle of Kensal Green Cemetery pretty
soon. And, speaking generally, I should say he ought to be in the middle
of Hanwell Asylum now. He must have escaped from there, I should think,
to go stravaging up the middle of a modern road like that, and turning
his back to admire the landscape, as if he were alone in the Sahara. Why,
every reasonably modern village idiot knows that the motorists can't see
what's on the other side of this hill when they come over it, and if I
hadn't happened to hear the car--"

"The car!" said the artist with a grave and severe astonishment, as one
who convicts a child of romancing. "What car?" He turned round in a
lordly manner and surveyed the street. "Where is this car?" he said
sarcastically.

"By the rate it was going at, I should say it was about seven miles
away," said the other.

"Why, of course it's quite true," said Enid, as a light broke upon her.
"There was a car that came very fast over the hill, just as you--"

"Just as I committed my criminal assault," said the young man in the
top-hat.

Walter Windrush was a gentleman and, what is by no means always the same
thing, a man who valued a reputation for handsome behaviour. But he would
have been more than human, if he had found it easy to adjust rapidly his
relations to a gentleman, who had first flung him across the road and
then, on his retaliating, started pommelling him like a pugilist, and to
behold instantly in the same being, and veiled in the same face and form,
a beloved friend and saviour to whom he must now dedicate his whole life
in gratitude. His acknowledgements were a little dazed and halting, but
his daughter was in a position to be more magnanimous and hearty. Upon
rational reconsideration, she rather liked the look of the young man, for
neatness and respectability do not always displease ladies who have seen
a good deal of the sublime liberty of the artistic life. Also, she had
not been seized suddenly by the throat in the middle of the road.

Cards and courtesies began to be exchanged; the young man learned with
surprise that he had insulted or rescued a distinguished man of letters,
and t