The Club of Queer Trades.................................................................................................................................1

G.K.Chesterton........................................................................................................................................1

Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something to do with the designing of the things

called flats in England and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of economising

space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those

perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may

find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name would attract

and startle the passerby, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passerby is only

looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the

Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a

dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers' Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk

Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries would be made. And the Club of

Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.

The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric

and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have

invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of

this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an

existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of

insuring men's furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn

by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock BurnabyBradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring

speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and

keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its

inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken

sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when

one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new

trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should

feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body

was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies

as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens

ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of

some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the doings of the Dead Man's Shoes Society

(that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the Cat and

Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the

Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a

word. The first of my revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I

have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner or later, because of my

singular hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis call me facetiously `The King of Clubs'. They also call me

`The Cherub', in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I have presented in my declining years. I

only hope the spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer

Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by

me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a stargazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of

Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the

street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him,

because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden

blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of

altering the sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was

surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books,

swords, armourthe whole dusthole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic relics, appeared

curiously keen and moderna powerful, legal face. And no one but I knew who he was.

Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene that occurred in, when one of the

most acute and forcible of the English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that

occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all. For some months, indeed for some

years, people had detected something curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the

law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as a K.C., and to be occupied in giving

personal and moral advice to the people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very

outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man who had attempted a crime

of passion: "I sentence you to three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and Godgiven

conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside." He accused criminals from the bench, not so

much of their obvious legal crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of justice, monstrous

egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated

diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come forward, gracefully

and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the household had been

thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with quiet dignity.

The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: "Get a new soul. That thing's not fit for a dog. Get a new

soul." All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day

when his wits actually deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful

financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought. The case was long and

complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came

for the great judge to give a summingup; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing

logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and

lowering at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a stentorian song. His remarks

"O Rowtyowty tiddlyowty Tiddlyowty tiddlyowty Hightyighty tiddlyighty Tiddlyighty ow."

I was sitting there one evening, about six o'clock, over a glass of that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept

behind a pile of blackletter folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the

great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck his square features and his fierce grey

hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily, when

the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a huge furred overcoat, swung himself

"Sorry to bother you, Basil," he gasped. "I took a libertymade an appointment here with a mana

Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had a practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire,

who can and does all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I

remember him as a journalist, a houseagent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, awhat

"I am and have been for some time," said Rupert, with some dignity, "a private detective, and there's my

A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being given, the door was thrown sharply open

and a stout, dapper man walked swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and said, "Good

evening, gentlemen," with a stress on the last syllable that somehow marked him out as a martinet, military,

literary and social. He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black moustache, which

Basil immediately said to me, "Let us come into the next room, Gully," and was moving towards the door,

The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major Brown I had met years before in

Basil's society. I had forgotten altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I

remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a quarter of each sentence, and that

sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.

Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he was anything but a warlike person.

Like many among the iron men who recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes

of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was precise to the point of the

exact adjustment of a teacup. One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religionthe cultivation

of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered like a child's at a new toy, the eyes

that had remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.

"Well, Major," said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging himself into a chair, "what is the matter

"Yellow pansies. Coalcellar. P. G. Northover," said the Major, with righteous indignation.

We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes shut in his abstracted way, said

"Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me. Something. Preposterous."

We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we

pieced together the Major's fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the reader to

what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major Brown in my own words. But the reader must

imagine the scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert and myself

getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of

the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.

Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an enthusiastic one. So far from

regretting his retirement on halfpay, it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll's

house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he

had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with two patent stewpots and a bad watercolour),

and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a

harbour in heaven. He was Dutchlike and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some tendency

to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the

stand rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw life like a pattern in a freehand

drawingbook. And assuredly he would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him

that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible

adventure, such as he had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.

One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual faultless manner, had set out for his

usual constitutional. In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass along

one of those aimlesslooking lanes which lie along the backgarden walls of a row of mansions, and which

in their empty and discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a

theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether so in the

Major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a

religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fishblue eyes and a ring of irradiating

red beard, was pushing before him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were

splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite pansies predominated. The Major

stopped and fell into conversation, and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors

and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less

excellent, praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth and rarity to a

degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped

"I'll tell you what, sir," he said. "If you're interested in them things, you just get on to that wall."

"On the wall!" cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul quailed within him at the thought of

"Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir," hissed the tempter. "I'll help you up, sir."

How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of the Major's life triumphed over all its

negative traditions, and with an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical

assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The second after, the flapping of the

frockcoat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments

were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in all his bold and

wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was

a vast pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it was not their horticultural aspects that

Major Brown beheld, for the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the sentence:

A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown looked sharply back at the road

behind him; the man with the barrow had suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its

incredible inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown did not. When romantic

ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military exploits, he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic

person, but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have thought

himself a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not easily believe this. He knew from his own

quaint learning that the garden arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it extravagantly

improbable that any one would pour out money like water for a joke against him. Having no explanation

whatever to offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clearheaded man, and waited as he would have

At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and the watering can fell from his hand,

"I am Major Brown," said that individual, who was always cool in the hour of action.

The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he stammered wildly, "Come downcome

"At your service," said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass beside him, without disarranging his

The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run towards the house, followed with

swift steps by the Major. His guide led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed

house, until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man turned with a face of apoplectic terror

Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran downstairs with a clatter.

The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and peacock and purple hangings, hat in

hand. He had the finest manners in the world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to see

She was a graceful, greenclad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour of Bedford Park. "You have come, I

"I have come, madam," he said, "to know what is the matter. To know why my name is written across your

He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe the effect produced on the mind by

that quiet and sunny garden scene, the frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was still,

and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he studied cried to heaven for his blood.

"You know I must not turn round," said the lady; "every afternoon till the stroke of six I must keep my face

Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to accept these outrageous riddles

"It is almost six," he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper clock upon the wall clanged the first

stroke of the hour. At the sixth the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most

attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf.

"That makes the third year I have waited," she cried. "This is an anniversary. The waiting almost makes one

And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From low down on the pavement of the dim

street (it was already twilight) a voice cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:

Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door and looked out. There was no sign of life

in the blue gloaming of the street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon sparks. On

"It is the end," she cried, with shaking lips; "it may be death for both of us. Whenever"

But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse proclamation from the dark street, again

Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was frustrated; there was no figure in sight,

and the street was far too long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational Major was a

little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the drawingroom. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific

Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in timein time to see something which at first

glance froze the blood. The cries appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.

The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man thrust through the coalhole in the

street. The next moment, again, it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. "Where's your

She looked at him with wild grey eyes. "You will not go down," she cried, "alone, into the dark hole, with

"Is this the way?" replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three at a time. He flung open the door of a

black cavity and stepped in, feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied, a pair of

great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized

him by the back of the head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a brutal image of

destiny. But the Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly clear and intellectual. He gave quietly

under the pressure until he had slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of the

invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one of his long, bony, and skilful hands, and

gripping the leg by a muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with a crash, along the

floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he

had evidently now no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and thither to get past the Major to the

door, but that tenacious person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the other hand to a beam. At

length there came a strain in holding back this human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to

rend and part from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and the dim fat figure of the giant vanished

out of the cellar, leaving the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his adventure and the only clue to

the mystery. For when he went up and out at the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole

equipment of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards and whitewashed walls.

"The lady was in the conspiracy, of course," said Rupert, nodding. Major Brown turned brick red. "I beg your

Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said nothing. When next he spoke he asked:

"There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepennybit," said the Major carefully; "there was a

cigaretteholder, a piece of string, and this letter," and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:

I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re Major Brown. Please see that he is

Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was some time before he answered:

"Perhaps not," said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. "One never knows. But going down a dark court to see

Rupert laughed stoutly. "Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a harmless stranger in a coalcellar may

"Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?" asked Basil, in the same distant and monotonous voice.

"I am looking at the letter," said the mad judge calmly; though, as a matter of fact, he was looking at the fire.

"My dear boy, you are glorious," cried Rupert, turning round, with laughter in his blue bright eyes. "Your

methods amaze me. Why, there is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You might as

well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar

Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not otherwise move.

"That's rather good," he said; "but, of course, logic like that's not what is really wanted. It's a question of

"Facts," murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, faroff animals, "how facts obscure the truth. I

may be sillyin fact, I'm off my headbut I never could believe in that manwhat's his name, in those

capital stories?Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong

thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. It's only the life of the

tree that has unity and goes uponly the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars."

"We have eternity to stretch our legs in," replied the mystic. "It can be an infinity of things. I haven't seen any

Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed collecting his thoughts in a humble and even

"Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through silent, silvery streets and squares

until you came into an open and deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as a

ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and saw it was a man disguised. And

"You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation of putting on singular clothes is that

you look nice in them; you would not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of ordinary

personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that he inherited a dancing madness from a great

grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if he refused

the ordeal. With BadenPowell, say, it might be a betbut not with Kitchener. I should know all that,

because in my public days I knew him quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals quite well.

It's not a criminal's letter. It's all atmospheres." And he closed his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.

Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and pity. The former said

"Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to thinkuntil your spiritual mystery turns upthat a man

who sends a note recommending a crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at least

tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral tastes. Can I have that revolver?"

"Certainly," said Basil, getting up. "But I am coming with you." And he flung an old cape or cloak round

"You!" said Rupert, with some surprise, "you scarcely ever leave your hole to look at anything on the face of

"I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance, "hear of anything on the face of the

We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster Bridge, and along the Embankment in

the direction of that part of Fleet Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major

Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the houndlike stoop and flapping mantle of young Rupert

Grant, who adopted, with childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest among

his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and poetry of London. Basil, who walked

behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.

Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight at danger, and gripped Basil's revolver

"I am not sure," answered Rupert, knitting his brows. "Of course, it's quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But

"I shouldn't get the police," said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert glanced at him and stared hard.

"Cold, perhaps," said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he was shaking.

"You're laughing," he cried. "I know that confounded, silent, shaky laugh of yours. What the deuce is the

amusement, Basil? Here we are, all three of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians"

"But I shouldn't call the police," said Basil. "We four heroes are quite equal to a host," and he continued to

Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the rest of us following. When he reached

"Stand close," he said in the voice of a commander. "The scoundrel may be attempting an escape at this

The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the old judge and his convulsion of

"Now," hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes suddenly over his shoulder, "when I say

`Four', follow me with a rush. If I say `Hold him', pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say `Stop',

stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil,

With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the room like an invasion, only to stop dead.

The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared, at the first glance, to be empty. But

on a second and more careful glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and drawers

of bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed moustache, and the air of a very average clerk,

"Did you knock?" he asked pleasantly. "I am sorry if I did not hear. What can I do for you?"

There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major himself, the victim of the outrage,

"I think," said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his face, "that this letter was written by

you." And with a loud clap he struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man called

"Say!" cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; "why, I want this confounded thing settled. I want"

"Certainly, sir," said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of the eyebrows. "Will you take a chair

for a moment." And he pressed an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room beyond.

The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but stood chafing and beating the floor with his

The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy, young man, in a frockcoat, entered

"Mr Hopson," said Northover, "this is Major Brown. Will you please finish that thing for him I gave you this

"You will excuse me, gentlemen," said the egregious Northover, with his radiant smile, "if I continue to work

until Mr Hopson is ready. I have some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday

The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence ensued; a placid and busy silence on the

At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled with a knock at the door, almost

simultaneous with the turning of the handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity,

The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few moments as he ran his eye up and

down the paper presented to him. He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered

something, muttering"Careless." Then he read it again with the same impenetrable reflectiveness, and

finally handed it to the frantic Brown, whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.

The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear later, but he found it like this:

"What," said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly rising out of his head, "What in

"What is it?" repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement. "It's your account, of course."

"My account!" The Major's ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. "My account! And what have I got to

The Major's hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words came. He scarcely stirred otherwise,

but he lifted the chair bodily into the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover's head.

The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on the elbow as he sprang up with

clenched fists, only to be seized by the united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the

"Stand still," cried Rupert authoritatively. "Major Brown's action is excusable. The abominable crime you

"A customer has a perfect right," said Northover hotly, "to question an alleged overcharge, but, confound it

"What, in God's name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?" shrieked Major Brown, whose

keen feminine nature, steady in pain or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and

exasperating mystery. "Who are you? I've never seen you or your insolent tomfool bills. I know one of your

"Mad," said Northover, gazing blankly round; "all of them mad. I didn't know they travelled in quartettes."

"Enough of this prevarication," said Rupert; "your crimes are discovered. A policeman is stationed at the

corner of the court. Though only a private detective myself, I will take the responsibility of telling you that

And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.

"Can you tell me," said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow, as he traced a pattern in the dust

with his swordstick, "can you tell me what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?"

The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and futile irrelevancy, and he answered

"Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney somethinga name with a hyphenGurneyBrown; that was it."

"And when did the house change hands?" said Basil, looking up sharply. His strange eyes were burning

And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great office chair and shouted with a

"Oh! it's too perfectit's too exquisite," he gasped, beating the arms with his fists. He was laughing

deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like

"Confound it, Basil," said Rupert, stamping. "If you don't want me to go mad and blow your metaphysical

"Permit me, sir, to explain," he said. "And, first of all, permit me to apologize to you, Major Brown, for a

most abominable and unpardonable blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if

you will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and dignity. Of course you need not

trouble about the bill. We will stand the loss." And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the

Poor Brown's face was still a picture of distraction. "But I don't even begin to understand," he cried. "What

Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and with a great deal of unconscious

dignity. On closer consideration, there were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,

especially a lean, sallow face, hawklike, and not without a careworn intelligence. Then he looked up

"You are standing," replied Northover, "in the office of the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited."

The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark eyes on the other's face.

"Major," said he, "did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter

hunger for something to happensomething, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: `Something pernicious

and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance;

something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.' Did you ever feel that?"

"Then I must explain with more elaboration," said Mr Northover, with a sigh. "The Adventure and Romance

Agency has been started to meet a great modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we

hear of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us and lead us splendidly astray. Now

the man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance

Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird

events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against

his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic

visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one

of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major

Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did

not see the end of it. I need scarcely explain further the monstrous mistake. Your predecessor in your present

house, Mr GurneyBrown, was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks, ignoring alike the dignity

of the hyphen and the glory of military rank, positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr GurneyBrown

were the same person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle of another man's story."

"How on earth does the thing work?" asked Rupert Grant, with bright and fascinated eyes.

"We believe that we are doing a noble work," said Northover warmly. "It has continually struck us that there

is no element in modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic

existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into

the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide

down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time,

the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from

pursuersall healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin

Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his

childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and

Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery had been reserved to the end, for as

"Of course; awfully dense, sir," he said. "No doubt at all, the scheme excellent. But I don't think" He

paused a moment, and looked dreamily out of the window. "I don't think you will find me in it. Somehow,

when one's seenseen the thing itself, you knowblood and men screaming, one feels about having a little

"Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire, at any time, to communicate with me,

"I should be obliged for your card, sir," said the Major, in his abrupt but courteous voice. "Pay for chair."

It ran, "P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency, 14 Tanner's Court, Fleet Street."

"What on earth is "C.QT."?" asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major's shoulder.

"Don't you know?" returned Northover. "Haven't you ever heard of the Club of Queer Trades?"

"There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven't heard of," said the little Major reflectively.

"The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people who have invented some new and

"You deserve to be," said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a smile, and speaking for the last time that

When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer smile, as he trod down the fire

and locked up his desk. "A fine chap, that Major; when one hasn't a touch of the poet one stands some chance

of being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all people getting into the nets of one of

Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An owlish head, with dark moustaches,

"What! back again, Major?" cried Northover in surprise. "What can I do for you?"

"It's horribly absurd," he said. "Something must have got started in me that I never knew before. But upon my

"Yes," said the Major. "`Jackals', and the titledeeds, and `Death to Major Brown'."

"I am terribly sorry, Major," said he, "but what you ask is impossible. I don't know any one I would sooner

oblige than you; but the rules of the agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an outsider; I

am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you understand"

"There is no one," said Brown, "who understands discipline better than I do. Thank you very much. Good

He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green garments. She was an actress, employed

(with many others) by the Romance Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in

her languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly that she had met scores of men who acted

splendidly in the charades provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who went

The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa, and the former has taken to smoking.

Otherwise he is unchangedexcept, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine

unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a

concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the titledeeds, and why

he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earththe top

of a tolerably deserted tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its

meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts

of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it

as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street,

in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact

that there was civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only

its monotony. No one would say, in going through a criminal slum, "I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals."

But here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums. Here there were statues; only

they were mostly statues of railway engineers and philanthropiststwo dingy classes of men united by their

common contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were the churches of dim and erratic

sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here, above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway

lines and hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But though one never knew, in one sense, what one

would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not seeanything really great, central, of the first

class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to

those really close and crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round

the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great

cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.

"But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his heavy abstracted way, when I had urged this

view, "that the very vileness of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the

human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to

live in a fourthrate civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good

people. And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world. Besides"

The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he was paying no attention to me. He was

"It is very odd," said Grant at last, grimly, "that I should have been caught out like this at the very moment of

my optimism. I said all these people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England."

"Oh, I was right enough," he went on, in that strange continuous and sleepy tone which always angered his

hearers at acute moments, "I was right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes; they

are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two; they may beat a wife or two with the poker.

But they are saints all the same; they are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings and

"Which man?" I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which Basil's bull's eyes were glaring.

He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly passing crowd, but though there was

nothing about him sufficient to attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious

consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black tophat, but there was enough in it of

those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the tophat into something as

rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of one who

appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather Oriental;

"I am not sure of the details," said Grant, "but his besetting sin is a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of

"What plan?" I asked. "If you know all about him, why don't you tell me why he is the wickedest man in

"I think you've made a mistake in my meaning," he said. "I don't know his name. I never saw him before in

"Never saw him before!" I cried, with a kind of anger; "then what in heaven's name do you mean by saying

"I meant what I said," said Basil Grant calmly. "The moment I saw that man, I saw all these people stricken

with a sudden and splendid innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were being

themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans,

are all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be evil."

"In God's name, look at his face," cried out Basil in a voice that startled the driver. "Look at the eyebrows.

They mean that infernal pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one of

the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the

sacred heavens look at his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat."

"But, after all," I said, "this is very fancifulperfectly absurd. Look at the mere facts. You have never seen

"Oh, the mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair. "The mere facts! Do you really admitare you still so

sunk in superstitions, so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an

"Well, an immediate impression may be," I said, "a little less practical than facts."

"Bosh," he said. "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical?

My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions

and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you measure his skull? Do you read up his

physiological state in a handbook? Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may

save your businessyou refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely upon those immediate mystical

impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that

"You always put things well," I said, "but, of course, such things cannot immediately be put to the test."

"Let us get off and follow him," he said. "I bet you five pounds it will turn out as I say."

The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked along for some time, his long

splendid frockcoat flying behind him. Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared

"Well," I said, "a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I thought it rather odd, to tell the truth,

We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like the figure of a black swan, was

silhouetted suddenly against the glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The

intervals between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the whole city. Our pace, therefore, had

become swift and mechanical between the lampposts; but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined

horse; I stopped also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness in front of us was

At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a yard off he did not realize that we

were there. He tapped four times on a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas cut

the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the interview was short and simple and

inexplicable as an interview could be. Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card and

And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the striding stranger through a labyrinth of

London lanes, the lights just helping us. It was only five o'clock, but winter and the fog had made it like

As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and tried to make out the direction

described. For some ten minutes I wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right.

We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable Londonmore dreary, one must admit, even than

"This is very extraordinary!" said Basil Grant, as we turned into Berkeley Square.

"I do not wonder," answered Basil, "at his walking through nasty streets; I do not wonder at his going to

"The operation of time is a singular one," he said with his imperturbable irrelevancy. "It is not a true

statement of the case to say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man. I remember

it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord

Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont's

"A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwooddon't you know his name? He is a man of

transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don't know

what; anyhow, he's a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight disadvantage of being, beyond

all question, off his head. He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of

progress and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and

proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public

grounds, as a cheap alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a matter of

indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or the devil. So his house is filled with an endless

succession of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is romantic; men who wear

short hair because it is medical; men who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who walk

on their hands for fear of tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons are generally fools, like

himself, they are almost always, like himself, good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter there."

"My good fellow," I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, "the truth of this affair is very simple. To

use your own eloquent language, you have the `slight disadvantage' of being off your head. You see a total

stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a

burglar because he enters an honest man's door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come

home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet with the distance we have to go, we shall be late

"I want," he cried out, "what a girl wants when she wears her new frock; I want what a boy wants when he

goes in for a clanging match with a monitorI want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right

about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will

"I will apologize," he said calmly, "for our not being dressed for a call," and walking across the vast misty

A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving my friend's name his manner passed

in a flash from astonishment to respect. We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly but

that our host, a whitehaired man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet us.

"My dear fellow," he cried, shaking Basil's hand again and again, "I have not seen you for years. Have you

"Not for all that time," answered Basil, smiling. "I have long given up my official position, my dear Philip,

and have been living in a deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment."

"An inopportune moment," cried the ardent gentleman. "You come at the most opportune moment I could

"I do not," answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of laughter came from the inner room.

"Basil," cried the other, "you must have been in the country. You must have been in the antipodes. You must

"As to who Shakespeare was," answered my friend placidly, "my views go no further than thinking that he

was not Bacon. More probably he was Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is" and his speech

"Wimpole!" cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. "Haven't you heard of the great modern wit? My dear

fellow, he has turned conversation, I do not say into an artfor that, perhaps, it always was but into a great

art, like the statuary of Michael Angeloan art of masterpieces. His repartees, my good friend, startle one

Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the very noise of it, a big, panting

apoplectic old gentleman came out of the inner house into the hall where we were standing.

"I tell you, Beaumont, I won't stand it," exploded the large old gentleman. "I won't be made game of by a

"Come, come," said Beaumont feverishly. "Let me introduce you. This is Mr Justice Grantthat is, Mr

"Who has not?" asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing him with some curiosity. He was

hot and heavy in his momentary anger, but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of

his face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart though corpulent, the chin

aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could

show an unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so much of a gentleman that

"I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont," he said gruffly, "to fail in respect to these gentlemen, and

even more especially to fail in it in your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but

At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre air came out of the inner room. He

"I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond," said Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant,

"Perfectly," said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and respectfully, but the cloud was still on

"I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going yet, Sir Walter. She says she has

The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal struggle; then his good manners triumphed,

and with a gesture of obeisance and a vague utterance of, "If Lady Beaumont . . . a lady, of course," he

followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely been deposited there half a minute before

another peal of laughter told that he had (in all probability) been scored off again.

"Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh," said Beaumont, as he helped us off with our coats. "He

"Oh, it's enlightened, you know, and progressiveand faces the facts of life seriously." At this moment

"I only ask," said Basil, "because of the last two friends of yours who had the modern mind; one thought it

wrong to eat fishes and the other thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardonthis way, if I remember

"Do you know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the

interior, "I can never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so

This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our slim friend with the Oriental face

for the first time that afternoon. Two people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the house,

Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and with the intense and awful thirst of the female

upper class for verbal amusement and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at

him with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the window.

He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from the curves of his smooth limbs to the

coils of his silvered hair suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a manthe

unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North London, his eyes shining with

"What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole," said Muriel Beaumont eagerly, "is how you contrive to treat all this

so easily. You say things quite philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm sure I

"I agree with Miss Beaumont," said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with indignation. "If I had thought of

"Difficult to keep your countenance," cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of alarm; "oh, do keep your

Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted readiness, and Sir Walter, turning

"I never talk tomfooleries," said the other, "without first knowing my audience."

Grant walked across the room and tapped the redmoustached secretary on the shoulder. That gentleman was

leaning against the wall regarding the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very

particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house rapturously listening to Wimpole.

"May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?" asked Grant. "It is about business. Lady Beaumont will

I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this strange external interview. We passed

"Drummond," said Basil sharply, "there are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this

afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are

wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has also some common sense. What do

Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face became suddenly as red as his

"Because I hate him like hell," said the other, after a long pause and violently.

Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss Beaumont and the stranger were

"I am in a terrible difficulty," said the young man, and his voice told us, like a clear bell, that he was an

honest man. "If I spoke about him as I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to be

able to say that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But again, the fact is I didn't. I hate him, that

is my private affair. But I also disapprove of himreally I do believe I disapprove of him quite apart from

my private feelings. When first he came, I admit he was much quieter, but I did not like, so to speak, the

moral swell of him. Then that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this fellow, with

his cheapjack wit, began to score off the old man in the way he does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad

lot; it must be bad to fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap savagely, unceasingly, as if

he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate

the man because a certain person admires him. But I believe that apart from that I should hate the man

This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the young man; that is, of pity for him

because of his obviously hopeless worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct

realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I was sorry that he seemed so steadily

set against the man, and could not help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however nobly

In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was perhaps the most startling of all

I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected me. I only know that for some reason

or other he so affected me that I was, within a few minutes, in the street outside.

"This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have just invited you and me to a grand

dinnerparty this very night, at which Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very

"Well, really," I said, "it is already six o'clock and I doubt if we could get home and dress. I see nothing

"Don't you?" said Grant. "I'll bet you'll see something extraordinary in what we're doing instead."

"Why," said he, "we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house on a winter evening. You must

forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is only to show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this

cigar, wait until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole have left this house?"

"Certainly," I said. "But I do not know which is likely to leave first. Have you any notion?"

"No," he said. "Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again, Mr Wimpole may leave first, feeling

that his last epigram is a thing to be flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some time

to analyse Mr Wimpole's character. But they will both have to leave within reasonable time, for they will

As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house drew a dark cab to the dark portal.

And then a thing happened that we really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh

They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt; then a certain geniality, fundamental

perhaps in both of them, made Sir Walter smile and say: "The night is foggy. Pray take my cab."

Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with both of them. And before I could

We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy streets. God only, I thought, knows why

we are running at all, but we are running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at the fork of

two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away rejoicing, having just come in contact with the

more generous among the rich. Then the two men talked together as men do talk together after giving and

receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to forgiveness or a duelat least so it seemed as we

watched it from ten yards off. Then the two men shook hands heartily, and one went down one fork of the

"Idiot!" I howled. "Sir Walter's gone down there. Wimpole has slipped us. He's half a mile down the other

"But I saw him!" I cried. "Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It's the old man . . . What are you doing?

Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet, whose white whiskers shone

silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.

"Charlie," said Basil hoarsely, "can you believe in my common sense for four minutes?"

"Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at once when I say `Now'. Now!"

We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old gentleman on his back. He fought with a

commendable valour, but we got him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and

fullblooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him; when he could not kick he

shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil's arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street

"I am sorry to incommode you," said Basil calmly out of the darkness; "but I have made an appointment

"Yes," he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged on the ground, whose eyes were

starting impotently from his head. "I have made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow.

An old friend. Jasper Drummond his name isyou may have met him this afternoon at the Beaumonts. He

For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness. By the time those hours were over

I had thoroughly made up my mind that the same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the

bench of a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine no other explanation of the

facts, with the portly, purplefaced old country gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of

After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the

"Mr Grant," he said blankly, "the thing is incredible. You were right; but what did you mean? All through this

dinnerparty, where dukes and duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him, that

extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn't say a funny thing. He didn't say anything at all. What

Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the place, jumped back, as from a mouse.

Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter's breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even

It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper Drummond read with a vacant eye and

undisguised astonishment. As far as he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or at

least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism. The greater part of the document had

been torn and obliterated in the struggle, but the termination remained. It ran as follows:

"What is it?" replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid chant. "What is it? It is a great new

profession. A great new trade. A trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy."

"A new profession!" said the young man with the red moustache vaguely; "a new trade!"

"A new trade," repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, "a new profession! What a pity it is immoral."

"It is," said Grant calmly, "the great new trade of the Organizer of Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on

the ground strikes you, as I have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character. He is, like

ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly

old, and his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He is a swindler, and a swindler of a perfectly delightful and novel

kind. He hires himself out at dinnerparties to lead up to other people's repartees. According to a

preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has arranged

for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for him. In short, he allows himself to be scored off

"This fellow Wimpole," said Basil Grant, smiling, "will not be an intellectual rival in the future. He had some

fine things, elegance and silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the floor."

"Not at all," said Basil indulgently; "he ought to be in the Club of Queer Trades."

The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been reduced to a singular condition. It is

the small things rather than the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of

the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the

mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with

small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I was engaged (on fierce and

equal terms) as I made the above reflections, was one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar

My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me. He and I were to turn up at the same

dinnerparty (for which I was in the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head to

come my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a small and confidential affair at the table of a

good but unconventional political lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a third guest, a

Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was an authority on chimpanzees. As Basil was an

old friend of the hostess and I had never seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual social

sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break the ice. The theory, like all my theories, was

I was handed a visiting card inscribed: "Rev. Ellis Shorter", and underneath was written in pencil, but in a

hand in which even hurry could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, "Asking the favour of a

I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of God has supremacy over all matters (a

valuable truth), and throwing on my dresscoat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawingroom. He rose at my

entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He flapped a plaid shawl over his right arm; he

flapped a pair of pathetic black gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he

flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a baldbrowed, whitehaired, whitewhiskered old clergyman, of a

"I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come I can only sayI can only say in my

"What I have to say," he said brokenly, "is so dreadfulit is so dreadfulI have lived a quiet life."

I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in time for dinner. But there was

something about the old man's honest air of bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger

Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old, noticed my secret impatience and seemed

"I'm so sorry," he said meekly; "I wouldn't have comebut for your friend Major Brown recommended

"Yes," said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid shawl about. "He told me you helped him

in a great difficultyand my difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it's a matter of life and death."

I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. "Will it take long, Mr Shorter?" I asked. "I have to go out to dinner

He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of

"I have no right, Mr SwinburneI have no right at all," he said. "If you have to go out to dinner, you have of

coursea perfect rightof course a perfect right. But when you come backa man will be dead."

The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and drowned in my mind. I did not want to

go and see a political widow, and a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this dear,

"No, thank you," he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not smoking cigars was a social disgrace.

"No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now," he repeated with that hysterical eagerness with which people

who do not drink at all often try to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all night

"Nothing else I can get for you?" I said, feeling genuinely sorry for the wellmannered old donkey. "A cup of

I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping

"I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in

Essex'he threw this in with an indescribable airiness of vanity'I have never known such things happen."

"As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex," he said, "I have never been forcibly dressed up as an old woman and made

to take part in a crime in the character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It may be

"I have never heard of it," I said, "as among the duties of a clergyman. But I am not well up in church

matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to follow you correctly. Dressed upas what?"

I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make an old woman of him, but the thing was

"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr Shorter, "and I will tell my story with the utmost possible precision.

At seventeen minutes past eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and pay

certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the treasurer of our League of Christian

Amusements, with whom I concluded some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the

matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a very earnest churchwoman, but

permanently bedridden. She is the author of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled

He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that can only be called, by a contradictory

phrase, eager deliberation. He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the detective

"I then proceeded," he went on, with the same maddening conscientiousness of manner, "to Mr Carr (not Mr

James Carr, of course; Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having consulted with

him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in

the organ pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings

are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very

active in church work, had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is entirely under my

wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any

"When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss Brett, but they were sewing very busily.

It is very difficult, of course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in these matters

of full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and repeat the actual details of a conversation,

particularly a conversation which (though inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work)

was one which did not greatly impress the hearer's mind at the time and was in factermostly about

socks. I can, however, remember distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a

woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she was introduced to me as Miss James)

remarked that the weather was very changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted, I

cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with white hair. The only other figure in the

group that caught my attention was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners, silver

hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic member of the party; and her views on the

subject of pinafores, though expressed with a natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong and

advanced. Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply in black) it could not be denied that the

"After about ten minutes' conversation I rose to go, and as I did so I heard something whichI cannot

"I heard," said the vicar solemnly, "I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with the silver hair) say to Miss James

(the lady with the woollen shawl), the following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the

spot, and as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them down on a piece of paper. I believe I

have it here." He fumbled in his breastpocket, bringing out mild things, notebooks, circulars and

programmes of village concerts. "I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James, the following words: `Now's

He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely and unflinchingly, as if

conscious that here he was unshaken about his facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards

"This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar

that one maiden lady should address another maiden lady as `Bill'. My experience, as I have said, may be

incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in exclusively spinster circles wilder customs

than I am aware of. But it seemed to me odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand

the phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time that the words, `Now's your time,

Bill', were by no means pronounced with that upperclass intonation which, as I have already said, had up to

now characterized Miss Mowbray's conversation. In fact, the words, `Now's your time, Bill', would have

"I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more surprised when, looking round me in

bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright

against the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still knitting, and I supposed that this

erect posture against the door was only an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended

"I said genially, `I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must really be going. I haveer' I

stopped here, for the words she had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely

businesslike, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I think, natural and excusable. I have these

words also noted down. I have not the least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render them

phonetically. But she said," and Mr Shorter peered shortsightedly at his papers, "she said: `Chuck it, fat

'ead,' and she added something that sounded like `It's a kop', or (possibly) `a kopt'. And then the last cord,

either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss

Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said: `Put 'is old 'ead in a bag, Sam, and tie 'im up before you start jawin'.

You'll be kopt yourselves some o' these days with this way of coin' things, har lar theater.'

"My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly fancied a moment before, that

unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous society of their own from which all others were excluded? I

remembered dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but now, alas! rusty), I

remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange female freemasonry. I remembered the witches'

Sabbaths. I was just, in my absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana's nymphs,

when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The moment it held me I knew it was not a

"Miss Brettor what I had called Miss Brettwas standing in front of me with a big revolver in her hand

and a broad grin on her face. Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an attitude so

totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in

her pockets and her cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wono, that is I saw that instead of

Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to arrange these genders and his plaid

"As for Miss Mowbray, shehe, held me in a ring of iron. He had her armthat is she had his armround

her neckmy neck I mean and I could not cry out. Miss Brettthat is, Mr Brett, at least Mr something

who was not Miss Bretthad the revolver pointed at me. The other two ladiesor ergentlemen, were

rummaging in some bag in the background. It was all clear at last: they were criminals dressed up as women,

to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?

"The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, `'Urry up, 'Arry. Show the old bloke what the game

"`Curse 'is eyes,' said Miss BrettI mean the man with the revolver`why should we show 'im the game?'

"`If you take my advice you bloomin' well will,' said the man at the door, whom they called Bill. `A man wot

"`Bill's right enough,' said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it had been Miss Mowbray's). `Bring out

"The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other two womenI mean menwere

turning over baggage, and asked them for something which they gave him. He came back with it across the

room and held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that display, all the previous surprises of

"It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands of these scoundrels might in any case

have caused a mild surprise; but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely

good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head

on my hand and was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no

snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a

"I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good deal; it was glazed as well as framed,

and the glass blurred some of the details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,

my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never posed so for any photographer.

"`Be'old the bloomin' miracle,' said the man with the revolver, with illtimed facetiousness. `Parson, prepare

to meet your God.' And with this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that part of the

picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair of white whiskers and a clerical collar. And

underneath was a portrait of an old lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand against the

woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin is like another. It had required only the whiskers

"`Entertainin', ain't it?' said the man described as 'Arry, as he shot the glass back again. `Remarkable

resemblance, parson. Gratifyin' to the lady. Gratifyin' to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin' to us, as

bein' the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the man who's come to live in

"`Well,' said the man 'Arry, pointing to the picture, `that's 'is mother. 'Oo ran to catch 'im when 'e fell? She

did,' and he flung his fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who was exactly like

"`Tell the old gent wot 'e's got to do and be done with it,' broke out Bill from the door. `Look 'ere, Reverend

Shorter, we ain't goin' to do you no 'arm. We'll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as for the old

"`You ain't much of a 'and at a description, Bill,' said the man behind me. `Mr Shorter, it's like this. We've got

to see this man Hawker tonight. Maybe 'e'll kiss us all and 'ave up the champagne when 'e sees us. Maybe on

the other 'and'e won't. Maybe 'e'll be dead when we goes away. Maybe not. But we've got to see 'im. Now

as you know, 'e shuts 'isself up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why and we does.

The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded funny coincidence,' he said,

accenting the penultimate, `it's a very unusual piece of good luck, but you're 'is mother.'

"`When first I saw 'er picture,' said the man Bill, shaking his head in a ruminant manner, `when I first saw it I

"`That's easy said, your 'oldness,' said the man with the revolver, goodhumouredly; `you've got to put on

those clothes,' and he pointed to a pokebonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.

"I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I had no choice. I could not fight five

men, to say nothing of a loaded pistol. In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an old

womanas somebody else's mother, if you pleaseand was dragged out of the house to take part in a

"It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were closing in fast. On a dark road, in a

blowing wind, we set out towards the lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that ever

straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every external, we were six very respectable old

ladies of small means, in black dresses and refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really five criminals

"I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as I walked, trying to think of some

manner of escape. To cry out, so long as we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for

the ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the other hand, to attempt to stop strangers

and explain the situation was impossible, because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long before I had

persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a story, my companions would certainly have got off

themselves, and in all probability would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had the misfortune to

be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to

this, that the Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.

"I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and keeping pace, as far as I could, with their

rapid and yet ladylike step, until at length I saw a lamppost and a policeman standing under it. I had made

up my mind. Until we reached them we were all equally demure and silent and swift. When we reached them

I suddenly flung myself against the railings and roared out: `Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Rule Britannia! Get

your 'air cut. Hoopla! Boo!' It was a condition of no little novelty for a man in my position.

"The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled, drunken old woman that was my travesty.

"`Come along quiet, or I'll eat your heart,' cried Sam in my ear hoarsely. `Stop, or I'll flay you.' It was

frightful to hear the words and see the neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.

"I yelled, and yelledI was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains that vulgar young men had sung, to my

regret, at our village concerts; I rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.

"`If you can't get your friend on quiet, ladies,' said the policeman, `I shall have to take 'er up. Drunk and

"I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of thing; but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words

that I did not know I had ever heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.

"`When we get you past,' whispered Bill, `you'll howl louder; you'll howl louder when we're burning your

"I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares that men have ever dreamed, there

has never been anything so blighting and horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their

pokebonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything so

"For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions and the perfect respectability of all our

dresses would overcome the policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one can describe

anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest,

calling out (if I remember correctly), `Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.' It was at that moment that I remembered most

"`You come along with me,' he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect imitation of a lady's finnicking voice.

"`Oh, pray, constable, don't make a disturbance with our poor friend. We will get her quietly home. She does

"`Pray let me take her home,' reiterated Bill, in the resumed character of Miss James, `she wants looking

"`That's no good,' cried Bill feverishly. `She wants her friends. She wants a particular medicine we've got.'

"`Yes,' assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, `no other medicine any good, constable. Complaint quite

"`I'm all righ'. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!' remarked, to his eternal shame, the Vicar of Chuntsey.

"`Look here, ladies,' said the constable sternly, `I don't like the eccentricity of your friend, and I don't like 'er

songs, or 'er 'ead in my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don't like the looks of you I've seen many as

"`We've not our cards with us,' said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable dignity. `Nor do we see why we

should be insulted by any Jackinoffice who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If

you choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend, no doubt you are legally entitled to

take her. But if you fancy you have any legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.'

"The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment. Under cover of their advantage my five

persecutors turned for an instant on me faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the darkness.

When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions on to them, I had seen the telegraphic look flash

"By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute reflection. So long as the ruffians were

with me, I dared not quit the role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the real case,

the officer would merely have thought that I was slightly recovered and would have put me in charge of my

"But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow

path of duty for a clergyman of the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but such

necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many improbable. Suppose the story got about that I

"I lurched up, the policeman halflifting me. I went along weakly and quietly for about a hundred yards. The

officer evidently thought that I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly and

easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp

and slow and reluctant figure. At the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the street

like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five

minutes' running, found I was gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and blessed stars,

The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair. Both the matter and the manner of his

narration had, as time went on, impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind these

things he was a countrybred man and gentleman, and had showed courage and a sporting instinct in the hour

of desperation. He had told his story with many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing

"And now," said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like servile energy, "and now, Mr

Swinburne, what about that unhappy man Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they

said was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for reasons that you perceive. Among other

"My friend Basil Grant," I said, "is the best man we can go to. He and I were to have gone to the same dinner

tonight; but he will just have come back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?"

"Not at all," he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd plaid shawl.

A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen's flats in Lambeth which Grant

inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and

scrappy interior, the white gleam of Basil's shirtfront and the lustre of his fur coat flung on the wooden

settle, struck me as a contrast. He was drinking a glass of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come back

He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter with the genuine simplicity and respect

which he never failed to exhibit in dealing with any human being. When it was over he said simply:

I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought

to have dined that evening, that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at Mr Shorter. I

Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer or his demeanour generally, for he

kept his big blue eyes fixed on the old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more

"You are quite sure, Mr Shorter," he repeated, "that you don't know Captain Fraser?"

"Quite," answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him returning so much to the timidity, not to

"Then our course is clear," he said. "You have not even begun your investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the

Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again, and put his hands in his pockets.

"Oh," he said, with emphasis. "Ohyou don't think it necessary; then," and he added the words with great

clearness and deliberation, "then, Mr Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you without your

And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my life had come. Splendid and exciting as

life was in continual contact with an intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that splendour and

excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived perpetually near the vision of the reason of things

which makes men lose their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart

disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had

come now. At the very moment of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a fellow creature, Basil Grant

"Your whiskers," he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. "Give me your whiskers. And your bald head."

And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for the door, but was intercepted. And

then, before I knew where I was the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime and a

pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables were vaulted with a noise like

thunder, screens were smashed, crockery scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and

And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last halfwitted touch to my mystification. The

Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed him to

behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have expected him to behave. His power of dodging,

leaping, and fighting would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old vicar looked

like a sort of farcical fairytale. Moreover, he did not seem to be so much astonished as I had thought. There

was even a look of something like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the

"Come, come, Mr Grant," he panted, "you can't do anything to me. It's quite legal. And it doesn't do any one

the least harm. It's only a social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant."

"I don't blame you, my man," said Basil coolly. "But I want your whiskers. And your bald head. Do they

"No, no," said Mr Shorter, laughing, "we provide them ourselves. They don't belong to Captain Fraser."

"What the deuce does all this mean?" I almost screamed. "Are you all in an infernal nightmare? Why should

Mr Shorter's bald head belong to Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do

"Well," said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, "the fact is I was detained by a visitor. I have him, as a

"In your bedroom?" I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point when he might have said in his

Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in. Then he came out again with the last

of the bodily wonders of that wild night. He introduced into the sittingroom, in an apologetic manner, and

by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers and a plaid shawl.

"Sit down, gentlemen," cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. "Sit down all of you and have a glass of wine.

As you say, there is no harm in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him

The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two duplicate grins, laughed heartily at

this, and one of them carelessly pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.

"Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades. These two gentlemen (whose health I

"It's really very simple, Mr Swinburne," began he who had once been the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in

Essex; and it gave me a shock indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no longer its

own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of a young city man. "It is really nothing very

important. We are paid by our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people whom they

want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser" and with that he hesitated and smiled.

"The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted us both out of the way very much. He

is sailing tonight for East Africa, and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is erwhat is I

believe described as `the romance of his life'. He wanted that two hours with her, and employed these two

reverend gentlemen to detain us at our houses so as to let him have the field to himself."

"And of course," said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, "as I had to keep a gentleman at home from

keeping an appointment with a lady, I had to come with something rather hot and strongrather urgent. It

"Thank you, sir," said the man respectfully, "always very grateful for any recommendation, sir."

The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps

"It's wonderful how common it's getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy from morning till night. I've no doubt

you've often knocked up against us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you

with hunting stories, when you're burning to be introduced to somebody, he's from our bureau. When a lady

calls on parish work and stops hours, just when you wanted to go to the Robinsons', she's from our bureau.

"That may have been a mistake, sir," he said. "But it was not our fault. It was all the munificence of Captain

Fraser. He requested that the highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain you

gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who impersonate vicars, as being the most

respectable and more of a strain. We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to satisfy the

firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars. Before that we had two years as colonels, the next in

Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst like a thunderstorm the

moment he left the room. This arose from many separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person,

who wore light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he was lean and graceful, like a

He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a degree so exaggerated as immeasurably

to eclipse the most miserable of the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There are

inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial civilization, humanity has almost become

nomadic once more. But in that restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant officer in

the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in his time, to judge from his conversation, from

partridges to elephants, but his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that "the moon" had been not

unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish,

He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which consisted practically of five articles.

Two oddlooking, largebladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a green

umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some

unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite

undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey

I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental sword. But this raised another odd

question about him. Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey,

though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under its

almost Italian gaiety. To find a middleaged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is

unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting,

Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man admiration, but not respect. They

came out of queer places, where a good man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling

hells; they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange smoke from cannibal incantations.

These are the kind of stories which discredit a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If

Keith's tales were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at any rate, every opportunity of being a

He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his brother Rupert, the voluble amateur

detective. And as I say was invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was a clever

young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and cleverness, when sharply combined, so often

produce, a somewhat extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it was meat and drink

to him. I had often got irritated with this boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am bound

to say that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at Basil's opposing him, however

I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's

"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think that that fellow really did go as a stowaway with

"He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as you may happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too

"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert contemptuously, "be a bit funnier than that. Say, for

"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied Basil dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That

doesn't prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is that telling a thing

crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are

not the sort of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they

are the sort of things that a man would do if he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking."

"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something rather like a sneer, "you seem to be going in for

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil placidly. "For fiction is the creation of the

"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing

into flippancy. "Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?"

"I should like to question a regiment of his landladies," said Rupert cynically.

"I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely in himself," I said mildly; "his mode

Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and Drummond Keith appeared again on the

"I say, Grant," he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the door, "I've got no money in the world till

Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was sitting by his desk, swung the chair

"Really," began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, "since Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this

"Here you are, Ugly," said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction of the quite nonchalant officer. "Are you

"Yes," replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. "As a matter of fact I want it now. I want to see

Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly,

Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like illtemper:

"Oh, you're going to see a houseagent, are you?" said Rupert Grant grimly. "Do you know, Mr Keith, I think

Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a little; his brow blackened sharply.

Rupert's face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony, and he answered:

"I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along with you to this houseagent's."

"Oh, in God's name, come to my houseagent's! Come to my bedroom. Look under my bed. Examine my

dustbin. Come along!" And with a furious energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of the

Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective excitement, soon shouldered alongside him,

talking to him with that transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the disguised

policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation was certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the

unmistakable unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil and I tramped

behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other that we had both noticed this.

Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and unpromising neighbourhoods in the

search for his remarkable houseagent. Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets

grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser with mud, a darker curiosity

deepened on the brows of Basil, and the figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a

gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or fifth lean grey street in that sterile district,

we came suddenly to a halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a sort of sulky

desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all indescribably dingy in appearance and in size scarce

sufficient even for a penny toyshop, ran the inscription: "P. Montmorency, HouseAgent."

"This is the office of which I spoke," said Keith, in a cutting voice. "Will you wait here a moment, or does

your astonishing tenderness about my welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my

Rupert's face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth would have induced him now to have

"If you will excuse me," he said, clenching his hands behind his back, "I think I should feel myself justified

"Oh! Come along in," exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture of savage surrender. And he

P. Montmorency, HouseAgent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind a bare brown counter. He had an

egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole

combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black frockcoat, a sort of semiclerical tie worn

at a very unclerical angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a houseagent as anything could

We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to

tell the truth, odd as he was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon something

The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and steely voice which he reserved for great

The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment, picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed

To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency's eyes wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant

"A houseagent," cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were "burglar'.

"Yes . . . oh, yes," said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish smile. "I am a houseagent . . . oh,

"Well, I think," said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, "that Lieutenant Keith wants to speak to you. We have

"Yes, sir," said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter. "It's all ready, sir. I've attended to all

"Right," cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness of a gunshot. "We needn't bother about

Mr Montmorency, HouseAgent, presented a picture of pathos. After stammering a moment he said: "Excuse

me . . . Mr Keith . . . there was another matter . . . about which I wasn't quite sure. I tried to get all the heating

apparatus possible under the circumstances . . . but in winter . . . at that elevation . . ."

"Can't expect much, eh?" said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same sudden skill. "No, of course not. That's

all right, Montmorency. There can't be any more difficulties," and he put his hand on the handle of the door.

"I think," said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, "that Mr Montmorency has something further to say to

Basil, who had remained throughout the procedings in a state of Napoleonic calm, which might be more

accurately described as a state of Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.

"Before you go, Lieutenant Keith," he said. "Come now. Really, what about the birds?"

"I'll take care of them," said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long back turned to us; "they shan't suffer."

"Thank you, sir, thank you," cried the incomprehensible houseagent, with an air of ecstasy. "You'll excuse

my concern, sir. You know I'm wild on wild animals. I'm as wild as any of them on that. Thank you, sir. But

The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an indescribable laugh and swung round to face us.

It was a laugh, the purport of which was direct and essential, and yet which one cannot exactly express. As

near as it said anything, verbally speaking, it said: "Well, if you must spoil it, you must. But you don't know

"There is another thing," continued Mr Montmorency weakly. "Of course, if you don't want to be visited

"Green!" shouted Keith. "Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won't have a house of another colour. Green!"

and before we could realize anything the door had banged between us and the street.

Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he spoke before the echoes of the door died

"Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited," he said. "What is the matter with him? Is he

"Oh, I should think not," said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. "The negotiations have been somewhat

"Green," said Rupert calmly. "That appears to be a very important point. It must be rather green. May I ask

you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin my companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for

houses by their colour? Do clients write to a houseagent asking for a pink house or a blue house? Or, to take

Rupert had his ruthless smile. "Can you tell me any place on earth in which a green house would be

The houseagent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing out a couple of lizards and leaving

"No," said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to suggest a sudden situation, "I can't.

And may I, as a busy man, be excused if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in

connection with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to get for you, sir?"

He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second staggered. Then he recovered himself

"I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has unduly delayed us from joining our

"Not at all, sir," said the houseagent, taking a South American spider idly from his waistcoat pocket and

letting it climb up the slope of his desk. "Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again."

Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious to face Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The

"What do you say now?" cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said nothing now.

We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely

dull. We walked through grey street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely meeting

In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly to thicken into knots of five or six and

then into great groups and then into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a

knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that

there is madness in the heart and core of the mob. It soon became evident that something really important had

happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our way to the front, with the cunning which is known

only to cockneys, and once there we soon learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been a brawl

concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead on the stones of the street. Of the other four,

all interesting matters were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous fact. One of the

four survivors of the brutal and perhaps fatal scuffle was the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn to

ribbons, his eyes blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other thing, however, pointed at him in a worse manner.

A short sword, or very long knife, had been drawn out of his elegant walkingstick, and lay in front of him

The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous omnipotence, and even as they did so,

"That is the man, constable," he shouted, pointing at the battered lieutenant. "He is a suspicious character. He

"There's been no murder done, sir," said the policeman, with his automatic civility. "The poor man's only

hurt. I shall only be able to take the names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good eye kept

"Have a good eye kept on that one," said Rupert, pale to the lips, and pointing to the ragged Keith.

"All right, sir," said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round of the people present, collecting the

addresses. When he had completed his task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately

connected with the examination had gone away. He still found, however, one eagerfaced stranger lingering

"Constable," he said, "I have a very particular reason for asking you a question. Would you mind telling me

whether that military fellow who dropped his swordstick in the row gave you an address or not?"

"Yes, sir," said the policeman, after a reflective pause; "yes, he gave me his address."

"My name is Rupert Grant," said that individual, with some pomp. "I have assisted the police on more than

one occasion. I wonder whether you would tell me, as a special favour, what address?"

"Yes," he said slowly, "if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey."

"Thank you," said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as fast as his legs could carry him,

Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to breakfast; he contrived, I don't know how, to

achieve always the attitude of the indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when Basil and I came

"Well," he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the meal. "What do you think of your

"What do I think of him?" inquired Basil slowly. "I don't think anything of him."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy that was somewhat exultant. "I thought

you'd come round to my view, but I own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man is a

"I think," said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, "that I did not make myself clear. When I said

that I thought nothing of him I meant grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that

he did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of him, since you think him a knave. I

"I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake," said Rupert, breaking an egg with unnecessary

sharpness. "What the deuce is the sense of it? Here's a man whose original position was, by our common

agreement, dubious. He's a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who doesn't conceal his acquaintance with

all the blackest and bloodiest scenes on earth. We take the trouble to follow him to one of his appointments,

and if ever two human beings were plotting together and lying to every one else, he and that impossible

houseagent were doing it. We followed him home, and the very same night he is in the thick of a fatal, or

nearly fatal, brawl, in which he is the only man armed. Really, if this is being glaringly good, I must confess

Basil was quite unmoved. "I admit his moral goodness is of a certain kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He

is very fond of change and experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are mere

coincidence or special pleading. It's true he didn't want to talk about his house business in front of us. No man

would. It's true that he carries a swordstick. Any man might. It's true he drew it in the shock of a street fight.

Any man would. But there's nothing really dubious in all this. There's nothing to confirm"

"If you please, sir," said the landlady, with an alarmed air, "there's a policeman wants to see you."

The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost as soon as he appeared there.

"I think one of you gentlemen," he said, curtly but respectfully, "was present at the affair in Copper Street last

Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the constable went on calmly, referring to a

"A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn in the struggle. Gave his name as

"This is amusing," said Basil, laughing. "I was in the very act of clearing that poor officer's character of rather

"Well, sir," said the constable, "I took all the men's addresses and had them all watched. It wasn't serious

enough to do more than that. All the other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address.

The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping both his thighs.

"It's certainly very extraordinary," said Basil quietly, with knitted brows. "It's odd the fellow should have

"Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer," cried Rupert, in a sort of rapture, "I don't wonder you couldn't be a

judge. You think every one as good as yourself. Isn't the thing plain enough now? A doubtful acquaintance;

rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and,

"It's certainly very extraordinary," repeated Basil. And he strolled moodily about the room. Then he said:

"You are quite sure, constable, that there's no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have really

"It was very simple, sir," said the policeman, chuckling. "The place he named was a wellknown common

quite near London, and our people were down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's

no such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is so near London, it's a blank moor with

hardly five trees on it, to say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right enough. He was

a clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost England that people know nothing about. Nobody could

say offhand that there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there

Basil's face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and darker with a sort of desperate sagacity.

He was cornered almost for the first time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather wondered at the

almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his original prejudice in favour of the wildly

"You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in the districtby the way, what

The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but before he could speak Rupert Grant, who

was leaning in the window in a perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with the sharp

"Why, I can tell you that, Basil," he said graciously as he idly plucked leaves from a plant in the window. "I

"The constable will correct me if I am wrong," said Rupert, looking sweetly at the ceiling. "It was: The Elms,

There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few seconds into the void. Then his head

fell back in his chair so suddenly that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his lips

had flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic laughter struck and shook the ceiling

laughter that shook the laughter, laughter redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not stop.

Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with laughter; but still he laughed. The rest

"Excuse me," said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet. "I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And

stupid, too. And also unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we're to get down to that place.

The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to know. It's quite out of proportion to the comparatively

"I have forgotten its name," said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his pockets as he rose. "Something

"You don't seriously mean," cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort of confusion of emotions. "You

"Why should you?" said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the plant in the window and staring at

"To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course," said Basil Grant. "I thought you wanted to find him?"

Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on the floor. "And in order to find

him," he said, "you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where

The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting laugh, and Rupert, who had family

"He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of St Paul's; he may be in jail (which I

think most likely); he may be in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store cupboard;

but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only one where he has just been systematically looked

for and where we know that he is not to be foundand that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us

"Exactly," said Basil calmly, getting into his greatcoat; "I thought you might care to accompany me. If not,

It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if they really show a resolution to depart.

We all followed Basil, and I cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished

decisively with his greatcoat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.

"My dear chap," he cried, "do you really mean that you see any good in going down to this ridiculous scrub,

where there is nothing but beaten tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that

came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying reference in a scrape?"

"Yes," said Basil, taking out his watch, "and, what's worse, we've lost the train."

He paused a moment and then added: "As a matter of fact, I think we may just as well go down later in the

day. I have some writing to do, and I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich

Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn't be in. But if we get down by the 5.15, which gets

"Catch him!" cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. "I wish we could. Where the deuce shall we catch him

"I keep forgetting the name of the common," said Basil, as he buttoned up his coat. "The Elmswhat is it?

"But there is no such place," groaned Rupert; but he followed his brother downstairs.

We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hatstand and our sticks from the umbrellastand; and

why we followed him we did not and do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning

of the fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was that we followed him the more

completely the more nonsensical appeared the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from

our breakfast table and said: "I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails," we should have followed him

I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this occasion has got any of the dark and

cloudy colour, so to speak, of the strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense

twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most

cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to

the human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the

suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has something about it as of evil elfland. It seems

to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos halfforgotten by Godsuch a place was Buxton Common,

There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But it was enormously increased by the

sense of grey futility in our expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional windstricken

trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were

maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left

men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under the captaincy of a madman going to look

for a man whom we knew was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at us

Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon.

We crossed swell after swell of the windy common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly Basil

stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad

"Well," he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and slapping them together, "here we are

The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked above us in the sky like shapeless

clouds of grey. There was not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of

that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.

"How jolly it is," he cried, "to get back to civilization. That notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilised

delusion. Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers.

Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the

red river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be

Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the wind died in the dreary trees.

"You'll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own house. I did when I visited him when he

lived in the cabin at Yarmouth, and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He's really a very good fellow. But

"What do you mean?" I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort of sanity. "What is his greatest

"His greatest virtue," replied Basil, "is that he always tells the literal truth."

"Well, really," cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger, and slapping himself like a cabman, "he

doesn't seem to have been very literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I ask, have

"He was too truthful, I confess," said Basil, leaning against the tree; "too hardly veracious, too severely

accurate. He should have indulged in a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it's time

"I suppose so," I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a cheery and sensible voice, but which

"Why, up here," cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above our heads, swarming up the grey

"Come up, all of you," he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a schoolboy. "Come up. You'll be

The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a yard anywhere, and in some places not

more than a foot, between them. Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of

footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I supposed, have been some sport of

Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the waste and dark had brought out and

made primary something wholly mystical in Basil's supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant's

staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious voice above called to us out of heaven.

Halfway up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me suddenly. The hypnotism of the

madman above fell from me, and I saw the whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I

saw three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible suspicion of a doubtful

adventurer and who had ended, God knows how, halfway up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from

that adventurer and all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all probability, laughing at us in

some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty to laugh at us about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but

when I thought what his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that moment, I nearly let go of the

"Swinburne," said Rupert suddenly, from above, "what are we doing? Let's get down again," and by the mere

"We can't leave poor Basil," I said. "Can't you call to him or get hold of him by the leg?"

"He's too far ahead," answered Rupert; "he's nearly at the top of the beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant

We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The mighty trunks were beginning to sway

and shake slightly in the wind. Then I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far

from the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe. I saw that the almost straight lines of

the tall elm trees diminished a little in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines taper

towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me feel lost in space, like a falling star.

"No," answered my fellow climber. "He's too far up. He must get to the top, and when he finds nothing but

wind and leaves he may go sane again. Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself."

"No," said Rupert, "he'd shout if he was. I've never known him to talk to himself before; I'm afraid he really

"Yes," I said sadly, and listened. Basil's voice certainly was sounding above us, and not by any means in the

rich and riotous tones in which he had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now and

After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said, "My God!" with a violent voice.

"No. Listen to Basil," said the other in a very strange voice. "He's not talking to himself."

Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a sudden burst of wind, but when it died

down I could still hear the conversational voice above. I could hear two voices.

Suddenly from aloft came Basil's boisterous hailing voice as before: "Come up, you fellows. Here's

And a second afterwards came the halfAmerican voice we had heard in our chambers more than once. It

Out of a hole in an enormous dark eggshaped thing, pendent in the branches like a wasps' nest, was

protruding the pale face and fierce moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly Southern

Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily into the opening. We fell into the full

glow of a lamplit, cushioned, tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table, and a circular

seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was Basil, who, in the instant after alighting there, had

fallen into an attitude of marmoreal ease as if he had been there from boyhood; he was smoking a cigar with a

slow pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond Keith, who looked happy also, but feverish and

doubtful compared with his granite guest. The third was the little baldheaded houseagent with the wild

whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in

parallels on the wall. The sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle in the corner.

In the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne. Glasses were already set for us.

The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot of a lighthouse. The room stirred

Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then Basil spoke.

"You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further question about the cold veracity of our

"I don't quite grasp it all," said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden glare. "Lieutenant Keith said his address

"It's really quite right, sir," said Keith, with an open smile. "The bobby asked me where I lived. And I said,

quite truthfully, that I lived in the elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr

Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses of this kind. He has a special line in

arboreal villas. It's being kept rather quiet at present, because the people who want these houses don't want

them to get too common. But it's just the sort of thing a fellow like myself, racketing about in all sorts of

"Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?" asked Rupert eagerly, recovering his ease with the romance of

Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and nervously pulled out a snake, which

"Wwell, yes, sir," he said. "The fact wasermy people wanted me very much to go into the

houseagency business. But I never cared myself for anything but natural history and botany and things like

that. My poor parents have been dead some years now, butnaturally I like to respect their wishes. And I

thought somehow that an arboreal villa agency was a sort ofof compromise between being a botanist and

"Nnot much," replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith, who was (I am convinced) his only

"My dear friends," said Basil, puffing his cigar, "always remember two facts. The first is that though when

you are guessing about any one who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing about

any one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the most likely. The second is to remember that

very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house in Clapham with

nothing but railings in front of it and had written `The Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was

anything fantastic about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have believed

"Drink your wine, gentlemen," said Keith, laughing, "for this confounded wind will upset it."

We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning mechanism, swung only slightly, we

knew that the great head of the elm tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.

Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was the reverse of an unsociable man. He

would talk to any one anywhere, and talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm

for that person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he were always on the top of an omnibus

or waiting for a train. Most of these chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his life. A

few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong intimates, but there was an

accidental look about all of them as if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a

goods train or presents fished out of a branpie. One would be, let us say, a veterinary surgeon with the

appearance of a jockey; another, a mild prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another, a young

captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in the Lancers; another, a small dentist from

Fulham, in all reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry,

and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloakroom about

the right hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the

compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a

cab together and then dined with each other twice a week until they died. I myself was another. I had met

Grant while he was still a judge, on the balcony of the National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words

about the weather. Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for men always talk about

the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the

image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was Professor Chadd. He was known to

the ethnological world (which is a very interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest,

if not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language. He was known to the neighbourhood of

Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a bearded man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face of an

unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He went to and fro between the British

Museum and a selection of blameless teashops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He

was never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by the lighter wits of the Persian MS.

room) to go to bed with them in his little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There he lived

with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the

lives of methodical students, but one would not have called it exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration

occurred when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a tornado of conversation.

Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and these seemed for some reason or other

to descend upon him particularly in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember vividly

(for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular

evening when the strange calamity fell upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular

class and type (the class that is at once academic and middleclass), a Radical of a solemn and oldfashioned

type. Grant was a Radical himself, but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of Radical

who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical party. Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article

called "Zulu Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise scientific report of his study of the

customs of the people of T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain interferences with these

customs both by the British and the Germans. Hewas sitting with the magazine in front of him, the

lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead, not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant

strode up and down the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his heavy tread.

"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd," he was saying, "it's you. You are quite right to

champion the Zulus, but for all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way of

cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but for all that you don't understand them as

well as I do, who don't know an assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu.

Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people who are their antithesis?

Why is it? You are sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage.

Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British

Museum. Look at this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still respectable article. "Look at it. For ten

mortal years to my certain knowledge you have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of

doubt that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to you to give one wild yell and hurl

And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head, so that it knocked over a pile of books with

Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his

"Your mental processes," he said, "always go a little too fast. And they are stated without method. There is no

kind of inconsistency"and no words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the word"between

valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their stage in the evolutionary process, so long as they find it

congenial and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this concession which I have just

described to you and the view that the evolutionary stage in question is, nevertheless, so far as we can form

any estimate of values in the variety of cosmic processes, definable in some degree as an inferior

Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone like two pallid moons.

"True," he said, "there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear. But there is a great deal of

incompatibility of temper. I am very far from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage,

whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything stupid or ignorant about howling at the

moon or being afraid of devils in the dark. It seems to me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man be

thought a sort of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of existence itself? Suppose, my dear Chadd,

suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?"

Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paperknife and the intent reverence of the

"Beyond all question," he said, "it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude to the hypothesis which I understand you

to entertain, that our civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I apprehend you), is or

may be a retrogression from states identical with or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover, I shall be

inclined to concede that such a proposition is of the nature, in some degree at least, of a primary proposition,

and cannot adequately be argued, in the same sense, I mean, that the primary proposition of pessimism, or the

primary proposition of the nonexistence of matter, cannot adequately be argued. But I do not conceive you

to be under the impression that you have demonstrated anything more concerning this proposition than that it

is tenable, which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement that it is not a contradiction in terms."

"You don't understand," he said, "but, on the other hand, as a compensation, you don't mind smoking. Why

you don't object to that disgustingly barbaric rite I can't think. I can only say that I began it when I began to

be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense

that you are a scientist, I know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For instance, your theory of

the origin of language, something about its having come from the formulated secret language of some

individual creature, though you knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its favour, still does not

convince me, because I have a feeling that that is not the way that things happen. If you ask me why I think

so I can only answer that I am a Zulu; and if you ask me (as you most certainly will) what is my definition of

a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one who has climbed a Sussex appletree at seven and been afraid of a

"Your process of thought" began the immovable Chadd, but his speech was interrupted. His sister, with

that masculinity which always in such families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm

The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in such men the fact that they regard

philosophy as a familiar thing, but practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out of

"I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd," said Basil Grant, "but I hear that the British

Museum has recognized one of the men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it not,

The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a great deal of pathos also. "I believe it's

true," she said. "If it is, it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great deal, but great

relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a lot of things. James' health has never been good, and

while we are as poor as we are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his own dreadful grinding

notions and discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or child. I have often been afraid that unless

something of this kind occurred we should really have to be careful of his brain. But I believe it is practically

"I am delighted," began Basil, but with a worried face, "but these redtape negotiations are so terribly chancy

that I really can't advise you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I've known men, and

good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be disappointed. Of course, if it is true"

"If it is true," said the woman fiercely, "it means that people who have never lived may make an attempt at

Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed look in his eyes.

"Not a bit true," answered Chadd after a moment's bewilderment. "Your argument was in three points

"Well," said the professor slowly, "in saying that you could possess a knowledge of the essence of Zulu life

"Oh! confound Zulu life," cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. "I mean, have you got the post?"

"You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts," he said, opening his eye with childlike wonder.

"Oh, yes, I got that. But the real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me since I

have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers

"I am crushed," said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor's sister retired to her room, possibly,

It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely long and tiresome journey from

Shepherd's Bush to Lambeth. This may be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with

Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point of fact, close upon

noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular,

seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt if he would have

opened any of them if there had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern

carelessness in being really urgent and coercivea telegram. This he opened with the same heavy distraction

with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but

something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure had been pulled together suddenly as

strings are tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been for

an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man

who had drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and came

"What does the woman mean?" I said after a pause, irritably. "Those women have been saying that the poor

"You are mistaken," said Grant composedly. "It is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. It

is true, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don't put it in

telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or God allmerciful. These things are truisms,

and often private ones at that. If Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman in a

postoffice that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she did it because it was a matter

of life and death, and she can think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly."

Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge, through Trafalgar Square, along

"I think you will take my word for it, my friend," he said; "this is one of the most queer and complicated and

astounding incidents that ever happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization."

"I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don't quite see it," I said. "Is it so very

extraordinary or complicated that a dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders

of the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a

head like a turnip and a soul like a spider's web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of

fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?"

"It would not be extraordinary in the least," answered Basil, with placidity. "It would not be extraordinary in

the least," he repeated, "if the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary circumstance to which

"The extraordinary thing," said Basil, ringing the bell, "is that he has not gone mad from excitement."

The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway as the door opened. Two other

Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a

general sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three blackclad ladies in some

strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.

"Sit down, won't you?" said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat rigid with pain. "I think you had

Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she continued, in an even and mechanical

"I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This morning I was clearing away the breakfast

things, my sisters were both somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out of the

room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however, without it, and stood for some time staring at

the empty grate. I said, `Were you looking for anything I could get?' He did not answer, but this constantly

happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my question, and still he did not answer. Sometimes he is

so wrapped up in his studies that nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one's

presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really do not know how to describe the sensation which I

then had. It seems simply silly, but at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one's brain. The

"Yes," replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to suggest that she felt the fantasticality of

her statement. "He was standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the toe pointing

downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to

the other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.

"`James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened. James gave three kicks in the air with

the right leg, flung up the other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a teetotum the

other way. `Are you mad?' I cried. `Why don't you answer me?' He had come to a standstill facing me, and

was looking at me as he always does, with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken

he remained a second or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift his left foot slowly from the floor

and describe circles with it in the air. I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on the

dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to him, implored him to speak to us with appeals that

might have brought back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop and dance and kick with a solemn silent

face. It looks as if his legs belonged to some one else or were possessed by devils. He has never spoken to us

"Where is he now?" I said, getting up in some agitation. "We ought not to leave him alone."

"Doctor Colman is with him," said Miss Chadd calmly. "They are in the garden. Doctor Colman thought the

Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden. It was a small and somewhat smug

suburban garden; the flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this shining

and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said tropical. In the

middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a small,

sharplooking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume Dr Colman), who was talking

very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend,

listening with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong sunlight gleaming on his glasses as

the lamplight had gleamed the night before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious

decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have been the identical figure of last night. That

one thing was that while the face listened reposefully the legs were industriously dancing like the legs of a

marionette. The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and

incredibility to the prodigythe prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles

should always happen in broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.

The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat drearily to the window.

"You know, Adelaide," she said, "that Mr Bingham from the Museum is coming again at three."

"I know," said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. "I suppose we shall have to tell him about this. I thought that no good

Grant suddenly turned round. "What do you mean?" he said. "What will you have to tell Mr Bingham?"

"You know what I shall have to tell him," said the professor's sister, almost fiercely. "I don't know that we

need give it its wretched name. Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to go on

like that?" And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the garden, the shining, listening face and the

Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. "When did you say the British Museum man was

"Then I have an hour before me," said Grant, and without another word threw up the window and jumped out

into the garden. He did not walk straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden path drew

near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting

halfpence out of his trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.

Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd's elbow, and said, in a loud familiar voice, "Well, my boy, do you

The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to speak. The professor turned his bald

and placid head towards Grant in a friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.

"Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?" Basil continued, still in the same loud and lucid tone.

Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg, his expression still benevolent and

inquiring. The doctor cut in rather sharply. "Shall we go inside, professor?" he said. "Now you have shown

me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go in," and he tried to draw the kicking

ethnologist by the elbow, at the same time whispering to Grant: "I must ask you not to trouble him with

"Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be

inconsistent with them if you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour. I want to

watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very little to him, and that little shall be as soothing

"It is rather dangerous for him," he said, "to be long in the strong sun without his hat. With his bald head,

"That is soon settled," said Basil composedly, and took off his own big hat and clapped it on the egglike skull

of the professor. The latter did not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.

The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for some seconds, with his head on one side

like a bird's, and then saying, shortly, "All right," strutted away into the house, where the three Misses Chadd

were all looking out from the parlour window on to the garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes for a

full hour without moving, and they saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness itself.

Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding in making him do anything but

continue to caper, and when he had done this slowly took a red notebook out of one pocket and a large

He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from him he would walk a few yards in

pursuit, stop, and make notes again. Thus they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of turf,

the one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a problem, the other leaping and playing like a

After about threequarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put the pencil in his pocket, but kept the

notebook open in his hand, and walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of him.

Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild morning had not anticipated or dreamed.

The professor, on finding Basil in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and then

drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his sister had described as being the first of all his

antics. And the moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out rigid before him,

confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped his bent leg, and swinging his weight

on to it kicked out the other behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a saltire cross, and then

flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air. Then before any of the spectators could say a word or even

entertain a thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of jig or hornpipe opposite each other;

They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss

Chadd come out feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor

Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pasdequatre, Basil Grant seemed about to turn a cartwheel, when

they were frozen in their follies by the steely voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, "Mr Bingham of the British

Mr Bingham was a slim, wellclad gentleman with a pointed and slightly effeminate grey beard,

unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable manners. He was the type of the overcivilized, as Professor

Chadd was of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some credit under the

circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a considerable experience of the more dilettante

fashionable salons. But neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two greyhaired

middleclass gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves about like acrobats as a substitute for an

The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant stopped abruptly. The doctor had

reappeared on the scene, and his shiny black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of

"Dr Colman," said Basil, turning to him, "will you entertain Professor Chadd again for a little while? I am

sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham, might I have the pleasure of a few moments' private conversation? My

Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful but a trifle bewildered.

"Miss Chadd will excuse me," continued Basil easily, "if I know my way about the house." And he led the

"Mr Bingham," said Basil, setting a chair for him, "I imagine that Miss Chadd has told you of this distressing

"She has, Mr Grant," said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort of compassionate nervousness. "I am

more pained than I can say by this dreadful calamity. It seems quite heartrending that the thing should have

happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend a position which falls far short of his merits. As

it is, of coursereally, I don't know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of course, retainI sincerely trust he

willhis extraordinarily valuable intellect. But I am afraidI am really afraidthat it would not do to have

"I have a suggestion to make," said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his chair, drawing it up to the table.

"I am delighted, of course," said the gentleman from the British Museum, coughing and drawing up his chair

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for Basil to clear his throat and collect his

"My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you could altogether call it a compromise,

still it has something of that character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume, through

"Eight hundred a year!" said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted his mild blue eyes to those of his

interlocutorand he raised them with a mild blue stare. "I think I have not quite understood you. Did I

understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his present state, in the Asiatic

"No," he said firmly. "No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say anything for him I could. But I do not

say, I cannot say, that he ought to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely say that

until he stops dancing you ought to pay him L800 Surely you have some general fund for the endowment of

"I really don't know," he said, blinking his eyes, "what you are talking about. Do you ask us to give this

"Not at all," cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. "I never said for life. Not at all."

"What for, then?" asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly to tear his hair. "How long is this

"No," said Basil, beaming, "but just what I said. Till he has stopped dancing." And he lay back with

Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and kept them there.

"Come, Mr Grant," he said. "Do I seriously understand you to suggest that the Government pay Professor

Chadd an extraordinarily high salary simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he

should be paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he is flinging his boots about in the back

"That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing, but actually to stop with the absurd

"There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant," he said coldly. "What you are trying to explain to me

may be a jokea slightly unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your pardon for

the former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity, the

mental downfall, of Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure to speak of it. But

it is clear there is a limit to everything. And if the Archangel Gabriel went mad it would sever his connection,

He was stepping towards the door, but Grant's hand, flung out in dramatic warning, arrested him.

"Stop!" said Basil sternly. "Stop while there is yet time. Do you want to take part in a great work, Mr

Bingham? Do you want to help in the glory of Europein the glory of science? Do you want to carry your

head in the air when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in a great discovery? Do you

"Then," said Basil lightly, "your task is easy. Get Chadd L800 a year till he stops dancing."

With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently to the door, but in passing out of it

"Forgive me, gentlemen," he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, "the fact is, Mr Grant, Ierhave made

"Drink!" echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. "Oh, no, it's not drink."

Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and vague. "Homicidal mania" he

"No," said Dr Colman sharply; "the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of a different character. The awful

"The awful thing about him is," repeated Colman, with deliberation, "that he isn't mad."

"There are quite wellknown physical tests of lunacy," said the doctor shortly; "he hasn't got any of them."

"But why does he dance?" cried the despairing Bingham. "Why doesn't he answer us? Why hasn't he spoken

"The devil knows," said Dr Colman coolly. "I'm paid to judge of lunatics, but not of fools. The man's not

"What on earth can it mean? Can't we make him listen?" said Mr Bingham. "Can none get into any kind of

"Give him a message?" they cried simultaneously. "How will you give him a message?"

"If you really want to know how I shall give him your message," he began, but Bingham cried:

"Well," said Basil, "like this." And he suddenly sprang a foot into the air, coming down with crashing boots,

His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact that one of his feet was making wild

"You drive me to it," he said. "You drive me to betray my friend. And I will, for his own sake, betray him."

The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as of one anticipating some disgraceful

Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.

"Idiots!" he cried. "Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James Chadd going dismally to and fro from

his dingy house to your miserable library, with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never seen

that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck casually behind his spectacles and above his

seedy old collar, the face of a man who might have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher's stone? It is

all my fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly faith. I argued against him on the score of his famous

theory about languagethe theory that language was complete in certain individuals and was picked up by

others simply by watching them. I also chaffed him about not understanding things in rough and ready

practice. What has this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has worked out a system of language of

his own (it would take too long to explain); he has made up, I say, a language of his own. And he has sworn

that till people understand it, till he can speak to us in this language, he will not speak in any other. And he

shall not. I have understood, by taking careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others. This shall not be

blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year from somewhere till he has stopped

dancing. To stop him now is an infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution."

"I thank you, Mr Grant," he said. "I hope I shall be able to answer for the source of the L800 and I fancy that

"No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham," said Grant heartily. "I think I will go and have a chat with the

The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and friendly. They were still dancing

The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of interestfirst, the long fantasias of detective

deduction in which he was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of London. His

brother Basil said of him: "His reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong. But

his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him right." Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was

certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I think worth telling.

We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street was full of that bright blue twilight

which comes about half past eight in summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming

of darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In

the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert

talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly

because he was trying to prove to me the nine hundred and ninetyninth of his amateur detective theories. He

would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special

providence in a falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy milkman who

walked in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid that

I have forgotten what were the main outlines of the milkman's crime. I think it had something to do with the

fact that he had only one small can of milk to carry, and that of that he had left the lid loose and walked so

quickly that he spilled milk on the pavement. This showed that he was not thinking of his small burden, and

this again showed that he anticipated some other than lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this (taken

in conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed something else that I have entirely forgotten. I am

afraid that I derided this detailed revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that Rupert Grant, who, though the

best of fellows, had a good deal of the sensitiveness of the artistic temperament, slightly resented my

derision. He endeavoured to take a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity which he associated with his

"My dear fellow," he said acidly, "I'll bet you half a crown that wherever that milkman comes to a real stop

We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of the mysterious milkman. He walked

quicker and quicker, and we had some ado to keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of

milk, silver in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it, he disappeared down the area steps of

a house. I believe Rupert really believed that the milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept him

as having vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took no hold on my mind, he darted after

I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamppost in the lonely street. Then the milkman came

swinging up the steps without his can and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more

elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet laughing; a not uncommon

"My friend," he said, rubbing his hands, "so much for all your scepticism. So much for your philistine

ignorance of the possibilities of a romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your prosaic

"What?" I said incredulously, "do you mean to say that you really did find anything the matter with the poor

"Oh, the milkman," he said, with a miserable affectation at having misunderstood me. "No, IIdidn't

"Well, to tell the truth," said Rupert, shifting restlessly from one foot to another, "the milkman himself, as far

as merely physical appearances went, just said, `Milk, Miss,' and handed in the can. That is not to say, of

I broke into a violent laugh. "You idiot," I said, "why don't you own yourself wrong and have done with it?

Why should he have made a secret sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did

"Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that the milkman did not betray himself. It is

"Then come along with you," I said, with a certain amicable anger, "and remember that you owe me half a

"As to that, I differ from you," said Rupert coolly. "The milkman's remarks may have been quite innocent.

Even the milkman may have been. But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I think,

as follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came to a real stop I should find out something

"Well," he answered, "I jolly well have. You just come with me," and before I could speak he had turned tail

once more and whisked through the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost

When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally, as the saying is, in a hole. There was

nothing but a closed door, shuttered windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous well in

which I found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me there, and who stood there with dancing

"Just listen to that," he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his

left on the shutters of the basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined my head

for a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an unmistakable human voice.

"Have you been talking to somebody inside?" I asked suddenly, turning to Rupert.

"No, I haven't," he replied, with a grim smile, "but I should very much like to. Do you know what somebody

In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a moment and listened. From behind the

wooden partition, in which there was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which

took the form of the words: "When shall I get out? When shall I get out? Will they ever let me out?" or words

"Perhaps you think I am the criminal," he said sardonically, "instead of being in some small sense the

detective. I came into this area two or three minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something

funny going on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a woman) was moaning like mad. No,

my dear friend, beyond that I do not know anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my

disinherited daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when I hear a human being wailing that she

can't get out, and talking to herself like a mad woman and beating on the shutters with her fists, as she was

"My dear fellow," I said, "I apologize; this is no time for arguing. What is to be done?"

"First of all," he said, "housebreaking." And he forced the blade into the crevice of the wood and broke

away a huge splinter, leaving a gap and glimpse of the dark windowpane inside. The room within was

entirely unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead and opaque surface, as dark as

a strip of slate. Then came a realization which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our

breath. Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window itself seemed suddenly to be a mask.

A pale human face was pressed against the glass within, and with increased distinctness, with the increase of

Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walkingstick and pointing the ferrule like a fencing sword at the

glass, punched a hole in it, smaller and more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he

had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and querulous and clear, making the same

"Get out? Of course I can't," moaned the unknown female bitterly. "They won't let me. I told them I would be

let out. I told them I'd call the police. But it's no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me as

I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick, incensed with this very sinister mystery,

when Rupert held my arm hard, held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to stop me, but

did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment, and in the act swung slightly round, so that I was

facing the supporting wall of the front door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness like that of Rupert,

for a figure almost as motionless as the pillars of the portico, but unmistakably human, had put his head out

from between the doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted lamps of the street was

just behind his head, throwing it into abrupt darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of his

face beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring at us. I must say I thought Rupert's calmness

magnificent. He rang the area bell quite idly, and went on talking to me with the easy end of a conversation

which had never had any beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did not stir. I almost thought it

was really a statue. In another moment the grey area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was

"Pray excuse me," said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make somehow or other at once affable and

underbred, "but we thought perhaps that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don't

"Not here," said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of the menial of the nonphilanthropic, and

"Very sad, very sadthe indifference of these people," said the philanthropist with gravity, as we went

together up the steps. As we did so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.

"Well, what do you make of that?" asked Rupert, slapping his gloves together when we got into the street.

I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such conditions I had but one thought.

"Don't you think," I said a trifle timidly, "that we had better tell your brother?"

"Oh, if you like," said Rupert, in a lordly way. "He is quite near, as I promised to meet him at Gloucester

Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted look. After a little looking about we

discovered Basil Grant with his great head and his great white hat blocking the ticketoffice window. I

thought at first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an astonishingly long time about it. As a

matter of fact, he was discussing religion with the bookingoffice clerk, and had almost got his head through

the hole in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time before he would talk of anything

but the growth of an Oriental fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some of the

official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get him to understand that we had made an

astounding discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively, walking between us up and down the

lamplit street, while we told him in a rather feverish duet of the great house in South Kensington, of the

equivocal milkman, of the lady imprisoned in the basement, and the man staring from the porch. At length he

"If you're thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be careful what you do. It's no good you two

going there. To go twice on the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would look

worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman who looked at you looked thoroughly, and

will wear, so to speak, your portraits next to his heart. If you want to find out if there is anything in this

without a police raid I fancy you had better wait outside. I'll go in and see them."

His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the house. It stood up ponderous and purple

against the last pallor of twilight. It looked like an ogre's castle. And so apparently it was.

"Do you think it's safe, Basil," said his brother, pausing, a little pale, under the lamp, "to go into that place

alone? Of course we shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do

"I know of nothing that is safe," said Basil composedly, "except, possiblydeath," and he went up the steps

and rang at the bell. When the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of gaslight in

the gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying our friend inside, we could not repress a shudder. It

had been like the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A freshening night breeze

began to blow up the street, and we turned up the collars of our coats. At the end of twenty minutes, in which

we had scarcely moved or spoken, we were as cold as icebergs, but more, I think, from apprehension than the

"I can't stand this," he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into the shadow, for the panel of gold was

again cut out of the black house front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming out. He

was roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you could have heard every syllable across the street.

Another voice, or, possibly, two voices, were laughing and talking back at him from within.

"No, no, no," Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility. "That's quite wrong. That's the most

ghastly heresy of all. It's the soul, my dear chap, the soul that's the arbiter of cosmic forces. When you see a

"Come and pitch into us again," came the laughing voice from out of the house. "We still have some bones

"Thanks very much, I willgood night," shouted Grant, who had by this time reached the street.

"I'm not sure," said Basil doubtfully. "What do you say to getting some dinner somewhere and going to the

Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get those fellows to come, but they couldn't."

"Good? What do you mean?" answered Basil, staring also. "Have you turned Puritan or Passive Resister, or

"But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!" cried Rupert. "What about the poor woman

"Oh, that," he said. "I'd forgotten that. That's all right. Some mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private

affair. But I'm sorry those fellows couldn't come with us. Shall we take one of these green omnibuses? There

"I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us," I said irritably. "How can we leave that woman locked

up? How can it be a mere private affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be

private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man's drawingroom, would you think it bad taste to talk about it

"That's very forcible," he said. "As a matter of fact, though, I know it's all right in this case. And there comes

"My dear chap, the thing's obvious," answered Basil, holding a return ticket between his teeth while he

fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. "Those two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They're not the

kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a paper before the omnibus comes."

"Oh, curse the paper!" cried Rupert, in a fury. "Do you mean to tell me, Basil Grant, that you are going to

leave a fellow creature in pitch darkness in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with the

"Good men do commit crimes sometimes," said Basil, taking the ticket out of his mouth. "But this kind of

good man doesn't commit that kind of crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?"

The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the dim wide street towards us. Basil had

stepped from the curb, and for an instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it and

"Basil," I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, "I simply won't leave this street and this house."

"Nor will I," said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers. "There's some black work going on there. If I left

"Of course if you feel like that," he said, "we'll investigate further. You'll find it's all right, though. They're

only two young Oxford fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this pseudoDarwinian

"I think," said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, "that we shall enlighten you further about their ethics."

"I propose, first of all," said Rupert, "to get into this house; secondly, to have a look at these nice young

Oxford men; thirdly, to knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house."

Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an instant with one of his sudden laughs.

"Poor little boys," he said. "But it almost serves them right for holding such silly views, after all," and he

quaked again with amusement "there's something confoundedly Darwinian about it."

"Oh, yes, I'll be in it," answered Basil, "if it's only to prevent your doing the poor chaps any harm."

He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but

somehow the instant the door opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.

"So sorry to haunt you like this," he said. "I met two friends outside who very much want to know you. May I

"Delighted, of course," said a young voice, the unmistakable voice of the Isis, and I realized that the door had

been opened, not by the decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was a short, but

shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a square, snubnosed face. He wore slippers and a sort of

"This way," he said; "mind the steps by the staircase. This house is more crooked and oldfashioned than you

would think from its snobbish exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really."

We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young inhabitants as a sittingroom, an

apartment littered with magazines and books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who

stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly, with dead brown hair brushed forward

and a Norfolk jacket. He was that particular type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and clumsy,

"Any more arguments?" he said, when introductions had been effected. "I must say, Mr Grant, you were

rather severe upon eminent men of science such as we. I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor

"Bosh," answered Grant. "I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague

popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion

and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man they knew they were talking about

a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they think they

do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the

words mean. The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking

unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science."

"That is all very well," said the big young man, whose name appeared to be Burrows. "Of course, in a sense,

science, like mathematics or the violin, can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the rudiments

may be of public use. Greenwood here," indicating the little man in the blazer, "doesn't know one note of

music from another. Still, he knows something. He knows enough to take off his hat when they play `God

save the King'. He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play `Oh, dem Golden Slippers'. Just in the same

Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument uncommon in philosophical

controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate. Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm

"Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne," he called out, and before I knew where I was I was locked in a

grapple with the man in the purple blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but I

was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of his feet from under him; he swung for a

moment on the single foot, and then we fell with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.

My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's voice finishing some long sentence of

". . . wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and I need not say unpleasant. Still one must

side with one's old friends against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying you up in this

antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can reasonably be while. . ."

I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the garotte of Rupert, while Basil was

striving to master his mighty hands. Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows;

how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by Rupert's arm, but a convulsive heave

went over his whole frame. An instant after his head plunged forward like a bull's, and Rupert Grant was

slung head over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in front of him. Simultaneously the bull's head

butted Basil in the chest, bringing him also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a Berserker roar,

leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the room, smashing the wastepaper basket. The bewildered

Greenwood sprang furiously to his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it now.

Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals through the great house. Before I could

get panting to my feet, and before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments, could even lift

his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room. Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were

now outnumbered. Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me back into the

corner upon the wreck of the paper basket. The other two flew at Basil, and pinned him against the wall.

In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil come with a loud incongruous

I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase, from between the swaying limbs of

my captors and his. To my astonishment his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child

I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of me so heavily that Greenwood could

afford to leave me to him. He turned quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The

latter's head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship, as his enemies pressed him down. He

flung up one hand just as I thought him falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I

afterwards discovered, of St Chrysostom's theology. Just as Greenwood bounded across the room towards the

group, Basil plucked the ponderous tome bodily out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the

air, so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over like a rolling ninepin. At the same

Rupert's head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he could on to the halfprostrate

Greenwood. They were rolling over each other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but

Rupert certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor was a sea of torn and trampled

papers and magazines, like an immense wastepaper basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to

the knees in them, as in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a sheet of the

Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some fantastic trouser frill.

Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies, might be dead for all I knew. I fancied,

however, that the broad back of Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in it

as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad back swayed hither and thither. It was

swaying on one leg; Basil, somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows' huge fists and those of the footman

were battering Basil's sunken head like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant's ankle out of his sudden and

savage grip. While his own head was forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his

captor was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face. Then suddenly the floor and

the walls and the ceiling shook together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the floor. Basil

sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like batteringrams knocked the footman into a cocked

hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and another in his teeth, and bound

him hand and foot almost before he knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang at

Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between them they secured him easily. The man

who had hold of me let go and turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and, to my infinite

satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other footman, bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was

stumbling out of the room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the battle was won.

Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.

To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a perfectly calm voice to the man who

"And now, gentlemen," he said, "since you have got your own way, perhaps you wouldn't mind telling us

"This," said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive, "this is what we call the survival of the

Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter phases of the fight, was intellectually

altogether himself again at the end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a

handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he sang out quite coolly:

"Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will

"All right," said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way in an armchair. "Don't hurry for us,"

he said, glancing round at the litter of the room, "we have all the illustrated papers."

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long

enough to hear, as I passed through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil's voice continuing

"And now, Mr Burrows," he said, settling himself sociably in the chair, "there's no reason why we shouldn't

go on with that amusing argument. I'm sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the

floor, and, as I told you before, I've no more notion why you are there than the man in the moon. A

conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You

were saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might

"Precisely," said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. "I hold that nothing more than a rough sketch of

And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join

in the amicable controversy. Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a

slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say,

together, and sank deeper and deeper into the underworld of that mysterious house, which, perhaps,

appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its semicriminal

The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors that would naturally lead to the

kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with

indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert

broke the door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.

"Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you captive are captives themselves. We

heard you crying and we came to deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are

For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead silence in it. Then there came a kind

of muttering and moaning. We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have

heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just as

"Has anybody got a match?" said Rupert grimly. "I fancy we have come pretty near the end of this business."

I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare, yellowpapered apartment with a darkclad figure at

the other end of it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It

had, however, revealed something more practicalan iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another

match and lit the gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.

At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfastroom sat an elderly lady with a singularly

high colour and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of

Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her piquant hair and

face perfectly against the brown background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one

place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the wood about an hour before.

"Madam," said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, "permit me to have the pleasure of announcing to you

that you are free. Your complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have

The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the

apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:

"Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had rescued me?"

"Yes, madam," said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. "We have very satisfactorily dealt with Mr

Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled affairs with them very satisfactorily."

"We persuaded them, my dear madam," said Rupert, laughing, "by knocking them down and tying them up.

To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat by the window.

"Do I understand," she said, with the air of a person about to begin knitting, "that you have knocked down Mr

"We have," said Rupert proudly; "we have resisted their oppression and conquered it."

The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us for an instant.

"But what about Greenwood and Burrows?" she said. "What did I understand you to say had become of

"They are lying on the floor upstairs," said Rupert, chuckling. "Tied hand and foot."

"Well, that settles it," said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into her seat again, "I must stop where I

"Stop where you are?" he said. "Why should you stop any longer where you are? What power can force you

"The question rather is," said the old lady, with composure, "what power can force me to go anywhere else?"

"I suppose you don't intend to tie me up," she said, "and carry me off? I certainly shall not go otherwise."

"But, my dear madam," cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, "we heard you with our own ears crying

"Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things," replied the captive grimly. "I suppose I did break down

a bit and lose my temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that."

"Some sense of honour?" repeated Rupert, and the last light of intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the

He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once more in the toils of my conscience

"Why," said the lady, "if you are particularly anxious to do me a little favour you might untie the gentlemen

Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague violence. With mouth open to

"Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true," Mr Burrows was saying, lying on his back and arguing easily

with Basil; "but we must consider the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality. . ."

"Who won't come out?" asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in an argument.

"The lady downstairs," replied Rupert. "The lady who was locked up. She won't come out. And she says that

"And a jolly sensible suggestion," cried Basil, and with a bound he was on top of the prostrate Burrows once

In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple jacket, who did not seem to regard

any of the proceedings as particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other hand, was

"Well," said Basil, in his cheeriest way, "I think we must be getting away. We've so much enjoyed our

evening. Far too much regard for you to stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we've made

"Basil," said Rupert desperately, "for God's sake come and see what you can make of the woman downstairs.

I can't get the discomfort out of my mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these

"No, no," cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. "No, no, look in the pantry, gentlemen.

Examine the coalhole. Make a tour of the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you."

This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others which I have narrated. I had been

through many wild days with Basil Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to

have gone mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the end of the day and its adventure

things had cleared themselves like the sky after rain, and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually

dawned upon me. But this day's work was destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we left that

house, ten minutes afterwards, one halfwitted touch was added which rolled all our minds in cloud. If

Rupert's head had suddenly fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of Greenwood's

shoulders, we could scarcely have been more suddenly stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We

had to go to bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it and let it stand in our memories

for weeks and months. As will be seen, it was not until months afterwards that by another accident and in

When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading, the two hosts bringing up the rear, we

found the door of the prison again closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as pitch. The

old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she seemed to have a weird preference for sitting in the

Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady turned her birdlike head as we all

stumbled forward in the strong gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up

and swept a sort of oldfashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to

whom it was natural to suppose this subservience had been offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in this

subservience, and desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they received it. To my surprise they did not seem

to have seen it at all: Burrows was paring his nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the

group and had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing fact became apparent. It was Basil Grant who

stood foremost of the group, the golden gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His face wore an

expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of a very grave smile. His head was slightly bent with

a restrained bow. It was he who had acknowledged the lady's obeisance. And it was he, beyond any shadow

"So I hear," he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, "I hear, madam, that my friends have been trying

"No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you," answered the lady with a high colour. "But you have

"I willingly attest it, madam," replied Basil, in the same level tones, "and the fact is that I am so much

gratified with your exhibition of loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large

discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of these gentlemen. But you know that

The captive made another reverence. "I have never complained of your injustice," she said. "I need scarcely

And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room, Basil holding the door open for her.

He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. "This will be a relief to you," he said.

"Yes, it will," replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like a sphinx.

We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as if we had fallen into it from some

"Basil," said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, "I always thought you were my brother. But are you a man? I

"At present," replied Basil, "my mere humanity is proved by one of the most unmistakable symbolshunger.

We are too late for the theatre in Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes the

As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my room, swinging a satchel in his hand

and with a general air of having jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the latest

and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less a thing than the discovery of the actual origin,

whereabouts, and headquarters of the source of all our joys and sorrowsthe Club of Queer Trades. I should

expand this story for ever if I explained how ultimately we ran this strange entity to its lair. The process

meant a hundred interesting things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of

roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding

I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger one than that I felt when I came out of

those rambling, sightless, and seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and

hospitable diningroom, surrounded upon almost every side by faces that I knew. There was Mr

Montmorency, the Arboreal HouseAgent, seated between the two brisk young men who were occasionally

vicars, and always Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the Adventure and

As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their chairs, and with the very action the

"The president's not here," said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to Professor Chadd.

"Nno," said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness. "I can't imagine where he is."

"Good heavens," said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, "I really feel a little nervous. I'll go and see." And he

"He's there, gentlemenhe's there all righthe's coming in now," he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I

could hardly help feeling the beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who was the first

member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of

madmen: what fantastic was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an expectation?

Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled and shaken with a shout, in the

midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and in evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.

How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person particularly prone to enjoy the long

luxuriance of the club dinner. But on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses.

Horsd'oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort of ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were

ostriches until that dinner was over. The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon being

made of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of the moon. And all the time Basil

Grant went on laughing and eating and drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he was there,

At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the time of the club speeches and the

"Gentlemen," he said, "it is a custom in this society that the president for the year opens the proceedings not

by any general toast of sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of his trade. We

then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It is my business, as the senior member, to open by stating

my claim to membership of this club. Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to

do justice and to administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in my work, as it was, I was not

touching even the fringe of justice. I was seated in the seat of the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and ermine;

nevertheless, I held a small and lowly and futile post. I had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and

my red and gold was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me taut and passionate problems, the

stringency of which I had to pretend to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the

time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have been far better relieved by a kiss or a

thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this grew on

me, there grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a

whisper or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had to say. Then came the time when I

publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and melted from public life."

Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I who were listening with intensity to

"Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself privately as a purely moral judge to settle

purely moral differences. Before very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly secret) had spread

over the whole of society. People were tried before me not for the practical trifles for which nobody cares,

such as committing a murder, or keeping a dog without a licence. My criminals were tried for the faults

which really make social life impossible. They were tried before me for selfishness, or for an impossible

vanity, or for scandalmongering, or for stinginess to guests or dependents. Of course these courts had no sort

of real coercive powers. The fulfilment of their punishments rested entirely on the honour of the ladies and

gentlemen involved, including the honour of the culprits. But you would be amazed to know how completely

our orders were always obeyed. Only lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South

Kensington whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means of breaking off an

engagement through backbiting, absolutely refused to leave her prison, although some wellmeaning persons

Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for the matter of that, I expect, was I.

This, then, was the explanation of the old lady's strange discontent and her still stranger content with her lot.

She was one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court. She was one of the clients of his Queer Trade.

We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health of Basil's new judiciary. We had only

a confused sense of everything having been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the

And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had made long ago to Major Brown. Thus