by Paul Merton
‘O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.’
He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.
I was sitting there one evening, about six o’clock, over a glass of that gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily, when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.
‘Sorry to bother you, Basil,’ he gasped. ‘I took a liberty—made an appointment here with a man—a client—in five minutes—I beg your pardon, sir,’ and he gave me a bow of apology.
Basil smiled at me. ‘You didn’t know,’ he said, ‘that I had a practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a—what are you now, Rupert?’
‘I am and have been for some time,’ said Rupert, with some dignity, ‘a private detective, and there’s my client.’
A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and said, ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ with a stress on the last syllable that somehow marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social. He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black moustache, which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by his sad sea-blue eyes.
Basil immediately said to me, ‘Let us come into the next room, Gully,’ and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:
‘Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.’
The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major Brown I had met years before in Basil’s society. I had forgotten altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I do not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.
Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his habits he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup. One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion—the cultivation of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his blue eyes glittered like a child’s at a new toy, the eyes that had remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round Roberts at Candahar.
‘Well, Major,’ said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging himself into a chair, ‘what is the matter with you?’
‘Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P.G. Northover,’ said the Major, with righteous indignation.
We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes shut in his abstracted way, said simply:
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me. Something. Preposterous.’
We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major’s fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.
Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll’s house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.
One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether so in the Major’s, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major’s own favourite pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent, praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to the Major.
‘I’ll tell you what, sir,’ he said. ‘If you’re interested in them things, you just get on to that wall.’
‘On the wall!’ cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.
‘Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,’ hissed the tempter. ‘I’ll help you up, sir.’
How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of the Major’s life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The second after, the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for once it was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the sentence:
DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN
A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the barrow had suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its incredible inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown did not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military exploits, he sometimes felt himself to be a p
ainfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again, might have thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke, but Brown could not easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint learning that the garden arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one; he thought it extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money like water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with six legs.
At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and the watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the gravel path.
‘Who on earth are you?’ he gasped, trembling violently.
‘I am Major Brown,’ said that individual, who was always cool in the hour of action.
The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he stammered wildly, ‘Come down—come down here!’
‘At your service,’ said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.
The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed house, until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man turned with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said, ‘don’t mention jackals.’
Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran downstairs with a clatter.
The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in the world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to see that the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking out.
‘Madam,’ he said, bowing simply, ‘I am Major Brown.’
‘Sit down,’ said the lady; but she did not turn her head.
She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour of Bedford Park. ‘You have come, I suppose,’ she said mournfully, ‘to tax me about the hateful title-deeds.’
‘I have come, madam,’ he said, ‘to know what is the matter. To know why my name is written across your garden. Not amicably either.’
He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene, the frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was still, and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he studied cried to heaven for his blood.
‘You know I must not turn round,’ said the lady; ‘every afternoon till the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.’
Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.
‘It is almost six,’ he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf.
‘That makes the third year I have waited,’ she cried. ‘This is an anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would happen once and for all.’
And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a voice cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:
‘Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?’
Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door and looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon sparks. On returning, he found the lady in green trembling.
‘It is the end,’ she cried, with shaking lips; ‘it may be death for both of us. Whenever—’
But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse proclamation from the dark street, again horribly articulate.
‘Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?’
Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific voice came:
‘Major Brown, Major Brown, where did—’
Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time—in time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.
The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again, it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. ‘Where’s your coal-cellar?’ he said, and stepped out into the passage.
She looked at him with wild grey eyes. ‘You will not go down,’ she cried, ‘alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?’
‘Is this the way?’ replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in, feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied, a pair of great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of the head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a brutal image of destiny. But the Major’s head, though upside down, was perfectly clear and intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure until he had slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of the invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one of his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with a crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had evidently now no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and thither to get past the Major to the door, but that tenacious person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the other hand to a beam. At length there came a strain in holding back this human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to rend and part from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and the dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the cellar, leaving the torn coat in the Major’s hand; the only fruit of his adventure and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out at the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole equipment of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards and whitewashed walls.
‘The lady was in the conspiracy, of course,’ said Rupert, nodding. Major Brown turned brick red. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I think not.’
Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said nothing. When next he spoke he asked:
‘Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?’
‘There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,’ said the Major carefully; ‘there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string, and this letter,’ and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:
Dear Mr Plover,
I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow The coal-cellar, of course.
Yours faithfully,
P.G. Northover.
Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut in:
‘Is it dated from anywhere?’
‘No—oh, yes!’ replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; ‘14 Tanner’s Court, North—’
Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.
‘Then why are we hanging here? Let’s get along. Basil, lend me your revolver.’
Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was some time before he answered:
‘I don’t think you’ll need it.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. ‘One never knows. But going down a dark court to see criminals—’
‘Do you think they are criminals?’ asked his brother.
Rupert laughed stoutly. ‘Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless experiment, but—’
‘Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?’ asked Basil, in the same distant and monotonous voice.
‘My dear fellow, you’ve been asleep. Look at the letter.’
‘I am looking at the letter,’ said the mad judge calmly; though, as a matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. ‘I don’t think it’s the sort of letter one criminal would write to another.’
‘My dear boy, you are glorious,’ cried Rupert, turning round, with laughter in his blue bright eyes. ‘Your methods amaze me. Why, there is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You might as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar Square.’
Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not otherwise move.
‘That’s rather good,’ he said; ‘but, of course, logic like that’s not what is really wanted. It’s a question of spiritual atmosphere. It’s not a criminal letter.’
‘It is. It’s a matter of fact,’ cried the other in an agony of reasonableness.
‘Facts,’ murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off animals, ‘how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly—in fact, I’m off my head—but I never could believe in that man—what’s his name, in those capital stories?—Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree. It’s only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up—only the green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.’
‘But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?’
