Manalive

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “Don’t be a brute,” growled Michael Moon.

  None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance along the table at Innocent Smith. He was still bowed above his paper toys, and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or shame. He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and tucked it in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved.

  Chapter III

  The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge

  Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American, and his respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.

  “Ignoring,” he said, “the delicate and considerable knightly protests that have been called forth by my colleague’s native sense of oration, and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my colleague’s question by no means devoid of rel’vancy. The last charge against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge on the paper is of bigamy and desertion. It does without question appear that the defence, in aspiring to rebut this last charge, have really admitted the next. Either Innocent Smith is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else that is exploded; but he is pretty well fixed for attempted bigamy. It all depends on what view we take of the alleged letter from Curate Percy. Under these conditions I feel justified in claiming my right to questions. May I ask how the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy? Did it come direct from the prisoner?”

  “We have had nothing direct from the prisoner,” said Moon quietly. “The few documents which the defence guarantees came to us from another quarter.”

  “From what quarter?” asked Dr. Pym.

  “If you insist,” answered Moon, “we had them from Miss Gray.”

  Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead, opened them very wide.

  “Do you really mean to say,” he said, “that Miss Gray was in possession of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?”

  “Quite so,” said Inglewood, and sat down.

  The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice, and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.

  “Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy’s narrative is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents in our own possession. Of these the principal and most certain is the testimony of Innocent Smith’s gardener, who was present at the most dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr. Gould, the gardener, please.”

  Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the gardener. That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith when they had a little house on the edge of Croydon. From the gardener’s tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain he had seen the place. It was one of those corners of town or country that one does not forget, for it looked like a frontier. The garden hung very high above the lane, and its end was steep and sharp, like a fortress. Beyond was a roll of real country, with a white path sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and branches of great gray trees writhing and twisting against the sky. But as if to assert that the lane itself was suburban, were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-green and a red pillar-box that stood exactly at the corner. Inglewood was sure of the place; he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle; he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared over the garden bushes above. The gardener’s account, unlike the curate’s, was quite free from decorative adjectives, however many he may have uttered privately when writing it. He simply said that on a particular morning Mr. Smith came out and began to play about with a rake, as he often did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree, and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in its final agony. Never, apparently, did he think of putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener, in consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity. But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he (the gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped red and white jacket (which might have been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part of his pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his wife, who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the garden, these decisive and very loud expressions–

  “I won’t stay here any longer. I’ve got another wife and much better children a long way from here. My other wife’s got redder hair than yours, and my other garden’s got a much finer situation; and I’m going off to them.”

  With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky, higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again. Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down in the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat. Much of the picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood’s accidental memory of the place. He could see with his mind’s eye that big bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind. But the gardener, on his own account, was quite prepared to swear to the public confession of bigamy, to the temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky, and the final disappearance of the man up the road. Moreover, being a local man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumours that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast, nothing was known of him again.

  This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge. So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account. “I hope you are not so insular,” he said, “that you will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood’s favour we will hear the French innkeeper.”

  Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already reading the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them to run something like this:–

  “Sir,–Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin’s Cafe on the sea-front at Gras, rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I know of the stranger out of the sea.

  “I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit beauty to pervade one’s whole life, just as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the onions!

  “But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening I felt like a poet–like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe in the mad Montmartre.

  “Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter and poisonous. I had never known it look so unfamiliar before. In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore. There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from the sea. It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men. He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him look like a Triton. Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging to him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside, asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded. Then the monster, with great politeness
, invited me to partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation. He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats. He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house. When I naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not know; it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, ‘over there.’

  “I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when he saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly minute. He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an auctioneer. I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last two, which were that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red pillar-box at the corner.

  “‘A red pillar-box!’ I cried in astonishment. ‘Why, the place must be in England!’

  “‘I had forgotten,’ he said, nodding heavily. ‘That is the island’s name.’

  “‘But,nom du nom,’ I cried testily, ‘you’ve just come from England, my boy.’

  “‘They SAID it was England,’ said my imbecile, conspiratorially. ‘They said it was Kent. But Kentish men are such liars one can’t believe anything they say.’

  “‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘you must pardon me. I am elderly, and thefumisteriesof the young men are beyond me. I go by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension of applied common sense called science.’

  “‘Science!’ cried the stranger. ‘There is only one good things science ever discovered–a good thing, good tidings of great joy– that the world is round.’

  “I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my intelligence. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already.’

  “‘Is it not even shorter,’ I asked, ‘to stop where you are?’

  “‘No, no, no!’ he cried emphatically. ‘That way is long and very weary. At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find the wife I really married and the house that is really mine. And that house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,’ he asked with a sudden intensity, ‘do you never want to rush out of your house in order to find it?’

  “‘No, I think not,’ I replied; ‘reason tells a man from the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life. I remain here, content to fulfil the life of man. All my interests are here, and most of my friends, and–’

  “‘And yet,’ he cried, starting to his almost terrific height, ‘you made the French Revolution!’

  “‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘I am not quite so elderly. A relative perhaps.’

  “‘I mean your sort did!’ exclaimed this personage. ‘Yes, your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you’re just back where you were before. Why, blast it all, that’s just where we all want to be–back where we were before! That is revolution–going right round! Every revolution, like a repentance, is a return.’

  “He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again, and then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck the tiny table with his colossal fist and went on.

  “‘I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an English Revolution. God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny. The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman marches to the outskirts of the town, and alone. But I am going to turn the world upside down, too. I’m going to turn myself upside down. I’m going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes, where trees and men hang head downward in the sky. But my revolution, like yours, like the earth’s, will end up in the holy, happy place– the celestial, incredible place–the place where we were before.’

  “With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason, he leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight, swinging his pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment, which also pointed to some loss of mental balance. This is all I know of the episode of the man landed from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of justice.– Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high consideration, with which I have the honour to be your obedient servant,

  “Jules Durobin.”

  “The next document in our dossier,” continued Inglewood, “comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia, and runs as follows:–

  “Sir,–My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the stationmaster at the station near Crazok. The great trains go by across the plains taking people to China, but very few people get down at the platform where I have to watch. This makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon the books I have. But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbours, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia so much as in other parts. Many of the peasants round here have never heard of Bernard Shaw.

  “I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult. The revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles of humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books, they were ill acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts, though provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there is a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them. This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.

  “It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains came through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching a train that had come in. Only one person got out of the train, far away up at the other end of it, for it was a very long train. It was evening, with a cold, greenish sky. A little snow had fallen, but not enough to whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops of some distant tablelands caught the evening light like lakes. As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the train he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen so large a man. But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because his shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little. From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.

  “Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled in one of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution, though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government side. I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and laid out right and left with such energy that he came through them without scathe and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and really astonished.

  “Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim, he could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.

  “‘There are not many houses to be had round here,’ I answered in the same language, ‘the district has been very disturbed. A revolution, as you know, has recently been suppressed. Any further building–’

  “‘Oh! I don’t mean that,’ he cried; ‘I mean a real house–a live house. It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.’

  “I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture moved me profoundly. We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can still be seen in the bright colours of the children’s dolls and of the ikons. For an instant the idea of a house running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the enlightenment of man moves slowly.

  “‘Have you no other house of your own?’ I asked.

  “‘I have left it,’ he said very sadly. ‘It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.’

  “‘And so,’ I said with sympathy, ‘you walked straight out of the front door, like a masculine Nora.’

  “‘Nora?�
� he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian word.

  “‘I mean Nora in “The Doll’s House,”’ I replied.

  “At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an Englishman; for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but ‘ukases.’

  ‘“The Doll’s House”?’ he cried vehemently; ‘why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll’s house. Don’t you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows WERE windows, while the big windows weren’t. A child has a doll’s house, and shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A banker has a real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest shriek when their real front doors open inwards.’

  “Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and was saying in a sort of loud whisper, ‘I have found out how to make a big thing small. I have found out how to turn a house into a doll’s house. Get a long way off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift of distance. Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it again. I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against the gate, and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the window. For the windows really open in my doll’s house.’

  “‘But why?’ I asked, ‘should you wish to return to that particular doll’s house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against convention, having made yourself in the conventional sense disreputable, having dared to be free, why should you not take advantage of your freedom? As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your marriage was only your mood. You have a right to leave it all behind, like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails. Having once escaped, you have the world before you. Though the words may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.’