G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.

  Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good humour.

  “Of course; awfully dense, sir,” he said. “No doubt at all, the scheme excellent. But I don’t think—” He paused a moment, and looked dreamily out of the window. “I don’t think you will find me in it. Somehow, when one’s seen—seen the thing itself, you know—blood and men screaming, one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you know, ‘There remaineth a rest.’ ”

  Northover bowed. Then after a pause, he said:

  “Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire, at any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown’s view of the matter ”

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

  The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.

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

  “What on earth is ‘C.Q.T.?’ ” asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major’s shoulder.

  “Don’t you know?” returned Northover. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Club of Queer Trades?”

  “There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven’t heard of,” said the little Major, reflectively. “What’s this one?”

  “The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one of the earliest members.”

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

  When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer smile, as he trod down the fire and locked his desk up. “A fine chap, that Major; when one hasn’t a touch of the poet one stands some chance of being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all people getting into the nets of one of Grigsby’s tales,” and he laughed out aloud in the silence.

  Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and somewhat absurd inquiry.

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

  The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.

  “It’s horribly absurd,” he said. “Something must have got started in me that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate desire to know the end of it all.”

  “The end of it all?”

  “Yes,” said the Major, “ ‘Jackals,’ and the title-deeds, and ‘death to Major Brown.’ ”

  The agent’s face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.

  “I am terribly sorry, Major,” said he, “but what you ask is impossible. I don’t know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules of the agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an outsider; I am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help. I do hope you understand ”

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

  And the little man withdrew for the last time.

  He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in her languid and intellectualised set. She always replied very quietly that she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a murderer.

  The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa, and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged— except, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognises with a concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that he will realise the rest of those purple adventures in a better world.

  II. THE PAINFUL FALL OF A GREAT REPUTATION

  BASIL GRANT and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth—the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

  The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilisation, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilisation, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say in going through a criminal slum, “I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals.” But here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums. Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway engineers and philanthropists— two dingy classes of men united by their common contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here, above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines and hospitals and all the real marks of civilisation. But though one never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not see—anything really great, central, of the first class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.

  “But you must always remember also,” said Grant to me, in his heavy abstracted way, when I had urged this view, “that the very vileness of the life of these ordered plebeian places, bears witness to the victory of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate civilisation. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good people. And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world. Besides ”

  “Go on,” I said.

  No answer came.

  “Go on,” I said, looking up.

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

  “What is the matter?” I asked, peering over also.

  “It is very odd,” said Grant at last, grimly, “that I should have been caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these people were good, and there is the wickedest man in London.”

  “Where?” I asked, leaning over further, “where?”

  “Oh, I was right enough,” he went on, in that strange continuous and sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, “I was right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes; they are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two; they may beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the same; they are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings and haloes—at any rate compared to that man.”

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

  He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The rest of his face was oval and I thought, rather Oriental; he had two black tufts of moustache.

  “What has he done?” I asked.

  “I am not sure of the details,” said Grant, “but his besetting sin is a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan.”

  “What plan?” I asked. “If you know all about him why don’t you tell me why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?”

  Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.

  “I think you’ve made a mistake in my meaning,” he said. “I don’t know his name. I never saw him before in my life.”

  “Never saw him before!” I cried, with a kind of anger; “then what in heaven’s name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in England?”

  “I meant what I said,” said Basil Grant calmly. “The moment I saw that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in these streets were being themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest sense, trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be evil.”

  “But if you never saw him before ” I began.

  “In God’s name, look at his face,” cried out Basil in a voice that startled the driver. “Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens, look at his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat.”

  I stirred uncomfortably.

  “But after all,” I said, “this is very fanciful—perfectly absurd. Look at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you ”

  “Oh, the mere facts,” he cried out in a kind of despair. “The mere facts! Do you really admit—are you still so sunk in superstitions, so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an immediate impression?”

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

  “Bosh,” he said. “On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook? Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept the clerk who may save your business—you refuse the clerk that may rob your till, entirely upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind.”

  “ ‘Why don’t you tell me why he is the wickedest man in England?’”

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

  Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.

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

  And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.

  The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked along for some time, his long splendid frock coat flying behind him. Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down an ill-lit alley. We swung silently after him.

  “This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take,” I said.

  “A man of what kind?” asked my friend.

  “Well,” I said, “a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part of the world at all.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Basil, and said no more.

  We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The intervals between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening on the whole city. Our pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between the lamp-posts; but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined horse; I stopped also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of the solid darkness in front of us was the darkness of his body.

  At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a yard off he did not realise that we were there. He tapped four times on a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas cut the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the interview was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could be. Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card and said:

  “At once. Take a cab.”

  A heavy, deep voice from inside said:

  “Right you are.”

  And with a click we were in blackness again, and striding on after the striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just helping us. It was only five o’clock, but winter and the fog had made it like midnight.

  “This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,” I repeated.

  “I don’t know,” said Basil humbly. “It leads to Berkeley Square.” As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and tried to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right. We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London—more dreary, one must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.

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

  “What is extraordinary?” I asked. “I thought you said it was quite natural.”

  “I do not wonder,” answered Basil, “at his walking through nasty streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do wonder at his going to the house of a very good man.”

  “What very good man?” I asked with exasperation.

  “The operation of time is a singular one,” he said with his imperturbable irrelevancy. “It is not a true statement of the case to say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man. I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont’s house.”

  “Who is old Beaumont?” I asked, irritaly.

  “A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood—don’t you know his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don’t know what; anyhow, he’s a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is romantic; men who wear short hair because it is me
dical; men who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands for fear of tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons are generally fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself, good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter there.”

  “My good fellow,” I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, “the truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language, you have the ‘slight disadvantage’ of being off your head. You see a total stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an honest man’s door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet with the distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner.”

  Basil’s eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.

  “I thought,” he said, “that I had outlived vanity.”

  “What do you want now?” I cried.

  “I want,” he cried out, “what a girl wants when she wears her new frock; I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a slanging match with a monitor—I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know.”

  “Do you really mean ?” I began.

  “I will apologise,” he said calmly, “for our not being dressed for a call,” and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark stone steps and rang at the bell.

  A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving my friend’s name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to respect. We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly but that our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet us.

  “My dear fellow,” he cried, shaking Basil’s hand again and again, “I have not seen you for years. Have you been—er—” he said, rather wildly, “have you been in the country?”