G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  “ ‘When first I saw ’er picture,’ said the man Bill, shaking his head in a ruminant manner, ‘when I first saw it I said—old Shorter. Those were my exact words—old Shorter.’

  “ ‘What do you mean, you wild creatures?’ I gasped. ‘What am I to do?’

  “ ‘That’s easy said, your ’oliness,’ said the man with the revolver good-humouredly; ‘you’ve got to put on those clothes,’ and he pointed to a poke-bonnet 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 woman—as somebody else’s mother, if you please, and was dragged out of the house to take part in a crime.

  “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 and a clergyman.

  “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 in 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 lady-like step, until at length I saw a lamp-post 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. Houp-la! Boo!’ It was a condition of no little novelty for a man of my position.

  “The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled, drunken old woman that was my travesty. ‘Now then, mum,’ he began gruffly.

  “ ‘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 yelled—I 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 disorderly she is right enough.’

  “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 feet off.’

  “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 poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything so heartbreaking in hell.

  “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, blimy, Bill.’ It was at that moment that I remembered most clearly that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex.

  “My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back of the neck.

  “ ‘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 drink too much, but she is quite a lady—only eccentric.’

  “ ‘She butted me in the stomach,’ said the policeman, briefly.

  “ ‘Eccentricities of genius,’ said Sam earnestly.

  “ ‘Pray let me take her home,’ reiterated Bill, in the resumed character of Miss James, ‘she wants looking after.’

  “ ‘She does,’ said the policeman, ‘but I’ll look after her.’

  “ ‘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 unique.’

  “ ‘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 quiet-dressed as you as was wrong ’uns. Who are you?’

  “ ‘We’ve not our cards with us,’ said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable dignity. ‘Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office 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 from face to face saying that only retreat was possible now.

  “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 rôle 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 friends. Now, however, if I liked I might safely undeceive him.

  “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 had pretended to be drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!

  “I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting 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, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried them in clean earth.”

  The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair. Both the matter and the man
ner 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 country-bred 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 realism.

  “And now ” I began.

  “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 things, they wouldn’t believe me. What is to be done?”

  I took out my watch. It was already half-past twelve.

  “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 to-night; 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 shirt-front 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 from the dinner-party.

  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:

  “Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?”

  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 only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, “No.”

  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 and more from his head.

  “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 say the demoralisation of his tone when he first entered my presence.

  Basil sprang smartly to his feet.

  “ ‘I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet’ ”

  “Then our course is clear,” he said. “You have not even begun your investigation, my dear Mr. Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go together to see Captain Fraser.”

  “When?” asked the clergyman, stammering.

  “Now,” said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.

  The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.

  “I really do not think that it is necessary,” he said.

  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. “Oh—you 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 whiskers.”

  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 judgment for the salvation of a fellow creature, Basil Grant had gone mad.

  “Your whiskers,” he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. “Give me your whiskers. And your bald head.”

  The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between. “Sit down, Basil,” I implored, “you’re a little excited. Finish your wine.”

  “Whiskers,” he answered sternly, “whiskers.”

  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 bellowed after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.

  And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last half-witted 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 fairy-tale. 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 unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.

  “ ‘Whiskers,’ he answered sternly, ‘whiskers’ ”

  At length Shorter was cornered.

  “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 belong to Captain Fraser?”

  “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 with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.”

  “No,” said Grant, “I didn’t.”

  “Didn’t you go to Mrs. Thornton’s dinner party?” I asked, staring. “Why not?”

  “Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was detained by a visitor. I have him as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”

  “In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.

  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 sitting-room, 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 from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that, eh?”

  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.

  “Basil,” I said, “if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?”

  He laughed again.

  “Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades. These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking) are Professional Detainers.”

  “And what on earth’s that?” I asked.

  “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.

  Basil smiled also. He intervened.

  “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 to-night for East Africa, and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is—er—what 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 strong—rather urgent. It wouldn’t have done to have been tame.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I acquit you of tameness.”

  “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 under the influence of Basil’s admirable Burgundy.

  “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. The Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.”