G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with his incontrollable and intolerable secret.

  “That is the man, constable,” he shouted, pointing at the battered lieutenant. “He is a suspicious character. He did the murder.”

  “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 on them.”

  “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 eager-faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It was Rupert Grant.

  “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 sword-stick 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?”

  The constable looked at him.

  “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, repeating the address to himself.

  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 down we found him ready and restless.

  “Well,” he said, sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the meal. “What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?”

  “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 translucent liar and knave.”

  “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 should say he was glaringly good myself.”

  “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 house-agent 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 that the glare does not dazzle me.”

  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 sword-stick. 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 ”

  As he spoke a knock came at the door.

  “If you please, sir,” said the landlady, with an alarmed air, “there’s a policeman wants to see you.”

  “Show him in,” said Basil, amid the blank silence.

  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 night, and drew my attention very strongly to a particular man.”

  Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.

  “A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith.”

  “This is amusing,” said Basil, laughing. “I was in the very act of clearing that poor officer’s character of rather fanciful aspersions. What about him?”

  “Well, sir,” said the constable, “I took all the men’s addresses and had them 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 place doesn’t exist.”

  The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping both his thighs.

  “Well, by all that’s good,” he cried. “This is a sign from heaven.” “It’s certainly very extraordinary,” said Basil quietly, with knitted brows. “It’s odd the fellow should have given a false address, considering he was perfectly innocent in the ”

  “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, finally, a false address. That’s what we call glaring goodness.”

  “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 gone to it and found it was a fraud?”

  “It was very simple, sir,” said the policeman, chuckling. “The place he named was a well-known 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 off-hand that there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there isn’t.”

  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 questionable lieutenant. At length he said:

  “You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in the district—by the way, what was the address?”

  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 and suave voice he loved so much to use.

  “Why, I can tell you that, Basil,” he said graciously, as he idly plucked leaves from a plant in the window. “I took the precaution to get this man’s address from the constable last night.”

  “And what was it?” asked his brother gruffly.

  “The constable will correct me if I am wrong,” said Rupert, looking sweetly at the ceiling. “It was ‘The Elm
s, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey.’ ”

  “Right, sir,” said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers. 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 of us were by this time ill almost with terror.

  “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 small distance.”

  “Get down to that place?” I repeated blankly. “Get down to what place?”

  “I have forgotten its name,” said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his pockets as he rose. “Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a time-table?”

  “You don’t seriously mean,” cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort of confusion of emotions. “You don’t mean that you want to go to Buxton Common, do you? You can’t mean that!”

  “Why shouldn’t I go to Buxton Common?” asked Basil, smiling. “Why should you?” said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.

  “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 we know he can’t be.”

  The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on with a reiterated gesture:

  “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 found—and that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to go.”

  “Exactly,” said Basil calmly, getting into his great coat; “I thought you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly here till I come back.”

  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 great coat 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 to Purley about 6,1 expect we shall just catch him.”

  “Catch him!” cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. “I wish we could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?”

  “I keep forgetting the name of the common,” said Basil, as he buttoned up his coat. “The Elms—what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That’s where we shall find him.”

  “But there is no such place,” groaned Rupert; but he followed his brother downstairs.

  We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our sticks from the umbrella-stand; 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 to the end of the world.

  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 dehumanised 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 elf-land. It seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God—such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.

  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 drab turf looked useless, the occasional wind-stricken 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 with a sort of sickly smile before it died.

  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 grin as of comfortable success.

  “Well,” he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and slapping them together, “here we are at last.”

  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.

  “Suddenly Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets”

  “How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilisation. That notion that civilisation 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 hearth-stone; 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 drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.”

  Rupert and I exchanged glaces 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 his greatest virtue remains what I said originally.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort of sanity. “What is his greatest virtue?”

  “His greatest virtue,” replied Basil, “is that he always tells the literal truth.”

  “W
ell, 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 you brought us out to this infernal place?”

  “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 we went in. We shall be late for dinner.”

  Rupert whispered to me with a white face:

  “Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a house?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as strange as the wind:

  “Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?” “Why, up here,” cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.

  “Come up, all of you,” he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a schoolboy. “Come up. You’ll be late for dinner.”

  The two great elms stood so close together that there was hardly 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 growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.