The Essential G. K. Chesterton

by G. K. Chesterton

  CONJURER. It hasn't been for want of trying. But it wasn't long before the spirits with whom I had been playing at table-turning, did what I think they generally do at the end of all such table-turning.

  PATRICIA. What did they do?

  CONJURER. They turned the tables. They turned the tables upon me. I don't wonder at your believing in fairies. As long as these things were my servants they seemed to me like fairies. When they tried to be my masters.... I found they were not fairies. I found the spirits with whom I at least had come in contact were evil ... awfully, unnaturally evil.

  PATRICIA. Did they say so?

  CONJURER. Don't talk of what they said. I was a loose fellow, but I had not fallen so low as such things. I resisted them; and after a pretty bad time, psychologically speaking, I cut the connexion. But they were always tempting me to use the supernatural power I had got from them. It was not very great, but it was enough to move things about, to alter lights, and so on. I don't know whether you realize that it's rather a strain on a man to drink bad coffee at a coffee-stall when he knows he has just enough magic in him to make a bottle of champagne walk out of an empty shop.

  PATRICIA. I think you behaved very well.

  CONJURER. [_Bitterly._] And when I fell at last it was for nothing half so clean and Christian as champagne. In black blind pride and anger and all kinds of heathenry, because of the impudence of a schoolboy, I called on the fiends and they obeyed.

  PATRICIA. [_Touches his arm._] Poor fellow!

  CONJURER. Your goodness is the only goodness that never goes wrong.

  PATRICIA. And what _are_ we to do with Morris? I--I believe you now, my dear. But he--he will never believe.

  CONJURER. There is no bigot like the atheist. I must think.

  [_Walks towards the garden windows. The other men reappear to arrest his movement._

  DOCTOR. Where are you going?

  CONJURER. I am going to ask the God whose enemies I have served if I am still worthy to save a child.

  [_Exit into garden. He paces up and down exactly as_ MORRIS _has done. As he does so_, PATRICIA _slowly goes out; and a long silence follows, during which the remaining men stir and stamp very restlessly. The darkness increases. It is long before anyone speaks._

  DOCTOR. [_Abruptly._] Remarkable man that Conjurer. Clever man. Curious man. Very curious man. A kind of man, you know.... Lord bless us! What's that?

  DUKE. What's what, eh? What's what?

  DOCTOR. I swear I heard a footstep.

  _Enter_ HASTINGS _with papers._

  DUKE. Why, Hastings--Hastings--we thought you were a ghost. You must be--er--looking white or something.

  HASTINGS. I have brought back the answer of the Anti-Vegetarians ... I mean the Vegetarians.

  [_Drops one or two papers._

  DUKE. Why, Hastings, you _are_ looking white.

  HASTINGS. I ask your Grace's pardon. I had a slight shock on entering the room.

  DOCTOR. A shock? What shock?

  HASTINGS. It is the first time, I think, that your Grace's work has been disturbed by any private feelings of mine. I shall not trouble your Grace with them. It will not occur again.

  [_Exit_ HASTINGS.

  DUKE. What an extraordinary fellow. I wonder if....

  [_Suddenly stops speaking._

  DOCTOR. [_After a long silence, in a low voice to_ SMITH.] How do you feel?

  SMITH. I feel I must have a window shut or I must have it open, and I don't know which it is.

  [_Another long silence._

  SMITH. [_Crying out suddenly in the dark._] In God's name, go!

  DOCTOR. [_Jumping up rather in a tremble._] Really, sir, I am not used to being spoken to....

  SMITH. It was not you whom I told to go.

  DOCTOR. No. [_Pause._] But I think I will go. This room is simply horrible.

  [_He marches towards the door._

  DUKE. [_Jumping up and bustling about, altering cards, papers, etc., on tables._] Room horrible? Room horrible? No, no, no. [_Begins to run quicker round the room, flapping his hands like fins._] Only a little crowded. A little crowded. And I don't seem to know all the people. We can't like everybody. These large at-homes....

  [_Tumbles on to a chair._

  CONJURER. [_Reappearing at the garden doors._] Go back to hell from which I called you. It is the last order I shall give.

  DOCTOR. [_Rising rather shakily._] And what are you going to do?

  CONJURER. I am going to tell that poor little lad a lie. I have found in the garden what he did not find in the garden. I have managed to think of a natural explanation of that trick.

  DOCTOR. [_Warmly moved._] I think you are something like a great man. Can I take your explanation to him now?

  CONJURER. [_Grimly._] No thank you. I will take it myself.

  [_Exit into the other room._

  DUKE. [_Uneasily._] We all felt devilish queer just now. Wonderful things there are in the world. [_After a pause._] I suppose it's all electricity.

  [_Silence as usual._

  SMITH. I think there has been more than electricity in all this.

  _Enter_ PATRICIA, _still pale, but radiant._

  PATRICIA. Oh, Morris is ever so much better! The Conjurer has told him such a good story of how the trick was done.

  _Enter_ CONJURER.

  DUKE. Professor, we owe you a thousand thanks!

  DOCTOR. Really, you have doubled your claim to originality!

  SMITH. It is much more marvellous to explain a miracle than to work a miracle. What was your explanation, by the way?

  CONJURER. I shall not tell you.

  SMITH. [_Starting._] Indeed? Why not?

  CONJURER. Because God and the demons and that Immortal Mystery that you deny has been in this room to-night. Because you know it has been here. Because you have felt it here. Because you know the spirits as well as I do and fear them as much as I do.

  SMITH. Well?

  CONJURER. Because all this would not avail. If I told you the lie I told Morris Carleon about how I did that trick....

  SMITH. Well?

  CONJURER. YOU would believe it as he believed it. You cannot think [_pointing to the lamp_] how that trick could be done naturally. I alone found out how it could be done--after I had done it by magic. But if I tell you a natural way of doing it....

  SMITH. Well?...

  CONJURER. Half an hour after I have left this house you will be all saying how it was done.

  [CONJURER _buttons up his cloak and advances to_ PATRICIA.

  CONJURER. Good-bye.

  PATRICIA. I shall not say good-bye.

  PATRICIA. Yes. That fairy tale has really and truly come to an end. [_Looks at him a little in the old mystical manner._] It is very hard for a fairy tale to come to an end. If you leave it alone it lingers everlastingly. Our fairy tale has come to an end in the only way a fairy tale can come to an end. The only way a fairy tale can leave off being a fairy tale.

  CONJURER. I don't understand you.

  PATRICIA. It has come true.

  CURTAIN

  Manalive

  by G. K. Chesterton

  Part I

  The Enigmas of Innocent Smith

  Chapter I

  How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House

  A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had han
ged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.

  The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has never been able to shake off. At some stage of those heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship.

  The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The proprietor of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons against whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both before and after all her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or rather under the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young but listless folks. And there were actually five inmates standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.

  All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with cold cloud. Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the gray and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless interior. When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold. The burst of light released and the burst of air blowing seemed to come almost simultaneously; and the wind especially caught everything in a throttling violence. The bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair. Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting and exterminating element. Now and again a twig would snap and fly like a bolt from an arbalist. The three men stood stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against a wall. The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly, they were blown into the house. Their two frocks, blue and white, looked like two big broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale. Nor is such a poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and unlifting day. Grass and garden trees seemed glittering with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland. It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.

  The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening. She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt, brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous. On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking; but she had not married, perhaps because there was always a crowd of men around her. She was not fast (though some might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible. A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra, or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door. Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt; she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades; and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her. To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose like the curtain of some long-expected pantomime.

  Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic and practical creatures alive. She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay. But as the gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they took on the monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory stirred in her that was almost romance--a memory of a dusty volume of _Punch_ in an aunt's house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops and croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part. This half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly, and Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion. Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness. In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake. The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel. It would be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her. Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door, before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork, it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands. She was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness. She spurned the ground, and she meant to spurn it. People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

  "It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman in white, going to the looking-glass.

  The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening gloves, and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an afternoon cloth for tea.

  "Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund Hunt, with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches had always been safe for an encore.

  "Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke, "but I dare say that is sometimes more important."

  Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person. She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be a big wind to blow your head off."

  There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the dull walls with ruby and gold.

  "Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's easier to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."

  "Oh, don't talk such rubbish," said Diana with savage sharpness.

  Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men who stood their ground might also have considered the problem of hats and heads. And, indeed, their position, touching hats, was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of the three abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to charge as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him. The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles, and ultimately held it in his hand. The third had no hat, and, by his attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life. Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women, for there was much of the three men in this difference.