CHESTERTON-FOUR FAULLESS - IV THE DETECTIVE AND THE PARSON
COLONEL HAYTER, the Chief of the Police, was moving towards the inner rooms with a motion that was casual but not accidental. Barbara indeed had rather wondered why such an official had accompanied them on a purely social visit, and she now began to entertain dim and rather incredible possibilities. The clergyman had turned away to one of the bookstands and was turning over the leaves of a volume with feverish excitement; it seemed almost that he was muttering to himself. He was a little like a man looking up a quotation on which he has been challenged.
"I hear you have a very nice garden here, Mr. Snow," said Hayter. "I should rather like to look at your garden."
Snow turned a startled face over his shoulder; he seemed at first unable to detach his mind from his preoccupation; then he said sharply but a little shakily, "There's nothing to see in my garden; nothing at all. I was just wondering--"
"Do you mind if I have a squint at it?" asked Hayter indifferently, and shouldered his way to the back door. There was something resolute about his action that made the others trail vaguely after him, hardly knowing what they did. Hume, who was just behind the detective, said to him in an undertone: "What do you expect to find growing in the old man's garden?"
Hayter looked over his shoulder with a grim geniality.
"Only a particular sort of tree you were talking of lately," he said.
But when they went out into the neat and narrow strip of back garden, the only tree in sight was the sycamore spreading over the desert path, and Barbara remembered with another subconscious thrill that this was the spot from which, as the experts calculated, the bullet had been fired.
Hayter strode across the lawn and was seen stooping over something in the tangle of tropical plants under the wall. When he straightened himself again he was seen to be holding a long and heavy cylindrical object.
"Here is something fallen from the gun-tree you said grew in these parts," he said grimly. "Funny that the gun should be found in Mr. Snow's back-garden, isn't it? Especially as it's a double-barrelled gun with one barrel discharged."
Hume was staring at the big gun in the detective's hand, and for the first time his usually stolid face wore an expression of amazement and even consternation.
"Damn it all!" he said softly, "I forgot about that. What a rotten fool I am!"
Few except Barbara even heard his strange whisper, and nobody could make any sense of it. Suddenly he swung round and addressed the whole company aloud, almost as if they were a public meeting.
"Look here," he said, "do you know what this means? This means that poor old Snow, who is probably still fussing over his hieroglyphics, is going to be charged with attempted murder."
"It's a bit premature," said Hayter, "and some would say you were interfering in our job, Mr. Hume. But I owe you something for putting us right about the other fellow, when I admit we were wrong."
"You were wrong about the other fellow and you are wrong about this fellow," said Hume, frowning savagely. "But I happened to be able to offer you evidence in the other case. What evidence can I give now?"
"Why should you have any evidence to give?" asked the other, very much puzzled.
"Well, I have," said Hume, "and I jolly well don't want to give it." He was silent for a moment and then broke out in a sort of fury: "Blast it all, can't you see how silly it is to drag in that silly old man? Don't you see he'd only fallen in love with his own prophecies of disaster, and was a bit put off when they didn't come true after all?"
"There are a good many more suspicious circumstances," cut in Smythe curtly. "There's the gun in the garden and the position of the sycamore."
There was a long silence during which Hume stood with huge hunched shoulders frowning resentfully at his boots. Then he suddenly threw up his head and spoke with a sort of explosive lightness.
"Oh, well then, I must give my evidence," he said, with a smile that was almost gay: "I shot the Governor myself."
There was a stillness as if the place had been full of statues, and for a few seconds nobody moved or spoke. Then Barbara heard her own voice in the silence, crying out: "Oh, you didn't!"
A moment later the Chief of Police was speaking with a new and much more official voice: "I should like to know whether you are joking," he said, "or whether you really mean to give yourself up for the attempted murder of Lord Tallboys."
Hume held up one hand in an arresting gesture, almost like a public speaker. He was still smiling slightly, but his manner had grown more grave.
"Pardon me," he said. "Pardon me. Let us distinguish. The distinction is of great value to my self-esteem. I did not try to murder the Governor. I tried to shoot him in the leg and I did shoot him in the leg."
"What is the sense of all this?" cried Smythe with impatience.
"I am sorry to appear punctilious," said Hume calmly. "Imputations on my morals I must bear, like other members of the criminal class. But imputations on my marksmanship I cannot tolerate; it is the only sport in which I excel." He picked up the double-barrelled gun before they could stop him and went on rapidly: "And may I draw attention to one technical point? This gun has two barrels and one is still undischarged. If any fool had shot Tallboys at that distance and not killed him, don't you think even a fool would have shot again, if that was what he wanted to do? Only, you see, it was not what I wanted to do."
"You seem to fancy yourself a lot as a marksman," said the Deputy Governor rudely.
"Ah, you are sceptical," replied the tutor in the same airy tone. "Well, Sir Harry, you have yourself provided the apparatus of demonstration, and it will not take a moment. The targets which we owe to your patriotic efficiency are already set up, I think, on the slope just beyond the end of the wall." Before anybody could move he had hopped up on to the low garden wall, just under the shadow of the sycamore. From that perch he could see the long line of the butts stretching along the border of the desert.
"Suppose we say," he said pleasantly, in the tone of a popular lecturer, "that I put this bullet about an inch inside the white on the second target."
The group awoke from its paralysis of surprise; Hayter ran forward and Smythe burst out with: "Of all the damned tomfoolery--"
His sentence was drowned in the deafening explosion, and amid the echoes of it the tutor dropped serenely from the wall.
"If anybody cares to go and look," he said, "I think he will find the demonstration of my innocence-not indeed of shooting the Governor, but of wanting to shoot him anywhere else but where I did shoot him."
There was another silence, and then this comedy of unexpected happenings was crowned with another that was still more unexpected; coming from the one person whom everybody had naturally forgotten.
Tom's high, crowing voice was suddenly heard above the crowd.
"Who's going to look?" he cried. "Well, why don't you go and look?"
It was almost as if a tree in the garden had spoken. And indeed the excitement of events had worked upon that vegetating brain till it unfolded rapidly, as do some vegetables at the touch of chemistry. Nor was this all, for the next moment the vegetable had taken on a highly animal energy and hurled itself across the garden. They saw a whirl of lanky limbs against the sky as Tom Traill cleared the garden wall and went plunging away through the sand towards the targets.
"Is this place a lunatic asylum?" cried Sir Harry Smythe, his face still more congested with colour and a baleful light in his eyes, as if a big but buried temper was working its way to the surface.
"Come, Mr. Hume," said Hayter in a cooler tone, "everybody regards you as a very sensible man. Do you mean to tell me seriously that you put a bullet in the Governor's leg for no reason at all, not even murder?"
"I did it for an excellent reason," answered the tutor, still beaming at him in a rather baffling manner. "I did it because I am a sensible man. In fact, I am a Moderate Murderer."
"And what the blazes may that be?"
"The philosophy of moderation in murder," continued the tutor blandly, "is one to which I have given some little attention. I was saying only the other day that what most people want is to be rather murdered, especially persons in responsible political situations. As it is, the punishments on both sides are far too severe. The merest touch or soupcon of murder is all that is required for purposes of reform. The little more and how much it is; the little less and the Governor of Polybia gets clean away, as Browning said."
"Do you really ask me to believe," snorted the Chief of Police, "that you make a practice of potting every public man in the left leg?"
"No, no," said Hume, with a sort of hasty solemnity. "The treatment, I assure you, is marked with much more individual attention. Had it been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I should perhaps have selected a portion of the left ear. In the case of the Prime Minister the tip of the nose would be indicated. But the point is the general principle that something should happen to these people, to arouse their dormant faculties by a little personal problem. Now if ever there was a man," he went on with delicate emphasis, as if it were a scientific demonstration, "if ever there was a man meant and marked out by nature to be rather murdered, it is Lord Tallboys. Other eminent men, very often, are just murdered, and everyone feels that the situation has been adequately met, that the incident is terminated. One just murders them and thinks no more about it. But Tallboys is a remarkable case; he is my employer and I know him pretty well. He is a good fellow, really. He is a gentleman, he is a patriot; what is more, he is really a liberal and reasonable man. But by being perpetually in office he has let that pompous manner get worse and worse, till it seems to grow on him, like his confounded top-hat. What is needed in such a case? A few days in bed, I decided. A few healthful weeks standing on one leg and meditating on that fine shade of distinction between oneself and God Almighty, which is so easily overlooked."
"Don't listen to any more of this rubbish," cried the Deputy-Governor. "If he says he shot Tallboys, we've got to take him up for it, I suppose. He ought to know."
"You've hit it at last, Sir Harry," said Hume heartily, "I'm arousing a lot of dormant intellects this afternoon."
"We won't have any more of your joking," cried Smythe with sudden fury; "I'm arresting you for attempted murder."
"I know," answered the smiling tutor, "that's the joke."
At this moment there was another leap and scurry by the sycamore and the boy Tom hurled himself back into the garden, panting aloud: "It's quite right. It's just where he said."
For the rest of the interview, and until that strange group had broken up on the lawn, the boy continued to stare at Hume as only a boy can stare at somebody who has done something rather remarkable in a game. But as he and Barbara went back to the Governorate together, the latter indescribably dazed and bewildered, she found her companion curiously convinced of some view of his own, which he was hardly competent to describe. It was not exactly as if he disbelieved Hume or his story. It was rather as if he believed what Hume had not said, rather than what he had.
"It's a riddle," repeated Tom with stubborn solemnity. "He's awfully fond of riddles. He says silly things just to make you think. That's what we've got to do. He doesn't like you to give it up."
"What we've got to do?" repeated Barbara.
"Think what it really means," said Tom.
There was some truth perhaps in the suggestion that Mr. John Hume was fond of riddles, for he fired off one more of them at the Chief of Police, even as that official took him into custody.
"Well," he said cheerfully, "you can only half hang me because I'm only half a murderer. I suppose you have hanged people sometimes?"
"Occasionally, I'm sorry to say," replied Colonel Hayter.
"Did you ever hang somebody to prevent him being hanged?" asked the tutor with interest.
IT is not true that Lord Tallboys wore his top-hat in bed, during his brief indisposition. Nor is it true, as was more moderately alleged, that he sent for it as soon as he could stand upright and wore it as a finishing touch to a costume consisting of a green dressing-gown and red slippers. But it was quite true that he resumed his hat and his high official duties at the earliest possible opportunity; rather to the annoyance, it was said, of his subordinate the Deputy-Governor, who found himself for the second time checked in some of those vigorous military measures which are always more easily effected after the shock of a political outrage. In plain words, the Deputy-Governor was rather sulky. He had relapsed into a red-faced and irritable silence, and when he broke it his friends rather wished he would relapse into it again. At the mention of the eccentric tutor, whom his department had taken into custody, he exploded with a special impatience and disgust. "Oh, for God's sake don't tell me about that beastly madman and mountebank!" he cried, almost in the voice of one tortured and unable to tolerate a moment more of human folly. "Why in the world we are cursed with such filthy fools . . shooting him in the leg .. moderate murderer . . mouldy swine!"
"He's not a mouldy swine," said Barbara Traill emphatically, as if it were an exact point of natural history. "I don't believe a word of what you people are saying against him."
"Do you believe what he is saying against himself?" asked her uncle, looking at her with screwed-up eyes and a quizzical expression. Tallboys was leaning on a crutch; in marked contrast to the sullenness of Sir Harry Smythe, he carried his disablement in a very plucky and pleasant fashion. The necessity of attending to the interrupted rhythm of his legs had apparently arrested the oratorical rotation of his hands. His family felt that they had never liked him so much before. It seemed almost as if there were some truth in the theory of the Moderate Murderer.
On the other hand, Sir Harry Smythe, usually so much more good-humoured with his family, seemed to be in an increasingly bad humour. The dark red of his complexion deepened, until by contrast there was something almost alarming about the light of his pale eyes.
"I tell you of all these measly, meddlesome blighters," he began.
"And I tell you you know nothing about it," retorted his sister-in-law. "He isn't a bit like that; he--"
At this point, for some reason or other, it was Olive who intervened swiftly and quietly: she looked a little wan and worried.
"Don't let's talk about all that now," she said hastily. "Harry has got such a lot of things to do. . . ."
"I know what I'm going to do," said Barbara stubbornly. "I'm going to ask Lord Tallboys, as Governor of this place, if he will let me visit Mr. Hume and see if I can find out what it means."
She had become for some reason violently excited and her own voice sounded strangely in her ears. She had a dizzy impression of Harry Smythe's eyes standing out of his head in apoplectic anger and of Olive's face in the background growing more and more unnaturally pale and staring, and hovering over all, with something approaching to an elvish mockery, the benevolent amusement of her uncle. She felt as if he had let out too much, or that he had gained a new subtlety of perception.
Meanwhile John Hume was sitting in his place of detention, staring at a blank wall with an equally blank face. Accustomed as he was to solitude, he soon found something of a strain in two or three days and nights of the dehumanized solitude of imprisonment. Perhaps the fact most vivid to his immediate senses was being deprived of tobacco. But he had other and what some could call graver grounds of depression. He did not know what sort of sentence he would be likely to get for confessing to an attempt to wound the Governor. But he knew enough of political conditions and legal expedients to know that it would be easy to inflict heavy punishment immediately after the public scandal of the crime. He had lived in that outpost of civilization for the last ten years, till Tallboys had picked him up in Cairo; he remembered the violent reaction after the murder of the previous Governor, the way in which the Deputy-Governor had been able to turn himself into a despot and sweep the country with coercion acts and punitive expeditions, until his impulsive militarism had been a little moderated by the arrival of Tallboys with a compromise from the home Government. Tallboys was still alive and even, in a modified manner, kicking. But he was probably still under doctor's orders and could hardly be judge in his own cause; so that the autocratic Smythe would probably have another chance of riding the whirlwind and directing the storm. But the truth is that there was at the back of the prisoner's mind something that he feared much more than prison. The tiny point of panic, which had begun to worry and eat away even his rocky stolidity of mind and body, was the fear that his fantastic explanation had given his enemies another sort of opportunity. What he really feared was their saying he was mad and putting him under more humane and hygienic treatment.
And indeed, anyone watching his demeanour for the next hour or so might be excused for entertaining doubts and fancies on the point. He was still staring before him in a rather strange fashion. But he was no longer staring as if he saw nothing, but rather as if he saw something. It seemed to himself that, like a hermit in his cell, he was seeing visions.
"Well, I suppose I am, after all," he said aloud in a dead and distinct voice. "Didn't St. Paul say something? . . . Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. ... I have seen that heavenly one coming in at the door like that several times, and rather hoped it was real. But real people can't come through prison doors like that. . . . Once it came so that the room might have been full of trumpets and once with a cry like the wind and there was a fight and I found out that I could hate and that I could love. Two miracles on one night. Don't you think that must have been a dream-that is supposing you weren't a dream and could think anything? But I did rather hope you were real then."
"Don't!" said Barbara Trail, "I am real now."
"Do you mean to tell me in cold blood that I am not mad," asked Hume, still staring at her, "and you are here?"
"You are the only sane person I ever knew," she replied.
"Good Lord," he said, "then I've said a good deal just now that ought only to be said in lunatic asylums-or in heavenly visions."
"You have said so much," she said in a low voice, "that I want you to say much more. I mean about the whole of this trouble. After what you have said . . don't you think I might be allowed to know?"
He frowned at the table and then said rather more abruptly: "The trouble was that I thought you were the last person who ought to know. You see, there is your family, and you might be brought into it, and one might have to hold one's tongue for the sake of someone you would care about."
"Well," she said steadily, "I have been brought into it for the sake of someone I care about."
She paused a moment and went on: "The others never did anything for me. They would have let me go raving mad in a respectable flat, and so long as I was finished at a fashionable school, they wouldn't have cared if I'd finished myself with laudanum. I never really talked to anybody before. I don't want to talk to anybody else now."
He sprang to his feet; something like an earthquake had shaken him at last out of his long petrified incredulity about happiness. He caught her by both hands and words came out of him he had never dreamed were within. And she, who was younger in years, only stared at him with a steady smile and starry eyes, as if she were older and wiser; and at the end only said: "You will tell me now."
"You must understand," he said at last more soberly, "that what I said was true. I was not making up fairy-tales to shield my long-lost brother from Australia, or any of that business in the novels. I really did put a bullet in your uncle, and I meant to put it there."
"I know," she said, "but for all that I'm sure I don't know everything. I'm sure there is some extraordinary story behind all this."
"No," he answered. "It isn't an extraordinary story, except an extraordinarily ordinary story."
He paused a moment reflectively and then went on: "It's really a particularly plain and simple story. I wonder it hasn't happened hundreds of times before. I wonder it hasn't been told in hundreds of stories before. It might so easily happen anywhere, given certain conditions.
"In this case you know some of the conditions. You know that sort of balcony that runs round my bungalow, and how one looks down from it and sees the whole landscape like a map. Well, I was looking down and saw all that flat plan of the place; the row of villas and the wall and path running behind it and the sycamore, and farther on the olives and the end of the wall, and so out into the open slopes being laid out with turf and all the rest. But I saw what surprised me; that the rifle-range was already set up. It must have been a rush order; people must have worked all night. And even as I stared, I saw in the distance a dot that was a man standing by the nearest target, as if adding the last touches. Then he made a sort of signal to somebody away on the other side and moved very rapidly away from the place. Tiny as the figure looked, every gesture told me something; he was quite obviously clearing out just before the firing at the target was to begin. And almost at the same moment I saw something else. Well, I saw one thing, anyhow. I saw why Lady Smythe is worried, and wandered distracted in the garden."
Barbara stared, but he went on: "Travelling along the path from the Governorate and towards the sycamore was a familiar shape. It just showed above the long garden wall in sharp outline like a shape in a shadow pantomime. It was the top-hat of Lord Tallboys. Then I remembered that he always went for a constitutional along this path and out on to the slopes beyond; and I felt an overwhelming suspicion that he did not know that the space beyond was already a firing-ground. You know he is very deaf, and I sometimes doubt whether he hears all the things officially told to him; sometimes I fear they are told so that he cannot hear. Anyhow, he had every appearance of marching straight across as usual, and there came over me in a cataract a solid, an overwhelming and a most shocking certainty.
"I will not say much about that now. I will say as little as I can for the rest of my life. But there were things I knew and you probably don't about the politics here and what had led up to that dreadful moment. Enough that I had good reason for my dread. Feeling vaguely that if things were interrupted there might be a fight, I snatched up my own gun and dashed down the slope towards the path, waving wildly and trying to hail or head him off. He didn't see me and couldn't hear me. I pounded along after him along the path, but he had too long a start. By the time I reached the sycamore, I knew I was too late. He was already half-way down the grove of olives and no mortal runner could reach him before he came to the corner.
"I felt a rage against the fool which a man looks against the background of fate. I saw his lean, pompous figure with the absurd top-hat riding on top of it; and the large ears standing out from his head . . the large, useless ears. There was something agonizingly grotesque about that unconscious back outlined against the plains of death. For I was certain that the moment he passed the corner that field would be swept by the fire, which would cut across at right angles to his progress. I could think of only one thing to do and I did it. Hayter thought I was mad when I asked him if he had ever hanged a man to prevent his being hanged. That is the sort of practical joke I played. I shot a man to prevent his being shot.
"I put a bullet in his calf and he dropped, about two yards from the corner. I waited a moment and saw that people were coming out of the last houses to pick him up. I did the only thing I really regret. I had a vague idea the house by the sycamore was empty, so I threw the gun over the wall into the garden, and nearly got that poor old ass of a parson into trouble. Then I went home and waited till they summoned me to give evidence about Gregory."
He concluded with all his normal composure, but the girl was still staring at him with an abnormal attention and even alarm.
"But what was it all about?' she asked. "Who could have--?"
"It was one of the best planned things I ever knew," he said. "I don't believe I could have proved anything. It would have looked just like an accident."
"You mean," she said, "that it wouldn't have been."
"As I said before, I don't want to say much about that now, but . . . Look here, you are the sort of person who likes to think about things. I'll just ask you to take two things and think about them, and then you can get used to the idea in your own way.
"The first thing is this. I am a Moderate, as I told you; I really am against all the Extremists. But when journalists and jolly fellows in clubs say that, they generally forget that there really are different sorts of Extremists. In practice they think only of revolutionary Extremists.
Believe me, the reactionary Extremists are quite as likely to go to extremes. The history of faction fights will show acts of violence by Patricians as well as Plebeians, by Ghibellines as well as Guelphs, by Orangemen as well as Fenians, by Fascists as well as Bolshevists, by the Ku-Klux-Klan as well as the Black Hand. And when a politician comes from London with a compromise in his pocket-it is not only Nationalists who see their plans frustrated.
"The other point is more personal, especially to you. You once told me you feared for the family sanity, merely because you had bad dreams and brooded over things of your own imagination. Believe me, it's not the imaginative people who become insane. It's not they who are mad, even when they are morbid. They can always be woken up from bad dreams by broader prospects and brighter visions-because they are imaginative. The men who go mad are unimaginative. The stubborn stoical men who had only room for one idea and take it literally. The sort of man who seems to be silent but stuffed to bursting, congested--"
"I know," she said hastily; "you needn't say it, because I believe I understand everything now. Let me tell you two things also; they are shorter, but they have to do with it. My uncle sent me here with an officer who has an order for your release . . and the Deputy-Governor is going home . . resignation on the grounds of ill-health."
"Tallboys is no fool," said John Hume; "he has guessed."
She laughed with a little air of embarrassment. "I'm afraid he has guessed a good many things," she said.
What the other things were is no necessary part of this story, but Hume proceeded to talk about them at considerable length during the rest of the interview, until the lady herself was moved to a somewhat belated protest. She said she did not believe that he could really be a Moderate after all.
MR. WALTER WINDRUSH, the eminent and eccentric painter and poet, lived in London and had a curious tree in his back garden. This alone would not have provoked the preposterous events narrated here. Many persons, without the excuse of being poets, have planted peculiar vegetables in their back gardens. The two curious facts about this curiosity were, first that he thought it quite remarkable enough to bring crowds from the ends of the earth to look at it, and, second, that if or when the crowds did come to look at it, he would not let them look.
To begin with, he had not planted it at all. Oddly enough, it looked very much as if he had tried to plant it and failed; or possibly tried to pull it up again, and failed again. Cold classical critics said they could understand the pulling up better than the putting in. For it was a grotesque object; a nondescript thing looking stunted or pollarded in the manner recalling Burnham Beeches, but not easily classifiable as vegetation. It was so squat in the trunk that the boughs seemed to spring out of the roots and the roots out of the boughs. The roots also rose clear of the ground, so that light showed through them as through branches, the earth being washed away by a natural spring just behind. But the girth of the whole was very large, and the thing looked rather like a polyp or cuttle-fish radiating in all directions. Sometimes it looked as if some huge hand out of heaven, like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, had tried to haul the tree out of the earth by the hair of its head.
Nobody indeed had ever planted this particular garden tree. It had grown like grass, and even like the wild grass of the wildest prairies. It was, in all probability, by far the oldest thing in those parts: there was nothing to prove it was not older than Stonehenge. It had never been planted in anybody's garden. Everything else had been planted round it. The garden and the garden wall and the house had been planted round it. The street had been planted round it; the suburb had been planted round it. London, in a manner of speaking, had been planted round it. For though the suburb in question was now sunk so deep in the metropolis that nobody ever thought of it as anything but metropolitan, it belonged to a district where the urban expansion had been relatively recent and rapid, and it was not really so very long ago that the strange tree had stood alone on a windy and pathless heath.
The circumstances of its ultimate preservation or captivity were as follows. Nearly half a lifetime before, it happened that Windrush, who was then an art student, was crossing the open common with two companions, one a student of his own age, but attached to the medical and not the artistic section of his own college, the other a somewhat older friend, a businessman whom the young men wished to consult upon a matter of business. They proposed to discuss their business (which was not unconnected with the general incapacity of young students to be businesslike) at the inn of the Three Peacocks on the edge of the common; and the elder man especially showed some impatience to reach its shelter, as the wind was rising and dusk was falling over that rather desolate landscape.
It was at this point that their progress was delayed by the highly exasperating conduct of Walter Windrush. He was moving as rapidly as the rest, when the strange outline of the tree seemed to bring him up all standing. He even raised his hands, not only in a pantomime of amazement unusual in the men of his race, but in gestures that might have been taken for some sort of pagan worship. He spoke in a hushed voice, and pointed, as if drawing their attention to a funeral or some occasion of awe. His scientific friend admitted that the way in which the tree straddled out of the earth was something of a botanical curiosity, but he did not need to be very scientific to discover the cause in the brook or fountain, that broke from the upper ground behind it and had forced its way through the crannies of the roots. He had the curiosity to hop up on one of the high roots and hoist himself up by one of the low branches, and then, remarking that the tree seemed to be half hollow, turned as if to resume his march. The commercial gentleman had already been waiting with some impatience to do so. But Walter Windrush could not be awakened from his trance of admiration. He continued to walk round and round the tree, to stare down into the straggling pools of water and then up to the wide cup or nest formed by the crown of boughs.
"At first," he said at last, "I did not know what had happened to me. Now I understand."
"Can't say I do," said his friend shortly, "unless it's going dotty. How long are you going to hang about here?"
Windrush did not answer immediately; then he said: "Don't you know that all poets and painters and people like me are naturally Communists? And don't you know that, for the same reason, we're all naturally vagabonds?"
"I confess," said their business adviser rather grimly, "that some of your recent financial antics might appeal to the Communists. But as for vagabonds, I imagine that vagabonds at least have the virtue of getting a move on."
"You don't understand me," said Windrush with a strange sort of dreamy patience; "I mean that I'm not a Communist now. I'm not a vagabond any more."
There was a staring silence and then he said in the same tone: "I never before in all my life saw anything that I wanted to possess."
"Do you really mean," expostulated the other, "that you would like to possess this one rotten old tree?"
Windrush went on as if the other had not spoken. "I have never before seen, in all my wanderings, any place where I wanted to stop and make my home. There cannot be anywhere in the world anything like that fantasia of earth and sky and water; built upon bridges like Venice, and letting daylight peer through its caverns like hell in Milton's poem; cloven as if by Alph the subterranean river and rising stark and clear of the clinging earth like the dead at the trump of doom. I have never seen anything like it. I do not really want to see anything else."
There was perhaps some excuse for his freak of imagination, in the momentary conditions that added mystery to the freak of nature. The stormy sky above the heath had changed from grey to purple, and from that to a sort of sombre Indian red which only brightened at the horizon in a single scarlet strip of sunset. Against this background the black and bizarre outline of the tree had really the appearance of something more mystical than a natural object; as if a tree were trying to walk or a monster from the waters rising in a wild effort to fly. But even if Windrush's companions had been more sympathetic with such moods than they were, they would hardly have been prepared for the finality with which he flung himself down on a clump of turf beside the brook and took out a pipe and tobacco pouch, rather as if he had just sat down in an arm-chair at the club.
"May I ask what you are doing?" asked his friend.
"I am acquiring squatter's rights," said the other.
They both besieged him with remonstrances, and it became more and more apparent to the others that he was perfectly serious, even if he was not perfectly sane. The businessman indicated to him in a brisk manner that, if he was really and truly interested in this absurd scrap of wilderness, he would be wiser to consult the agents of the estate of which it formed a part, as he would not get any "squatter's rights" in half a century. To the extreme astonishment of the adviser, the poet thanked him quite gravely for the advice and took out a piece of paper to note down the agent's name and address.
"Meanwhile," said the commercial gentleman with great decision, "as this does not seem to me at all an agreeable place to squat in, you will have to come and squat in the Three Peacocks if you want to do any further business with me."
"Don't be a fool, Windrush," said his other companion sharply, "you can't really want to be left here all night."
"That happens to be exactly what I do want," replied Windrush. "I have seen the sun sink in my own private pool, and I want to see the moon rise out of it. You can't blame a prospective purchaser for testing the property under all conditions."
The business friend had already turned away, and his dark, sturdy figure, expressing scorn in the very line of its back, had disappeared behind the sprawling tree. The other man lingered a moment longer, but in the face of the irrational rationality of the last remark, he also followed in the same path. He had gone about six yards and was also turning round by the tree, when the poet's whole manner suddenly altered. He threw down his pipe with an apologetic word and pursued his friends with an entirely new style and gesture, bowing with sweeping motions of courtesy.
"I beg your pardon," he said magnificently; "I do hope you will come down to my little place again. I fear I have failed in hospitality."
After he had himself lingered a moment or two by the tree and then resumed his seat on the bank, he sat gazing in a fascinated manner at the pools before him which, in the last intensity of sunset, gleamed like lakes of blood. He actually remained thus for many hours, seeing the red pools turn black with night and white with moonlight; as if he were indeed some Hindoo hermit who had gone into a stony ecstasy. But when he first moved on the following morning, he seemed filled with a far more novel and surprising practicality. He betook himself to the agents of the estate; he explained and negotiated for several months, and at length became the actual legal possessor of about two acres of ground surrounding his favourite freak of vegetation, and proceeded to fence it in with the most mathematical rigidity, like a settler staking out a claim in a desert. The rest of his extraordinary enterprise was all the more extraordinary for being comparatively ordinary. He built a small house on the land; he betook himself to habits of literary industry and respectability which soon enabled him to turn it into a very presentable country dwelling. In due course he even completed his social solidification by marrying a wife, who died after presenting him with one child, a daughter. The daughter grew up happily enough in these rustic but not rude conditions, and the life of Mr. Walter Windrush continued in sufficient serenity, until the coming of the great tragedy of his later life.
The name of that tragedy was London. The endless expansion of the city came crawling over those hills and commons like a rising sea, and the rest of his history, or of that part of his history, was entirely concerned with his moods of defiance and measures of defence in the face of so incongruous a deluge. He swore by all the Muses that if this loathsome labyrinth of ugliness and vulgarity must indeed surround his sacred tree and his secret garden, at least it should not touch them. He erected a ridiculously high wall all round the spot; he observed the utmost ceremony about admitting anyone into it, and indeed, towards the end, the ceremony rather hardened into suspicion. Some unwary guests had treated the garden as if it were a garden; nay, even the tree as if it were a tree. And as it was his boast that this his hermitage was the last free space of the earth left in England, and the refuge of a poetry everywhere else conquered by prose, he fell latterly into a habit of locking the door into the garden and putting the key in his pocket. In every other aspect of life he was quite hospitable and humane; he gave his daughter a very good time in every other direction, but he tended more and more to treating this place as sacred to his own solitude, and through long days and nights nothing ever stirred in that strange enclosure but its lonely master walking round and round his tree.
CHESTERTON-FOUR FAULLESS - IV THE DETECTIVE AND THE PARSON