Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 290
“Immediately under the windows a little path ran on the edge of some meadow land attached to the garden, where the Blakeneys had been getting in their hay; and a moderately large mound of hay looked almost mountainously dark against that low and lowering sky; a two-pronged pitchfork lying across it had certainly something grim about its black outline, which may have captured poor Gale’s fancy; for he was always prone to be taken by odd sights as if they were signals. Anyhow at that moment the host and hostess and other guests came hurrying by; the old man lamenting over the ruin of his hay; but the lady of the house apparently much more concerned about the fate of some highly ornamental garden-chairs, which had apparently been left out on the lawn just adjoining the meadow, under the large apple-tree whose boughs were now tossing and twisting in the storm.
“Gabriel Gale, when in his right mind, is the most chivalrous of men, and would have regained the lady’s chairs at a bound. But now he could do nothing but glare at the unfortunate Saunders; who awoke trembling to his social duties, in that agony of self-consciousness in which a man is afraid to do the right thing and afraid not to do it. At length, however, he jerked himself forward, fumbled with the door, flung it open and ran out into the reverberating rain. Then Gale followed him to the open door and shouted something after him. For most of the company, I think, it was lost in the din; but even if they had heard it, they certainly could not have understood it. I heard it; and I thought I understood it only too well. For what Gale shouted through the storm was, ‘Why don’t you call the chairs and they’ll come to you.’
“A second or so afterwards he added, as if it were an afterthought, ‘You might as well tell the tree to come here as well.’ Naturally there was no answer; and indeed Saunders, partly by his natural clumsiness and partly in the distraction of the driving elements, seemed for the moment to have lost his way and was staggering up the steeper path of the meadow some way to the left of the tree. I could just see his long figure and angular awkward elbows traced against the sky. Then followed the sudden, violent and utterly unintelligible incident. A rope happened to lie half round one of the swathes in the foreground; and Gale, leaping out of the door, caught it up and seemed to be knotting it in a sort of savage haste. The next moment there swept across the sky the great swirling curves of a noose thrown in the manner of a lasso. And I could see the wavering figure on the dark ridge alter its attitude and rear up as against an invisible obstacle, as the rope tightened and tugged it back.
“I looked round for assistance; and was surprised and somewhat alarmed to find I was alone. The host and hostess, and the others, having despatched the obliging Saunders after the chairs, had rushed off to summon the servants or secure other doors and windows, or look after other fittings threatened by the weather; and there was no one but myself to watch the unmeaning and apparently imbecile tragedy outside. I saw Gale drag Saunders like a sack at the end of a rope along the whole length of windows and disappear round a corner of the house. But I turned cold with a new fear when, even as he rushed past, he snatched the hay-fork from the mound and seemed to disappear brandishing it, like the fabulous fork of a demon. I rushed after them, but slipping on the wet stones, hurt my foot and had to limp; the raving storm seemed to have swallowed up that lunatic and all his antics; and it was not until some time afterwards that men found how that dance had ended. Herbert Saunders was found tied to a tree, still alive and even unwounded, but presenting the appearance of having barely missed a murderous attack; for the prongs of the pitchfork were driven by sheer fury into the tree on each side of his neck, holding him pinned there as by an iron ring. Gabriel Gale was not found for nearly a day, until after the storm was spent and the sunshine had returned; and he was loitering about in an adjoining meadow blowing the clocks off dandelions. I have seldom known him so serene.”
There was a short silence. “How is the other fellow… Saunders?” asked Butterworth, after a pause of frowning consideration. “Was he much hurt?”
“Had a shock and is still shaky, of course,” answered Garth. “Had to go for a rest-cure or something; but I believe he’s all right now. Only you can hardly expect a harmless person who’s been half murdered in a raving attack like that to feel very friendly or forgiving. So I’m afraid they will make it a case of attempted murder unless we can get our friend off on medical grounds. As a matter of fact, I have him waiting outside in the car.”
“Very well,” said the London doctor, rising with abrupt composure and buttoning up his coat. “We had better go along to see him now and get it over.”
The interview between Gale and the two doctors, at an adjacent hotel, was so short and so extraordinary that they went away with their very level heads turning like wind-mills. For Gale displayed nothing even of the merely childish innocence of levity attributed to him in the tale of the dandelions. He listened with patience, and a humorous and benevolent mildness which made the two doctors, who were considerably his seniors, feel as if they were being treated as juniors. When Garth began to break it to him gently that some sort of rest-cure was required in his own interests, he laughed heartily and anticipated all such periphrases.
“Don’t be nervous, old man,” he said, “you mean I ought to be in a madhouse; and I’m sure you mean well.”
“You know I am your friend,” said Garth earnestly; “and all your friends would say what I say.”
“Indeed,” said Gale, smiling. “Well, if that is the opinion of my friends, perhaps it would be better to get the opinion of my enemies.”
“What do you mean,” demanded the other. “Of your enemies?”
“Shall we say of my enemy?” continued Gale in level tones. “Of the man to whom I have done this perfectly outrageous thing. Well, really, that is all I ask; that before you lock me up for this outrage, you ask Herbert Saunders himself what he thinks about it.”
“Do you mean,” broke in Butterworth rather impatiently, “that we are to ask him whether he liked being half-throttled and impaled on a pitchfork?”
“Yes,” said Gale nodding, “I want you to ask him whether he liked being half throttled and impaled on a pitchfork.”
He slightly knitted his brows as if considering a new and merely practical point and then, added:
“I should send him a telegram now… say anything… ‘How do you like being lassoed?’ or, ‘What price pitchforks?’ or something playful of that sort.”
“We could telephone, if it comes to that,” said Garth.
The poet shook his head. “No,” he said, “that sort of man feels much more free in writing. He will only stammer on the telephone. He won’t stammer anything like what you imagine, even then; but he will stammer. But writing with his head in one of those little cubicles at the telegraph office, he will feel as free as in a confessional box.”
The two doctors, when they parted in some bewilderment, but tacitly accepting this suggestion of a respite, lost no time in fulfilling the condition required. They sent off a carefully worded telegram to Saunders, who had now returned home to his mother’s house, asking him what were his impressions and views about the extraordinary conduct of Gabriel Gale. The reply came back with remarkable promptitude; and Garth came to Butterworth with the open telegram in his hand and a rather dazed expression on his face. For the exact terms of the message were:
“Can never be sufficiently grateful to Gale for his great kindness which more than saved my life.”
The two doctors looked at each other in silence; and in almost as complete a silence got into a car and drove across the hills once more to the Blakeney’s house, where Gale was still staying.
They drove across the hilly country and descended into the wide and shallow valley where stood the house which sheltered that dangerous character, Mr. Gabriel Gale. Garth could recall, and Butterworth could imagine, all the irony suggested to the imagination by such a story about such a scene. The house of the Blakeneys stood high and plain just beyond the river; it was one of those houses that strike the eye as old-fashioned and yet not old. Certainly it was not old enough to be beautiful; but it had everything that recalls, to those that faintly remember them, the last traditions of Early Victorian lingering into Mid-Victorian times. The tall pillars looked so very pallid; the long plain windows looked in dismally upon high-ceilinged rooms; the curtains that hung parallel with the pillars were strips of dull red; and even from that distance the humorous Butterworth was certain that they had heavy and quite useless tassels. It was a strange house to have been the scene of an incredible crime or lunacy. It was an even stranger house to have been, as was alleged, the scene of a yet more incredible or mysterious mercy. All about it lay its ordered gardens and its mown or unmown meadows; its plantations of trees and deep alleys and shrubberies; all the things which on that wild night had been given over to the withering splendour of the lightning and the wind. Now the whole landscape was laid bare in a golden calm of summer; and the blue heavens above it were so deep and still that the sound of a humming fly hung there and was heard as far away as the skylark. Thus glittered in the sun, all solid and objective, the stage properties of that hideous farce. Garth saw all the blank and staring windows which he had last beheld streaming with rain and swept by the wind and the wild dance of the lunatic and his victim. He saw the forked tree to which the victim had been bound, still with the two black holes in it where the fork had pierced it, looking like the hollow eyes of a skull, and making the whole seem like some horned goblin. There was the heaped up hay, still to some extent disordered and scattered as by the dizzy dance of a small cyclone; and beyond it rose the high green wall of the unmown and standing grass of the next meadow. From the very thick of this mild jungle or miniature forest, a long thin line of smoke was drawn up into the sky; as if from a very small fire of weeds. Nothing else human or alive was visible in the sultry summer landscape; but Garth seemed to know and recognize the significance of the smoke. He sent a far halloo across the fields, calling out, “Is that you, Gale?”
Two feet pointed skyward and two long legs upside down rose vertically out of the tall grass, just beyond the smoke; and waved to them like arms, as if according to a preconcerted science of signalling. Then the legs seemed to give a leap and dive and the owner of the legs came the right side up and rose or surged slowly out of the depths of green, gazing across at them with a misty and benevolent expression. He was smoking a long thin cigar: the fire behind the smoke.
He received them and their news with no air of triumph, still less of surprise. Abandoning his grassy nest, he sat down with them on the garden-chairs which had also played their part in the mystery; and only smiled a little as he handed back the telegram.
“Well,” he said; “do you still think I am mad?”
“Well,” said Butterworth, “I can’t help wondering whether he is.”
Gale leaned across, showing his first eagerness, and said, “He isn’t. But he jolly nearly was.”
Then he leaned slowly back again and stared abstractedly at a daisy on the lawn, almost as if he had forgotten their presence. When he spoke again it was in a clear but rather colourless tone, like a lecturer:
“A very large number of young men nearly go mad. But nearly all of them only nearly do it; and normally they recover the normal. You might almost say it’s normal to have an abnormal period. It comes when there’s a lack of adjustment in the scale of things outside and within. Lots of those boys, those big healthy schoolboys you hear about, who care for nothing but cricket or the tuckshop, are bursting with a secret and swelling morbidity. But in this young man it was rather symbolically expressed even in the look of him. It was like his growing out of his clothes, or being too big for his boots. The inside gets too big for the outside. He doesn’t know how to relate the two things; and generally he doesn’t relate them at all. In one way his own mind and self seem to be colossal and cosmic and everything outside them small or distant. In another way the world is much too big for him; and his thoughts are fragile things to be hidden away. There are any number of cases of that disproportionate secretiveness. You know how silent boys have been about incredible abuses in bad schools. Whether or no it’s false to say a girl can’t keep a secret, it’s often really the ruin of a boy that he can keep a secret.
“Now in that dangerous time, there’s a dreadfully dangerous moment; when the first connexion is made between the subjective and objective: the first real bridge between the brain and real things. It all depends what it is; because, while it confirms his self-consciousness, it may happen to confirm his self-deception. That young man had never really been noticed by anybody until Lady Flamborough happened to tell him that he had brought the bad weather. It came just at the moment when his whole sense of proportions and possibilities had gone wild. I think the first thing that made me suspect he was…. By the way,” added Gale abruptly, “what was it that made you first suspect me of being mad?”
“I think,” said Garth slowly, “it was when you were staring out of the window at the storm.”
“The storm? Was there a storm?” asked Gale vaguely. “Oh yes, now I come to think of it, there was.”
“But, hang it all,” replied the doctor, “what else could you have been staring out of the window at, except the storm?”
“I wasn’t staring out of the window,” answered Gale.
“Really, my dear fellow,” remonstrated Dr. Garth.
“I was staring at the window,” said the poet. “I often stare at windows. So few people ever look at windows, unless they are stained glass-windows. But glass is a very beautiful thing, like diamonds; and transparency is a sort of transcendental colour. Besides, in this case there was something else; and something far more awful and thrilling than a thunderstorm.”
“Well, what were you looking at, that was more awful than a thunderstorm?”
“I was looking at two raindrops running down the pane,” said Gale. “And so was Saunders.”
Seeing the others staring at him he continued: “Oh yes, it’s quite true; as the poet says,” and he recited with great and unusual gravity:
"'Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the soul to stagger
Till the stars can hardly stand.'
“Haven’t I told you a thousand times,” he continued with increasing earnestness and animation, “that I always find myself looking at some little thing, a stone or a starfish or what not, and that’s the only way I can ever learn anything? But when I looked at Saunders, I saw his eyes were fixed on the same spot on the window-pane; and I shuddered from head to foot, for I knew I had guessed right. He was wearing a certain kind of unobtrusive smile.
“You know that incurable gamblers sometimes bet on a race between two raindrops. But there is this specially about the sport; that it is abstract and equal and gives one a sense of impartiality. If you bet on a dog-fight, you may find you really sympathize with a Scotch terrier against an Irish terrier, or vice versa; you may like the look of a billiard player or even the colours of a jockey. Therefore the event may go against your sympathies; and you will realize your limitations. But in the case of those two crystal spheres hung in a void of transparency, there is something like the equal scales of an abstract justice; you feel that whichever wins might be the one you had chosen. You may easily, in a certain secret megalomania, persuade yourself it is the one you have chosen. It is easy to imagine oneself controlling things hung so evenly. That was when I said to him, to test whether I was following his train of thought, ‘It makes you feel like God.’ Did you think I was talking about the storm? Storm! Pooh! Why should a storm make a man think he’s God? If he’d got any sense it might make him feel he wasn’t. But I knew that Saunders was just at the delicate crisis, where he was half trying to believe he was. He was half trying to think he had really changed the weather and might change everything; and a game like that of the raindrops was just the thing to encourage him. He really felt as if he were Omnipotence looking at two falling stars: and he was the special providence in them.
“Remember that there is always something double about morbidity; the sound old popular phrase said the madman was ‘beside himself’. There is a part of him encouraging itself to go mad; and a part that still doesn’t quite believe in the mania. He would delight in easy self deceptions, as in the raindrops. He would also sub-consciously avoid tests too decisive. He would avoid wanting to want something incredible; as that a tree should dance. He would avoid it; partly for fear it should and partly for fear it shouldn’t. And I was suddenly and furiously certain, with every cell of my brain, that he must stop himself instantly, violently, by telling the tree to dance; and finding it wouldn’t.
“That was when I shouted to him to tell the chairs and the tree to move. I was certain that unless he learnt his human limitations sharply and instantly, something illimitable and inhuman would take hold of him in that very hour. He took no notice; he rushed out into the garden; he forgot all about the chairs; he ran up that steep meadow with a leap like that of a wild goat; and I knew he had broken loose from reality and was out of the world. He would go careering through waste places, with the storm within and without; and when he returned from that country walk he would never be the same again. He would leap and dance on that lonely road; he would be horribly happy; nothing would stop him. I was already resolved that something must stop him. It must be something abrupt, arresting, revealing the limit of real things; the throttling shock with which a thing comes to the end of its tether. Then I saw the rope and threw it, catching him back like a wild horse. Somehow there rose in my imagination the image of the pagan Centaur rearing backwards, bridled, and rampant against heaven: for the Centaur, like all paganism, is at once natural and unnatural; a part of nature-worship and yet a monster.
