Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 295
It was after one of his repeated assertions that these stories about bad luck were all the same sort of damned nonsense that the keen though quavering voice of old Creed got a word in edgeways.
“There, my dear Crundle, I would make a distinction,” he said in a legal manner. “They are all damned nonsense, but they are not all the same sort of damned nonsense. As a point of historical research, they seem to me to differ in rather a singular fashion. The origin of some is obvious, of others highly obscure. The fancies about Friday and thirteen have probably a religious basis; but what, for instance, can be the basis of objecting to peacocks’ feathers?”
Crundle was replying with a joyful roar that it was some infernal rubbish or other, when Gale, who had quickly slipped into a seat beside the man called Noel, interposed in a conversational manner.
“I fancy I can throw a little light on that. I believe I found a trace of it in looking at some old illuminated manuscripts of the ninth or tenth century. There is a very curious design, in a stiff Byzantine style, representing the two armies preparing for the war in heaven. But St. Michael is handing out spears to the good angels; while Satan is elaborately arming the rebel angels with peacocks’ feathers.”
Noel turned his hollow eyes sharply in the direction of the speaker. “That is really interesting,” he said; “you mean it was all that old theological notion of the wickedness of pride?”
“Well, there’s a whole peacock in the garden for you to pluck,” cried Crundle in his boisterous manner, “if any of you want to go out fighting angels.”
“They are not very effective weapons,” said Gale gravely, “and I fancy that is what the artist in the Dark Ages must have meant. There seems to me to be something that rather hits the wrong imperialism in the right place, about the contrast in the weapon; the fact that the right side was arming for a real and therefore doubtful battle, while the wrong side was already, so to speak, handing out the palms of victory. You cannot fight anybody with the palms of victory.”
Crundle showed a curious restlessness as this conversation proceeded; and a much less radiant restlessness than before. His prominent eyes shot questions at the speakers, his mouth worked, and his fingers began to drum on the table. At last he broke out:
“What’s all this mean, eh? One would think you were half on the side of all the stuff and nonsense… all of you talking about it with those long faces.”
“Pardon me,” interposed the old lawyer, with a relish for repeating the logical point, “my suggestion was very simple, I spoke of causes, not of justifications. I say the cause of the peacock legend is less apparent than that of the bad luck of Friday.”
“Do you think Friday unlucky?” demanded Crundle, like one at bay, turning his starting eyes on the poet.
“No, I think Friday lucky,” answered Gale. “All Christian people, whatever their lighter superstitions, have always thought Friday lucky. Otherwise they would have talked about Bad Friday instead of Good Friday.”
“Oh, Christians be…” began Mr. Crundle with sudden violence; but he was stopped by something in the voice of Noel that seemed to make his violence a vain splutter.
“I’m not a Christian,” said Noel in a voice like stone. “It is useless now to wonder whether I wish I were. But it seems to me that Mr. Gale’s point is a perfectly fair one; that such a religion might well actually contradict such a superstition. And it seems to me also that the truth might be applied yet further. If I believed in God, I should not believe in a God who made happiness depend on knocking over a salt-cellar or seeing a peacock’s feather. Whatever Christianity teaches, I presume it does not teach that the Creator is crazy.”
Gale nodded thoughtfully, as if in partial assent, and answered rather as if he were addressing Noel alone, in the middle of a wilderness.
“In that sense of course you are right,” he said. “But I think there is a little more to be said on the matter. I think most people, as I say, have really taken these superstitions rather lightly, perhaps more lightly than you do. And I think they mostly referred to lighter evils, in that world of rough-and-tumble circumstance which they thought of rather as connected with elves than with angels. But, after all, Christians admit more than one kind even of angels; and some of them are fallen angels… like the people with the peacocks’ feathers. Now I have a feeling that they might really have to do with peacocks’ feathers. Just as lower spirits play low tricks with tables and tambourines, they might play low tricks with knives and salt-cellars. Certainly our souls do not depend on a broken mirror; but there’s nothing an unclean spirit would like better than to make us think so. Whether he succeeds depends on the spirit in which we break it. And I can imagine that breaking the mirror in a certain moral spirit… as, for instance, a spirit of scorn and inhumanity… might bring one in touch with lower influences. I can imagine that a cloud might rest on the house where such a thing was done, and evil spirits cluster about it.”
There was a rather singular silence, a silence that seemed to the speaker to brood and settle even upon the gardens and streets beyond; no one spoke; the silence was punctuated at last by the thin and piercing cry of a peacock.
Then it was that Humphrey Crundle startled them all with his first outbreak. He had been staring at the speaker with bursting eyeballs; at length, when he found his voice, it was so thick and hoarse that the first note of it was hardly more human than the bird’s. He stuttered and stammered with rage, and it was only towards the end of the first sentence that he was even intelligible. “… Coming here and jabbering blasted drivel and drinking my burgundy like a lord; talking rubbish against our whole… against the very first… why don’t you pull our noses as well? Why the hell don’t you pull our noses?”
“Come, come,” cut in Noel in his trenchant tones, “you are getting unreasonable, Crundle; I understand that this gentleman came here at your own invitation, to take the place of one of our friends.”
“I understood Arthur Bailey sent a wire that he was detained,” observed the more precise lawyer, “and that Mr. Gale had kindly taken his place.”
“Yes,” snapped Crundle, “I asked him to sit down as thirteenth man, and that alone smashes your superstition; for considering how he came in, he’s jolly lucky to get a good dinner.”
Noel again interposed with a remonstrance; but Gale had already risen to his feet. He did not seem annoyed, but rather distrait; and he addressed himself to Creed and Noel, neglecting his excitable host.
“I am much obliged to you gentlemen,” he said, “but I think I shall be going. It is quite true that I was invited to the dinner, but hardly to the house… well, I can’t help having a curious notion about it.”
He played for a moment with the crossed knives on the table; then he said, looking out into the garden…
“The truth is I’m not sure the thirteenth man has been so lucky after all.”
“What do you mean?” cried his host sharply. “Dare you say you haven’t had a good dinner? You’re not going to pretend you’ve been poisoned.”
Gale was still looking out of the window; and he said without moving:
“I am the fourteenth man, and I did not pass under the ladder.”
It was characteristic of old Creed that he could only follow the logical argument in a literal fashion, and missed the symbol and the spiritual atmosphere which the subtler Noel had already understood. For the first time the old lawyer in the red wig really looked a little senile. He blinked at Gale and said querulously: “You don’t mean to say you’d bother to keep all those rules about ladders and things?”
“I’m not sure I should bother to keep them,” replied Gale, “but I am sure I shouldn’t bother to break them. One seems to break so many other things when one begins to break them. There are many things that are almost as easy to break as a looking-glass.” He paused a moment, and added as if in apology: “There are the Ten Commandments, you know.”
There was another abrupt accidental silence, and Noel found himself listening with irrational rigidity for the ugly voice of the beautiful bird outside. But it did not speak. He had the sub-conscious and still more meaningless fancy that it had been strangled in the dark.
Then the poet for the first time turned his face to Humphrey Crundle, and looked straight into the goggling eyes as he spoke.
“Peacocks may not be unlucky; but pride is unlucky. And it was in insolence and contempt that you set yourself to trample on the traditions or the follies of humbler men; so that you have come to trample on a holier thing at last. Cracked mirrors may not be unlucky; but cracked brains are unlucky; and you have gone mad on reason and common sense till you are a criminal lunatic this day. And red may need not be unlucky; but there is something that is more red and much more unlucky; and there are spots of it on the window-sill and on the steps of the ladder. I took it for the red petals myself.”
For the first time in his restless hour of hospitality the man at the head of the table sat perfectly still. Something in his sudden and stony immobility seemed to startle all the rest into life, and they all sprang to their feet with a confused clamour of protest and question. Noel alone seemed to keep his head under the shock.
“Mr. Gale,” he said firmly, “you have said too much or too little. A good many people would say you were talking a lot of lurid nonsense, but I have a notion that what you talk is not always such nonsense as it sounds. But if you leave it as it is, it will be simply unsupported slander. In plain words you say there has been a crime here. Whom do you accuse; or are we all to accuse each other?”
“I do not accuse you,” answered Gale, “and the proof is that if it must be verified, you had better verify it yourself. Sir Daniel Creed is a lawyer, and may very properly accompany you. Go and look yourselves at the marks on the ladder. You will find some more in the grass round the foot of the ladder, leading away in the direction of that big dust-bin in the corner of the garden. I think it would be as well if you looked in the dust-bin. It may be the end of your search.”
Old Crundle continued to sit like a graven image; and something told them that his goggle eyes were now, as it were, turned inward. He was revolving some enigma of his own which seemed to baffle and blind him, so that the whole disordered scene broke about him unnoticed. Creed and Noel left the room and could be heard running down the stairs and talking in low voices under the window. Then their voices died away in the direction of the dust-bin; and still the old man sat with the opal on his breast, as still as an Eastern idol with its sacred gem. Then he seemed suddenly to dilate and glow as if a monstrous lamp had been lit within him. He sprang to his feet, brandished his goblet as if for a toast, and brought it down again on the table so that the glass was shattered and the wine spilt in a blood-red star.
“I’ve got it; I was right,” he cried in a sort of exaltation. “I was right; I was right after all. Don’t you see, all of you? Don’t you see? That man out there isn’t the thirteenth man. He’s really the fourteenth man, and the fellow here is the fifteenth. Arthur Bailey’s the real thirteenth man, and he’s all right, isn’t he? He didn’t actually come to the house, but why should that matter? Why the devil should that matter? He’s the thirteenth member of the club, isn’t he? There can’t be any more thirteenth men afterwards, can there? I don’t care a curse about all the rest; I don’t care what you call me or what you do to me. I say all this fool’s poetical stuff goes to pot, because the man in the dust-bin isn’t number thirteen at all, and I challenge anybody…”
Noel and Creed were standing in the room with very grim faces as the man at the head of the table gabbled on with a frightful volubility. When he gasped and choked for a moment with the rush of his own words, Noel said in a voice of steel:
“I am sorry to say that you were right.”
“Most horrible thing I ever saw in my life,” said old Creed, and sat down suddenly, lifting a liqueur glass of cognac with a shaking hand.
“The body of an unfortunate man with his throat cut has been concealed in the dust-bin,” went on Noel in a lifeless voice. “By the mark on his clothes, which are curiously old-fashioned for a comparatively young man, he seems to have come from Stoke-under-Ham.”
“What was he like?” asked Gale with sudden animation.
Noel looked at him curiously. “He was very long and lank, with hair like tow,” he replied. “What do you mean?”
“I guessed he must have looked a little like me,” answered the poet.
Crundle had collapsed in his chair again after his last and strangest outbreak, and made no attempt at explanation or escape. His mouth was still moving, but he was talking to himself; proving with ever-increasing lucidity and repetition that the man he had murdered had no right to the number thirteen. Sir Daniel Creed seemed for the moment almost as stricken and silent a figure; but it was he who broke the silence. Lifting his bowed head with its grotesque wig, he said suddenly: “This blood cries for justice. I am an old man, but I would avenge it on my own brother.”
“I am just going to telephone for the police,” said Noel quietly. “I can see no cause for hesitation.” His large figure and features looked notably less languid, and his hollow eyes had a glow in them.
A big florid man named Bull, of the commercial traveller type, who had been very noisy and convivial at the other end of the table, now began to take the stage like the foreman of a jury. It was rather typical of him that he waited for more educated people to lead, and then proceeded to lead them.
“No cause for hesitation. No case for sentimentalism,” he trumpeted as healthily as an elephant. “Painful business, of course; old member of the club and all that. But I say I’m no sentimentalist; and whoever did this deserves hanging. Well, there’s no doubt of who did it. We heard him practically confess a minute ago, when these gentlemen were out of the room.”
“Always thought he was a bad lot,” said one of the clerks; possibly a clerk with an old score of his own.
“I am all for acting at once,” said Noel. “Where is the telephone?”
Gabriel Gale stepped in front of the collapsed figure in the chair, and turned his face to the advancing crowd.
“Stop,” he cried, “let me say a word.”
“Well, what is it?” asked Noel steadily.
“I do not like boasting,” said the poet, “but unfortunately the argument can only take that form. I am a sentimentalist, as Mr. Bull would say; I am by trade a sentimentalist; a mere scribbler of sentimental songs. You are all very hard-headed, rational, sensible people who laugh at superstitions; you are practical men, and men of common sense. But your common sense didn’t discover the dead body. You would have smoked your practical cigars and drunk your practical grog and gone home all over smiles, leaving it to rot in the dust-bin. You never found out where your rational sceptical road can lead a man, as it has led that poor gibbering idiot in the chair. A sentimentalist, a dabbler in moonshine, found out that for you; perhaps because he was a sentimentalist. For I really have a streak in me of the moonshine that leads such men astray; that is why I can follow them. And now the lucky sentimentalist must say a word for the unlucky one.”
“Do you mean for the criminal?” asked Creed in his sharp but shaky voice.
“Yes,” replied Gale. “I discovered him and I defend him.”
“So you defend murderers, do you?” demanded Bull.
“Some murderers,” answered Gale calmly. “This one was a rather unique sort of murderer. In fact, I am far from certain that he was a murderer at all. It may have been an accident. It may have been a sort of mechanical action, almost like an automaton.”
The light of long-lost cross-examinations gleamed in Creed’s aged eyes, and his sharp voice no longer shook.
“You mean to say,” he said, “that Crundle read a telegram from Bailey, realized there was a vacant place, went out into the street and talked to a total stranger, brought him in here, went somewhere to fetch a razor or a carving knife, cut his guest’s throat, carried the corpse down the ladder, and carefully covered it with the lid of the dust-bin. And he did all that by accident, or by an automatic gesture.”
“Very well put, Sir Daniel,” answered Gale; “and now let me put you a question, in the same logical style. In your legal language, what about motive? You say he could not assassinate a total stranger by accident; but why should he assassinate a total stranger on purpose? On what purpose? It not only served no end he had in view; it actually ruined everything he had in view. Why in the world should he want to make a gap in his Thirteen Club dinner? Why in the name of wonder should he want to make the thirteenth man a monument of disaster? His own crime was at the expense of his own creed, or cranky doubt, denial, or whatever you call it.”
“That is true,” assented Noel, “and what is the meaning of it all?”
“I do believe,” replied Gale, “that nobody can tell you but myself; and I will tell you why. Do you realize how full life is of awkward attitudes? You get them in snapshots; I suppose the new ugly schools of art are trying to snap them; figures leaning stiffly, standing on one leg, resting unconscious hands on incongruous objects. This is a tragedy of awkward positions. I can understand it because I myself, this very afternoon, was in the devil of an awkward position.
“I had climbed in through that window simply out of silly curiosity, and I was standing at the table like a fool, picking up the knives and putting them straight. I still had my hat on, but when Crundle came in I made a movement to take it off with the knife still in my hand; then I corrected myself and put the knife down first. You know those tiny confused movements one sometimes has. Now Crundle, when he first saw me, and before he saw me close, staggered as if I had been God Almighty or the hangman waiting in his dining-room; and I think I know why. I am awkward and tall and tow-haired, too; and I was standing there dark against the daylight where the other had stood. It must have seemed as if the corpse had lifted the dust-bin lid and crawled back up the ladder, and taken up his station like a ghost. But meanwhile my own little irresolute gesture with the half-lifted knife had told me something. It had told me what really happened.
