Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 302
The man opposite looked at him steadily and rather strangely for a moment, and then said:
“I have half a mind. . . . Look here, have you any human curiosity as well as journalistic curiosity? I mean, would the one man like to know, even if the million never knew?”
“Oh, yes,” replied the journalist, “I have plenty of curiosity, even about things I am told in confidence. But I can’t quite see why Marillac’s taste in champagne and ortolans should be so very confidential.”
“Well,” answered the other gravely, “why do you think he chooses them?”
“I guess I’ve got a bromide mind,” said the American, “but I should rather suspect him of choosing the things he likes.”
“Au contraire, as the other gourmet said when asked if he lunched on the boat.”
The man with the peculiar eyes broke off from his flippant speech, plunged for a few moments into profound silence, and then resumed in so different a tone that it was like another man suddenly speaking at the table.
“Every age has its bigotry, which is blind to some particular need of human nature; the Puritans to the need for merriment, the Manchester School to the need for beauty, and so on. There is a need in man, or at least in many men, which it is not fashionable to admit or allow for in these days. Most people have had a touch of it in the more serious emotions of youth; in a few men it burns like a flame to the last, as it does here. Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has been blamed for imposing it, but in fact, it rather regulated and even restrained the passion than forced it. It exists in all religions, to a wild and frantic extent in some of the religions of Asia. There men hack themselves with knives or hang themselves on hooks, or walk through life with withered arms rigidly uplifted, crucified upon empty air. It is the appetite for what one does not like. Marillac has it.”
“What on earth—” began the startled journalist, but the other continued:
“In short, it is what people call Asceticism, and one of the modern mistakes is not allowing for its real existence in rare but quite real people. To live a life of incessant austerity and self-denial, as Marillac does, is surrounded with extraordinary difficulties and misunderstandings in modern society. Society can understand some particular Puritan fad, like Prohibition, especially if it is imposed on other people, above all, on poor people. But a man like Marillac, imposing on himself, not abstinence from wine, but abstinence from worldly pleasures of every sort. . . .”
“Excuse me,” said Pinion in his most courteous tones, “I trust I’d never have the incivility to suggest that you have gone mad, so I must ask you to tell me candidly whether I have.”
“Most people,” replied the other, “would answer that it is Marillac who has gone mad. Perhaps he has; anyhow, if the truth were known, he would certainly be thought so. But it isn’t only to avoid being put in a lunatic asylum that he hides his hermit’s ideal by pretending to be a man of pleasure. It’s part of the whole idea, in its only tolerable form. The worst of those Eastern fakirs hung on hooks is that they are too conspicuous. It may make them just a little vain. I don’t deny that Stylites and some of the first hermits may have been touched with the same danger. But our friend is a Christian anchorite; and understands the advice, ‘When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.’ He is not seen of men to fast. On the contrary, he is seen of men to feast. Only, don’t you see, he has invented a new kind of fasting.”
Mr. Pinion of the Comet suddenly laughed, a curt and startled laugh, for he was very quick and had already guessed the joke.
“You don’t really mean—” he began.
“Well, it’s quite simple, isn’t it?” replied his informant. “He feasts on all the most luxurious and expensive things that he doesn’t like. Especially on the things that he simply detests. Under that cover, nobody can possibly accuse him of virtue. He remains impenetrably protected behind a rampart of repulsive oysters and unwelcome aperitifs. In short, the hermit must now hide anywhere but in the hermitage. He generally hides in the latest luxurious gilded hotels, because that’s where they have the worst cooking.”
“This is a very extraordinary tale,” said the American, arching his eyebrows.
“You begin to see the idea?” said the other. “If he has twenty different hors-d’œuvres brought to him and takes the olives, who is to know that he hates olives? If he thoughtfully scans the whole wine-list and eventually selects a rather recondite Hock, who will guess that his whole soul rises in disgust at the very thought of Hock: and that he knows that’s the nastiest — even of Hocks? Whereas, if he were to demand dried peas or a mouldy crust at the Ritz, he would probably attract attention.”
“I never can quite see,” said the man in spectacles restlessly, “what is the good of it all.”
The other man lowered his magnetic eyes and looked down with some embarrassment. At last he said:
“I think I can see it, but I don’t think I can say it. I had a touch of it myself once, only in one special direction, and I found it almost impossible to explain to anybody. Only there is one mark of the real mystic and ascetic of this sort; that he only wants to do it to himself. He wants everybody else to have what wine or smokes they want and will ransack the Ritz for it. The moment he wants to dragoon the others, the mystic sinks into a mire of degradation and becomes the moral reformer.”
There was a pause, and then the journalist said suddenly:
“But, look here, this won’t do. It isn’t only wasting his money on wining and dining that has got Marillac a bad name. It’s the whole thing. Why is he such a fan for these rotten erotic plays and things? Why does he go about with a woman like Mrs. Prague? That doesn’t seem like a hermit, anyhow.”
The man facing Pinion smiled and the heavier man on his right half turned with a sort of grunt of laughter.
“Well,” he said, “it’s pretty plain you’ve never been about with Mrs. Prague.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked Pinion; and this time there was something like a general laugh.
“Some say she’s his Maiden Aunt and it’s his duty to be kind to her,” began the first man, but the second man interrupted him gruffly:
“Why do you call her a Maiden Aunt when she looks like a—”
“Quite so, quite so,” said the first man rather hastily, “and why ‘looks like’ — if it comes to that?”
“But her conversation!” groaned his friend. “And Marillac stands it for hours on end!”
“And her play!” assented the other. “Marillac sits through five mortal acts of it. If that isn’t being a martyr—”
“Don’t you see?” cried the shabby man with something like excitement. “The Count is a cultivated and even learned man; also he is a Latin and logical to the point of impatience. And yet he sticks it. He endures five or six acts of a Really Modern Intellectual Incisive Drama. The First Act in which she says that Woman will no longer be put on a pedestal; the Second Act in which Woman will no longer be put under a glass case; the Third Act in which Woman will no longer be a plaything for man, and the Fourth in which she will no longer be a chattel; all the clichés. And he still has two acts before him, in which she will not be something else, will not be a slave in the home or an outcast flung from the home. He’s seen it six times without turning a hair; you can’t even see him grind his teeth. And Mrs. Prague’s conversation! How her first husband could never understand, and her second husband seemed as if he might understand, only her third husband carried her off as if there was real understanding — and so on, as if there were anything to be understood. You know what an utterly egotistical fool is like. And he suffers even those fools gladly.”
“In fact,” put in the big man in his brooding manner, “you might say he has invented the Modern Penance. The Penance of Boredom. Hair-shirts and hermits’ caves in a howling wilderness would not be so horrible to modern nerves as that.”
“By your account,” ruminated Pinion, “I’ve been chasing a pleasure-seeker tripping on the light fantastic toe and only found a hermit standing on his head.” After a silence he said abruptly, “Is this really true? How did you find it out?”
“That’s rather a long story,” replied the man opposite. “The truth is that Marillac allows himself one feast in the year, on Christmas Day, and eats and drinks what he really likes. I found him drinking beer and eating tripe and onions in a quiet pub in Hoxton, and somehow we were forced into confidential conversation. You will understand, of course, that this is a confidential conversation.”
“I certainly shan’t print it,” answered the journalist. “I should be regarded as a lunatic if I did. People don’t understand that sort of lunacy nowadays, and I rather wonder you take to it so much yourself.”
“Well, I put my own case before him, you see,” answered the other. “In a small way it was a little like his own. And then I introduced him to my friends, and so he became a sort of President of our little club.”
“Oh,” said Pinion rather blankly, “I didn’t know you were a club.”
“Well, we are four men with a common bond at least. We have all had occasion, like Marillac, to look rather worse than we were.”
“Yes,” grunted the large man rather sourly, “we’ve all been Misunderstood. Like Mrs. Prague.”
“The Club of Men Misunderstood is rather more cheerful than that, however,” continued his friend. “We are all pretty jolly here, considering that our reputations have been blasted by black and revolting crimes. The truth is we have devoted ourselves to a new sort of detective story — or detective service if you like. We do not hunt for crimes but for concealed virtues. Sometimes, as in Marillac’s case, they are very artfully concealed. As you will doubtless be justified in retorting, we conceal our own virtues with brilliant success.”
The journalist’s head began to go round a little, though he thought himself pretty well accustomed both to crazy and criminal surroundings. “But I thought you said,” he objected, “that your reputations were blasted with crime. What sort of crime?”
“Well, mine was murder,” said the man next to him. “The people who blasted me did it because they disapproved of murder, apparently. It’s true I was rather a failure at murder, as at everything else.”
Pinion’s gaze wandered in some bewilderment to the next man who answered cheerfully:
“Mine was only a common fraud. A professional fraud, too, the sort that gets you kicked out of your profession sometimes. Rather like Dr. Cook’s sham discovery of the North Pole.”
“What does all this mean?” asked Pinion; and he looked inquiringly at the man opposite, who had done so much of the explaining so far.
“Oh, theft,” said the man opposite, indifferently; “the charge on which I was actually arrested was petty larceny.”
There was a profound silence, which seemed to settle in a mysterious manner, like a gathering cloud, on the figure of the fourth member, who had not spoken so far a single word. He sat erect in his rather stiff, foreign fashion; his wooden, handsome face was unchanged and his lips had never moved even for so much as a murmur. But now, when the sudden and deep silence seemed to challenge him, his face seemed to harden from wood to stone and when he spoke at last, his foreign accent seemed something more than alien, as if it were almost inhuman.
“I have committed the Unpardonable Sin,” he said. “For what sin did Dante reserve the last and lowest hell; the Circle of Ice?”
Still no one spoke; and he answered his own question in the same hollow tone:
“Treason. I betrayed the four companions of my party, and gave them up to the Government for a bribe.”
Something turned cold inside the sensitive stranger, and for the first time he really felt the air around him sinister and strange. The stillness continued for another half minute, and then all the four men burst out into a great uproar of laughter.
The stories they told, to justify their boasts or confessions, are here retold in a different fashion, as they appeared to those on the outskirts rather than the centre of the events. But the journalist, who liked to collect all the odd things of life, was interested enough to record them, and then afterwards recast them. He felt he had really got something, if not exactly what he had expected, out of his pursuit of the dashing and extravagant Count Raoul de Marillac.
THE MODERATE MURDERER
I
THE MAN WITH THE GREEN UMBRELLA
The new Governor was Lord Tallboys, commonly called Top-hat Tallboys, because of his attachment to that uncanny erection, which he continued to carry balanced on his head as calmly among the palm-trees of Egypt as among the lamp-posts of Westminster. Certainly he carried it calmly enough in lands where few crowns were safe from toppling. The district he had come out to govern may here be described, with diplomatic vagueness, as a strip on the edge of Egypt and called for our convenience Polybia. It is an old story now; but one which many people had reason to remember for many years, and at the time it was an imperial event. One Governor was killed, another Governor was nearly killed, but in this story we are concerned only with one catastrophe, and that was rather a personal and even private catastrophe.
Top-hat Tallboys was a bachelor and yet he brought a family with him. He had a nephew and two nieces of whom one, as it happened, had married the Deputy Governor of Polybia, the man who had been called to rule during the interregnum after the murder of the previous ruler. The other niece was unmarried; her name was Barbara Traill, and she may well be the first figure to cross the stage of this story.
For indeed she was rather a solitary and striking figure, raven dark and rich in colouring with a very beautiful but rather sullen profile, as she crossed the sandy spaces and came under the cover of one long low wall which alone threw a strip of shadow from the sun, which was sloping towards the desert horizon. The wall itself was a quaint example of the patchwork character of that borderland of East and West. It was actually a line of little villas, built for clerks and small officials, and thrown out as by a speculative builder whose speculations spread to the ends of the earth. It was a strip of Streatham amid the ruins of Heliopolis. Such oddities are not unknown, when the oldest countries are turned into the newest colonies. But in this case the young woman, who was not without imagination, was conscious of a quite fantastic contrast. Each of these dolls’ houses had its toy shrubs and plants and its narrow oblong of back garden running down to the common and continuous garden wall; and it was just outside this wall that there ran the rough path, fringed with a few hoary and wrinkled olives. Outside the fringe there faded away into infinity the monstrous solitude of sand. Only there could still be detected on that last line of distance a faint triangular shape, a sort of mathematical symbol whose unnatural simplicity has moved all poets and pilgrims for five thousand years. Anyone seeing it really for the first time, as the girl did, can hardly avoid uttering a cry: “The Pyramids!”
Almost as she said it a voice said in her ear, not loud but with alarming clearness and very exact articulation: “The foundations were traced in blood and in blood shall they be traced anew. These things are written for our instruction.”
It has been said that Barbara Traill was not without imagination; it would be truer to say that she had rather too much. But she was quite certain she had not imagined the voice, though she certainly could not imagine where it came from. She appeared to be absolutely alone on the little path which ran along the wall and led to the gardens round the Governorate. Then she remembered the wall itself, and looking sharply over her shoulder, she fancied she saw for one moment a head peering out of the shadow of a sycamore, which was the only tree of any size for some distance, since she had left the last of the low sprawling olives two hundred yards behind. Whatever it was, it had instantly vanished, and somehow she suddenly felt frightened, more frightened at its disappearance than its appearance. She began to hurry along the path to her uncle’s residence at a pace that was a little like a run. It was probably through this sudden acceleration of movement that she seemed to become aware, rather abruptly, that a man was marching steadily in front of her along the same track towards the gates of the Governorate.
He was a very large man, and seemed to take up the whole of the narrow path. She had something of the sensation, with which she was already slightly acquainted, of walking behind a camel through the narrow and crooked cracks of the Eastern town. But this man planted his feet as firmly as an elephant; he walked, one might say, even with a certain pomp, as if he were in a procession. He wore a long frock-coat and his head was surmounted by a tower of scarlet, a very tall red fez, rather taller than the top-hat of Lord Tallboys. The combination of the red Eastern cap and the black Western clothes is common enough among the Effendi class in those countries. But somehow it seemed novel and incongruous in this case, for the man was very fair and had a big blond beard blown about in the breeze. He might have been a model for the idiots who talk of the Nordic type of European, but somehow he did not look like an Englishman. He carried hooked on one finger a rather grotesque green umbrella or parasol, which he twirled idly like a trinket. As he was walking slower and slower and Barbara was walking fast and wanted to walk faster, she could hardly repress an exclamation of impatience and something like a request for room to pass. The large man with the beard immediately faced round and stared at her; then he lifted a monocle and fixed it in his eye and instantly smiled his apologies. She realized that he must be short-sighted and that she had been a mere blur to him a moment before, but there was something else in the change of his face and manner, something that she had seen before, but to which she could not put a name.
He explained, with the most formal courtesy, that he was going to leave a note for an official at the Governorate, and there was really no reason for her to refuse him credence or conversation. They walked a little way together, talking of things in general, and she had not exchanged more than a few sentences before she realized that she was talking to a remarkable man.
