Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 306
“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 soupçon 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.
VI
THE THING THAT REALLY HAPPENED
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.”
