Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 310
In the black storm of her mind she had a lightning blaze of intuition and said:
“Is this a sort of revenge?”
He stopped in the very middle of a polysyllable and turned pale to the lips.
“Have you come to the end of your long words, you liar and quack and mountebank?” she cried in a tempest of indescribable fury. “Do you think I don’t know why you’re trying to make out my father isn’t responsible? Because I told you he could turn you out of the house . . . because . . .”
The pale lips seemed to move as if with a grin of agony: “And why should I mind that?”
“Because,” she began and then stopped dead. An abyss had opened in herself into which she did not look. For a moment he sat on the sofa stiff as a corpse and then suddenly the corpse came to life.
“Yes!” he cried, leaping up. “You are right! It is you. It is you all the time! How can I leave you alone with him? You must believe me! I tell you the man is mad.” He cried out suddenly in a new and ringing voice: “I swear to God I am afraid he will kill you! And how should I live after that?”
She was so astounded at this burst of passion after all the pedantry, that for the first time something broke or wavered in her hard voice and she could only say: “If it is me you are thinking about, you must leave him alone.”
And with that a sort of stony detachment suddenly settled back upon him and he said, in a voice that seemed a hundred miles away: “You forget that I am a doctor. I have in any case a duty to the public.”
“And now I know you are a skunk and a scoundrel,” she said. “They always have a duty to the public.”
And then, in the silence that followed, they both heard the sounds which could alone, perhaps, have aroused them from their dumb mutual defiance. A long, light and swinging step was heard down the corridors, and the light humming of some post-prandial song, told Enid with sufficient clearness who had returned, and the next moment Walter Windrush stood in the room, looking festive and rather magnificent in evening dress. He was a tall and handsome old gentleman, and before him the figure of the sullen doctor looked not only square but almost squat. But when the artist looked across his studio, he saw the windows open and the festivity faded from his face.
“I have just walked through your garden,” said the doctor in a soft voice.
“Then you will kindly walk out of my house,” said the artist.
He had turned pale with anger or some other passion, but he spoke clearly and firmly. After a silence he said: “I must ask you to cease from any communications with me and my family.”
Judson started and stepped forward with a violent gesture which he checked as he made it. But his voice broke out of him like something beyond his control.
“You say I am to go out of this house. I say it is you who shall go out of this house!”
Then, as if grinding his teeth, he added with what seemed inconceivable intellectual cruelty: “I am going to have you certified as a lunatic.”
He walked furiously out of the room towards the front door, and Windrush turned to his daughter. She was staring at him with wide eyes, but her colour was such that he thought, for the fraction of an instant, that she was dead.
Of the next frightful forty-eight hours in which the threat was carried out with all its consequences, Enid could never remember many details. But she remembered some nameless hour of night or morning that seemed but a part of a sleepless night, when she stood on the doorstep and looked wildly up and down the street, as if expecting her neighbours to rescue her from a house on fire. And there crept upon her the cold certainty, more cruel than any fire, that in this sort of calamity there was no hope from neighbours, nor any appeal against the machine of modern oppression. She saw a policeman standing near the next lamp-post, outside the next house. She thought of calling to the policeman, as if to save her from a burglar, and then she realized that she might as well call to the lamp-post. If two doctors chose to testify that Walter Windrush was mad, they turned the whole modern world with them — police and all. If they chose to testify that it was an emergency case, he could be taken away at once, under the eye of any policeman, and it seemed that he was being taken away at once. Nevertheless, there was something about the policeman planted at that particular spot, where she had never seen one before, that riveted her eye. And even as she gazed, the next-door neighbour, Mr. Wilmot, came out of his front door with a light suitcase in his hand.
She felt a sudden impulse to consult him, perhaps it was an impulse to consult anybody. But he had always seemed to be a man of many types of information, including the scientific, and she impulsively ran across and asked for a moment’s interview. Mr. Wilmot seemed a little hurried, which was far from being his usual demeanour, but he politely bowed her back into his front parlour. When she got there, a rather inexplicable shyness or evasion overcame her. She felt a new and irrational reluctance to give away somebody or something, she knew not what. Moreover, there was something unfamiliar about the familiar face and form of Mr. Wilmot. He was wearing horn spectacles, through which his glance seemed sharper and more alert than of old. His clothes were the same, but they were buttoned up more neatly and all his movements were more brisk. He still had the wisps that looked like whiskers but the face underneath had so altered in expression that one might almost fancy the whiskers were part of a wig.
Dazed and doubtful in a new fashion, she felt impelled to put her point in a more impersonal way, and asked whether he could give any advice to a friend of hers, who had been warned of a disease called Duodiapsychosis. Could he tell her if there was such a disease, as she knew he knew a lot about those things?
He admitted that he knew a little about those things. But he still seemed hurried — courteously but convincingly hurried. He looked it up in a work of reference, turning the pages very rapidly; no, he doubted whether there was any such thing.
“It seems to me,” he said, looking gravely at her through his spectacles, “that your friend may be the victim of a quack.”
With that repetition of her suspicions, she turned homewards and he rather eagerly followed her into the street. The policeman saluted him; there was nothing much in that; policemen saluted her father and other well-known residents. But she did think it odd that he said to the policeman, as he went off: “There’s one thing more I must make sure of. Unless I wire, things can go forward here as arranged.”
When she came back to her own house, she knew it was something worse than a house of death. There was a black taxicab waiting outside it, which made her think of a funeral, almost with envy. If she had known who was already in the taxicab, she might have stopped and made a scene in the street. As it was, she burst into the house and found two grave, dark-clad doctors sitting in the light of the bow-window in front, with a table between them, covered with official documents and pen and ink. One of the doctors, who was just about to sign one of the documents, was a stately, silver-haired gentleman in a very elegant astrakhan overcoat; she gathered from the conversation that his name was Doone. The other doctor was the abominable John Judson.
She had paused an instant just outside the room and heard the tail-end of their scientific talk.
“You and I know, of course,” Judson was saying, “how much the mere idea of subconsciousness, or horizontal division of the mind, has been superseded by vertical division of the mind. But the layman has hardly heard yet of the new double or ambidextrous consciousness.”
“Quite so,” said Dr. Doone in a level and soothing voice.
He had a very soothing voice, and with it he earnestly did his best to soothe Enid Windrush. He really seemed to be profoundly touched with the tragedy of her position.
“I cannot expect you to believe how much I feel for your misfortunes,” he said. “I can only say that anything that can soften the shock for anyone involved will be done. I will not disguise from you that your father is already in the cab outside, under the care of tactful and humane attendants. I will not disguise from you that some deception, such as has to be used to the sick, has been employed in prevailing upon him, but I told him no more than the truth in saying that he was going with his best friends. These things are very terrible, my child, but perhaps we may all draw nearer to each other in—”
“Oh, sign the thing and be done,” said Dr. Judson rudely.
“Be silent, sir,” said Doone, with fine dignity and indignation. “If you have neither the manners nor the morals for dealing with people in misfortune, I, at least, have more experience. Miss Windrush, I am sorry.”
He held out his hand and Enid stood hesitating and then retreated like one distraught; so distraught that she actually turned to Dr. Judson.
“Send that man away,” she cried with the shrillness of hysteria. “Send him away! He is more horrible even than—”
“More horrible than—” repeated Judson, waiting,
She looked at him with a wild inscrutable stare and said:
“More horrible than you.”
“Have you signed that damned thing yet?” said Judson, boiling with impatience. But, even as they had turned away from him, Doone had signed the paper and Judson snatched it up with furious haste and ran out of the house.
And then she saw something that finally put him beyond pardon. For as he ran down the steps, he seemed to give a sort of bound of cheerfulness, like a boy on a holiday; like a man who has at last got what he wanted. She felt she could have forgiven him everything except that last little leap of joy.
Some time after — she could not have said how long — she still sat staring out of the bow-window into the empty street. She had reached that state when the soul feels that nothing worse can happen in the world. But she was wrong. For it was only a few minutes later that two policemen and a man in plain clothes came up those steps and, after some apologies and uncomfortable explanations, announced that they had a warrant for the arrest of Walter Windrush on a charge of murder.
V
THE SECRET OF THE TREE
The motives of the simple are more subtle than those of the subtle. The former do not sort out their own emotions and the result is often more mysterious, especially as they never afterwards attempt to solve the mystery. Enid was a very elemental and unconscious character, who had never before been thrown into such a turmoil of thoughts and feelings. And her first feeling, under her last shock, was a primitive human feeling that for her isolation had come to an end. She had found something more crushing and complicated than she could carry alone, and she must have a friend.
She therefore went straight out of the front door and down the road to find a friend. She went to find a charlatan, a schemer, a grotesque lying mystagogue, a man who had done her and hers the most abominable wrong, and she found him just going into his own house, with the brass plate outside it. Something not to be formulated in words told her that, in some dark, distorted, undiscoverable way he was on her side, and that he would manage to get whatever he chose to try for. She stopped the villain of her strange story and spoke to him quite naturally, as if he were her brother.
“I wish you would come back to our place a moment,” she said. “Another ghastly thing has happened now and I can’t make head or tail of anything.”
He turned promptly and threw a sharp glance up the street.
“Ah,” he said, “then the police have come already.”
She stared at him speechless for a moment, as a light gradually began to break upon her rocking brain.
“Did you know they were coming?” she cried; and then in a final universal flash she seemed to take in a thousand things at once. The combined product of them all was perhaps curious. For there broke out of her only the expression of incredulous astonishment: “But aren’t you wicked, then?”
“Only moderately so,” he replied. “But I dare say what I did would be considered indefensible. It was the only thing I could think of to save him. It had to be done in rather a hurry.”
She drew a deep breath and there dawned upon her gradually, like something seen in the distance, a memory and a meaning.
“Why, I see now,” she said. “It was just like what you did, when you shoved him from under the car.”
“I’m afraid I’m impetuous,” said Judson, “and perhaps I jump too soon.”
“But on both occasions,” she said, “you only jumped just in time.”
Then she went into the house alone; her mind was still stratified with terror; the notion of her father as a monkey, as a lunatic, as something worse. And yet in a corner of her sunken subconscious soul something was singing, because her friend was not so wicked after all.
Ten minutes later, when Inspector Brandon, a sandy-haired representative of the C.I.D., with a stolid appearance but a lively eye, entered the Windrush parlour, he found himself confronted with a square-faced, square-shouldered medical gentleman, with dark hair and an inscrutable smile. Nobody, who had seen Dr. Judson shaken by the various passions of the late peril and crisis, could have recognized him, in the placid impenetrable friend of the family who now sat facing the policeman.
“I am sure, Inspector, that you agree with me in wishing to spare the unfortunate lady as far as possible,” he said smoothly. “I happen to be the family physician, and I shall have to be responsible for her condition in any case. But I am responsible in other ways, too, and you may take it from me that a man in my position will put no obstacles in your way in doing your duty. I hope you have no objection, for the moment, to explaining the general nature of your business to me.”
“Well, sir,” said the Inspector, “so far as that is concerned, it’s generally rather a relief in these cases to be able to talk to a third party. But you’ll understand, of course, that I shall expect you to talk straight.”
“I’ll talk straight enough,” answered the doctor coolly. “I understand you have a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Walter Windrush.”
The policeman nodded:
“For the murder of Isaac Morse,” he said. “Do you know where Windrush is at present?”
“Yes,” said Judson gravely, “I know where Windrush is at present.”
He looked across the table tranquilly, with level brows, and added:
“I will tell you, if you like. I will take you to him, if you like. I know exactly where he is just now.”
“We mustn’t have any hiding or hanky-panky, you know,” said the Inspector. “You will be taking a serious responsibility, if there’s any chance that he will escape.”
“He will not escape.” said Dr. Judson.
There was a silence, which was broken by a slight scurry outside and a telegraph-boy ran up the steps with a wire for the Inspector. That official read it with a frown of surprise, and then looked across at his companion.
“This comes opportunely in one sense,” he said. “It seems to justify our pausing for an explanation, if you’re quite sure of what you say.”
He handed the telegram to the doctor, who read with his rapid glance the words: DON’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT W. W. TILL I COME. SHALL BE ROUND IN HALF AN HOUR. HARRINGTON.
“That is from my superior officer.” said the official. “The chief detective who has been studying this matter on the spot. Indeed, one of the chief detectives in the world today, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, dryly. “Didn’t Mr. Harrington pursue his studies under the name of Mr. Wilmot? And live next door?”
“You seem to know a thing or two,” said Inspector Brandon with a smile.
“Well, your friend behaved so much like a burglar that I guessed he must be a policeman,” said Judson, “and he said he had the best authority; I found it wasn’t the authority of the family, so I assumed it was probably the authority of the law.”
“Whatever he said was pretty sound, you may be certain,” said the other. “Harrington is pretty nearly infallible in the long run. And in this case he was certainly justified by what he found, though nobody would ever have guessed it.”
“What he found,” said the doctor, “was the skeleton of a man, stuffed into the hollow of the tree, evidently having been there for a long time, marked by an unmistakable injury to the occiput, done by violence and inflicted with the left hand.”
Brandon stared across at him. “And how do you know that he found that?” he asked.
“I know because I found it myself,” answered Judson.
There was a pause, and then he added: “Yes, Inspector, it is quite true that I know something about this business; as I told you, I can take you to Windrush himself if necessary. Of course, I don’t claim any right to bargain with you, but since you are hung up by that telegram for the moment, and I may be in a position to help, do you mind doing me a favour in return? Will you tell me the whole story? Or perhaps I should say the whole theory?”
The face of Brandon of the C.I.D was not only humorous and good-humoured; it was also highly intelligent, when the first veneer of official stolidity had worn off. He looked at the doctor thoughtfully for a little, and seemed to approve of what he studied. Then he said with a smile:
“I suppose you are one of those amateur detectives who read detective stories, or even write them. Well, I don’t deny this is a bit of a detective story. And there is one question that’s always turning up in books and talk of that sort, and it’s rather relevant here. You’ve seen it twenty times. Suppose a real Man of Genius wanted to commit a crime?”
He ruminated a little and then went on. “From our point of view, the great problem in any crime of killing is always what to do with the body. I expect that fact has saved many a man from being murdered. The fact that he is more dangerous to his enemy dead than alive. All sorts of tricks are tried; dismembering and dispersing the body, throwing it into kilns and furnaces, putting it under concrete floors, like Dr. Crippen. And in the study of such stories, this story does stand out as the very extraordinary and yet effective expedient of what I call a Man of Genius.
