Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 313
She had the best sort of quite unconscious courage, and she simply walked out into the hall and looked. What she saw astounded her by being so ordinary. She had seen it in so many films and read about it in so many novels, that she could hardly believe that it really looked like that. The safe stood open and a shabby man was kneeling in front of it, with his back to her, so that she could see nothing but his shabbiness, his head being covered by a battered and shapeless broad-brimmed hat. On one side of him on the floor glittered the steel of a centre-bit and some other tools of his art; on the other side glittered even more brilliantly the silver and stones of some ornament, looking like a chain and clasp, presumably a portion of his spoils. There seemed somehow to be nothing sharp or unexpected about the experience; it was almost conventional, in being so like what it was supposed to be. She only spoke as she felt, in a tone entirely cold and commonplace, when she said: “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m not climbing the Matterhorn or playing the trombone at present,” grunted the man in a gruff and distant voice. “I suppose it’s plain enough what I am doing.”
Then, after a silence, he resumed in a warning tone: “Don’t you go saying that brooch thing there is yours, because it isn’t. I didn’t even get it out of this safe; let’s say I lifted it off another family earlier in the evening. It’s a pretty thing — sort of imitation fourteenth century, with Amor Vincit Omnia on it. It’s all very well to say that love conquers everything, and force is no remedy and all that. But I’ve forced this safe: I never found a safe I could open by just loving what was inside.”
There was something rather paralysing about the way in which the burglar placidly went on talking without even looking round; and she thought it a little odd that he should know the meaning of the Latin inscription, simple as it was. Nor could she bring herself to scream or run or stop him in any way, when he went on with the same conversational composure.
“Must be meant for a model of the big clasp that Chaucer’s Prioress wore; that had the same motto on it. Don’t you think Chaucer was a corker in the way he hit off social types — even social types that are there still? Why, the Prioress is an immortal portrait in a few lines of a most extraordinary creature called the English Lady. You can pick her out in foreign hotels and pensions. The Prioress was nicer than most of those, but she’s got all the marks; fussing about her little dogs; being particular about table-manners; not liking mice killed; the whole darned thing even down to talking French, but talking it so that Frenchmen can’t understand.”
He turned very slowly and stared at her.
“Why, you’re an English Lady!” he cried as if astonished. “Do you know they are getting rare?”
Miss Millicent Milton probably did possess, like the Prioress of Chaucer, the more gracious virtues of the English Lady. But it must in honesty be admitted that she also possessed some of the vices of the type. One of the crimes of the English Lady is an unconscious class-consciousness. Nothing could alter the fact that, the moment the shabby criminal had begun to talk about English literature in the tones of her own class, her whole judgement was turned upside down, and she had a chaotic idea that he could not really be a criminal at all. In abstract logic, she would have been obliged to admit that it ought not to make any difference. In theory, she would concede that a student of medieval English has no more business to break open other people’s safes than anybody else. In principle she might confess that a man does not purchase a right to steal silver brooches, even by showing an intelligent interest in the Canterbury Tales. But something of uncontrollable custom in her mind made her feel that the case was altered. Her feeling could only have been conveyed by the very vague colloquialisms which such people employ; as that he wasn’t exactly a real burglar, or that it was “Quite Different”, or that there was “some mistake”. What she really meant (to the grave disadvantage of all her culture and her world) was that there were some people, criminals or no, whom she could see from the inside, and all other people she saw from the outside, whether they were burglars or bricklayers.
The young man who was staring at her was dark, shaggy and unshaven, but the neglect of shaving had passed its most repellent stage of transition and might be regarded as a rather imperfect beard. Its patchiness reminded her of the quaintly divided beards of certain foreigners, and gave him something of the general look of a cultivated Italian organ-grinder. There was something else that was abnormal about his face, which she could not immediately define, but she thought it was the fact that his mouth was always twisting with mockery, rather as if it had taught itself always to mock, and yet his dark, sunken eyes were not only grave but in some sort of mad way, enthusiastic. If the grotesque beard could have completely covered the mouth like a mask, they might have been the eyes of a fanatic in the desert shouting a battle-cry of belief. He must be deeply indignant with society to have turned to this lawless life; or perhaps he had had a tragedy with a woman or something. She wondered what the real story was, and what the woman was like.
While she was forming these confused impressions, the remarkable burglar went on talking; whatever else he felt, he seemed to feel no embarrassment about talking.
“It’s jolly fine of you to stand there like that — well, that’s another trait. The English Lady is brave; Edith Cavell was a type of the tribe. But there are other tribes now, and that sort of brooch generally belongs to the last sort of person for whom it was made. That alone would be a justification for the trade of burglary, which keeps things briskly in circulation, doesn’t allow them to stagnate in incongruous surroundings. If that brooch had really been worn by Chaucer’s Prioress at the moment, you don’t imagine I’d have taken it, do you? On the contrary, if I really met anybody as nice as the Prioress, I might be tempted to give it to her straight away, at the expense of my professional profits. But why should some vulgar cockatoo of a sham Countess own a thing like that? We want more theft, house-breaking and highway robbery to shift and rearrange the furniture of society; to regroup — if you follow me — its goods and chattels, as if after a spring-cleaning; to—”
At this important point in the social programme, it was interrupted by a gasp and snort as startling as a trumpet-blast. And Millicent, looking across, saw her employer, the aged Nadoway, standing framed in the doorway, and looking a very small and shrunken figure in an enormous purple dressing-gown. It was not until that moment that she awoke to astonishment at her own silence and composure; or saw anything odd in the fact that she had stood listening to the criminal in front of the safe, as if he had been talking to her over the tea-table.
“What! A burglar?” gasped Mr. Nadoway.
Almost at the same moment there was a scurry of running and the big, breathless figure of the Junior Partner, John Nadoway, dressed in his shirt and trousers, also burst into the room, with a revolver in his hand. But he almost instantly lowered the weapon he had lifted and said, in the same incredulous and curiously emphatic voice: “Damn it all! A burglar!”
The Rev. Norman Nadoway was not long behind his brother — he was respectably muffled in a greatcoat and looked very pale and solemn. But perhaps the most curious thing about him was that he also confined himself to saying, with the same inscrutable intensity: “A burglar!”
Millicent thought there was, on the face of it, something singularly inept about this triple emphasis. It was about as obvious that the burglar was a burglar as that the safe was a safe. She could not imagine why the three men should all talk as if a burglar were a griffin, or something they had never heard of before, until it suddenly dawned on her that their surprise was not at a burglar paying them a particular visit, but rather at this particular visitor being a burglar.
“Yes,” said the visitor, looking round at them with a smile, “it’s quite true I’m a burglar now. I think I was only a begging-letter writer when we last met. Thus do we rise on our dead selves to higher things; it was a very paltry little misdemeanour compared to this, wasn’t it, for which father first turned me out?”
“Alan,” said Norman Nadoway very gravely, “why do you come back here like this? Why here, of all places?”
“Why, to tell you the truth,” said the other, “I thought that our respected Papa might want a little moral support.”
“What the devil do you mean?” asked John Nadoway irritably. “A nice sort of moral support you are!”
“I am a very moral support,” observed the stranger with proper pride. “Don’t you realize it? I am the only real son and heir. I am the only man who is really carrying on the business. I am an example of atavism; I am a reversion to type.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” cried old Nadoway with sudden fury.
“Jack and Norman know,” said the burglar grimly. “They know what I’m talking about. They know what I mean when I say I’m the real representative of Nadoway and Son. It’s the fact they’ve been trying to cover up, poor old chaps, for the last five or six years.”
“You were born to disgrace me,” said the old man, trembling with anger; “you would have dragged my name in the dirt, if I hadn’t sent you to Australia and got rid of you, and now you come back as a common thief.”
“And the real representative,” said the other, “of the methods that made Nadoway’s Nubs.” Then he said with sudden scorn:
“You say you’re ashamed of me. Good Lord, my dear Dad! Haven’t you discovered yet that both your other sons are ashamed of you? Look at their faces!”
It was enough that the other two sons involuntarily turned their faces away, and even as it was, turned them too late.
“They are ashamed of you. But I am not ashamed of you. We are the Adventurers of the family.”
Norman Nadoway raised a protesting hand, but the other went on with a sweep of spontaneous satire.
“Do you think I don’t know? Do you think everybody doesn’t know? Don’t I know that’s why Norman and Jack are announcing new industrial methods and preaching new social ideals and all the rest? Cleansing the Name of Nadoway — because the Name of Nadoway stinks to the ends of the earth! Because the business was founded on every sort of swindling and sweating and grinding the faces of the poor and cheating the widow and orphan. And, above all, on robbery — on robbing rivals and partners and everybody else, exactly as I have robbed that safe!”
“Do you think it decent,” asked his brother angrily, “to come here and not only rob your father’s safe, but insult and attack your father before his face?”
“I am not attacking my father,” said Alan Nadoway; “I am defending my father. And I am the only man here who can defend him. For I am a criminal, too.”
He let loose the next few words with an energy that made everybody jump. “What do you know about it? You go to college with his money; you get a partnership in his firm; you live on the money he made and are ashamed of the way he made it. But he didn’t begin like that, any more than I did. He was thrown out into the gutter, just as I was thrown out into the gutter. You try it, and see what sort of dirt you will eat! You don’t know anything about the way men are turned into criminals; the shifts and the delays and the despair, and the hopes that an honest job may turn up, that end by taking a dishonest one. You’ve no right to be so damned superior to the Two Thieves of the family.”
Old Nadoway made an abrupt movement, adjusting his spectacles, and Millicent, who was an acute observer, suspected that for one instant he was not only staggered but strongly moved.
“All this,” said John Nadoway after a silence, “doesn’t explain what you’re doing here. As you probably know, there’s practically nothing in that safe, and the thing you’ve got there certainly doesn’t come out of it. I can’t quite make out what you’re up to, in any case.”
“Well,” said Alan, with his ironical smile, “you can examine the safe and the rest of the premises after I’ve gone. Perhaps you may make a few discoveries. And perhaps on the whole I—”
In the middle of his words there arose, faint but shrill and unmistakable, upon Millicent’s ear, the sound of something at once alarming and amusing; something she had been subconsciously expecting for a long time past. In the room beyond, her aunt had awakened; probably she had awakened to all the melodramatic possibilities of an interruption in the middle of the night. The Victorian tradition had still its living witness. Millicent herself had been frozen into a cool acceptance of the adventure — an acceptance she could not fully explain even to herself. But somebody at least had shrieked, in a respectable manner, on hearing a house-breaker.
The five people looked at each other and realized that, after that shriek, the extraordinary family situation could no longer be kept in the family. The only chance was for the burglar to bolt with the promptitude of any other burglar. He turned and darted through the apartments on his left, which happened to be the apartments of Miss Milton and Mrs. Mowbray, so that shriek after shriek now rent the air. But a crash of glass from a remote window told the rest that the intruder had managed to burst out of the house and disappear in the darkness of the garden, and they all, for varied and rather complex reasons, heaved their separate sighs of relief.
Millicent, needless to say, had to resume in a serious manner the duties of soothing an aunt; so that the shriek faded into shrill questions. Then she went into her own room, beyond which the hole in the burst window showed a black star in the slate-green of the glass. Then she realized that, right in the path of the disappearing robber, there was deliberately spread out for inspection, on her own dressing-table, as crown jewels are spread out upon velvet, the silver chain and studded clasp which had been fancifully dedicated to the Prioress, and on which was written in Latin “Love Conquers All”.
III
A QUEER REFORMATION
Millicent Milton could not help wondering a good deal, especially when walking about the garden in her off hours, whether she would ever see the burglar again. In the ordinary way, it would seem improbable. But then, nobody could say that this criminal was connected with the household in an ordinary way. As a burglar, he would presumably vanish; as a brother, he would not improbably turn up again. Especially as he was a rather disreputable brother, for they always turn up again. She tentatively asked questions of the other two brothers, but could get very little light on the situation. The acquisitive Alan had mockingly advised them to examine the house for the traces of his depredations. But he must have conducted them with great secrecy and selection, for nobody seemed sure of how much he had taken. It was one of the many problems in the story that she could not solve, and could not see any particular probability that she ever would solve, when she looked up idly and saw him standing quite calmly on the top of the garden wall and looking down into the garden. The wind plucked the plumes of his dark hair one by one and turned them over as he was turning the leaves of the tree nearest his perch.
“Another way to burgle a house,” he said, in a clear distant voice like a popular lecturer, “is to get over the garden wall. It sounds simple, but stealing things is generally simple. Only, in this case, I can’t quite make up my mind what to steal.
I think,” he added calmly, “that I shall begin by stealing a little of your time. But don’t be alarmed, in any secretarial sense. I assure you I have an appointment.”
He jumped from the wall and alighted on the turf beside her, but without in any way disturbing the flow of his remarks.
“Yes; it is really true that I am summoned to quite a family council; an inquiry into the possibility of rehabilitating my affairs. But, thank God, I can’t be rehabilitated for another hour or so. While I am still in a completely criminal state of mind, I should rather like to have a talk with you.”
She said nothing but gazed at the distant line of rather grotesque palm-trees planted as a frontier in the garden and felt returning upon her that irrational sense that this place had always been rather romantic, in spite of the people who lived in it.
“I suppose you know,” said Alan Nadoway, “that my father flew into a frightful rage with me when I was only eighteen, and flung me bodily all the way to Australia. Looking back on it now, I can see that there was something to be said for his business standards in the matter. I had given one of my boon companions a handful of money which I really regarded as my own, but which my father regarded rigidly as belonging to the firm. From his point of view, it was stealing. But I didn’t really know much about stealing then, compared with the close and conscientious study I have given to it since. But what I want to tell you is what happened to me on my way back from Australia.”
“Wouldn’t your family like to hear about it?” she could not help asking, with a touch of experimental irony.
“I dare say they would,” he said. “But I am not sure they’d understand the story, even if they did hear it.” Then after a brief reflective silence he said:
“You see, my story is too simple to be understood. Too simple to be believed. It sounds exactly like a parable; that is, it sounds like a fable and not a fact. There’s my brother Norman now — he’s a sincere man and very serious. He reads the parables in the New Testament every Sunday. But he could hardly believe in anything so simple as one of those parables, if it happened in real life.”
“Do you mean that you are the Prodigal Son?” she asked, “and he is the Elder Brother?”
“Rather hard if the Australians had to be the Swine,” said Alan Nadoway. “But I don’t mean that at all. On the one hand, it underrates the magnanimity of my brother Norman. On the other hand, it perhaps slightly exaggerates the leaping and ecstatic hospitality of my father.”
She could not repress a smile, but, filled with the loftiest secretarial traditions, refrained from comment.
“No; what I mean,” he said, “is that stories told in that simple way, for the sake of illustration, always sound as if they weren’t true. It’s just the same with the parables of political economy. Norman has read a lot of political economy too, if you come to that. He must often have read those textbooks that begin with the statement: ‘There is a man on an island.’ Somehow the student or the schoolboy always feels inclined to say there never was any man on any island. All the same, there was.”
