Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 314
She began to feel a little bewildered. “Was what?” she asked.
“There was me,” said Alan. “You can’t believe this story because there’s a desert island in it. It’s like telling a story with a dragon in it. All the same, there’s a moral to the dragon.”
“Do you mean,” she asked, growing rather impatient, “that you have been on a desert island?”
“Yes, and on one or two other odd things. But the extraordinary thing was that everything was all right till I came to an inhabited island. Well, I spent several years, to start with, in a pretty uninhabited part of a more or less inhabited island. I mean, of course, the one marked on the map as Australia. I was trying to farm in a very remote part of the bush, till a run of bad luck forced me to crawl as best I could back to the towns. I was going to say back to civilization, but that sounds odd, if you know the towns. By the final stroke of luck my transport animals fell sick and died in a wilderness and I was left as if I had been on the other side of the moon. Nobody in these historical countries, of course, has an idea of what the earth is like, or how a great lot of it might just as well be the moon. There seemed no more chance of getting across those infinities of futile soil patched with wattle, than of persuading a comet that had knocked you into space to take you back home again. I trudged along quite senselessly, till I saw something like a tall blue bush that wasn’t one of the monotonous mass of blue-grey bushes, and I saw it was smoke. It’s a good proverb, by God, that where there’s smoke there’s fire. It’s a greater proverb, and one too near to God to be written often, that where there’s fire there’s man, and nobody knows which is the greater miracle. Well, I found somebody; he wasn’t anybody in particular; I dare say you would have found all sorts of deficiencies in him if he’d been in the village or the club. But he was a magician all right; to me he had powers not given to beast or bird or tree, and he gave me some cooked food and set me on the right road to a settlement. At the settlement, a little outpost in the wilds, it was the same. They didn’t do much for me; they couldn’t; but they did something and didn’t think it particularly unusual to be asked. The long and short of it was that I got to a seaport at last and managed to make a bargain to work my passage with the master of a small craft. He wasn’t a particularly nice man and I wasn’t particularly comfortable, but it was not suicide but a sea-wave that swept me off suddenly one night, early enough to be seen and raise the cry of ‘Man overboard!’ That nasty little boat, with its still more nasty little captain, coasted about for four hours trying to pick me up, but it couldn’t be done, and I was eventually picked up by a sort of native canoe, rowed by a sort of half-native lunatic who really and truly lived on a desert island. I hailed him as I had just been vainly hailing the ship, and he gave me brandy and shelter and the rest of it, as a matter of course. He was quite a character, a white man, or whitish man, who had gone fantee and wore nothing but a pair of spectacles and worshipped a god of his own he had made out of an old umbrella. But he didn’t think it odd that I should ask him for help, and in his own way he gave it. Then came the day when we sighted a ship, very far out, but passing the island, and I hailed and hailed and waved long sheets and towels and lit flares and all the rest. And eventually the ship did alter her course and touched at the island to take us off; everybody was pretty dry and official, but they did it as a regular matter of duty. And all this time, and especially on that last stretch of homeward voyage, I was singing to myself a song as old as the world: Coelum non animam — By the waters of Babylon — or, in other words, of all things the worst is exile, and it will be well with a man in his own home. After all my wild hairbreadth escapes I stepped on to the dock in Liverpool, as a schoolboy enters his father’s house on the first day of the Christmas holidays. I had forgotten that I had practically no money, and I asked a man to give or lend me some. I was immediately arrested for begging and began my career as a criminal by sleeping in jail.
“Now I suppose you see the point of the economic parable. I had been in the ends of the earth, and among the scum of the earth; I had been among all sorts of ragamuffins who had very little to give and were often quite unwilling to give it. I had waved to passing ships and hallooed to passing travellers and doubtless been heartily cursed for doing so. But nobody ever thought it odd that I should ask for the help. Nobody certainly thought it criminal that I should shriek at a ship when I was drowning, or crawl towards a camp-fire when I was dying. In all those wild seas and waste places people did assume that they had to rescue the drowning and the dying. I was never actually punished for being in want till I came to a civilized city. I was never called a criminal for asking for sympathy, till I returned to my own home.
“Well, if you have understood that parable of the New Prodigal Son, you may possibly understand why he thinks he found the Swine when he came home; a lot more Swine than Fatted Calves. The rest of the story consisted largely of assaults on the police, breaking and entering various premises and all the rest. My family has at last woken up to the fact that I might be reclaimed or my position regularized; chiefly, I imagine — in the case of some of them at least — because people like yourself and your aunt having been let into the secret is liable to be socially awkward. Anyhow, we are to meet here this afternoon and form a committee for turning me into a respectable character. But I don’t think they quite realize the job they’ve taken on. I don’t think they quite know what happens inside people like me; and it’s because I rather want you to understand it, before they begin jabbering, that I’ve told you what I call the parable of the exile. Always remember that as long as he was among strangers, not to say scoundrels, he had a chance.”
They had been sitting on a garden seat during the conversation and Millicent rose from it, as she saw the black-clad group of the father and brothers approaching across the lawn.
Alan Nadoway remained seated with somewhat ostentatious languor, and its significance was sharpened when she realized that old Jacob Nadoway was walking well ahead of the others and that his brows were black as a thunderstorm in the sunshine. It was instantly apparent that something new and nasty had occurred.
“Perhaps it would be affectation to inform you,” said the father with heavy bitterness, “that there has been another burglary in the neighbourhood.”
“Another?” said Alan, raising his eyebrows. “That, when you come to think of it, is a rather curious word. And what is the other?”
“Mrs. Mowbray,” said the father sternly, “went over yesterday to visit her friend, Lady Crayle. She was naturally disturbed about what had happened in our own house, and it seems that something happened about an hour earlier at the Crayles.”
“What did they lift off the Crayles?” asked the young man, with patient interest. “How did they know there was a burglary?”
“The burglar was surprised and bolted,” said Jacob Nadoway. “Unfortunately, he dropped something and left it behind in the haste of his flight.”
“Unfortunately!” repeated Alan with an air of being mildly and conventionally shocked. “Unfortunately for whom?”
“Unfortunately for you,” said his father. There was a painful silence and John Nadoway broke into it in his blundering but unconquerably good-humoured way.
“Look here, Alan,” he said. “If anybody is going to help you, these sort of games have got to stop. We could pass it off as a practical joke of a sort, when you did it to us, but even then you frightened Miss Milton, and Mrs. Mowbray is all up in the air. But how the devil are we to keep you out of the police-court if you break into the neighbours’ houses and leave your cigar-case with a card inside?”
“Careless — careless,” said Alan in a vexed tone, rising with his hands in his pockets. “You must remember I am only at the beginning of my career as a burglar.”
“You are at the end of your career as a burglar,” said old Nadoway, “or else at the beginning of your career as a convict for five years in Dartmoor. With that case and card, Lady Crayle can convict you, and will if I give the word. I’ve only come here to offer you a last chance, when you’ve thrown away a thousand chances. Drop this thieving business, here and now, and I’ll find you a job. Take it or leave it.”
“Your father and I,” said Norman Nadoway, in his detached and delicate accent, “have not always agreed about the treatment of hard cases. But he is obviously justified in this, I have a great deal of sympathy with you in many ways, but it is one thing to forgive a man thieving when he may be starving — it is quite another to forgive him, when he would rather go on starving, if only he may go on thieving.”
“That’s the point,” assented the stolid John in fraternal admiration. “We’re willing to recognize a brother who isn’t any longer a burglar. The only other thing we could recognize would be a burglar who isn’t any longer a brother. Are you just Alan, to whom father’s ready to give a job, or a fellow out of the street whom we have simply to hand over to the police? But, by God, you can’t be both.”
Alan’s eyes roamed round the family house and garden and rested for a moment on Millicent, with a certain expression of pathos. Then he sat down on the garden seat again, with his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his hands as if he were wrestling in prayer, or at least in perplexity of spirit. The three other men stood watching him with an awkward rigidity.
At last he threw up his head again, flinging back his black, plume-like locks, and they all saw instantly that his pale face had a new expression.
“Well,” said old Jacob, not without a new note of appeal, “won’t you give up all this blackguard burglary business?”
Alan Nadoway rose. “Yes, father,” he said gravely. “Now I come to look at it seriously, I see you have a right to my promise. I will give up the burglary business.”
“Thank God for that,” said his brother Norman, his hard delicate voice shaken for the first time. “I’m not going to moralize now, but you’ll find there is one thing about any other job you get; it will be one in which a man need not hide.”
“After all, it’s a rotten job, burglary,” said John with his jerky attempt at joviality and general reconciliation. “Must be a perfect nightmare always getting into the wrong house at the wrong end, something like putting on your trousers upside down. It’ll pay you better really, and you’ll get peace of mind.”
“Yes,” said Alan thoughtfully; “all that you say is true, and there is a sort of hampering complication about the life; learning the whereabouts of treasures and so on. No, I am going to turn over a new leaf. I am going to reform and go into a different line of life altogether. A simpler, more straightforward line. I am told that picking pockets is much more lucrative nowadays.”
He continued to gaze thoughtfully at the distant palms, but all the other faces were turned towards him with an incredulous stare.
“A friend of mine down Lambeth way,” said Alan, “does most frightfully well with people coming out of tube stations and so on. Of course, they’re much poorer than the people who own all these safes and jewels and things, but then there are a lot of them, and it’s wonderful what you can collect by the end of the day. My friend got fifteen shillings in sixpences and coppers off people coming out of the cinema, but then he’s awfully nifty with his fingers. I reckon I can learn the knack.”
There was a startled silence and then Norman said in a controlled voice:
“It would be of some importance to me to know that this is a joke. I will risk my reputation for humour.”
“Joke,” said Alan, with an absent-minded air. “Joke. . . . Oh, no, it isn’t a joke. It’s a job. And a jolly sight better job than any my father will offer me.”
“Then you can follow it to jail!” said the old man, and his voice rang out in the garden like a gun announcing sunset. “Clear out of this place in three minutes and I will not call the policeman down the road.”
And with that he turned his back and strode away followed by his other sons, and Alan remained standing alone by the garden seat, and he might have been a statue in the garden.
The garden indeed had grown more still, and in a manner grey and statuesque, with the creeping advance of twilight, and something of its too florid character was veiled by dusk and damp vapours beginning to rise from the surrounding meadows, though overhead the sky was clear and beginning to show the points of stars in the general greyness. The points brightened and the dusk sank deeper and deeper, and it did not seem for the moment that the two human statues left in the garden would move. Then the woman moved very swiftly, walking straight across the lawn to where the man stood by the garden seat, and in that greater gravity and stillness he became conscious of the last incongruity. Her face, which was commonly very grave, was puckered with derision, like that of an elf.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve done it now.”
“If you mean,” he answered, “that I’ve done for my prospects here, I never thought I had any.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” she said. “When I say you’ve done it, I mean you’ve overdone it.”
“Overdone what?” he asked in the same stony style.
“Overdone the lie,” she said, smiling steadily. “Overdressed the part, if you like. I don’t understand what it all means, but it doesn’t mean what it says, certainly not what you say. I could bring myself to believe that you were a burglar and broke into rich houses. But when you say you’re a pickpocket who pinches sixpences off poor people coming out of the pictures, I simply know you’re not, and there’s an end of it. It’s the last finishing touch that spoils a work of art.”
“What do you suppose I am?” he asked harshly.
“Well, won’t you tell me?” she inquired with a certain brightness.
After a strained silence he said with a curious intonation, “I would do anything for you.”
“Well,” she answered, “everybody knows that the curse of my sex is curiosity.”
He buried his head in his hands and after a silence said with a great groan: “Amor Vincit Omnia.”
A moment or two later he lifted his head again and began to talk, and her eyes grew starry with astonishment as she stood and listened under the stars.
IV
THE PROBLEMS OF DETECTIVE PRICE
Mr. Peter Price, the private inquiry agent, did not glow with that historic appreciation of the type known as the English Lady which was such a credit to the heads and hearts of Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer and Mr. Alan Nadoway. The English Lady is a jewel of many facets, or even a flower including some botanical variations. And Mr. Price had seen, on many occasions, that face of the goddess which is turned upon foreign waiters, discontented cabmen, people who want windows shut or open at inappropriate times, and other manifest enemies of human society. And he was just recovering from an interview with a very pronounced specimen of the type, a certain Mrs. Milton-Mowbray, who had talked to him in clear and decisive tones for about three-quarters of an hour, without telling him anything of which he could make any sort of sense.
So far as he could piece it out from his notes, it was something like this. She was sure there had been a burglary in Mr. Nadoway’s house, where she and her niece were staying, and that they were keeping it from her, so that she might not find out she had been robbed. She was sure the burglary was at the Nadoways’ house, because property belonging to young Mr. Nadoway had been found after a burglary at another house. The other house was Lady Crayle’s house, and the burglar must have gone there from the Nadoways, taking the Nadoway things with him and then dropping them in his flight. As a matter of fact, he must have dropped something at the Nadoways too, as she was sure her niece had picked up a sort of brooch thing, that nobody had seen before. But her niece wouldn’t say anything about it; they were all keeping things from her — that is, from the indignant Mrs. Milton-Mowbray.
“He seems to be rather a careless burglar,” Mr. Price had said, looking at the ceiling, “and not what you might call fortunate in his profession. First he steals something from somebody and leaves it at Mr. Nadoway’s. Then he steals something from Mr. Nadoway and leaves it at Lady Crayle’s. Did he actually steal anything from Lady Crayle? And at whose house did he leave that?”
He was a short, fat, baldish man whose features seemed to fold in on themselves so that it was impossible to say for certain whether he smiled, but the lady at any rate was neither of the temper nor in the mood to search his face for irony.
“That,” she said triumphantly, “is just what I say! Nobody will tell me. Everybody is perfectly vague. Even Lady Crayle is vague. She says she supposes it must have been a burglary, or why should the man run away? And the Nadoways are vaguer still. I’ve told them again and again they needn’t consider my feelings, I’m not going to faint, even if I have been robbed. But I really think I have a right to know.”
“Perhaps it would assist them a little,” said the private detective, “if you first of all told them whether you had been robbed. You see, this seems to me a rather puzzling business in a good many ways, but what I’m trying to get at is what has been taken from whom. We’ll grant, for the sake of argument, that there were two robberies. And we’ll grant, for the sake of argument, that there was only one robber. It’s presumed he was a robber, because he leaves about in other people’s houses, things you think cannot have belonged to him. But none of these things, so far as I understand, belonged to any of the people he was then in the act of robbing. None of these things, for instance, belonged to you.”
“How can I tell?” she said with a sweeping gesture of agnosticism. “Nobody will tell me the truth. I am—”
“My dear madam,” said Mr. Price with belated firmness, “you cannot require anybody to tell you the truth about yourself. Have you lost anything yourself? Have you missed anything yourself? For that matter, has Lady Crayle missed anything herself?”
