Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 321
Nevertheless, the man’s word was given, and Grimm felt certain that he would keep it, and heaved a huge sigh of relief on reflecting that they had probably seen the last of the power of Casc and Phocus and Sebastian over the people of that land. And though the worthy Colonel was in one sense wildly wrong about all his calculations in the case, he was, in fact, perfectly right in that one.
He joined John Conrad outside the palace and said to him with military brevity: “Well, I suppose we had better leave the next step to you.”
The next step led them together down the long poplar avenue, past the outer gates of the palace, across the Fountain Square where stood (now somewhat symbolically) the statue of Pavonia the Victorious, down a number of genteel by-streets striking outward from the square, and finally into the familiar and stately curve of Peacock Crescent. By a coincidence, it was once more a night of broad moonshine and the pale façade of that terrace struck once more into him a certain chill of mystery, as of one looking at a marble mask. But it was not to the line of the familiar houses, or to the door of the familiar house, that Colonel Grimm was conducted by his guide. It was across the road to the little plot or shrubbery, with the railing round it; and, passing through the gate in the railing, they walked in the deep, dim grass and under the shadow of the large shrubs. In a place where the grass was shorter and smoother, immediately under the shadow of one of the bushes, Conrad stooped down and seemed to be moving his finger like one writing in the dust.
“Perhaps you do not know,” he said, without lifting his head, “that most of the proclamations and phrases in this revolution are jokes. Almost what you might call practical jokes; certainly private jokes. There is a sort of trap-door or lid that lifts in this place, and that nobody ever found, because ordinary openings are roughly round or square or oblong or triangular, or some such calculable shape. But you cannot lift this until you have traced every curve in an extremely complicated outline. Only it ought to be a familiar outline. Only it isn’t.”
As he spoke, he appeared to jerk up a certain section of the turf, which seemed to be in reality a board with grass growing on top of it, like a large flat cap covered with green feathers. But when he held up the green lid so that it was black against the moon, the other could perceive that it was of a very elaborate outline, indented and diversified as if with capes and bays.
“You ought to know that,” he said. “You must have studied it often enough in the Atlas, especially the military Atlas. That is the map of Pavonia. And that, if you will excuse our little joke, is what we meant when we said that we should look for safety to the frontiers.”
Before the Chief of Police could reply, his informant had abruptly disappeared with a sort of dive. The earth seemed to have swallowed him up. But Grimm heard his reassuring voice coming out of the newly-uncovered abyss, and saying cheerily: “Come along down. There’s quite an easy ladder. Just follow me, and you shall see the last of the men you fear.”
Colonel Grimm stood for a moment like a statue in the moonlight. Then he plunged into the black well before him. And indeed, in doing so, he rather deserved to have a statue, not merely in the moonlight, but in the sun and the sight of men; like the statue of Pavonia Victrix. For he had seldom done a braver thing in a life and profession of no little courage. He was unarmed; he was alone; he had really very inadequate reasons, when reasonably reviewed, for trusting this mysterious mountebank and adventurer, or supposing that such a man would keep his promise. But even if he did keep his promise, what after all, was his promise? That through this dark entry the solitary officer should be led into the very lair of the lion; into the presence of the invincible Casc, with his triumvirate of anarchs and the devil knew what array of military violence; all apparently established in a subterranean empire under the earth. It was hardly a metaphor to say that it was like descending into hell; and Grimm, though not given to sentiment, could hardly help feeling something sad and symbolic in the fact that the aperture above his head, growing smaller and smaller with distance, traced upon the dark the glimmering outline of his own country. The last dim light out of the sky looked down on him in the shape of Pavonia and then grew dark. It was almost as if he were falling through all-annihilating space, and Pavonia were a distant star. And indeed, when he came to look back on the unnatural wanderings of that night, he was haunted by a sort of contradiction in time and especially in space; by a sense that he had in fact travelled thousands of miles and covered continents and even worlds; combined with a logical certainty, like that of some mathematical fact apparently evaded in a mathematical puzzle, that he had really been operating over a comparatively small area and close to places that he knew, or (as he told himself somewhat bitterly) that he ought to have known. It was doubtless largely the result of his fatigue and the final perplexity with which he faced the final mystery; but it must be allowed for if we are to understand the dazed and almost drugged spirit of discipline in which he took the final phases of the affair. He had left something behind him in the upper air of the little garden, and he sometimes fancied afterwards that it was the power to laugh.
The light like a distant star above him disappeared, and he continued to descend the ladder, rung by rung, only very vaguely imagining what sort of perils or horrors might be below. But whatever he thought of it, it was nothing so extraordinary as what he found.
VI
THE SPEAKING OF THE WORD
Colonel Grimm of the Pavonian Police was very exactly described as a hard-headed man, and one not easily divorced from reality. It was perhaps all the more strongly that he remembered that night as a nightmare. It really had the indescribable qualities of a dream; the repetitions and the inconsistencies; the scraps of past experience appearing like sudden pictures amid the chaos of the formless and unfamiliar; the general sense of having a double mind, one sane and the other mad. It was all the more so when his subterranean wanderings, beginning in the sunken shaft in the garden, did bring him back into what would normally have been called normal scenes. He did indeed revisit the glimpses of the moon, but it made him feel all the more like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. He could not help feeling that he was revisiting the glimpses of the other side of the moon and had come out on the other side of the world. He could not be certain that he had not found an outlet under some strange sky, with stars, and moons of its own, and yet presenting objects of a mocking familiarity. His first revelation, or rather menace of things yet unrevealed, came to him when, after groping through a level tunnel, he began to ascend what seemed to be a corresponding ladder in a corresponding chimney on the other side. When he was half-way up this vertical tunnel, the man ahead of him turned and said in a low and hoarse tone: “Stay where you are a moment. I will go on and look round; they won’t be alarmed at me.”
He remained hanging on the ladder and looking up at a pale disc of light like the moon itself, which showed the opening of the well. A moment after the disc was darkened, blotted out as by the cap that had covered the corresponding hole, but peering up through the dusk, he fancied there was something curious about this particular stopper. He flashed on his electric torch and nearly fell off the ladder. For the aperture was filled with a face peering down at him and grinning like a goblin; a turnip of a face with green spectacles which he recognized instantly as that of Professor Phocus. And Professor Phocus said, with the horrible distinctness with which things are sometimes said in a dream:
“You won’t catch us so easily. We’ve only to say The Word and the world will be destroyed.”
Then the grotesque stopper was taken out of the strange bottle; the disc of dull light reappeared; and after a few moments of bewildered waiting, he heard the voice of his guide whispering over the brink.
“He’s gone,” said Conrad. “You can come up now.”
When he came up, it was to find himself once more in the moonlight and apparently somewhere in the back premises of Peacock Crescent. It expresses the dazed detachment from daily life which these experiences had somehow produced in him, that he was quite surprised to see the police, whom he had himself stationed to watch the place, standing round and composedly answering the rather conspiratorial signals of Conrad.
“You can go into the house in a minute,” said Conrad in the same low voice. “I’ll just nip in and see that everything’s all right, but I’m sure they’re all boxed up in there. Bring your men with you, of course.”
He darted into the back of a house, which Grimm fancied was the house next door to the original scene of the raid, and for some little time the police and their Chief waited patiently outside. They had just begun to consider the advisability of following their solitary leader into the den of criminals, when they caught their breath and stood still, staring up at the house.
One of the window blinds was jerked up and there appeared at the window the unmistakable face and form which the Princess had beheld upon the café table. The poet, Sebastian, stood staring at the moon, in what is supposed to be the manner of poets, looking more than usually florid with his flaming red moustache and whiskers and a necktie of yet another glowing and romantic shade. Then he stretched out his arm to the moon, with a theatrical gesture, and seemed to begin to sing, or at least to speak in a sing-song fashion. It was impossible to conceive anything more operatic; in the sense in which that word is almost synonymous with idiotic. But the words he was chanting were familiar:
“As Aaron’s serpent swallowed snakes and rods,
As God alone is greater than the gods,
As all stars shrivel in the single sun,
The words are many, but The Word is one.”
Then he suddenly snapped the blind down and vanished, the room behind him turning dark. They could hardly believe that the incident, especially so senseless an incident, had really happened at all.
The next moment they were conscious that their creepy friend the conspirator had come close to them again in complete silence and was whispering:
“You can go in now and nab them all.”
Grimm, at the head of his stolid policemen, stumped up some stairs and along one or two passages and arrived eventually in a large, empty room. It was rather a curious room, having one table in the middle, with four chairs and four pads of blotting paper, as if arranged for a regular committee. But what was much more curious was this: that in each of the four walls of the room there was let in a door, with an old brass knocker, as if they were the four front doors of separate houses. Each of them bore a notice in large letters; one being inscribed “Professor Phocus”, another “General Casc”, a third “Mr. Loeb”, and a fourth simply “Sebastian”, as with that magnificent flourish with which foreign poets sign a single name.
“This is where they live,” said John Conrad, “and I promise you they shall not escape.”
Then after a pause he added: “But before we seek them out in their separate suites of apartments, I want to talk to you about something. I want to talk to you about The Word.”
“I suppose,” said the official grimly, “that we are to be allowed to hear The Word also, though somebody has just told me that it will destroy the world.”
“I do not think it will destroy the world,” answered Conrad gravely. “I hope it will rather recreate it.”
“Then,” said Grimm, “I may take it that when we do know The Word, we shan’t find that is a joke too.”
“In one sense it’s a joke,” answered the other. “In one sense when you know it, you will know it’s a joke. But the joke is that you know it already.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by saying so,” said the other.
“You have heard The Word twenty times,” said Conrad.
“You heard it only ten minutes ago. We have shouted and bellowed The Word at you all the time, and made it as plain as a placard on the wall. The whole secret of this conspiracy is really in one word; only that we’ve never kept it a secret.”
Grimm was looking at him with gleaming eyes under his heavy brows, and something like a suspicion was creeping into his face. Conrad repeated very seriously, with a slow and heavy enunciation the words:
“As all stars shrivel in the single sun . . .”
Grimm leapt to his feet with an oath and suddenly made a dash at the door labelled “Sebastian”.
“Yes, you’ve got it,” said Conrad with a smile. “It’s only a question of which word you italicize. Or, if you like, of which word you begin with a big letter.”
“The words are many,” muttered Grimm, fumbling at the door.
“Yes,” answered the other, “but the word is One.”
Colonel Grimm flung open the door of the poet’s suite of apartments and found it was a cupboard. It was quite an ordinary shallow cupboard with a few hat-pegs, and from these were hanging a red wig, a red artificial beard, a scarf of peacock colours and all the externals of the popular poet.
“All the history of the great revolution,” went on John Conrad, in the calm tone of a lecturer, “the whole method by which it was enabled to spread and menace the great State of Pavonia is and always was to be summed up in a single word: a word I constantly repeated, but a word that you never guessed. It is the word One.”
He stepped from the table to the door at right angles to the open one; the door inscribed with the name of the Professor, and throwing it open, revealed another cupboard, with a hat-peg supporting an unnaturally narrow, tall hat, a dilapidated waterproof and a bulbous mask bridged by a pair of green spectacles.
“These are the luxurious apartments of the celebrated Professor Phocus,” he said. “Need I explain to you that there never was any Professor Phocus? — except myself, of course, who professed to be the Professor. In the case of Loeb and Casc I ran rather a greater risk, for they were, or had been, real people.”
He paused a moment, rubbing his long chin, and then said:
“But it’s odd how you shrewd policemen blunder by not simply believing what you are told. You said that the Pavonian people must all be drilled in a wonderful conspiracy; simply because they denied that there was a conspiracy. They all agreed in that; so you thought that was conspiracy in itself. As a matter of fact they knew nothing, because there was nothing to know. It was the same with your international relations. Old General Casc told you again and again that he was old, and he was ill and in retirement. And so he is. He’s in such complete retirement that he hasn’t even heard that he is walking about the streets of the Pavonian capital in full uniform. But you wouldn’t believe him, because you wouldn’t believe anybody. The Princess herself said the poet looked all painted and artificial in his purple whiskers. And that would have told you the whole story, if you’d only listened to her. Then everybody said, even the King himself, that old Loeb the pawnbroker was dead, and so he was. He died years before I began to impersonate him with these trifling adornments.”
And he threw open another cupboard, displaying a dusty interior festooned as if with cobwebs with the grey whiskers and shabby grey garments attributed to the miser.
“That was the beginning of the whole business. Old Loeb really did take this house privately, but for very private reasons; not exactly out of pure public spirit; no. I really was his servant, having come down to that sort of service, and the only thing I inherited from the old rascal’s régime, the only thing I didn’t invent myself, was the underground passage, which he had constructed for himself. As I say, there were no political ideals involved in that; odd sort of ladies used it and so on. He was not a nice old gentleman. Well, I don’t know whether you will enter into the fine shade of my feelings, but, although I was starving and ready to be a scavenger, yet three years in the service of a sensual usurer left me in a rather revolutionary state of mind. It seemed to me that the world, as seen from that particular sewer, by that particular scavenger, was rather an ugly place. So I decided to have a revolution. Or rather, I decided to be a revolution. It was all very easy, really, if one did it slowly and with a little tact and imagination. I built up the characters of four quite different public men, two of them quite imaginary. You never saw any two of them at the same moment, and you never noticed it. When they were supposed to gather for their periodical dinner, I had only to put on one disguise after the other and go round behind the scenes, so to speak, in the underground passage, so that they only seemed to turn up one after another in a leisurely fashion. For the rest, you’ve no notion how easy it is to bamboozle a really enlightened, educated modern town, used to newspapers and all that. It was only necessary for each person to have a vast, vague reputation, more or less foreign. When Professor Phocus wrote learned letters to the papers, with half the alphabet after his name, nobody was going to admit they had never heard of the famous Professor Phocus. When Sebastian said he was the greatest poet in modern Europe, everybody felt that he ought to know. And if you get three or four names of that sort nowadays, you have got everything. There never was a time in history when the few counted for so much, and the many for so little. When the newspapers say ‘The nation is behind Mr. Binks’, it means that about three newspaper proprietors are behind him. When the professors say ‘The opinion of Europe has now accepted the Gollywog theory’, it means that about four professors in Germany have accepted it. The moment I’d got my millionaire and my man of science, I knew I was pretty safe; but the poet was a pleasing ornament and I knew the threat of the foreign general would throw you all into fits. By the way,” he added apologetically, “I have not shown you the magnificent apartments of General Casc, but it’s only the uniform. The rest consists chiefly of blacking.”
