Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 329
“Pond will think all this terribly expensive,” said Wotton, with a sad smile. “Pond is quite the Old Liberal in the matter of economy and retrenchment. But he will agree that we are all bound to show particular care in this case.”
“N-no,” said Mr. Pond, pursing his lips dubiously. “I don’t think I should show any particular care in this case.”
“Not show any particular care!” repeated the astonished Wotton.
“I certainly shouldn’t show it,” said Mr. Pond. “In such cases, nobody of sense would take such particular precautions, any more than anybody would send an important letter by registered post.”
“Well, you must pardon my dullness,” said Sir Hubert, “but, as a matter of fact, I have heard of people sending an important letter by registered post.”
“It is done, I believe,” said Mr. Pond, with distant disparagement. “But that is when you are trying to prevent a letter being lost. Just now you are trying to prevent a letter being found.”
“That sounds rather interesting,” said Dyer, with some restrained amusement.
“Don’t you see? It’s quite simple,” answered Pond. “If you want to prevent a document from being dropped down a drain, or thrown into a dustbin, or used to light the fire or to make a bird’s nest, or any other accident of neglect, then it is a good thing to draw attention to it, by stamping or sealing or safeguarding it in some particular way. But if you want to prevent it from being tracked and spotted and snatched out of your hands, by violence or stratagem, then it’s the worst thing in the world to mark it in a particular way. Registration, for instance, doesn’t mean that your messenger can’t be knocked on the head or have his pocket picked. It only means that your messenger or his department can be held responsible; may have to apologize or compensate. But you don’t want apologies or compensations; you want the letter. I should say it would be far safer from a watchful enemy, if it were unmarked and sent along with a thousand others looking exactly the same.”
It is a tribute to the essential shrewdness, underlying the apparent woodenness of Wotton and Dyer, that the paradox of Pond prevailed. The documents, however, were too bulky to be treated as ordinary letters; and after some discussion, they were placed in one of a large number of white wooden boxes, light and not very large, which were in general use for sending chocolate and other provisions to the army or navy or some branches of the public service. The only part of his original program on which the hard-headed Dyer continued to insist was that of putting guards and searchers at essential points of the route of travel.
“I suppose there’ll be some damned fuss about it afterwards,” he said, “and people will pester us about interfering with the liberty of the subject. We’re handicapped in this confounded constitutional country. Now if we were in—”
He shut his mouth rather sharply, as a discreet knock sounded on the door, and Sir Hubert’s clerk glided in to say he had discharged his commission. Sir Hubert did not see him at first, his frowning gaze being fixed on the railway-map of the route to be pursued; and Dyer happened at the moment to be examining very closely the white deal box, which had already been selected and sent in as a sample. But Mr. Pond noticed the clerk; and could not help thinking that he was rather worth noticing. He was a young man named Franks, with fair hair correctly flattened, and neat enough in figure and costume; but his wide face had that indescribable look which is sometimes seen, of which we can only say that it suggests the large head on the little figure of a dwarf, or perhaps that sunken between the shoulders of a hunchback; the face is not normal, even upon a normal figure. But the other causes which arrested Mr. Pond’s eye for a moment were, first, the fact that the clerk was noticeably ill at ease when he silently handed papers to his superior; and, last but not least, that he had started visibly when he saw the detective from Scotland Yard.
The second Council, if it may be called so, was held in what all agreed was the strategical centre of the whole manœuvre: a certain railway-junction in the Midlands. It so happened that the consignment of boxes, along with mailbags and similar things, had to be shifted here from one train to another, which came up afterwards to the same platform. It was at this point that there was most possibility of any interference from outside; and it is to be feared that Dyer stretched several points in his reluctant compromise with the British Constitution, in the matter of police orders which stopped, detained or examined persons attempting to enter or leave the station.
“I have told our people they mustn’t even let us out of the station,” he said, “without close examination, for fear somebody should have a fancy for dressing up as Mr. Pond.”
“It has quite a festive sound, so near Christmas,” said Mr. Pond dolefully. “So I take it that for the present we must stay on the station; and one can hardly say it looks particularly festive.”
Nothing, indeed, can well look more desolate than one of the numerous side platforms of an empty railway-station on a dreary winter day; unless it is the empty Third Class Waiting-Room which is provided to be a human refuge from the winter blast. Somehow the waiting-room looks even less human than the platform from which it is a refuge; hung with a few printed notices that nobody could possibly read, tables of trains or dusty plans of railways, equipped in one corner with broken pens with which nobody could write, and dried inkstands containing no ink to write with; with one dab of dull colours, the faded advertisement of an insurance company. It certainly seemed to the casual mind a godforsaken place to be spending any part of Christmas; but Mr. Pond had a stoical cheerfulness under such circumstances which rather surprised those who only knew his catlike love of comfortable domestic routine.
He entered this empty and unsightly apartment with a brisk step, stopping for a moment to stare reflectively at the dried ink and broken pens on the corner table.
“Well,” he said, turning away, “they couldn’t do very much with those, anyhow; but, of course, they might have pencils or fountain-pens. I’m rather glad I did it, on the whole.”
“Pond,” said Wotton gravely, “this is in your department anyhow; and I’m sure that Dyer will agree that we’ve done well to follow your advice so far. But I hope you don’t mind my having a mild curiosity about what it is that you’ve done.”
“Not at all,” replied Pond. “Perhaps I ought to have told you about it before. Very likely I ought to have done it before. But just after you’d been good enough to let me have my own way, about sending it along with all the other stuff in plain identical boxes, I sat down and had a hard think about what would be the next best precaution following on that. I’m pretty certain that if it had been taken in a special car by armed men, that car would have been wrecked and those armed men perhaps robbed by force of arms; anyhow, there was too much of a risk of it. There’s a much more elaborate gangster organization working against us already than most people have any notion of; and to multiply purchases and preparations is to multiply clues and transactions for their spies to trail. But I don’t think the gangs could possibly get in here, especially now that the police are holding the gates of all these stations like fortresses. An isolated man or so could do very little against them. But what could an isolated man do?”
“Well,” said Wotton rather impatiently. “What could he do?”
“As I say,” continued Mr. Pond calmly, “I sat down and had a good think about what a spy or stray intruder might do, in a quiet way without any noise of battle, murder or sudden death, if he did manage somehow to spot the right box. So I got on to the private telephone to headquarters; and told them to see that the postal and transport authorities held up every one of the boxes or packages on which the address seemed to have been altered; anything crossed out or anything substituted. A man might conceivably snatch a moment to re-direct a box to some of his friends in London; though he could never take the box out of the station without being searched. That’s what I did; and it was these broken-down penholders that reminded me of it. It’s a pretty broken-down place to spend Christmas in, as you say; they have given us a sort of a fire, which is more than some waiting-rooms do; but it looks as if it were dying of depression; and I don’t wonder.”
He stirred up the neglected fire, making quite a creditable blaze, with his usual instinct for the comforts of life; then he added: “I hope you don’t disagree with that second precaution of mine.”
“No; I think that also is a very sensible precaution; though I hope there is no chance of anybody hitting on the right box, even by accident.” Hubert Wotton frowned a moment at the renewed flame and the dancing sparks, and then said gloomily, “This is about the time when people at Christmas are going to the pantomime. Or, at any rate, to the pictures.”
Mr. Pond nodded; he seemed to be suddenly smitten with a fit of abstraction. At last he said:
“I sometimes wonder whether things weren’t better when pictures meant the pictures in the fire, instead of the pictures on the film.”
Sir Hubert Wotton gruffly suggested, in a general way, that the dingy fire in a Third Class Waiting-Room was not one in which he would prefer to look for pictures.
“The fire pictures, like the cloud pictures,” went on Mr. Pond, “are just incomplete enough to call out the imagination to complete them. Besides,” he added, cheerfully poking the fire, “you can stick a poker into the coals and break them up into a different picture; whereas, if you push a great pole through the screen because you don’t like the face of a film-star, there is all sorts of trouble.”
Dyer, who had stamped out on to the platform during this imaginative interlude, returned at this moment with highly practical news. By exploring many tunnels, and scouring many platforms on that labyrinthine junction, he had found that there really was a remote refreshment-room, in which it was possible to have some sort of lunch; which had been a silent problem for all three of the officials involved.
“I’ll stay on this platform,” he said; “in fact I shall stay on this platform all night if necessary. This is my particular job. But you go and get your lunch first and come back; and I’ll see if I can get some afterwards. Never mind about the trains; I’ve arranged for all that; and, anyhow, I shall be there when the only possible moment of danger comes.”
In fact, his last words were almost drowned in the throb and racket of the approach of the first train. They all saw the mailbags and boxes and packages duly put out on the platform; and then Wotton, a man of regular habits, who was beginning to feel rather peckish, was easily persuaded by Dyer to accept his arrangement and go in search of a bite of food. Wotton and Pond dispatched their rather meagre lunch with reasonable rapidity; but even so had occasion to quicken their footsteps as they came within sight of their own original platform; since a train, which was apparently the second train, was beginning to shift and puff out of the station; and when they rejoined their companion, the platform was already bare.
“All safe,” said Dyer, with satisfaction. “I saw all the boxes and things into the van myself; and nobody’s been here to interfere with them. Our main trouble is really over; and I shouldn’t mind having a little lunch myself.”
He grinned at them, rubbing his hands in a congratulatory manner; and as he turned towards the subterranean passages, they turned once more with the intention of returning to the hollow and smoky cell of the waiting-room.
“It does seem as if there were nothing more for us to do here,” said Wotton. “It rather increases the freezing futility of this shack.”
“I consider it quite a Christmas triumph,” said Mr. Pond, with undiminished cheerfulness, “that we have managed to keep the fire in, anyhow. . . . Why, I believe it’s begun to snow.”
For some time they had noted that the afternoon, already darkening towards the early winter evening, had something of that lurid greenish light which often glows under the load of snow-clouds; a sprinkling began to fall as they went along the apparently interminable platform; and by the time they reached the austere waiting-room, its roof and doorway were powdered with silver. The fire was burning briskly inside; Dyer had evidently been keeping himself warm.
“It’s devilish queer,” said Wotton, “but the whole thing is really beginning to look like a Christmas card. Our dismal salle d’attente will soon be a parody of Father Christmas’s cottage in a pantomime.”
“The whole thing is like the parody of a pantomime,” said Pond in a lower and more disquieted tone, “and as you say, it is very queer.”
After a pause, Wotton added abruptly:
“What is worrying you, Pond?”
“I’m wondering, if not worrying,” answered Pond, “about exactly what a man would do to intercept or misdirect that box, in a place like this, with no pens or anything. . . . Of course, there’s not much in that; he might have a fountain-pen or a pencil.”
“Oh, you’ve settled all that; you seem to be mad on pencils,” said Wotton impatiently. “It comes of always blue-pencilling those everlasting proofs of yours.”
“It wouldn’t be a blue pencil,” said Pond, shaking his head. “I was thinking of something more like a red pencil; which would mark very black indeed. But what bothers me is that there are always more ways of doing anything than you’d fancy, even in a place like this.”
“But you’ve blocked all that already,” insisted the other; “by telephoning as you did.”
“Well,” said Pond obstinately, “and what would they do then; if they knew I’d telephoned?”
Wotton looked puzzled; and Pond sat down in silence, stirring the fire and staring at it.
After a silence he said abruptly: “I wish Dyer were back.”
“What do you want him now for?” asked his friend. “I should say he’d earned a little late lunch. As far as I can see, he’s finished the business; and it’s all over here.”
“I fear,” said Pond, without taking his head out of the fireplace, “that it’s only just going to begin.”
There was another silence of growing mystification, like the gathering darkness outside. And then Pond observed suddenly:
“I suppose we’ve come back to the right platform.”
Wotton’s face only expressed the stolid stupefaction natural under the circumstances; but in his depths, which were deeper than some supposed, an unearthly chill touched him for the first time. Nightmare stirred in its sleep; not the mere practical perplexity of a problem, but all those doubts beyond reason which revolve round place and time. Before he could speak, Pond added:
“This is a different shaped poker.”
“What the devil do you mean?” exploded Wotton at last. “They have locked up the station; and there is nobody on it but ourselves; except that girl in the bar. You don’t imagine she has put a new set of furniture and fire-irons in all the waiting-rooms?”
“No,” said Mr. Pond. “I didn’t say a new poker. I said a new shape of poker.”
Almost as he spoke, he leapt away from the fireplace, leaving the poker in the fire, and ran to the doorway, craning out his head and listening. His companion listened also; and recognized as an objective reality, which was no nightmare, a noise of scrambling footsteps somewhere on the platform. But, when they ran out, the platform appeared to be perfectly empty, now a blank and solid table of snow; and they began to realize that the noise came from underneath their feet. Looking over the railing, they saw that the whole raised woodwork of the station was intercepted at one point by a belt of grassy embankment, very grey and discoloured with the smoke; they were just in time to see a dark lean figure scramble up this bank and dive under the platform, in such a manner that he was able the next moment to crawl out on the line. Then he calmly mounted the platform, and stood there like a passenger waiting for a train.
Apart from the fact that the stranger had practically burgled the station, against such very special difficulties, Wotton’s mind, already full of suspicions, decided at a glance that he was very much of a dark horse. Curiously enough, he looked a little like a horse, having a long equine visage and a strange sort of stoop; he was swarthy and haggard and his hollow eyes were such dense patches of shadow that it was a sort of shock to realize that the eyes within were glaring. He was dressed with the last extreme of shabbiness, in a long threadbare and almost ragged waterproof; and they thought they had never seen before a face and figure so symbolic of desolation and dreary tragedy. It seemed to Wotton that he himself had his first real glimpse of those depths in which despair manufactures the many revolutionary movements which it had been his duty to combat; but, of necessity, his duty prevailed.
He stepped up to the man, asking him who and what he was, and why he had thus evaded the police blockade. The man appeared to ignore the other questions for the moment; but in answer to the question about what he was, his tragic lantern-jaw moved and emitted a very unexpected reply.
“I am a Clown,” he said in a depressed voice.
At this answer Mr. Pond seemed to start with altogether a new sort of surprise. He had ruminated on the puzzles hitherto, like one pursuing the study of things which some might find surprising, but at which he himself was no longer very much surprised. But he gaped helplessly at this as a man does at a miracle; or still more, in a case like this, at a coincidence. Then another and yet more undignified change came over him. It can only be said that, having begun by goggling, he ended by giggling.
