Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 332
There was a lengthy silence and then Pond resumed:
“I understand the horrid truth that you yourself are a perfectly honourable and high-minded person and that your own problem is extremely difficult to solve. I assure you that I am quite incapable of taunting you with it. It was to the Republic, to the idea of equality and justice, that you swore loyalty; and to that you have been loyal.”
“You had better say what you think.” said Marcus gloomily. “You mean that I am really only serving a gang of crooks, whom any blackguard can blackmail.”
“No, I will not ask you to admit that now,” answered Pond. “Just now I wanted to ask you quite another question. Can’t you imagine a man sympathizing with the strikers, or even being a sincere Socialist?”
“Well,” replied Marcus, after a spasm of concentration, “I suppose one ought to imagine. I suppose he might hold that, the Republic resting on the Social Contract, it might supersede even free contracts.”
“Thank you,” said Mr. Pond with satisfaction, “that is exactly what I wanted. It is an important contribution to Pond’s Law of Paradox, if I may be pardoned for expressing myself so playfully. And now let us go and talk to M. Louis.”
He stood up before the astonished official, who had no apparent alternative but to follow him as he passed swiftly across the café. Some vivacious and talkative young men were taking leave of M. Louis, who courteously invited the newcomers to the empty chairs, saying something about “my young friends often enliven my solitude with their rather Socialistic views.”
“I should not agree with your young friends,” said Marcus curtly, “I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract.”
“I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more,” answered M. Louis smiling. “But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract.” He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. “I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all.”
While the smoke of his cigarette mounted towards the balcony, Mr. Pond’s eye followed it and found the balcony fitted out with what looked like a bedstead, a screen, and an old looking-glass, all very shabby. The only other object was a dusty old cross-hilted sword, such as might have come from a curiosity shop. Mr. Pond eyed this last object with considerable curiosity.
“Please permit me to play the host,” said M. Louis affably. “Perhaps you would like a cocktail or something; I stick to a little benedictine.”
As he turned in his chair towards the waiter, a shot rang through the café and the little glass before him lay in a star of splinters. The bullet that spilt the drink had missed the drinker by half a yard. Marcus looked wildly round; the café was deserted, for it was already late; no figure was in sight but the solid back of the gendarme standing outside. But Marcus went white with horror; for M. Louis made one quaint little gesture which, if it meant anything, could only mean that the policeman himself had turned for an instant and fired.
“A little reminder, perhaps, that it is time to go to bed,” said M. Louis gaily. “I go up by the fire-escape and I sleep on the balcony. Doctors think so much of this open-air treatment. Well, my people have always gone to bed in public; so many tramps do, don’t they? Good night, gentlemen.”
He lightly scaled the iron ladder and began on the balcony, before their astonished eyes, to assume a capacious dressing-gown and prepare for slumber.
“Pond,” said Marcus, “we are in a nightmare of nonsense.”
“No,” replied Pond, “for the first lime it begins to make sense. I have been stupid; but I am beginning at last to see what it all means.” After ruminating a moment, he resumed rather apologetically:
“Forgive me if I refer again to my foolish jest about Pond’s Law. I think I have discovered a rather useful principle. It is this. Men may argue for principles not entirely their own, for various reasons; as a joke in a rag debate, or covered by professional etiquette, like a barrister, or merely exaggerating something neglected and needing emphasis; long before we come to those who do it hypocritically or for hire. A man can argue for principles not his own. But a man cannot argue from principles not his own; the first principles he assumes, even for sophistry or advocacy, will probably be his own fundamental first principles. The very language he uses will betray him. That Bolshevist bookseller professed to be a bourgeois; but he talked like a Bolshevist about a bourgeois. He talked about exploitation and the class-war. So you tried to imagine yourself a Socialist; but you did not talk like a Socialist. You talked about the Social Contract, like old Rousseau. Now our friend M. Louis was defending his sympathy with strikers and even Socialists. But he used the oldest and most traditional argument of all, older than the Roman Law. The idea about leonine contract is as old as Leo and a long sight older than Leo XIII. Therefore, he represents something even older than your Rousseau and your Revolution. I knew after five words that he was not the blackmailing blackguard of romance; and yet he is romantic. And he could be legally arrested; but only for a rather curious crime. And yet again, he cannot be arrested. He can only be assassinated.
“The blackmail charge rests on one scene, in which a lady knelt to him in the street. You argued truly that ladies in your country think so much of formality and propriety, that they could never do this except in some extreme of agony and despair. It did not occur to you that, perhaps, it might be only an extreme of formality and propriety.”
Marcus began slowly: “What the devil—” And then Mr. Pond rapped out quite smartly: “And then the sword. What is a sword for? It’s absurd to say for fighting; he wouldn’t wave a mediæval sword against people shooting him with guns. If it were for duels he would have a duelling-sword; and probably two in a case. What else can you do with a sword? Well, you can swallow it; and at one time I really had a fancy he might be a conjurer. But it’s too big a swallow; so is the notion. What can be done with a sword, but not with a spear or gun or battle-axe? Have you heard of the Accolade? Long ago a man could be knighted by any knight; but by all modern custom it can only be done—”
“Only—” began Marcus, beginning to stare.
“Only by a King,” said Pond. And the young Republican sprang up rigid at the challenge.
“Yes,” continued Pond, “the King has crept back among you. It is not your fault. Republics might be all right if Republicans were as honourable as you are; but you have confessed that they are not . . . and that’s what he meant about going to bed in public. You know the old kings really did. But he had another reason. He had one real fear; that they might deport him secretly. They could deport him technically, of course; all these Republics have laws against Royalist claimants remaining in the realm. But if they did it publicly, he would proclaim himself and—”
“Why don’t they do it publicly?” asked the Republican explosively.
“Politicians do not understand much; but politicians do understand politics,” said Pond pensively. “I mean they do understand the immediate effect on mobs and movements. Somehow he had slipped in and started a campaign of private popularity before they even knew who he was. When once he was popular, they were helpless. How could they say: ‘Yes, he is popular, he is on the side of the people and the poor; the young men accept his leadership; but he is the King and therefore he must go’? They know how horribly near the world is to answering: ‘Yes; he is the King and, by God, he shall stay.’”
Mr. Pond had told this story, at somewhat greater length but in far more classic diction; and by that time had actually finished the oysters. He gazed pensively at the shells and added: “You will of course recall the meaning of the word ostracism. It meant that in ancient Athens a man was sometimes exiled merely for being important; and the votes were recorded by oyster-shells. In this case he should have been exiled for being important; but he was so very important that nobody could be told of his importance.”
RING OF LOVERS
“As I said before,” observed Mr. Pond, towards the end of one of his lucid but rather lengthy speeches, “our friend Gahagan here is a very truthful man and tells wanton and unnecessary lies. But this very truthfulness—”
Captain Gahagan waved a gloved hand as in courteous acknowledgement of anything anybody liked to say; he had an especially flamboyant flower in his coat and looked unusually gay. But Sir Hubert Wotton, the third party at the little conference, sat up. For he followed the flow of words with tireless, intelligent attention, while Gahagan, though radiant, seemed rather abstracted; and these abrupt absurdities always brought Sir Hubert up standing.
“Say that again,” he said, not without sarcasm.
“Surely that is obvious enough,” pleaded Mr. Pond. “A real liar does not tell wanton and unnecessary lies. He tells wise and necessary lies. It was not necessary for Gahagan to tell us once that he had seen not one sea-serpent but six sea-serpents, each larger than the last; still less to inform us that each reptile in turn swallowed the last one whole; and that the last of all was opening its mouth to swallow the ship, when he saw it was only a yawn after too heavy a meal, and the monster suddenly went to sleep. I will not dwell on the mathematical symmetry with which snake within snake yawned, and snake within snake went to sleep, all except the smallest, which had had no dinner and walked out to look for some. It was not, I say, necessary for Gahagan to tell this story. It was hardly even wise. It is very unlikely that it would promote his worldly prospects, or gain him any rewards or decorations for scientific research. The official scientific world, I know not why, is prejudiced against any story even of one sea-serpent, and would be the less likely to accept the narrative in its present form.
“Or again, when Captain Gahagan told us he had been a Broad Church missionary, and had readily preached in the pulpits of Nonconformists, then in the mosques of Moslems, then in the monasteries of Tibet, but was most warmly welcomed by a mystical sect of Theists in those parts, people in a state of supreme spiritual exaltation who worshipped him like a god, until he found they were enthusiasts for Human Sacrifice and he was the victim. This statement was also quite unnecessary. To have been a latitudinarian clergyman is but little likely to advance him in his present profession, or to fit him for his present pursuits. I suspect the story was partially a parable or allegory. But anyhow, it was quite unnecessary and it was obviously untrue. And when a thing is obviously untrue, it is obviously not a lie.”
“Suppose,” said Gahagan abruptly, “suppose I were to tell you a story that really is true?”
“I should regard it with great suspicion,” said Wotton grimly.
“You mean you would think I was still romancing. But why?”
“Because it would be so very like a romance,” retorted Wotton.
“But don’t you think,” asked the Captain thoughtfully, “that real life sometimes is like a romance?”
“I think,” replied Wotton, with a certain genuine shrewdness that lay very deep in him, “that I could always really tell the difference.”
“You are right,” said Pond; “and it seems to me the difference is this. Life is artistic in parts, but not as a whole; it’s like broken bits of different works of art. When everything hangs together, and it all fits in, we doubt. I might even believe that Gahagan saw six sea-serpents; but not that each was larger than the last. If he’d said there was first a large one and then a little one and then a larger one, he might have taken us in. We often say that one social situation is like being in a novel; but it doesn’t finish like the novel — at least, not the same novel.”
“Pond,” said Gahagan, “I sometimes think you are inspired, or possessed of a devil in a quiet way. It’s queer you should say that; because my experience was just like that. With this difference; each familiar melodrama broke off; but only turned to blacker melodrama — or tragedy. Again and again, in this affair, I thought I was in a magazine story; and then it turned to quite another story. Sort of dissolving view, or a nightmare. Especially a nightmare.”
“And why especially?” asked Wotton.
“It’s a horrible story,” said Gahagan, lowering his voice. “But it’s not so horrible now.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Pond, nodding. “You are happy and wish to tell us a horrible story.”
“And what does that mean?” demanded Wotton.
“It means,” said Gahagan, “that I got engaged to be married this morning.”
“The devil you — I beg your pardon,” said Wotton, very red in the face. “Congratulations, of course, and all that. But what has it to do with the nightmare?”
“There is a connexion,” said Gahagan dreamily. “But you want the horrible story and not the happy one. Well, it was a bit of a mystery, at least to me; but I understood it at last.”
“And when you’ve done mystifying us, you will tell us the solution?”
“No; Pond will tell you the solution,” said Gahagan maliciously. “He’s already puffed up because he guessed the kind of story, before he even heard it. If he can’t finish the story, when he has heard it—”
He broke off and then resumed more solidly:
“It began with a dinner-party, what they call a stag-party, given by Lord Crome, following on a cocktail-party mostly given by Lady Crome. Lady Crome was a tall and swift and graceful person with a small dark head. Lord Crome was quite the reverse; he was in every way, physical and mental, a ‘long-headed’ person. You’ve heard of a hatchet-face; his was a hatchet that cut off his own head — or rather his own body, abolishing the slighter and more insignificant figure. He is an economist and he gave one the impression of being distrait and rather bored with all the ladies who swam about in the wake of his wonderful wife, that darting swan; and perhaps that was why he wanted the cooler society of his own sex. Anyhow, he kept some of his male guests for a little dinner after the at-home was over. I happened to be one of them; but, in spite of that, it was a select company.
“It was a select company; and yet it hardly seemed to have been selected. They were mostly well-known men, and yet it looked as if Crome had taken their names out of a hat. The first person I ran into was Captain Blande, supposed to be one of the biggest officers in the British Army, and I should think the stupidest, for any strategic purposes. Of course he looks magnificent — like a chryselephantine statue of Hercules, and about as useful in time of war. I once used the word ‘chryselephantine,’ meaning gold and ivory; and he thought I was calling him elephantine. Classical education of the pukka sahib. Well, the man he was put next to was Count Kranz, the Hungarian scientist and social reformer. He speaks twenty-seven languages, including philosophical language. I wonder what language he talked to Captain Blande in. Just beyond the Count was another fellow more of Blande’s sort; but darker and leaner and livelier; a fellow called Wooster of some Bengal regiment. His language also would be limited: the Latin verb polo, polas, polat; I play polo, thou playest polo, he plays polo, or (more devastatingly) he does not play polo. But just as polo itself was an Asiatic game, and can be traced through the gilded jungle of Persian and Indian illuminations, so there was something faintly Eurasian about this man Wooster; he was like a dark-striped tiger and one could fancy him gliding through a jungle. That pair at least looked a little more well-matched; for Kranz also was dark and good-looking, with arched, black, Assyrian eyebrows and a long, dark beard, spreading like a fan or the forked tail of a bird. I sat next, and got on with Wooster pretty well; on the other side of me was Sir Oscar Marvell, the great actor-manager, all very fine and large, with the Olympian curls and the Roman nose. Here also there was some lack of rapport. Sir Oscar Marvell didn’t want to talk about anything but Sir Oscar Marvell; and the other men didn’t want to talk about Sir Oscar Marvell at all. The three remaining men were the new Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Pitt-Palmer, a very frigid-looking young man like the bust of Augustus Cæsar — and indeed he was classical enough, and could have quoted the classics all right; one Italian singer, whose name I could not remember, and one Polish diplomat, whose name nobody could remember. And I was saying to myself all the time: ‘What a funny collection!’”
“I know this story,” said Wotton positively. “A humorous host collects a lot of incompatible people for the pleasure of hearing them quarrel. Done very well in one of Anthony Berkeley’s detective stories.”
“No,” replied Gahagan. “I think their incompatibility was quite accidental, and I know that Crome didn’t use it to make them quarrel. As a matter of fact, he was a most tactful host, and it would be truer to say he prevented them from quarrelling. He did it rather cleverly, too, by beginning to talk about heirlooms and family jewels and so on. Different as they were, most of them were well-off, and what is called of a good family; and it was about as close to common ground as they could get. The Pole, who was a baldish but graceful person, with very charming manners, and much the wittiest man at table, was giving an amusing account of the adventures of a medal of Sobieski when it fell into the hands first of a Jew, and then of a Prussian, and then of a Cossack. In contrast to the Pole, who was hairless and talkative, the Italian beyond him was silent, and rather sulky, under his bush of black hair.
“‘That’s an interesting-looking ring you are wearing yourself, Lord Crome,’ said the Pole politely. ‘Those heavy rings are generally historic. I think I should really like to wear an episcopal ring or, better still, a Papal ring. But then there are all those tiresome preliminaries about being made Pope; it involves celibacy; and I—’ And he shrugged his shoulders.
