Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 337
“Hysterics,” said Mr. Pond. “What, do you think the poor lady cannot be hysterical, because she does not scream the house down? But any doctor will tell you that hysteria is mostly secretive and silent. And there really is a vein of hysteria in a great many of the Germans; it is at the very opposite extreme to the external excitability of the Latins. No, madam, I do not think she is climbing down the fire-escape. I think she is saying that her pupils do not love her, and thinking about weltschmerz and suicide. And really, poor woman, she is in a very hard position.”
“She won’t come to family prayers,” continued the patriotic matron, not to be turned from her course, “because we pray for a British victory.”
“You had better pray,” said Mr. Pond, “for all the unhappy Englishwomen stranded in Germany by poverty or duty or dependence. If she loves her native land, it only shows she is a human being. If she expresses it by ostentatious absences or sulks or banging doors, that may show she is too much of a German. It also shows she is not much of a German spy.”
Here again, however, Mr. Pond was careful not to ignore or entirely despise the warning; he kept an eye on the German governess, and even engaged that learned lady in talk upon some trivial pretext — if anything she touched could remain trivial.
“Your study of our national drama,” he said gravely, “must sometimes recall to you the greatest and noblest work that ever came out of Germany.”
“You refer to Goethe’s Faust, I presume,” she replied.
“I refer to Grimm’s Fairy-Tales,” said Mr. Pond. “I fear I have forgotten for the moment whether the story we call Puss-in-Boots exists in Grimm’s collection in the same form; but I am pretty certain there is some variant of it. It always seems to me about the best story in the world.”
The German governess obliged him with a short lecture on the parallelism of folk-lore; and Pond could not help feeling faintly amused at the idea of this ethnological and scientific treatment of a folk-tale which had just been presented on the pier by Miss Patsy Pickles, in lights and various other embellishments, supported by that world-famed comedian who called himself Alberto Tizzi and was born in the Blackfriars Road.
When he returned to his office at twilight, and, turning, beheld the figure of Mrs. Hartog-Haggard again hovering without, Mr. Pond began to think he was in a nightmare. He wondered wildly whether she had drawn some dark conclusions from his own meeting with the Teutonic teacher of youth. Perhaps he, Mr. Pond, was a German spy, too. But he ought to have known his neighbour better; for when Mrs. Hartog-Haggard spoke she had once again forgotten, for the moment, her last cause of complaint. But she was more excited than ever; she ducked under the frame of scaffolding and darted into the room, crying out as she came:
“Mr. Pond, do you know what is right opposite your own house?”
“Well, I think so,” said Mr. Pond, doubtfully, “more or less.”
“I never read the name over the shop before!” cried the lady. “You know it is all dark and dirty and obliterated — that curiosity shop, I mean; with all the spears and daggers. Think of the impudence of the man! He’s actually written up his name there: ‘C. Schiller.’”
“He’s written up C. Schiller; I’m not so sure he’s written up his name,” said Mr. Pond.
“Do you mean,” she cried, “that you actually know he goes by two names? Why, that makes it worse than ever!”
“Well,” said Mr. Pond, rising suddenly, and with a curtness that cut all his own courtesy, “I’ll see what I can do about it.”
And for the third time did Mr. Pond take some steps to verify the Hartog-Haggard revelations. He took the ten or twelve steps necessary to take him across the road and into the shop of C. Schiller, amid all the shining sabres and yataghans. It was a very peaceable-looking person who waited behind all this array of arms; not to say a rather smooth and sleek one; and Pond, leaning across the counter, addressed him in a low and confidential voice.
“Why the dickens do you people do it? It will be more than half your own fault if there’s a row of some kind and a Jingo mob comes here and breaks your windows for your absurd German name. I know very well this is no quarrel of yours. I am well aware,” Mr. Pond continued with an earnest gaze, “that you never invaded Belgium. I am fully conscious that your national tastes do not lie in that direction. I know you had nothing to do with burning the Louvain Library or sinking the Lusitania. Then why the devil can’t you say so? Why can’t you call yourself Levy, like your fathers before you — your fathers who go back to the most ancient priesthood of the world? And you’ll get into trouble with the Germans, too, some day, if you go about calling yourself Schiller. You might as well go and live in Stratford-on-Avon and call yourself Shakespeare.”
“There’th a lot of prejudith againth my rathe,” said the warden of the armoury.
“There’ll be a lot more, unless you take my advice,” said Mr. Pond with unusual brevity; and left the shop to return to the office.
The square figure of Mr. Butt, who was sitting at the desk looking towards the doorway, rose at his entrance; but Pond waved him to his seat again and, lighting a cigarette, began to moon about the room in a rather moody fashion. He did not believe that there was anything very much in any of the three avenues of suspicion that had been opened to him; though he owned that there were indirect possibilities about the last. Mr. Levy was certainly not a German; and it was very improbable that he was a real enthusiast for Germany; but it was not altogether impossible to suppose, in the tangle and distraction of all the modern international muddle, that he might be some sort of tool, conscious or unconscious, of a real German conspiracy. So long as that was possible, he must be watched. Mr. Pond was very glad that Mr. Levy lived in the shop exactly opposite.
Indeed, he found himself gazing across the street in the gathering dusk with feelings which he found it hard to analyse. He could still see the shop, with its pattern of queer, archaic weapons, through the frame of the last few poles left in the low scaffolding round the porch; for the workmen’s business had been entirely limited to the porch itself and the props were mostly cleared away, the work being practically over; but there was just enough suggestion of a cluster or network of lines to confuse the prospect at that very confusing turn of the twilight. Once he fancied he saw something flicker behind them, as if a shadow had shifted; and there arose within him the terror of Mrs. Hartog-Haggard, which is the terror of boredom and a sort of paralysed impatience, one of the worst of the woes of life.
Then he saw that the shifting shadow must have been produced by the fact that the lights had been turned up in the shop opposite; and he saw again, and now much more clearly, the queer outline of all those alien Asiatic weapons, the crooked darts and monstrous missiles, the swords with a horrid resemblance to hooks or the blades that bent back and forth like snakes of iron. . . . He became dreamily conscious of the chasm between Christendom and that great other half of human civilization; so dreamily that he hardly knew which was a torture implement and which was a tool. Whether the thought was mingled with his own belief that he was fighting a barbarism at heart as hostile, or whether he had caught a whiff of the strange smell of the East from that apparently harmless human accident who kept the shop, he could hardly be certain himself; but he felt the peculiar oppression of his work as he had never felt it before.
Then he shook himself awake, telling himself sharply that his business was working and not worrying about the atmosphere of the work; and that he should be ashamed to idle when his two subordinates were still busy, Butt behind him, and Travers in the office above. He was all the more surprised, when he turned sharply around, to find that Butt was not working at all; but, like himself, was staring, not to say glaring, as in a congested mystification, into the twilight. Butt was commonly the most calm and prosaic of subordinates; but the look on his face was quite enough to prove that something was really the matter.
“Is anything bothering you?” asked Pond, in a gentle voice which people found very encouraging.
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Butt. “I’m bothering about whether I’m going to be a beast or not. It’s a beastly caddish thing to say a word, or hint a word, against your comrades or anybody connected with them. But after all — well, sir, there is the country, isn’t there?”
“There is certainly the country,” said Mr. Pond, very seriously.
“Well,” Butt blurted out at last, “I’m not a bit comfortable about Arthur.”
Then, after a sort of gasp, he tried again: “At least, it isn’t so much Arthur as Arthur’s . . . what Arthur’s doing. It makes it all the nastier to have put it like that. But you know he got engaged last week. Have you met his fiancée, sir?”
“I have not yet had the honour,” replied Pond, in his punctilious way.
“Well, sir, Arthur brought her in here to-day while you were out; he’d just taken her to the pantomime of Puss-in-Boots on the pier, and they were laughing like anything. Of course, that’s quite all right; it was his off time; but it seemed to me it wasn’t quite all right that she walked straight upstairs without any invitation, even from him, to the private office where we don’t allow visitors to go. Of course, that’s about the only possible case where I could hardly prevent it. In the ordinary way, we’re perfectly safe; I mean the documents are perfectly safe. There’s only one door, and you or I are always sitting bang in front of it; and there’s only one staircase, and nobody uses it but we three. Of course, she might have done it in all innocence; that’s what made it seem quite too ghastly to snub her. And yet. . . . Well, she’s a very nice-looking girl, and no doubt a very nice girl; but somehow that’s just the one word that wouldn’t jump to my mind about her — innocence.”
“Why, what sort of a girl is she?” asked Pond.
“Well,” said Mr. Butt, gloomily seeking words, “we all know that making-up and even dyeing your hair doesn’t mean what it once did; lots of women do it who are perfectly decent; but not those who are — well, utterly inexperienced. It seemed to me that, while she might be perfectly honest, she would know very decidedly whether a thing is done or not.”
“If she is engaged to him,” said Pond, with a rather unusual severity, “she must know that he is here on highly confidential work, and she must be as anxious to protect his honour as we are. I’m afraid that I shall have to ask you for some sort of description.”
“Well,” said Butt, “she’s very tall and elegant, or . . . no, elegant is exactly the word. She has beautiful golden hair — very beautiful golden hair — and very beautiful long dark eyes that make it look rather like a gilded wig. She has high cheekbones, not in the way that Scotch girls have, but somehow as if it were part of the shape of the skull; and though she’s not at all long in the tooth, in any sense, her teeth are just a little to the fore.”
“Did he meet her in Besançon, near Belfort?”
“Pretty rum you should say that,” said Butt, miserably; “because he did.”
Mr. Pond received the news in silence.
“I hope, sir, you won’t assume anything against Arthur,” said Butt, huskily. “I’m sure I’d do anything to clear him of any—”
As he spoke, the ceiling above them shook with a thud like thunder; then there was a sound of scampering feet; and then utter stillness. No one acquainted with Mr. Pond’s usual process of ambulation could have believed that he flew up the staircase as he did just then.
They flung open the door, and they saw all that was to be seen. All that was to be seen was Arthur Travers stretched out face downwards on the ground, and between his shoulder-blades stood out the very long hilt of a very strange-looking sword. Butt impetuously laid hold of it, and was startled to find that it was sunk so deep in the corpse and the carpeted floor that he could not have plucked it out without the most violent muscular effort. Pond had already touched the wrist and felt the rigidity of the muscles and he waved his subordinate away.
“I am sorry to say that our friend is certainly dead,” he said steadily. “In that case, you had better not touch things till they can be properly examined.” Then, looking at Butt very solemnly, he added:
“You said you would do anything to clear him. One thing is certain: that he is quite cleared.”
Pond then walked in silence to the desk, which contained the secret drawer and the secret plan of the harbour. He only compressed his lips when he saw that the drawer was empty.
Pond walked to the telephone and issued orders to about six different people. He did about twenty things, but he did not speak again for about three-quarters of an hour. It was only about the same time that the stunned and bewildered Butt stumbled into speech.
“I simply can’t make head or tail of anything. That woman had gone; and, besides, no woman could have nailed him to the floor like that.”
“And with such an extraordinary nail,” said Pond, and was silent once more.
And indeed the riddle revolved more and more on the one thing that thief and murderer had left behind him: the enormous misshapen weapon. It was not difficult to guess why he had left it behind; it was so difficult to tug out of the floor that he probably had no time to try effectually, hearing Pond clattering up the stairs; he thought it wiser to escape somehow, presumably through the window. But about the nature of the thing itself it was hard to say anything, for it seemed quite abnormal. It was as long as a claymore; yet it was not upon the pattern of any known sword. It had no guard or pommel of any kind. The hilt was as long as the blade; the blade was twice as broad as the hilt; at least, at its base, whence it tapered to a point in a sort of right-angled triangle, only the outer edge or hypotenuse being sharpened. Pond gazed musingly at this uncouth weapon, which was made very rudely of iron and wood painted with garish colours; and his thoughts crept slowly back to that shop across the road that was hung with strange and savage weapons. Yet this seemed to be in a somewhat cruder and gaudier style. Mr. Schiller-Levy naturally denied all knowledge of it, which he would presumably have done in any case; but what was much more cogent, all the real authorities on such barbaric or Oriental arms said that they had never seen such a thing before.
Touching many other things, the darkness began to thin away to a somewhat dreary dawn. It was ascertained that poor Arthur’s equivocal fiancée had indeed fled; very possibly in company with the missing plan. She was known by this time to be a woman quite capable of stealing a document or even stabbing a man. But it was doubtful whether any woman was capable of stabbing a man, with that huge and heavy and clumsy instrument, so as to fix him to the floor; and quite impossible to imagine why she should select it for the purpose.
“It would all be as clear as death,” said Mr. Butt, bitterly, “except for that lumbering, long-hilted short-sword, or whatever it is. It never was in Levy’s shop. It never was in Asia or Africa or any of the tribes the learned jossers tell us about. It’s the real remaining mystery of the whole thing.”
Mr. Pond seemed to be waking up slowly from a trance of hours or days.
“Oh, that,” he said, “that’s the only thing about it I’m really beginning to understand.”
It has been hinted, with every delicacy, we may hope, that the attitude of Mr. Pond towards the visits of Mrs. Hartog-Haggard was, perhaps, rather passive than receptive; that he did not look forward to them as pants the hart for cooling streams; and that for him they rather resembled getting into hot water. It is all the more worthy of record that, on the last occasion of her bringing him a new tale of woe, he actually leapt to his feet with an air of excitement and even of triumph. He had been right in his premonitions about the wisdom of folly; and the triumph was truly the triumph of the fool. Mrs. Hartog-Haggard gave him the clue after all.
She darted in under the scaffolding by the doorway, the same dark and almost antic figure. Full of the Cause, she was utterly oblivious of such trifles as the murder of his friend. She had now reverted to her original disapproval of her own governess. She had altered nothing, except all her reasons for disapproving of her governess. On the former occasion she had appeared to claim the fairy-tale used for pantomimes as exclusively English and part of the healthy innocence of the stately homes of England. Now she was denouncing the German woman for taking the children to the pantomime at all; regarding it as a ruse for filling them with the gruesome tales of Grimm and the terrors of the barbaric forest.
“They’re sent to do that,” she repeated in the fierce, confidential voice she used in such cases. “They’re sent here to undermine all our children’s nerves and minds. Could any other nation be such fiends, Mr. Pond? She’s been poisoning their poor little minds with horrors about magicians and magic cats; and now the worst has happened, as I knew it would. Well — you haven’t done anything to stop it; and my life is simply ruined. My three girls are all twittering with terror; and my boy is mad.”
The symptoms of Mr. Pond were still mainly those of fatigue; and she rapped out a repetition.
“He is mad, I tell you, Mr. Pond; he is actually seeing things out of those horrible German fairy-tales; says he saw a giant with a great knife walking through the town by moonlight . . . a giant, Mr. Pond.”
Mr. Pond staggered to his feet and for once really goggled and gulped like a fish. Mrs. Hartog-Haggard watched him with wild eyes, intermittently exclaiming: “Have you no word of consolation for a mother?”
Mr. Pond abruptly controlled himself and managed to recapture, at least, a hazy courtesy.
“Yes, madam,” he said. “I have the best possible consolation for a mother. Your son is not mad.”
He looked more judicial, and even severe, when he next sat in consultation with Mr. Butt, Sir Hubert Wotton, and Inspector Grote, the leading detective of the district.
“What it comes to is this,” said Mr. Pond, very sternly: “that you do not really know the story of Puss-in-Boots. And they talk about this as an epoch of Education.”
“Oh, I know it’s about a clever cat and all the rest of it,” said Butt, vaguely. “A cat that helps its master to get things—”
