Manalive

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform: the question of whether dons see double because they are drunk, or get drunk because they see double. It is enough for them (the undersigned persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar and profitable theme–which is puddles. What (the undersigned persons ask themselves) is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud. The two great historic universities of England have all this large and level and reflective brilliance. Nevertheless, or, rather, on the other hand, they are puddles–puddles, puddles, puddles, puddles. The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an emphasis inseparable from strong conviction.”

  Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some present, and continued with eminent cheerfulness:–

  “Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of the undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes of canal and the glittering rainy gutters into which the water broke up round the back of Brakespeare College. Had these thoughts crossed his mind he would have been much happier than he was. Unfortunately he did not know that his puzzles were puddles. He did not know that the academic mind reflects infinity and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still. In his case, therefore, there was something solemn, and even evil about the infinity implied. It was half-way through a starry night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above and below. To young Smith’s sullen fancy the skies below seemed even hollower than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he counted the stars he would find one too many in the pool.

  “In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping on the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower. For to him, and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things. Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For the young men of that sad time thought that the god always comes from the machine. They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god. IN short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them– atrocious because it was true. All their universe was black with white spots.

  “Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college. The only light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the upper part of the building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and received his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night. Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound. Smith had been at Dr. Eames’s lecture for the first half of the morning, and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second half. He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half. He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was melancholy still. Then, as he was going home to his diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn in to that gentleman’s private house.

  “Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer. Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a European reputation and a bald head.

  “‘I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,’ said Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small, ‘because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise–bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers–’

  “‘All thinkers,’ said Eames, ‘are pessimist thinkers.’

  “After a patch of pause, not the first–for this depressing conversation had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence– the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: ‘It’s all a question of wrong calculation. The moth flies into the candle because he doesn’t happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin–because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness–that they don’t even know how to look for it–is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river. There’s one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!’

  “‘Of course,’ he went on dreamily, ‘one or two men see the sober fact a long way off–they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs mostly try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to destroy themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man that wanders about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the wrong door and come into the right place. He sees things at the right angle. But the common world–’

  “‘Oh, hang the common world!’ said the sullen Smith, letting his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.

  “‘Let’s give it a bad name first,’ said the Professor calmly, ‘and then hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it. So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.’

  “‘Why doesn’t he strike us dead?’ asked the undergraduate abstractedly, plunging his hands into his pockets.

  “‘He is dead himself,’ said the philosopher; ‘that is where he is really enviable.’

  “‘To any one who thinks,’ proceeded Eames, ‘the pleasures of life, trivial and soon tasteless, and bribes to bring us into a torture chamber. We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the... What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.’

  “Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was. Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.

  “‘I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,’ said Smith, with rough tenderness. ‘I’ll put the puppy out of his pain.’

  “Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. ‘Do you mean to kill me?’ he cried.

  “‘It’s not a thing I’d do for every one,’ said Smith with emotion; ‘but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow. I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.’

  “‘Put that thing down,’ shouted the Warden.

  “‘It’ll soon be over, you know,’ said Smith with the air of a sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a compassionate expression.

  “Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of early daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real tr
aces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames’s balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains. With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight. The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little lakes round Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space. They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.

  “‘Hang the world, we said,’ observed Smith, ‘and the world is hanged. “He has hanged the world upon nothing,” says the Bible. Do you like being hanged upon nothing? I’m going to be hanged upon something myself. I’m going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,’ he murmured; ‘never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you. For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express desire.’

  “‘Help!’ cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; ‘help!’

  “‘The puppy struggles,’ said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity, ‘the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and kinder than he,’ and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the upper part of Eames’s bald head.

  “‘Smith,’ said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort of ghastly lucidity, ‘I shall go mad.’

  “‘And so look at things from the right angle,’ observed Smith, sighing gently. ‘Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The only cure is an operation–an operation that is always successful: death.’

  “As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything, with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink. All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings took on different tints: here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof. All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly individual and significant about them, like crests of famous knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last. Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as though hypnotized; and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply. As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry: all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college. The sun rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night. He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.

  “Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might have called to a student to shut a door.

  “‘Let me come off this place,’ he cried; ‘I can’t bear it.’

  “‘I rather doubt if it will bear you,’ said Smith critically; ‘but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you back into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get back to life?’

  “‘I’d give anything to get back,’ replied the unhappy professor.

  “‘Give anything!’ cried Smith; ‘then, blast your impudence, give us a song!’

  “‘What song do you mean?’ demanded the exasperated Eames; ‘what song?’

  “‘A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,’ answered the other gravely. ‘I’ll let you off if you’ll repeat after me the words–

  “‘I thank the goodness and the grace

  That on my birth have smiled.

  And perched me on this curious place,

  A happy English child.’

  “Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly told him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr. Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic statue.

  “‘You are now engaged in public worship,’ remarked Smith severely, ‘and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks on the pond.’

  “‘The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.

  “‘Not forgetting the drakes,’ said Smith sternly. (Eames weakly conceded the drakes.) ‘Not forgetting anything, please. You shall thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and sticks and rags and bones and spotted blinds.’

  “‘All right, all right,’ repeated the victim in despair; ‘sticks and rags and bones and blinds.’

  “‘Spotted blinds, I think we said,’ remarked Smith with a rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a long metallic finger.

  “‘Spotted blinds,’ said Emerson Eames faintly.

  “‘You can’t say fairer than that,’ admitted the younger man, ‘and now I’ll just tell you this to wind up with. If you really were what you profess to be, I don’t see that it would matter to snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff neck and dashed out all your drivelling devil-worshipping brains. But in strict biographical fact you are a very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you like a brother. I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your head so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear), and then we will go in and have some breakfast.’

  “He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor endured with singular firmness, and then said, ‘But don’t fire them all off.’

  “‘Why not’ asked the other buoyantly.

  “‘Keep them,’ asked his companion, ‘for the next man you meet who talks as we were talking.’

  “It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.

  “It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from the ladder,and some little time longer to disentangle himself from the Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively, he rejoined his companion in the late extraordinary scene. He was astonished to find the gigantic Smith heavily shaken, and sitting with his shaggy head on his hands. When addressed, he lifted a very pale face.

  “‘Why, what is the matter?’ asked Eames, whose own nerves had by this time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.

  “‘I must ask your indulgence,’ said Smith, rather brokenly. ‘I must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.’

  “‘YOU have had an escape from death?’ repeated the Professor in not unpardonable irritation. ‘Well, of all the cheek–’

  “‘Oh, don’t you understand, don’t you understand?’ cried the pale young man impatiently. ‘I had to do it, Eames,; I had to prove you wrong or die. When a man’s young, he nearly always has some one whom he thinks the top-water mark of the mind of man–some one who knows all about it, if anybody knows.

  “‘Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. Nobody could comfort me if YOU said there was no comfort. If you really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see. Don’t you see that I HAD to prove you didn’t really mean it?�
�� or else drown myself in the canal.’

  “‘Well,’ said Eames hesitatingly, ‘I think perhaps you confuse–’

  “‘Oh, don’t tell me that!’ cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance of mental pain; ‘don’t tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence with the Will to Live! That’s German, and German is High Dutch, and High Dutch is Double Dutch. The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not “the Will to Live.” What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute. I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses. It was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life, whatever that is. Eames, we’ve been to the brink of death together; won’t you admit I’m right?’

  “‘Yes,’ said Eames very slowly, ‘I think you are right. You shall have a First!’

  “‘Right!’ cried Smith, springing up reanimated. ‘I’ve passed with honours, and now let me go and see about being sent down.’

  “‘You needn’t be sent down,’ said Eames with the quiet confidence of twelve years of intrigue. ‘Everything with us comes from the man on top to the people just round him: I am the man on top, and I shall tell the people round me the truth.’

  “The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window, but he spoke with equal firmness. ‘I must be sent down,’ he said, ‘and the people must not be told the truth.’

  “‘And why not’ asked the other.

  “‘Because I mean to follow your advice,’ answered the massive youth, ‘I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state you and I were in last night–I wish we could even plead drunkenness. I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists–pills for pale people. And in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful surprise– to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as the sunrise; not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be recalled any more than the dying breeze. I don’t want people to anticipate me as a well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast.’