G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  “And this fellow Wimpole—” began Drummond with indignation.

  “This fellow Wimpole,” said Basil Grant, smiling, “will not be an intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the floor.”

  “That fellow,” cried Drummond furiously, “that fellow ought to be in gaol.”

  “Not at all,” said Basil, indulgently; “he ought to be in the Club of Queer Trades.”

  III. THE AWFUL REASON OF THE VICAR’S VISIT

  THE REVOLT of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs. The stud with which I was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as I made the above reflections, was one which I was trying to introduce into my shirt collar when a loud knock came at the door.

  My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me. He and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head to come my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a small and confidential affair at the table of a good but unconventional political lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a third guest, a Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was an authority on chimpanzees. As Basil was an old friend of the hostess and I had never seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he (with his usual social sagacity) might have decided to take me along in order to break the ice. The theory, like all my theories, was complete; but as a fact it was not Basil.

  I was handed a visiting card inscribed: “Rev. Ellis Shorter,” and underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, “Asking the favour of a few moments’ conversation on a most urgent matter.”

  I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on my dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at my entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He flapped a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic black gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration, that he flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed, white-haired, white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy type. He said:

  “I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come—I can only say—I can only say in my defence, that I come—upon an important matter. Pray forgive me.”

  I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.

  “What I have to say,” he said, brokenly, “is so dreadful—it is so dreadful—I have lived a quiet life.”

  I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in time for dinner. But there was something about the old man’s honest air of bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger and more tragic than my own.

  I said gently: “Pray go on.”

  Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old, noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said weakly; “I wouldn’t have come—but for— your friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.”

  “Major Brown!” I said, with some interest.

  “Yes,” said the Reverend Mr. Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid shawl about. “He told me you helped him in a great difficulty—and my difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it’s a matter of life and death.”

  I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. “Will it take long, Mr. Shorter?” I asked. “I have to go out to dinner almost at once.”

  He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.

  “I have no right, Mr. Swinburne—I have no right at all,” he said. “If you have to go out to dinner, you have of course—a perfect right—of course a perfect right. But when you come back—a man will be dead.”

  And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.

  The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this dear, doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.

  “Will you have a cigar?” I said.

  “No thank you,” he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not smoking cigars was a social disgrace.

  “A glass of wine?” I said.

  “No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now,” he repeated with that hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often try to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all night drinking rum-punch. “Not just now, thank you.”

  “Nothing else I can get for you?” I said, feeling genuinely sorry for the well-mannered old donkey. “A cup of tea?”

  I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:

  “I have had such a time, Mr. Swinburne. I am not used to these excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex”—he threw this in with an indescribable airiness of vanity—“I have never known such things happen.”

  “What things happen?” I asked.

  He straightened himself with sudden dignity.

  “As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex,” he said, “I have never been forcibly dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before.”

  “I have never heard of it,” I said, “as among the duties of a clergyman. But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to follow you correctly. Dressed up—as what?”

  “As an old woman,” said the vicar solemnly, “as an old woman.”

  I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic, and I said respectfully:

  “May I ask how it occurred?”

  “I will begin at the beginning,” said Mr. Shorter, “and I will tell my story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and pay certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr. Jervis, the treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs. Arnett, a very earnest church-woman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled (unless my memory misleads me) ‘Eglantine.’ ”

  He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation. He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the detective stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be kept back.

  “I then proceeded,” he went on, with the same maddening conscientiousness of manner, “to Mr. Carr (not Mr. James Carr, of course; Mr. Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss Brett. The Dorcas meetings are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife being unwell, Miss Brett, a new-comer in our village, but very active in church work, had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society is entirely under my wife’s management as a r
ule, and except for Miss Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members of it. I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.

  “When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in these matters of full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and repeat the actual details of a conversation, particularly a conversation which (though inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good work) was one which did not greatly impress the hearer’s mind at the time and was, in fact—er—mostly about socks. I can, however, remember distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with a woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather was very changeable.

  Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted, I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with white hair. The only other figure in the group that caught my attention was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners, silver hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic member of the party; and her views on the subject of pinafores, though expressed with a natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong and advanced. Besides her (although all five ladies were dressed simply in black) it could not be denied that the others looked in some way what you men of the world would call dowdy.

  “After about ten minutes’ conversation I rose to go, and as I did so I heard something which—I cannot describe it—something which seemed to—but I really cannot describe it.”

  “What did you hear?” I asked, with some impatience.

  “I heard,” said the vicar solemnly, “I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl), the following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the spot, and as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them down on a piece of paper. I believe I have it here.” He fumbled in his breast-pocket, bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and programmes of village concerts. “I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James, the following words: ‘Now’s your time, Bill.’ ”

  He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about his facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.

  “This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should address another maiden lady as ‘Bill.’ My experience, as I have said, may be incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in exclusively spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But it seemed to me odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not misunderstand the phrase) I should have been strongly impelled to maintain at the time that the words, ‘Now’s your time, Bill,’ were by no means pronounced with that upper-class intonation which, as I have already said, had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray’s conversation. In fact, the words, ‘Now’s your time, Bill,’ would have been, I fancy, unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.

  “I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more surprised, when looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was only an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended departure.

  “I said genially, ‘I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must really be going. I have—er ’ I stopped here, for the words she had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely businesslike, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I think, natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have not the least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render them phonetically. But she said,” and Mr. Shorter peered short-sightedly at his papers, “she said: ‘Chuck it, fat ’ead,’ and she added something that sounded like, ‘It’s a kop,’ or (possibly) ‘a kopt.’ And then the last cord, either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the mantelpiece, said: ‘Put ’is old ’ead in a bag, Sam, and tie ’im up before you start jawin’. You’ll be kopt yourselves some o’ these days with this way of doin’ things, har lar theater.’

  “A big revolver in her hand”

  “My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but now, alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their strange female freemasonry. I remembered the witches’ Sabbaths. I was just in my absurd light-headedness, trying to remember a line of verse about Diana’s nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from behind. The moment it held me I knew it was not a woman’s arm.

  “Miss Brett—or what I had called Miss Brett—was standing in front of me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face. Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wo no, that is, I saw that instead of being a woman she—he, I mean—that is, it was a man.”

  Mr. Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed with a higher fever of nervousness:

  “As for Miss Mowbray, she—he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her arm—that is she had his arm—round her neck—my neck I mean—and I could not cry out. Miss Brett—that is, Mr. Brett, at least Mr. something who was not Miss Brett—had the revolver pointed at me. The other two ladies—or—er—gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag in the background. It was all clear at last: they were criminals dressed up as women, to kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex. But why? Was it to be Nonconformists?

  “The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ‘’Urry up, ’Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is and let’s get off.’

  “ ‘Curse ’is eyes,’ said Miss Brett—I mean the man with the revolver—‘why should we show ’im the game?’

  “ ‘If you take my advice you bloomin’ well will,’ said the man at the door, whom they called Bill. ‘A man wot knows wot ’e’s doin’ is worth ten wot don’t, even if ’e’s a potty old parson.’

  “ ‘Bill’s right enough,’ said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it had been Miss Mowbray’s). ‘Bring out the picture, ’Arry.’

  “The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other two women—I mean men—were turning over baggage, and asked them for something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room and held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that display, all the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.

  “It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise; but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a photograph. It was a photograph that I had never had taken.

  “I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth, my head and hand, pose
d for a professional photographer. And I had never posed so for any photographer.

  “ ‘Be’old the bloomin’ miracle,’ said the man with the revolver, with ill-timed facetiousness. ‘Parson, prepare to meet your God.’ And with this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that part of the picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair of white whiskers and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait of an old lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand against the woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin is like another. It had required only the whiskers and the collar to make it me in every hair.

  “ ‘Entertainin’, ain’t it?’ said the man described as ’Arry, as he shot the glass back again. ‘Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin’ to the lady. Gratifyin’ to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin’ to us, as bein’ the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel Hawker, the man who’s come to live in these parts, don’t you?’

  “I nodded.

  “ ‘Well,’ said the man ’Arry, pointing to the picture, ‘that’s ’is mother. ’Oo ran to catch ’im when ’e fell? She did,’ and he flung his fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who was exactly like me.

  “ ‘Tell the old gent wot ’e’s got to do and be done with it,’ broke out Bill from the door. ‘Look ’ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain’t goin’ to do you no ’arm. We’ll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as for the old woman’s clothes—why, you’ll look lovely in ’em.’

  “ ‘You ain’t much of a ’and at a description, Bill,’ said the man behind me. ‘Mr. Shorter, it’s like this. We’ve got to see this man Hawker to-night. Maybe he’ll kiss us all and ’ave up the champagne when ’e sees us. Maybe on the other ’and—’e won’t. Maybe ’e’ll be dead when we goes away. Maybe not. But we’ve got to see ’im. Now as you know, ’e shuts ’isself up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don’t know why and we does. The only one as can ever get at ’im is ’is mother. Well, it’s a confounded funny coincidence,’ he said, accenting the penultimate, ‘it’s a very unusual piece of good luck, but you’re ’is mother.’