G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  “If it is true,” said the woman fiercely, “it means that people who have never lived may make an attempt at living.”

  Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the mazed look in his eyes.

  “Is it true?” asked Basil, with burning eyes.

  “Not a bit true,” answered Chadd after a moment’s bewilderment. “Your argument was in three points fallacious.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Grant.

  “Well,” said the professor slowly, “in saying that you could possess a knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from ”

  “Oh! confound Zulu life,” cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. “I mean, have you got the post?”

  “You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts,” he said, opening his eye with childlike wonder. “Oh, yes, I got that. But the real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me since I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it is absolutely impeded by the facts.”

  “ ‘What do you make of that?’ ”

  “I am crushed,” said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor’s sister retired to her room, possibly to laugh, possibly not.

  It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely long and tiresome journey from Shepherd’s Bush to Lambeth. This may be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal, a time, in point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular, seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern carelessness in being really urgent and coercive—a telegram. This he opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man had drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and came round to me in two strides.

  “What do you make of that?” he said, and flattened out the wire in front of me.

  It ran: “Please come at once. James’s mental state dangerous. Chadd.”

  “What does the woman mean?” I said after a pause, irritably. “Those women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he was born.”

  “You are mistaken,” said Grant composedly. “It is true that all sensible women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that, all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don’t put it in telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or God all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at that. If Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman in a post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly certain that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and she can think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly.”

  “It will force us of course,” I said, smiling.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied; “there is a cab-rank near.”

  Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge, through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road. Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.

  “I think you may take my word for it, my friend,” he said; “this is one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilisation.”

  “I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don’t quite see it,” I said. “Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul like a spider’s web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?”

  “It would not be extraordinary in the least,” answered Basil, with placidity. “It would not be extraordinary in the least,” he repeated, “if the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary circumstance to which I referred.”

  “What,” I asked, stamping my foot, “was the extraordinary thing?”

  “The extraordinary thing,” said Basil, ringing the bell, “is that he has not gone mad from excitement.”

  The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three black-clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat rigid with pain. “I think you had better be told first what has happened.”

  Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she continued, in an even and mechanical voice:

  “I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however, without it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said, ‘Were you looking for anything I could get?’ He did not answer, but this constantly happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my question, and still he did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up in his studies that nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him aware of one’s presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really do not know how to describe the sensation which I then had. It seems simply silly, but at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting one’s brain. The fact is, James was standing on one leg.”

  Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.

  “Standing on one leg?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” replied the dead voice of the woman, without an inflection to suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. “He was standing on the left leg and had the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.

  “ ‘James, what is the matter?’ I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened. James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a teetotum the other way. ‘Are you mad?’ I cried. ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ He had come to a standstill, facing me, and was looking at me as he always does, with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When I had spoken he remained a second or two motionless, and then his only reply was to lift his left foot slowly from the floor and describe circles with it in the air. I rushed to the door and shouted for Christina. I will not dwell on the dreadful hours that followed. All three of us talked to him, implored him to speak to us with appeals that might have brought back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop and dance and kick with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs belonged to some one else or were possessed by devils. He has never spoken to us from that time to this.”

  “Where is he now?” I said, getting up in some agitation. “We ought not to leave him alone.”

  “Doctor Colman is with him,” said Miss Chadd calmly. “They are in the garden. Doctor Colman
thought the air would do him good. And he can scarcely go into the street.”

  “James was standing on one leg”

  Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden. It was a small and somewhat snug suburban garden; the flower beds a little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a small, sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I presume Dr. Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with a nervous twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend, listening with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong sunlight gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the night before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have been the identical figure of last night. That one thing was that while the face listened reposefully the legs were industriously dancing like the legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and incredibility to the prodigy— the prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a harlequin. For miracles should always happen in broad daylight. The night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.

  The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat drearily to the window.

  “You know, Adelaide,” she said, “that Mr. Bingham from the Museum is coming again at three.”

  “I know,” said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. “I suppose we shall have to tell him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to us.”

  Grant suddenly turned round. “What do you mean?” he said. “What will you have to tell Mr. Bingham?”

  “You know what I shall have to tell him,” said the professor’s sister, almost fiercely. “I don’t know that we need give it its wretched name. Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to go on like that?” And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the garden, the shining, listening face and the unresting feet.

  Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. “When did you say the British Museum man was coming?” he said.

  “Three o’clock,” said Miss Chadd briefly.

  “Then I have an hour before me,” said Grant, and without another word threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden path drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the broad brim of his hat.

  Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd’s elbow, and said, in a loud familiar voice, “Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our inferiors?”

  The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.

  “Have you converted Dr. Colman to your views?” Basil continued, still in the same loud and lucid tone.

  Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg, his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather sharply. “Shall we go inside, professor?” he said. “Now you have shown me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go in,” and he tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the same time whispering to Grant: “I must ask you not to trouble him with questions. Most risky. He must be soothed.”

  Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:

  “Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour. I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr. Colman, that I shall say very little to him, and that little shall be as soothing as—as syrup.”

  The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.

  “It is rather dangerous for him,” he said, “to be long in this strong sun without his hat. With his bald head, too.”

  “That is soon settled,” said Basil composedly, and took off his own big hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.

  The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for some seconds, with his head on one side, like a bird’s, and then saying, shortly, “All right,” strutted away into the house, where the three Misses Chadd were all looking out from the parlour window on to the garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without moving, and they saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness itself.

  Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding in making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he had done this slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large pencil out of another.

  He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again. Thus they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of turf, the one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a problem, the other leaping and playing like a child.

  After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of him.

  Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his sister had described as being the first of all his antics. And the moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out rigid before him, confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The professor dropped his bent leg, and swinging his weight on to it kicked out the other behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like a Saltire cross, and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into the air. Then before any of the spectators could say a word or even entertain a thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort of jig or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two madmen instead of one.

  They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre. Basil Grant seemed about to turn a cartwheel, when they were frozen in their follies by the steely voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, “Mr. Bingham, of the British Museum.”

  Mr. Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable manners. He was the type of the over-civilised, as Professor Chadd was of the uncivilised pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.

  “They followed each other round and round … one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a problem, the other leaping and playing like a child”

  The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them to the other.

  “Dr. Colman,” said Basil, turning to him, “will you entertain Professor Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr. Bingham, might I have the pleasure of few mo
ments’ private conversation? My name is Grant.”

  Mr. Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful but a trifle bewildered.

  “Miss Chadd will excuse me,” continued Basil easily, “if I know my way about the house.” And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the back door into the parlour.

  “Mr. Bingham,” said Basil, setting a chair for him, “I imagine that Miss Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence.”

  “She has, Mr. Grant,” said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort of compassionate nervousness. “I am more pained than I can say by this dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should have happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of course—really, I don’t know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of course, retain—I sincerely trust he will—his extraordinary valuable intellect. But I am afraid—I am really afraid—that it would not do to have the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts—er—dancing about.”

  “I have a suggestion to make,” said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his chair, drawing it up to the table.

  “I am delighted, of course,” said the gentleman from the British Museum, coughing and drawing up his chair also.

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:

  “My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume, through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd £800 a year until he stops dancing.”