G K Chesterton- The Dover Reader

by G. K. Chesterton

  “And now, gentlemen,” he said, “since you have got your own way, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us what the deuce all this is?”

  “This,” said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive, “this is what we call the survival of the fittest.”

  Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the later phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he sang out quite coolly:

  “Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.”

  “All right,” said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way in an armchair. “Don’t hurry for us,” he said, glancing round at the litter of the room, “we have all the illustrated papers.”

  Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil’s voice continuing conversationally:

  “And now, Mr. Burrows,” he said, settling himself sociably in the chair, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on with that amusing argument. I’m sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor, and, as I told you before, I’ve no more notion why you are there than the man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public.”

  “Precisely,” said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. “I hold that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can be …”

  “This is what we call the survival of the fittest”

  And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I noticed that Mr. Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy. Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a slight degree of resentment. Mr. Burrows, however, was all philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper into the underworld of that mysterious house, which perhaps appeared to us somewhat more Tartarian than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.

  The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the servants’ hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.

  Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an abyss:

  “Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are free.”

  For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.

  “Has anybody got a match?” said Rupert grimly. “I fancy we have come pretty near the end of this business.”

  I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical—an iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.

  At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelean black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one place; at the place where Rupert’s knife had torn a great opening in the wood about an hour before.

  “Madam,” said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, “permit me to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue.”

  The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:

  “Rescue? Where is Mr. Greenwood? Where is Mr. Burrows? Did you say you had rescued me?”

  “Yes, madam,” said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. “We have very satisfactorily dealt with Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Burrows. We have settled affairs with them very satisfactorily.”

  The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.

  “What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?” she cried.

  “We persuaded them, my dear madam,” said Rupert, laughing, “by knocking them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?”

  To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat by the window.

  “Do I understand,” she said, with the air of a person about to begin knitting, “that you have knocked down Mr. Burrows and tied him up?”

  “We have,” said Rupert proudly; “we have resisted their oppression and conquered it.”

  “Oh, thanks,” answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.

  A considerable pause followed.

  “The road is quite clear for you, madam,” said Rupert pleasantly.

  The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us for an instant.

  “But what about Greenwood and Burrows?” she said. “What did I understand you to say had become of them?”

  “They are lying on the floor upstairs,” said Rupert, chuckling. “Tied hand and foot.”

  “Well, that settles it,” said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into her seat again, “I must stop where I am.”

  Rupert looked bewildered.

  “Stop where you are?” he said. “Why should you stop any longer where you are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserablecell?”

  “The question rather is,” said the old lady, with composure, “what power can force me to go anywhere else?”

  We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both. At last I said, “Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you here?”

  “I suppose you don’t intend to tie me up,” she said, “and carry me off? I certainly shall not go otherwise.”

  “But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation,

  “we heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”

  “Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive grimly. “I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”

  “Some sense of honour?” repeated Rupert, and the last light of intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with rolling eyes.

  He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. “Can we do nothing for you, madam?” I said forlornly.

  “Why,” said the lady, “if you are particularly anxious to do me a little favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.”

  Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of t
he sitting-room and scene of battle.

  “Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,” Mr. Burrows was saying, lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; “but we must consider the matter as it appears to our senses. The origin of morality …”

  “Basil,” cried Rupert, gasping, “she won’t come out.”

  “Who won’t come out?” asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in an argument.

  “The lady downstairs,” replied Rupert. “The lady who was locked up. She won’t come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these fellows loose.”

  “And a jolly sensible suggestion,” cried Basil, and with a bound he was on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds with hands and teeth.

  “A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr. Greenwood.”

  In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.

  “Well,” said Basil, in his cheeriest way, “I think we must be getting away. We’ve so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we’ve made ourselves at home. Good-night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert.”

  “Basil,” said Rupert desperately, “for God’s sake come and see what you can make of the woman downstairs. I can’t get the discomfort out of my mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these gentlemen won’t mind perhaps …”

  “No, no,” cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. “No, no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coalhole. Make a tour of the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you.”

  This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to have gone mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the end of the day and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the sky after rain, and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned upon me. But this day’s work was destined to end in confusion worse confounded. Before we left that house, ten minutes afterwards, one half-witted touch was added which rolled all our minds in cloud. If Rupert’s head had suddenly fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun to sprout out of Greenwood’s shoulders, we could scarcely have been more suddenly stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We had to go to bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it and let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As will be seen, it was not until months afterwards that by another accident and in another way it was explained. For the present I only state what happened.

  When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading, the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison again closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as pitch. The old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas; she seemed to have a weird preference for sitting in the dark.

  Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady turned her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up and swept a sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this subservience had been offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in this subservience, and desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they received it. To my surprise they did not seem to have seen it at all; Burrows was paring his nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the back of the group and had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing fact became apparent. It was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the group, the golden gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His face wore an expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of a very grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It was he who had acknowledged the lady’s obeisance. And it was he, beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been directed.

  “So I hear,” he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, “I hear, madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without success.”

  “No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you,” answered the lady with a high colour. “But you have not found me guilty of treachery.”

  “I willingly attest it, madam,” replied Basil, in the same level tones, “and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of these gentlemen. But you know that you can safely leave it at mine.”

  The captive made another reverence. “I have never complained of your injustice,” she said. “I need scarcely say what I think of your generosity.”

  And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room, Basil holding the door open for her.

  He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. “This will be a relief to you,” he said.

  “Yes, it will,” replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like a sphinx.

  “ ‘Basil,’ said Rupert, ‘I always thought you were my brother. But are you a man? I mean—are you only a man?’ ”

  We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as if we had fallen into it from some high tower.

  “Basil,” said Rupert at last, in a weak voice. “I always thought you were my brother. But are you a man? I mean—are you only a man?”

  “At present,” replied Basil, “my mere humanity is proved by one of the most unmistakable symbols—hunger. We are too late for the theatre in Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes the green omnibus!” and he had leaped on it before we could speak.

  As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less a thing than the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and headquarters of the source of all our joys and sorrows—the Club of Queer Trades. I should expand this story for ever if I explained how ultimately we ran this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding of the subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer Trades.

  I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger one than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and hospitable dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces that I knew. There was Mr. Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated between the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always Professional Detainers. There was P. G. Northover, founder of the Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented the Dancing Language.

  As we entered all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their chairs, and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat gaped at us like a missing tooth.

  “The president’s not here,” said Mr. P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to Professor Chadd.

  “N-no,” said that philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness. “I can’t imagine where he is.”

  “Good heavens,” said Mr. Montmorency, jumping up, “I really feel a little nervous. I’ll go and see.” And he ran out of the room.

  An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.

  “Mr. Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent”

  “ ‘The President’s not here’ ”

  “He’s there, gentlemen—he’s there all right—he�
�s coming in now,” he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who was the first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of madmen; what fantastic was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an expectation?

  Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and in evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.

  How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses. Hors-d’oeuvres sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort of ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was over. The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon being made of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was made of the moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and eating and drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he was there, the king of these capering idiots.

  At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his feet amid a surge of song and cheers.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “it is a custom in this society that the president for the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast or sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of his trade. We then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It is my business, as the senior member, to open by stating my claim to membership of this club. Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my best in that capacity to do justice and to administer the law. But it gradually dawned on me that in my work, as it was, I was not touching even the fringe of justice. I was seated in the seat of the mighty, I was robed in scarlet and ermine; nevertheless, I held a small and lowly and futile post. I had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and my red and gold was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me taut and passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this grew on me, there grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had to say. Then came the time when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and melted from public life.”