Four Faultless Felons E-Book

G.K. Chesterton

• Herausgeber: Fractal Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Timeless Classic
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 354

Beschreibung

Four Faultless Felons includes The Moderate Murderer, The Honest Quack, The Ecstatic Thief, and The Loyal Traitor. Chesterton's protagonist's faultless crimes include: murder, fraud, theft, and treason. They are motivated by good intentions of course, by altruism and virtues.

Leseprobe

G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

Four Faultless Felons

New Edition

LONDON ∙ NEW YORK ∙ TORONTO ∙ SAO PAULO ∙ MOSCOW

PARIS ∙ MADRID ∙ BERLIN ∙ ROME ∙ MEXICO CITY ∙ MUMBAI ∙ SEOUL ∙ DOHA

TOKYO ∙ SYDNEY ∙ CAPE TOWN ∙ AUCKLAND ∙ BEIJING

New Edition

Published by Fractal Press

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www.fractal-press.co.uk

This Edition first published in 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fractal Press

Design and Artwork © 2014 www.urban-pic.co.uk

Images and Illustrations © 2014 Stocklibrary.org

All Rights Reserved.

Contents

PROLOGUE OF THE PRESSMAN

THE MODERATE MURDERER

I. — THE MAN WITH THE GREEN UMBRELLA

II. — THE BOY WHO MADE A SCENE

III. — THE MAN WHO COULD NOT HATE

IV. — THE DETECTIVE AND THE PARSON

V. — THE THEORY OF MODERATE MURDER

VI. — THE THING THAT REALLY HAPPENED

THE HONEST QUACK

I. — THE PROLOGUE OF THE TREE

II. — THE MAN WITH THE BLACK BAG

III. — THE TRESPASSER IN THE GARDEN

IV. — THE DISEASE OF DUODIAPSYCHOSIS

V. — THE SECRET OF THE TREE

VI. — THE EPILOGUE OF THE GARDEN

THE ECSTATIC THIEF

I. — THE NAME OF NADOWAY

II. — THE BURGLAR AND THE BROOCH

III. — A QUEER REFORMATION

IV. — THE PROBLEMS OF DETECTIVE PRICE

V. — THE THIEF ON TRIAL

VI. — THE CLEANSING OF THE NAME

THE LOYAL TRAITOR

I. — THE MENACE OF THE WORD

II. — THE PROCESSION OF THE PLOTTERS

III. — THE PRINCESS INTERVENES

IV. — THE UNREASONABLENESS OF WOMAN

V. — THE TERMS OF A TRAITOR

VI. — THE SPEAKING OF THE WORD

EPILOGUE OF THE PRESSMAN

PROLOGUE OF THE PRESSMAN

Mr. Asa Lee Pinion, of the Chicago Comet, had crossed half of America, the whole of the Atlantic, and eventually even Piccadilly Circus, in pursuit of the notable, if not notorious figure of Count Raoul de Marillac. Mr. Pinion wanted to get what is called “a story”; a story to put in his paper. He did get a story, but he did not put it in his paper. It was too tall a story, even for the Comet. Perhaps the metaphor is true in more ways than one, and the fable was tall like a church-spire or a tower among the stars: beyond comprehension as well as belief. Anyhow, Mr. Pinion decided not to risk his readers’ comments. But that is no reason why the present writer, writing for more exalted, spiritual and divinely credulous readers, should imitate his silence.

Really, the anecdote he heard was quite incredible: and Mr. Pinion was not intolerant. While the Count was painting the town red and himself black, it was quite possible to believe that he was not so black as he was painted. After all, his extravagance and luxury, however ostentatious, did no particular harm to anybody but himself; and if he associated with the dissipated and degraded, he had never been known to interfere with the innocent or the reputable. But while it was credible enough that the nobleman was not so black as he was painted, he certainly could not be quite so white as he was painted, in the wild story that was told that evening. The story came from a friend of the Count’s, much too friendly a friend, thought Mr. Pinion, friendly to the point of feeble-mindedness. He supposed it must be a delusion or a hoax; anyhow he did not put it into his paper. Yet it is because of this highly improbable anecdote that the Count de Marillac stands at the opening of this book, to introduce the four stories which were put forth as parallels to his own.

But there was one fact which struck the journalist as odd even at the beginning. He understood well enough that it would be difficult to catch the Count anywhere, as he whirled from one social engagement to another, in the manner appropriately called “fast”. And he was not offended when Marillac said he could only spare ten minutes at his London club before going on to a theatrical first-night and other ensuing festivities. During that ten minutes, however, Marillac was quite polite, answered the rather superficial society questions which the Comet wanted answered, and very genially introduced the journalist to three or four club companions or cronies who were standing about him in the lounge, and who continued to stand about after the Count himself had made his beaming and flashing exit.

“I suppose,” said one of them, “that the naughty old man has gone to see the naughty new play with all the naughty new people.”

“Yes,” grunted a big man standing in front of the fire. “He’s gone with the naughtiest person of all, the author, Mrs. Prague. Authoress, I suppose she’d call herself—being only cultured and not educated.”

“He always goes to the first night of those plays,” assented the other. “P’raps he thinks there won’t be a second night, if the police raid the place.”

“What play is it?” asked the American in a gentle voice. He was a quiet little man with a very long head and a refined falcon profile; he was much less loud and casual than the Englishmen.

“Naked Souls,” said the first man with a faint groan. “Dramatized version of the world-shaking novel ‘Pan’s Pipes.’ Grapples grimly with the facts of life.”

“Also bold, breezy and back to Nature,” said the man by the fire. “We hear a lot just now about Pan’s Pipes. They seem to me a little too like drain-pipes.”

“You see,” said the other, “Mrs. Prague is so very Modern, she has to go back to Pan. She says she cannot bear to believe that Pan is dead.”

“I think,” said the large man, with a touch of heavy violence, “that Pan is not only dead but rotting and stinking in the street.”

It was the four friends of Marillac who puzzled Mr. Pinion. They were obviously rather intimate friends, and yet they were not, on the whole, of the sort likely to be even acquaintances. Marillac himself was much what might have been expected, rather more restless and haggard than his handsome portraits might have implied, a thing likely enough with his late hours and his advancing years. His curly hair was still dark and thick, but his pointed grey beard was whitening fast; his eyes were a little hollow, and had a more anxious expression than could be inferred, at a distance, from his buoyant gestures and rapid walk. All that was quite in character, but the tone of the group was different. One figure alone out of the four seemed in some sense of Marillac’s world, having something of the carriage of a military officer, with that fine shade that suggests a foreign officer. He had a clean-shaven, regular and very impassive face; he was sitting down when he bowed politely to the stranger, but something in the bow suggested that, standing up, he would have clicked his heels. The others were quite English and quite different. One of them was the very big man, with big shoulders bowed but powerful and a big head not yet bald but striped with rather thin brown hair. But the arresting thing about him was that indescribable suggestion of dust or cobwebs that belongs to a strong man leading a sedentary life, possibly scientific or scholarly, but certainly obscure, in its method if not its effect; the sort of middle-class man with a hobby, who seems to have been dug out of it with a spade. It was hard to imagine a more complete contradiction to such a meteor of fashion as the Count. The man next him, though more alert, was equally solid and respectable and free from fashionable pretensions; a short, square man with a square face and spectacles, who looked like what he was, an ordinary busy suburban general practitioner. The fourth of Marillac’s incongruous intimates was quite frankly shabby. Grey seedy clothes hung limply on his lean figure, and his dark hair and rather ragged beard could, at the best, be only excused as Bohemian. He had very remarkable eyes, sunk very deep in his head and yet, by a paradox, standing out like signals. The visitor found himself continually drawn to them, as if they were magnets.

But, all together, the group bothered and bewildered him. It was not merely a difference of social class, it was an atmosphere of sobriety and even of solid work and worth, which seemed to belong to another world. The four men in question were friendly in a modest and even embarrassed manner; they fell into conversation with the journalist as with any ordinary equal in a tram or a tube, and when, about an hour later, they asked him to share their dinner at the club, he had no such sense of strain as he might have felt in facing one of the fabulous Luculline banquets of their friend the Count de Marillac.

For however seriously Marillac might or might not be taking the serious drama of Sex and Science, there was no doubt that he would take the dinner even more seriously. He was famous as an epicure of almost the classic and legendary sort, and all the gourmets of Europe reverenced his reputation. The little man with the spectacles glanced at this fact, indeed, as they sat down to dinner:

“Hope you can put up with our simple fare, Mr. Pinion,” he said. “You’d have had a much more carefully selected menu if Marillac had been here.”

The American reassured him with polite expressions about the club dinner; but added:

“I suppose it is true that he does make rather an art of dining?”

“Oh, yes,” said the man in spectacles. “Always has all the right things at the wrong times. That’s the ideal, I suppose.”

“I suppose he takes a lot of trouble?” said Pinion.

“Yes,” said the other. “He chooses his meals very carefully. Not carefully from my point of view. But then I’m a doctor.”

Pinion could not keep his eyes off the magnetic eyes of the man with the shabby clothes and shaggy hair. Just now the man was gazing across the table with a curious intentness, and in the ensuing silence, he suddenly intervened.

“Everybody knows he’s very particular in choosing his dinner. But I bet not one man in a million knows the principle on which he chooses it.”

“You must remember,” said Pinion, with his soft accent, “that I am a journalist, and I should like to be the one man in a million.”

The man opposite looked at him steadily and rather strangely for a moment, and then said:

“I have half a mind. . . . Look here, have you any human curiosity as well as journalistic curiosity? I mean, would the one man like to know, even if the million never knew?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the journalist, “I have plenty of curiosity, even about things I am told in confidence. But I can’t quite see why Marillac’s taste in champagne and ortolans should be so very confidential.”

“Well,” answered the other gravely, “why do you think he chooses them?”

“I guess I’ve got a bromide mind,” said the American, “but I should rather suspect him of choosing the things he likes.”

“Au contraire, as the other gourmet said when asked if he lunched on the boat.”

The man with the peculiar eyes broke off from his flippant speech, plunged for a few moments into profound silence, and then resumed in so different a tone that it was like another man suddenly speaking at the table.

“Every age has its bigotry, which is blind to some particular need of human nature; the Puritans to the need for merriment, the Manchester School to the need for beauty, and so on. There is a need in man, or at least in many men, which it is not fashionable to admit or allow for in these days. Most people have had a touch of it in the more serious emotions of youth; in a few men it burns like a flame to the last, as it does here. Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has been blamed for imposing it, but in fact, it rather regulated and even restrained the passion than forced it. It exists in all religions, to a wild and frantic extent in some of the religions of Asia. There men hack themselves with knives or hang themselves on hooks, or walk through life with withered arms rigidly uplifted, crucified upon empty air. It is the appetite for what one does not like. Marillac has it.”

“What on earth—” began the startled journalist, but the other continued:

“In short, it is what people call Asceticism, and one of the modern mistakes is not allowing for its real existence in rare but quite real people. To live a life of incessant austerity and self-denial, as Marillac does, is surrounded with extraordinary difficulties and misunderstandings in modern society. Society can understand some particular Puritan fad, like Prohibition, especially if it is imposed on other people, above all, on poor people. But a man like Marillac, imposing on himself, not abstinence from wine, but abstinence from worldly pleasures of every sort. . . .”

“Excuse me,” said Pinion in his most courteous tones, “I trust I’d never have the incivility to suggest that you have gone mad, so I must ask you to tell me candidly whether I have.”

“Most people,” replied the other, “would answer that it is Marillac who has gone mad. Perhaps he has; anyhow, if the truth were known, he would certainly be thought so. But it isn’t only to avoid being put in a lunatic asylum that he hides his hermit’s ideal by pretending to be a man of pleasure. It’s part of the whole idea, in its only tolerable form. The worst of those Eastern fakirs hung on hooks is that they are too conspicuous. It may make them just a little vain. I don’t deny that Stylites and some of the first hermits may have been touched with the same danger. But our friend is a Christian anchorite; and understands the advice, ‘When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.’ He is not seen of men to fast. On the contrary, he is seen of men to feast. Only, don’t you see, he has invented a new kind of fasting.”

Mr. Pinion of the Comet suddenly laughed, a curt and startled laugh, for he was very quick and had already guessed the joke.

“You don’t really mean—” he began.

“Well, it’s quite simple, isn’t it?” replied his informant. “He feasts on all the most luxurious and expensive things that he doesn’t like. Especially on the things that he simply detests. Under that cover, nobody can possibly accuse him of virtue. He remains impenetrably protected behind a rampart of repulsive oysters and unwelcome aperitifs. In short, the hermit must now hide anywhere but in the hermitage. He generally hides in the latest luxurious gilded hotels, because that’s where they have the worst cooking.”

“This is a very extraordinary tale,” said the American, arching his eyebrows.

“You begin to see the idea?” said the other. “If he has twenty different hors-d’œuvres brought to him and takes the olives, who is to know that he hates olives? If he thoughtfully scans the whole wine-list and eventually selects a rather recondite Hock, who will guess that his whole soul rises in disgust at the very thought of Hock: and that he knows that’s the nastiest—even of Hocks? Whereas, if he were to demand dried peas or a mouldy crust at the Ritz, he would probably attract attention.”

“I never can quite see,” said the man in spectacles restlessly, “what is the good of it all.”

The other man lowered his magnetic eyes and looked down with some embarrassment. At last he said:

“I think I can see it, but I don’t think I can say it. I had a touch of it myself once, only in one special direction, and I found it almost impossible to explain to anybody. Only there is one mark of the real mystic and ascetic of this sort; that he only wants to do it to himself. He wants everybody else to have what wine or smokes they want and will ransack the Ritz for it. The moment he wants to dragoon the others, the mystic sinks into a mire of degradation and becomes the moral reformer.”

There was a pause, and then the journalist said suddenly:

“But, look here, this won’t do. It isn’t only wasting his money on wining and dining that has got Marillac a bad name. It’s the whole thing. Why is he such a fan for these rotten erotic plays and things? Why does he go about with a woman like Mrs. Prague? That doesn’t seem like a hermit, anyhow.”

The man facing Pinion smiled and the heavier man on his right half turned with a sort of grunt of laughter.

“Well,” he said, “it’s pretty plain you’ve never been about with Mrs. Prague.”

“Why, what do you mean?” asked Pinion; and this time there was something like a general laugh.

“Some say she’s his Maiden Aunt and it’s his duty to be kind to her,” began the first man, but the second man interrupted him gruffly:

“Why do you call her a Maiden Aunt when she looks like a—”

“Quite so, quite so,” said the first man rather hastily, “and why ‘looks like’—if it comes to that?”

“But her conversation!” groaned his friend. “And Marillac stands it for hours on end!”

“And her play!” assented the other. “Marillac sits through five mortal acts of it. If that isn’t being a martyr—”

“Don’t you see?” cried the shabby man with something like excitement. “The Count is a cultivated and even learned man; also he is a Latin and logical to the point of impatience. And yet he sticks it. He endures five or six acts of a Really Modern Intellectual Incisive Drama. The First Act in which she says that Woman will no longer be put on a pedestal; the Second Act in which Woman will no longer be put under a glass case; the Third Act in which Woman will no longer be a plaything for man, and the Fourth in which she will no longer be a chattel; all the clichés. And he still has two acts before him, in which she will not be something else, will not be a slave in the home or an outcast flung from the home. He’s seen it six times without turning a hair; you can’t even see him grind his teeth. And Mrs. Prague’s conversation! How her first husband could never understand, and her second husband seemed as if he might understand, only her third husband carried her off as if there was real understanding—and so on, as if there were anything to be understood. You know what an utterly egotistical fool is like. And he suffers even those fools gladly.”

“In fact,” put in the big man in his brooding manner, “you might say he has invented the Modern Penance. The Penance of Boredom. Hair-shirts and hermits’ caves in a howling wilderness would not be so horrible to modern nerves as that.”

“By your account,” ruminated Pinion, “I’ve been chasing a pleasure-seeker tripping on the light fantastic toe and only found a hermit standing on his head.” After a silence he said abruptly, “Is this really true? How did you find it out?”

“That’s rather a long story,” replied the man opposite. “The truth is that Marillac allows himself one feast in the year, on Christmas Day, and eats and drinks what he really likes. I found him drinking beer and eating tripe and onions in a quiet pub in Hoxton, and somehow we were forced into confidential conversation. You will understand, of course, that this is a confidential conversation.”

“I certainly shan’t print it,” answered the journalist. “I should be regarded as a lunatic if I did. People don’t understand that sort of lunacy nowadays, and I rather wonder you take to it so much yourself.”

“Well, I put my own case before him, you see,” answered the other. “In a small way it was a little like his own. And then I introduced him to my friends, and so he became a sort of President of our little club.”

“Oh,” said Pinion rather blankly, “I didn’t know you were a club.”

“Well, we are four men with a common bond at least. We have all had occasion, like Marillac, to look rather worse than we were.”

“Yes,” grunted the large man rather sourly, “we’ve all been Misunderstood. Like Mrs. Prague.”

“The Club of Men Misunderstood is rather more cheerful than that, however,” continued his friend. “We are all pretty jolly here, considering that our reputations have been blasted by black and revolting crimes. The truth is we have devoted ourselves to a new sort of detective story—or detective service if you like. We do not hunt for crimes but for concealed virtues. Sometimes, as in Marillac’s case, they are very artfully concealed. As you will doubtless be justified in retorting, we conceal our own virtues with brilliant success.”

The journalist’s head began to go round a little, though he thought himself pretty well accustomed both to crazy and criminal surroundings. “But I thought you said,” he objected, “that your reputations were blasted with crime. What sort of crime?”

“Well, mine was murder,” said the man next to him. “The people who blasted me did it because they disapproved of murder, apparently. It’s true I was rather a failure at murder, as at everything else.”

Pinion’s gaze wandered in some bewilderment to the next man who answered cheerfully:

“Mine was only a common fraud. A professional fraud, too, the sort that gets you kicked out of your profession sometimes. Rather like Dr. Cook’s sham discovery of the North Pole.”

“What does all this mean?” asked Pinion; and he looked inquiringly at the man opposite, who had done so much of the explaining so far.

“Oh, theft,” said the man opposite, indifferently; “the charge on which I was actually arrested was petty larceny.”

There was a profound silence, which seemed to settle in a mysterious manner, like a gathering cloud, on the figure of the fourth member, who had not spoken so far a single word. He sat erect in his rather stiff, foreign fashion; his wooden, handsome face was unchanged and his lips had never moved even for so much as a murmur. But now, when the sudden and deep silence seemed to challenge him, his face seemed to harden from wood to stone and when he spoke at last, his foreign accent seemed something more than alien, as if it were almost inhuman.

“I have committed the Unpardonable Sin,” he said. “For what sin did Dante reserve the last and lowest hell; the Circle of Ice?”

Still no one spoke; and he answered his own question in the same hollow tone:

“Treason. I betrayed the four companions of my party, and gave them up to the Government for a bribe.”

Something turned cold inside the sensitive stranger, and for the first time he really felt the air around him sinister and strange. The stillness continued for another half minute, and then all the four men burst out into a great uproar of laughter.

The stories they told, to justify their boasts or confessions, are here retold in a different fashion, as they appeared to those on the outskirts rather than the centre of the events. But the journalist, who liked to collect all the odd things of life, was interested enough to record them, and then afterwards recast them. He felt he had really got something, if not exactly what he had expected, out of his pursuit of the dashing and extravagant Count Raoul de Marillac.

THE MODERATE MURDERER

I. — THE MAN WITH THE GREEN UMBRELLA

The new Governor was Lord Tallboys, commonly called Top-hat Tallboys, because of his attachment to that uncanny erection, which he continued to carry balanced on his head as calmly among the palm-trees of Egypt as among the lamp-posts of Westminster. Certainly he carried it calmly enough in lands where few crowns were safe from toppling. The district he had come out to govern may here be described, with diplomatic vagueness, as a strip on the edge of Egypt and called for our convenience Polybia. It is an old story now; but one which many people had reason to remember for many years, and at the time it was an imperial event. One Governor was killed, another Governor was nearly killed, but in this story we are concerned only with one catastrophe, and that was rather a personal and even private catastrophe.

Top-hat Tallboys was a bachelor and yet he brought a family with him. He had a nephew and two nieces of whom one, as it happened, had married the Deputy Governor of Polybia, the man who had been called to rule during the interregnum after the murder of the previous ruler. The other niece was unmarried; her name was Barbara Traill, and she may well be the first figure to cross the stage of this story.

For indeed she was rather a solitary and striking figure, raven dark and rich in colouring with a very beautiful but rather sullen profile, as she crossed the sandy spaces and came under the cover of one long low wall which alone threw a strip of shadow from the sun, which was sloping towards the desert horizon. The wall itself was a quaint example of the patchwork character of that borderland of East and West. It was actually a line of little villas, built for clerks and small officials, and thrown out as by a speculative builder whose speculations spread to the ends of the earth. It was a strip of Streatham amid the ruins of Heliopolis. Such oddities are not unknown, when the oldest countries are turned into the newest colonies. But in this case the young woman, who was not without imagination, was conscious of a quite fantastic contrast. Each of these dolls’ houses had its toy shrubs and plants and its narrow oblong of back garden running down to the common and continuous garden wall; and it was just outside this wall that there ran the rough path, fringed with a few hoary and wrinkled olives. Outside the fringe there faded away into infinity the monstrous solitude of sand. Only there could still be detected on that last line of distance a faint triangular shape, a sort of mathematical symbol whose unnatural simplicity has moved all poets and pilgrims for five thousand years. Anyone seeing it really for the first time, as the girl did, can hardly avoid uttering a cry: “The Pyramids!”

Almost as she said it a voice said in her ear, not loud but with alarming clearness and very exact articulation: “The foundations were traced in blood and in blood shall they be traced anew. These things are written for our instruction.”

It has been said that Barbara Traill was not without imagination; it would be truer to say that she had rather too much. But she was quite certain she had not imagined the voice, though she certainly could not imagine where it came from. She appeared to be absolutely alone on the little path which ran along the wall and led to the gardens round the Governorate. Then she remembered the wall itself, and looking sharply over her shoulder, she fancied she saw for one moment a head peering out of the shadow of a sycamore, which was the only tree of any size for some distance, since she had left the last of the low sprawling olives two hundred yards behind. Whatever it was, it had instantly vanished, and somehow she suddenly felt frightened, more frightened at its disappearance than its appearance. She began to hurry along the path to her uncle’s residence at a pace that was a little like a run. It was probably through this sudden acceleration of movement that she seemed to become aware, rather abruptly, that a man was marching steadily in front of her along the same track towards the gates of the Governorate.

He was a very large man, and seemed to take up the whole of the narrow path. She had something of the sensation, with which she was already slightly acquainted, of walking behind a camel through the narrow and crooked cracks of the Eastern town. But this man planted his feet as firmly as an elephant; he walked, one might say, even with a certain pomp, as if he were in a procession. He wore a long frock-coat and his head was surmounted by a tower of scarlet, a very tall red fez, rather taller than the top-hat of Lord Tallboys. The combination of the red Eastern cap and the black Western clothes is common enough among the Effendi class in those countries. But somehow it seemed novel and incongruous in this case, for the man was very fair and had a big blond beard blown about in the breeze. He might have been a model for the idiots who talk of the Nordic type of European, but somehow he did not look like an Englishman. He carried hooked on one finger a rather grotesque green umbrella or parasol, which he twirled idly like a trinket. As he was walking slower and slower and Barbara was walking fast and wanted to walk faster, she could hardly repress an exclamation of impatience and something like a request for room to pass. The large man with the beard immediately faced round and stared at her; then he lifted a monocle and fixed it in his eye and instantly smiled his apologies. She realized that he must be short-sighted and that she had been a mere blur to him a moment before, but there was something else in the change of his face and manner, something that she had seen before, but to which she could not put a name.

He explained, with the most formal courtesy, that he was going to leave a note for an official at the Governorate, and there was really no reason for her to refuse him credence or conversation. They walked a little way together, talking of things in general, and she had not exchanged more than a few sentences before she realized that she was talking to a remarkable man.

We hear much in these days about the dangers of innocence, much that is false and a little that is true. But the argument is almost exclusively applied to sexual innocence. There is a great deal that ought to be said about the dangers of political innocence. That most necessary and most noble virtue of patriotism is very often brought to despair and destruction, quite needlessly and prematurely, by the folly of educating the comfortable classes in a false optimism about the record and security of the Empire. Young people like Barbara Traill have often never heard a word about the other side of the story, as it would be told by Irishmen or Indians or even French Canadians, and it is the fault of their parents and their papers if they often pass abruptly from a stupid Britishism to an equally stupid Bolshevism. The hour of Barbara Traill was come, though she probably did not know it.

“If England keeps her promises,” said the man with the beard, frowning, “there is still a chance that things may be quiet.”

And Barbara had answered, like a schoolboy:

“England always keeps her promises.”

“The Waba have not noticed it,” he answered with an air of triumph.

The omniscient are often ignorant. They are often especially ignorant of ignorance. The stranger imagined that he was uttering a very crushing repartee, as perhaps he was, to anybody who knew what he meant. But Barbara had never heard of the Waba. The newspapers had seen to that.

“The British Government,” he was saying, “definitely pledged itself two years ago to a complete scheme of local autonomy. If it is a complete scheme, all will be well. If Lord Tallboys has come out here with an incomplete scheme, a compromise, it will be very far from well. I shall be very sorry for everybody, but especially for my English friends.”

She answered with a young and innocent sneer, “Oh yes—I suppose you are a great friend of the English.”

“Yes,” he replied calmly. “A friend: but a candid friend.”

“Oh, I know all about that sort,” she said with hot sincerity. “I know what they mean by a candid friend. I’ve always found it meant a nasty, sneering, sneaking, treacherous friend.”

He seemed stung for an instant and answered, “Your politicians have no need to learn treachery from the Egyptians.” Then he added abruptly: “Do you know on Lord Jaffray’s raid they shot a child? Do you know anything at all? Do you even know how England tacked on Egypt to her Empire?”

“England has a glorious Empire,” said the patriot stoutly.

“England had a glorious Empire,” he said. “So had Egypt.”

They had come, somewhat symbolically, to the end of their common path and she turned away indignantly to the gate that led into the private gardens of the Governor. As she did so he lifted his green umbrella and pointed with a momentary gesture at the dark line of the desert and the distant Pyramid. The afternoon had already reddened into evening, and the sunset lay in long bands of burning crimson across the purple desolation of that dry inland sea.

“A glorious Empire,” he said. “An Empire on which the sun never sets. Look . . . the sun is setting in blood.”

She went through the iron gate like the wind and let it clang behind her. As she went up the avenue towards the inner gardens, she lost a little of her impatient movement and began to trail along in the rather moody manner which was more normal to her. The colours and shadows of that quieter scene seemed to close about her; this place was for the present her nearest approach to home, and at the end of the long perspective of gaily coloured garden walks, she could see her sister Olive picking flowers.

The sight soothed her; but she was a little puzzled about why she should need any soothing. She had a deeply disquieting sense of having touched something alien and terrible, something fierce and utterly foreign, as if she had stroked some strange wild beast of the desert. But the gardens about her and the house beyond had already taken on a tone or tint indescribably English, in spite of the recent settlement and the African sky. And Olive was so obviously choosing flowers to put into English vases or to decorate English dinner-tables, with decanters and salted almonds.

But as she drew nearer to that distant figure, it grew more puzzling. The blossoms grasped in her sister’s hand looked like mere ragged and random handfuls, torn away as a man lying on the turf would idly tear out grass, when he is abstracted or angry. A few loose stalks lay littered on the path; it seemed as if the heads had been merely broken off as if by a child. Barbara did not know why she took in all these details with a slow and dazed eye, before she looked at the central figure they surrounded. Then Olive looked up and her face was ghastly. It might have been the face of Medea in the garden, gathering the poisonous flowers.

II. — THE BOY WHO MADE A SCENE

Barbara Traill was a girl with a good deal of the boy about her. This is very commonly said about modern heroines. None the less, the present heroine would be a very disappointing modern heroine. For, unfortunately, the novelists who call their heroines boyish obviously know nothing whatever about boys. The girl they depict, whether we happen to regard her as a bright young thing or a brazen little idiot, is at any rate in every respect the complete contrary of a boy. She is sublimely candid; she is slightly shallow; she is uniformly cheerful; she is entirely unembarrassed; she is everything that a boy is not. But Barbara really was rather like a boy. That is, she was rather shy, obscurely imaginative, capable of intellectual friendships and at the same time of emotional brooding over them; capable of being morbid and by no means incapable of being secretive. She had that sense of misfit which embarrasses so many boys, the sense of the soul being too big to be seen or confessed, and the tendency to cover the undeveloped emotions with a convention. One effect of it was that she was of the sort troubled by Doubt. It might have been religious doubt, at the moment it was a sort of patriotic doubt, though she would have furiously denied that there was any doubt about the matter. She had been upset by her glimpse of the alleged grievances of Egypt or the alleged crimes of England, and the face of the stranger, the white face with the golden beard and the glaring monocle, had come to stand for the tempter or the spirit that denies. But the face of her sister suddenly banished all such merely political problems. It brought her back with a shock to much more private problems, indeed to much more secret problems, for she had never admitted them to anyone but herself.

The Traills had a tragedy, or rather, perhaps, something that Barbara’s brooding spirit had come to regard as the dawn of a tragedy. Her younger brother was still a boy; it might more truly be said that he was still a child. His mind had never come to a normal maturity, and though opinions differed about the nature of the deficiency, she was prone in her black moods to take the darkest view and let it darken the whole house of Tallboys. Thus it happened that she said quickly, at the sight of her sister’s strange expression:

“Is anything wrong about Tom?”

Olive started slightly, and then said, rather crossly than otherwise: “No, not particularly. . . . Uncle has put him with a tutor here, and they say he’s getting on better. . . . Why do you ask? There’s nothing special the matter with him.”

“Then I suppose,” said Barbara, “that there is something special the matter with you.”

“Well,” answered the other, “isn’t there something the matter with all of us?”

With that she turned abruptly and went back towards the house, dropping the flowers she had been making a pretence of gathering, and her sister followed, still deeply disturbed in mind.

As they came near the portico and veranda, she heard the high voice of her uncle Tallboys, who was leaning back in a garden chair and talking to Olive’s husband, the Deputy Governor. Tallboys was a lean figure with a large nose and ears standing out from his stalk of a head; like many men of that type he had a prominent Adam’s apple and talked in a full-throated gobbling fashion. But what he said was worth listening to, though he had a trick of balancing one clause against another, with alternate gestures of his large, loose hands, which some found a trifle irritating. He was also annoyingly deaf. The Deputy Governor, Sir Harry Smythe, was an amusing contrast, a square man with a rather congested face, the colour high under the eyes, which were very light and clear, and two parallel black bars of brow and moustache, which gave him rather a look of Kitchener, until he stood up and looked stunted by the comparison. It also gave him a rather misleading look of bad temper, for he was an affectionate husband and a good-humoured comrade, if a rather stubborn party man. For the rest the conversation was enough to show that he had a military point of view, which is sufficiently common and even commonplace.

“In short,” the Governor was saying, “I believe the Government scheme is admirably adapted to meet a somewhat difficult situation. Extremists of both types will object to it, but extremists object to everything.”

“Quite so,” answered the other, “the question isn’t so much whether they object as whether they can make themselves objectionable.”

Barbara, with her new and nervous political interests, found herself interrupted in her attempt to listen to the political conversation by the unwelcome discovery that there were other people present. There was a very beautifully dressed young gentleman, with hair like black satin, who seemed to be the local secretary of the Governor; his name was Arthur Meade. There was an old man with a very obvious chestnut wig and a very unobvious, not to say inscrutable yellow face, who was an eminent financier known by the name of Morse. There were various ladies of the official circle who were duly scattered among these gentlemen. It seemed to be the tail-end of a sort of afternoon tea, which made all the more odd and suspicious the strange behaviour of the only hostess, in straying to the other garden and tearing up the flowers. Barbara found herself set down beside a pleasant old clergyman with smooth, silver hair, and an equally smooth, silver voice, who talked to her about the Bible and the Pyramids. She found herself committed to the highly uncomfortable experience of pretending to conduct one conversation while trying to listen to another.

This was the more difficult because the Rev. Ernest Snow, the clergyman in question, had (for all his mildness) not a little gentle pertinacity. She received a confused impression that he held very strong views on the meaning of certain Prophecies in connection with the end of the world and especially with the destiny of the British Empire. He had that habit of suddenly asking questions which is so unkind to the inattentive listener. Thus, she would manage to hear a scrap of the talk between the two rulers of the province; the Governor would say, balancing his sentences with his swaying hands: