1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
In "The Man Who Knew Too Much," G.K. Chesterton crafts a compelling collection of short stories that intertwines mystery, philosophy, and social commentary. The book features the adventurous detective work of Horne Fisher, a character whose acumen transcends mere crime-solving as he grapples with moral complexities and the enigmatic nature of truth. Chesterton employs a distinctive narrative style characterized by wit, paradox, and rich imagery, which reflects the intricacies of Edwardian society and its psychological undercurrents. The stories push the boundaries of the detective genre, inviting readers to ponder the deeper implications of knowledge and ignorance, making it both a thrilling and intellectually stimulating read. A prolific writer known for his defense of faith and critique of modernity, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was profoundly influenced by his surroundings and the philosophical debates of his time. His background as a journalist and essayist dedicated to exploring social justice shines through in this work, where Fisher often finds himself navigating moral dilemmas indicative of early 20th-century anxieties. Chesterton's own explorations of spirituality and human nature are intricately woven into the fabric of the narrative. "The Man Who Knew Too Much" is highly recommended for readers seeking to engage with a layered narrative that challenges conventional notions of justice and morality. Chesterton's ability to intertwine thrilling detective elements with profound philosophical inquiries offers a unique reading experience that resonates well beyond the genre, making it an essential addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers, in one continuous design, a single-author collection by Gilbert Keith Chesterton under the title The Man Who Knew Too Much. First published as a book in 1922, it presents a compact cycle of mystery fiction that explores the relation between knowledge, power, and conscience. The present arrangement brings together the eight linked investigations centered on Horne Fisher and, in many editions of the text, the companion romance in four parts often known collectively as The Trees of Pride. The result is neither a miscellany nor a sampler, but a coherent portrait of Chesterton’s detective art at a decisive moment in his career.
Chesterton’s range as an English writer is well known across fiction and essays, yet this book concentrates on narrative art: short stories and a short novelistic romance. The Fisher tales exemplify concise detective storytelling; the concluding quartet expands to a miniature novel in parts, allowing broader atmospherics and argument. Together they display how Chesterton adapts the procedures of crime fiction to moral inquiry, using puzzles not as mere technical amusements but as occasions for weighing political realities, personal loyalties, and the sometimes divergent demands of truth, justice, and mercy.
At the heart of the first section stands Horne Fisher, the eponymous man who knows too much: a figure whose intimacy with the inner workings of national life informs, and complicates, his understanding of crime. The eight tales are presented here in their established sequence: The Face in the Target, The Vanishing Prince, The Soul of the Schoolboy, The Bottomless Well, The Fad of the Fisherman, The Hole in the Wall, The Temple of Silence, and The Vengeance of the Statue. Each offers a discrete mystery while deepening a portrait of knowledge as both advantage and burden.
Following those investigations comes a distinctly shaped narrative in four episodes: The Tale of the Peacock Trees, The Wager of Squire Vane, The Mystery of the Well, and The Chase After the Truth. These parts comprise a single romance often circulated under the collective title The Trees of Pride. Where the Fisher cycle turns on the pressures of public life, this story narrows to a country estate, a contentious wager, and rumors attaching to a grove of exotic trees. Its premise draws the reader from local superstition to rational pursuit, without foreclosing the strangeness of human motives.
The genres represented here are therefore tightly focused yet subtly varied. The Fisher stories belong to detective fiction, with crimes, enigmas, and inquiries set against political and social backdrops. The four-part romance belongs with the short novel or novella and carries the flavor of a mystery tale colored by folklore and rural tradition. Across both, Chesterton balances the formal satisfactions of the puzzle with the broader reach of the adventure story, admitting satire and parable without abandoning the concrete pleasures of scene, character, and revealed circumstance.
Several unifying themes thread these works. Most conspicuous is the tension between private truth and public consequence: what one ought to do when knowledge touches high office, old friendship, or communal fear. Another is Chesterton’s fascination with the ordinary made luminous—how familiar landscapes or customs can hide decisive facts in plain sight. He also returns to the moral calculus of guilt and responsibility, distinguishing what can be proved from what should be believed, and weighing the cost of action when every path carries its own injury to persons or institutions.
Stylistically, these pieces exhibit Chesterton’s celebrated paradoxes and sharp turns of thought, yet they are disciplined by the demands of detection. His imagery is vivid and economical, his dialogue pointed, his chapter endings firm. He tilts the camera from broad caricature to fine psychological observation with abrupt, theatrical clarity. Clues are often moral or social rather than merely material; a word choice, a habit, a posture may illuminate the hidden pattern. The prose relishes contrast—light and shadow, town and country, bold claim and quiet inference—until a shifted perspective restores coherence to the scene.
The Fisher sequence also experiments with the figure of the detective. Fisher is neither a professional sleuth nor an infallible oracle, but a man whose acquaintance with the levers of government complicates any simple resolution. He is often paired with an observer drawn from journalism or public life, a perspective that keeps the drama immediate and intelligible. In the closing romance, the emphasis falls on a local notable—Squire Vane—and the circle around him. Both structures favor conversation, conflicting testimony, and the gradual testing of ideas before action solidifies them.
Chesterton’s treatment of politics is notable for its restraint within a popular genre. He neither reduces mystery to ideology nor ignores the realities of power. Instead, the stories dwell on the costs of knowing: how a fact, once seen in full context, may preclude remedies that a simpler story would endorse. The romance, for its part, considers the interplay of fear and pride, tradition and experiment, without derogating from the necessity of evidence. In all, the author invites readers to read the world carefully, not cynically—to keep skepticism sharp and hope intact.
Within the history of mystery writing, these works stand at the threshold of the Golden Age. They adapt the earlier romance of adventure to the coming rigor of the clue-puzzle, while preserving Chesterton’s signature concern for metaphysical and civic questions. The collection complements his other fictional achievements, most famously the Father Brown stories, by offering a different center of gravity: less clerical casuistry, more engagement with public affairs. Its influence endures in later political mysteries that grapple with state secrecy, public scandal, and the ethics of disclosure.
This edition presents the material in a reading order that respects the internal architecture of the book: eight linked yet self-contained tales followed by a continuous four-part romance. Readers may take each piece independently, but the cumulative effect is intentional. Recurrent motifs surface and resurface; phrases, images, and situations echo in altered keys. The shift from the corridors of influence to a contested landscape in the closing quartet is not a digression but a complementary variation on the central theme of knowing and doing.
The lasting significance of The Man Who Knew Too Much lies in its union of entertainment and seriousness. It offers ingenious problems, lively characters, and crisp scenes, yet it also asks what justice demands when facts are tangled with fear, privilege, or pride. By assembling these fictions in one place, the collection clarifies their shared concerns and formal experiments, allowing new readers to encounter them as a coherent whole. Chesterton’s voice, at once playful and grave, reminds us that clarity often arrives not as thunder but as the quiet click of things fitting into place.
Author Biography
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, essayist, and journalist whose work bridged the late Victorian and early modern periods. Celebrated for paradox, wit, and a capacious imagination, he published across genres—criticism, polemic, poetry, fiction, and biography—while maintaining a vigorous public presence in newspapers and on the lecture platform. He is widely recognized as a formative voice in modern mystery fiction and as a major apologist for Christian thought in the English-speaking world. The stories in this collection, including investigations such as The Face in the Target and The Vanishing Prince, show him bringing philosophical curiosity to the everyday spectacles of crime, politics, and conscience.
Chesterton grew up in London and was educated at St Paul’s School before studying art at the Slade School of Fine Art and taking classes at University College London. Though he did not take a degree, his formal training in drawing and his autodidactic reading shaped a prose style attentive to image and argument alike. Publicly acknowledged influences ranged from Charles Dickens and Robert Browning to the medieval imagination that later drew him to Thomas Aquinas. Early exposure to the fin de siècle press and the debates of his day prepared him for a career in which he treated literature, politics, and religion as connected conversations.
His professional life began in journalism around the turn of the twentieth century, writing reviews and columns that quickly made his name. He contributed to papers such as the Daily News and the Illustrated London News, developing a distinctive method: defend common sense by surprising means. Paradox was not ornament but instrument. Alongside essays and literary criticism, he turned to fiction to dramatize intellectual conflict, as in the novel The Man Who Was Thursday. The move between page and platform—editorial, lecture, and book—created an audience that followed him from argument to allegory, and back again, across a remarkably productive career.
Detective fiction offered him a stage on which ethics, governance, and personal loyalty could collide. The Horne Fisher cycle, gathered in The Man Who Knew Too Much, includes The Face in the Target, The Vanishing Prince, The Soul of the Schoolboy, The Bottomless Well, The Fad of the Fisherman, The Hole in the Wall, The Temple of Silence, and The Vengeance of the Statue. These tales present puzzles rooted less in physical clues than in political knowledge and moral cost. Fisher’s quiet expertise lets Chesterton examine how public service, secrecy, and compromise shape the meaning of truth, without reducing mystery to mere mechanism.
Chesterton’s narrative range within shorter forms extends beyond a single sequence. Pieces such as The Tale of the Peacock Trees, The Wager of Squire Vane, The Mystery of the Well, and The Chase After the Truth pursue related questions about honor, evidence, and the spectacle of modern life. Their settings shift—from country houses to city streets—yet the emphasis remains on the drama of ideas made visible in action. His better-known priest-detective, Father Brown, similarly treats detection as a moral art, but these stories demonstrate how Chesterton could achieve comparable effects with different protagonists, registers, and tones while retaining his unmistakable voice.
Underlying the variety was a coherent set of convictions. Chesterton argued for the worth of ordinary people, limits on centralized power, and the rehabilitation of tradition. In the early 1920s he entered the Roman Catholic Church, a commitment that anchored later essays and biographies and informed the ethical center of his fiction. He also advocated economic ideas now grouped under distributism, advancing them in journalism and in G.K.’s Weekly. The comic title The Fad of the Fisherman hints at a frequent satiric target: fashionable enthusiasms mistaken for first principles. His criticism and stories alike urge humility, clarity, and responsibility in public and private life.
In his later years Chesterton continued to lecture, travel, and publish at an astonishing pace, producing columns, biographies, and stories until his death in 1936. He engaged in high-profile debates with contemporaries, and his manner—at once combative and generous—helped keep divergent audiences in the conversation. Subsequent generations have returned to his mysteries and essays for their unusual combination of playfulness and seriousness. The titles in this collection, with their blend of detection and reflection, remain gateways to his larger body of work. They continue to influence writers, scholars, and general readers who value fiction that entertains while probing the stakes of truth.
Historical Context
Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote across the long transition from late Victorian confidence through Edwardian debate to the unsettled interwar years. The Man Who Knew Too Much appeared in 1922, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the Anglo‑Irish Treaty, and in the same year as Chesterton’s reception into the Catholic Church. The collection follows Horne Fisher, a man intimately acquainted with Britain’s governing class, letting Chesterton draw on decades of journalism about politics, press, and public morals. Its settings—country houses, ministries, clubs, museums—mirror institutions that had survived the war but were increasingly questioned by an expanded, newly enfranchised public.
Across the stories, Chesterton observes the reconfiguration of British power from aristocratic networks to mass party politics and professional bureaucracy. The 1911 Parliament Act and the Representation of the People Act of 1918 limited hereditary influence and widened the electorate, altering how decisions were made and scrutinized. Horne Fisher’s insider vantage dramatizes the era’s paradox: greater public oversight alongside more intricate, often opaque administration. The collection’s repeated emphasis on cabinet rooms, civil service channels, and backstairs influence registers interwar anxieties about accountability, as politicians negotiated coalition governments, wartime legacies, and a state apparatus enlarged by mobilization and emergency measures.
The burgeoning mass press forms a crucial backdrop. By the early 20th century, Lord Northcliffe’s papers and other dailies had created a national news culture, shaping reputations and policy debates. In The Face in the Target, the presence of journalist Harold March signals the era’s new intermediaries between power and the public. Chesterton, long a columnist himself, depicts how headlines, leaks, and official denials could obscure as much as reveal. The Official Secrets Act of 1911, intended to curb espionage and unauthorized disclosures, looms over these narratives, complicating the ethics of reporting and the possibility of full transparency in public life.
Several tales reflect the shadows cast by political scandal. The Marconi affair of 1912–13, involving allegations of insider trading by ministers, had eroded trust in the governing elite. The Fad of the Fisherman, with its juxtaposition of leisure and leadership, draws on a climate in which private habits and public decisions were newly entangled in the press. Chesterton’s skepticism toward plutocracy and political patronage—rooted in his wider polemics—finds fictional echo in clubs, boardrooms, and drawing rooms where policy and profit might meet. The stories probe how such entanglements distort justice without directly reproducing any single real case.
The Vanishing Prince resonates with the era’s conflicts over nationalist legitimacy and coercive power. The Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) concluded with the Anglo‑Irish Treaty, while unrest and self‑determination movements stirred across the Empire. By invoking a hunted political figure and divided loyalties, the story channels debates about rebellion, amnesty, and state violence familiar to British readers of the early 1920s. Chesterton does not write reportage; rather, he refracts the moral quandaries of counter‑insurgency and political romanticism through chase, rumor, and secrecy, reflecting a public sphere in which sympathy and suspicion often shifted with each fresh communiqué.
Education reforms inform the atmosphere of The Soul of the Schoolboy. The 1902 Education Act reorganized English schooling, strengthening local authority control, while the 1918 Fisher Act raised the school‑leaving age and expanded provision. These measures intensified disputes over classical versus modern curricula, moral formation, and social mobility. Chesterton, a critic of purely utilitarian pedagogy, situates the schoolboy within networks of class and aspiration, where the prestige of the public‑school ethos coexisted uneasily with democratic claims. The story’s attention to youthful conscience and institutional expectations reflects a society negotiating what knowledge—and which virtues—should guide the next generation.
The Bottomless Well and The Mystery of the Well draw on the symbolism of ancient water sources and the English country estate. Wells in folklore and parish history evoke continuity, boundary, and ownership—matters unsettled by 19th‑century enclosures and 20th‑century taxation and death duties that pressured the landed class. By locating enigmas at such sites, Chesterton engages with rural Britain’s legal and cultural sediment: commons turned private, paths disputed, and the quiet persistence of parish memory. These settings also highlight jurisdictional complexities of country policing, where tradition, deference, and sparse resources shaped the early stages of inquiry.
The Hole in the Wall turns architectural detail into a meditation on privacy and surveillance at a time of rapid building and urban change. After the war, the 1919 Addison Act began a program of state‑aided housing, and expanding suburbs altered the relationship between public and private space. Chesterton uses thresholds, apertures, and sightlines to stage anxieties about who is watching whom, and by what right. Such concerns echoed broader debates about police powers, press intrusion, and the ethics of observation in a society both more tightly networked by technology and more insistently protective of the sanctity of home.
The Temple of Silence evokes the period’s complicated traffic between credulity and skepticism. Spiritualism surged after 1914 as bereaved families sought consolation, even as the Society for Psychical Research and prominent skeptics assessed claims. Chesterton, wary of occult fashion and sympathetic to longstanding religious tradition, contrasts the clamorous new media and political rhetoric with the allure of stillness—libraries, archives, or chapels where memory and authority reside. The story’s atmosphere taps a widespread postwar longing for meaning without endorsing any single creed, reflecting an intellectual climate in which science, confession, and superstition contested the same emotional ground.
Public monuments and their meanings, central to The Vengeance of the Statue, came under fresh scrutiny in the 1910s and 1920s. Britain saw an unprecedented wave of war memorials after 1918, alongside ongoing Victorian and Edwardian programs of civic statuary. These objects embodied collective narratives of sacrifice, empire, or local pride—and became flashpoints for disputes over whose story was told in stone. Chesterton’s focus on a statue’s symbolic agency mirrors contemporary fascination with how art, commemoration, and political power intersect, and how damage to a monument could be read as a cultural affront, a political act, or a personal vendetta.
The Tale of the Peacock Trees reflects imperial networks of taste and botany that flourished from the 18th century into Chesterton’s time. Plants, motifs, and animals associated with the subcontinent—of which the peacock is emblematic—circulated through London markets, Kew Gardens, and country‑house collections. Aestheticism and orientalist design filtered these imports into British visual culture. By situating intrigue among exotic flora and aristocratic landscaping, the story gestures toward the Empire’s subtle presence in domestic life, where global trade and colonial prestige appeared as ornament while also carrying implications of power, appropriation, and the cultivated distance between metropolitan consumers and colonial realities.
The Wager of Squire Vane captures the squirearchy at a historical hinge. By the early 20th century, the social authority of landed gentry faced challenges from party machines, professional administrators, and new wealth. Country sports and gentlemanly wagers—once informal regulators of status and honor—existed alongside increasingly centralized policing and codified law. Chesterton uses the wager’s code to examine how personal reputation, local memory, and legal formality collide. His portrayal reflects the gradual shift from a world ruled by acquaintance and deference to one governed by procedure, in which even the highest standing could not wholly shield a man from scrutiny.
Class conflict and industrial tensions rumble in the background of the collection, even when plots center on the elite. The wartime command economy and demobilization were followed by labor unrest, including major strikes in 1919–1921. Expanding trade unions and a more politically mobilized working class reshaped public argument about authority and fairness. Chesterton seldom takes readers onto the factory floor here, but his settings—clubs, ministries, country houses—register the pressure of a broader electorate and a more assertive press. The frictions of class and power help explain the stories’ concern with legitimacy: who has the right to decide, to judge, or to conceal.
Shifts in technology and policing methods also inform the texture of events. The motorcar, telephone, and railway compress distances, enabling alibis and escapes unthinkable a generation earlier. The Metropolitan Police’s Criminal Investigation Department and the adoption of fingerprinting in the early 1900s symbolized a growing forensic confidence. Yet Chesterton often resists gadget‑centered detection, preferring moral and psychological insight to laboratory proof. The Hole in the Wall and other tales exploit architectural or geographical quirks rather than microscope slides, reflecting an ambivalent modernity: new tools exist, but human character, habit, and myth continue to shape both crime and its interpretation.
Espionage and state secrecy form a recurring, distinctly pre‑ and post‑war frame. The Secret Service Bureau (later MI5 and MI6) emerged in 1909 amid spy scares and European rivalries; the Official Secrets Act of 1911 criminalized unauthorized disclosures. Stories such as The Face in the Target and The Chase After the Truth probe the ethical costs of raison d’état, where preventing scandal or guarding intelligence can conflict with ordinary justice. Chesterton’s protagonist embodies the burden of knowing details that cannot be broadcast, a dilemma many readers recognized from wartime censorship, D‑Notices, and the persistent opacity of high policy even in peacetime.
Within the evolving detective genre, the collection stands at the threshold of the so‑called Golden Age. Agatha Christie’s first novel appeared in 1920; Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts soon followed. Chesterton, later a founding figure of the Detection Club (1930), had already shaped the genre with Father Brown. Here, however, he blends detection with political fable, closer at times to the high‑level intrigue of John Buchan or the moral paradoxes of Joseph Conrad than to pure puzzle plots. The result is a hybrid that illuminates public life’s ambiguities while still honoring the reader’s expectation of rational, if unsettling, explanation.
Chesterton’s social thought—articulated in essays, journalism, and the 1922 book Eugenics and Other Evils—frames the collection’s moral horizon. He defended small property, distrusted concentrated capital and bureaucratic gigantism, and criticized fashionable scientific ideologies when they eclipsed human dignity. These convictions color episodes like The Fad of the Fisherman and The Wager of Squire Vane, where personal conscience collides with political convenience or social expediency. His reception into Catholicism in 1922 did not inaugurate these views but crystallized a long‑standing emphasis on personhood, tradition, and the limits of technocratic reason—concerns that animate the tensions at the heart of Horne Fisher’s knowledge and restraint. The collection functions as a commentary on its own era’s crises of trust: postwar disillusionment, administrative secrecy, press sensationalism, and the faltering prestige of inherited authority. Later readers, encountering the stories after mid‑century scandals—from intelligence defections to ministerial indiscretions—have found Chesterton’s portrait of elite compromise eerily durable. Contemporary debates about surveillance, public monuments, and imperial legacies further renew interest, inviting interpretations that situate these tales not only within the detective canon but also within the continuing argument about how modern societies remember, govern, and judge.
Synopsis (Selection)
Affairs of State and Silent Temples: The Face in the Target; The Vanishing Prince; The Soul of the Schoolboy; The Bottomless Well; The Fad of the Fisherman; The Hole in the Wall; The Temple of Silence; The Vengeance of the Statue
In this core sequence of linked investigations, a well-connected observer navigates crimes that brush the highest levels of society, where scandal and statecraft overlap. Puzzles pivot on physical oddities—a face on a target, a vanishing figure, a seemingly bottomless well, a toppled statue—yet the solutions hinge on paradoxical insights into motive, privilege, and the hidden costs of power. The tone is cool, witty, and disquieted, balancing sympathy for individuals with a skeptical view of institutions and the price of knowing too much.
Odd Tales and Country Riddles: The Tale of the Peacock Trees; The Wager of Squire Vane; The Mystery of the Well; The Chase After the Truth
These companion tales tilt from political intrigue toward parable and countryside riddle, presenting wagers, legendary trees, and urgent pursuits as laboratories for testing truth. Each mystery stages a clash between reputation and reality—a daring bet, a peacock-shadowed grove, a murky well, and a headlong chase—resolved by common sense turned at an unexpected angle. The mood is playful yet pointed, using comic exaggeration and moral inquiry to reveal how appearances deceive and how certainty is earned.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The Face in the Target
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
I
THE FACE IN THE TARGET
HAROLD MARCH, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous estate of Torwood Park. He was a good-looking young man in tweeds, with very pale curly hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely try to forget them. For his errand at Torwood Park was a political one; it was the place of appointment named by no less a person than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, then introducing his so-called Socialist Budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview with so promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics, and nothing about politicians[1q]. He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture, about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.
Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon a sort of cleft almost narrow enough to be called a crack in the land. It was just large enough to be the water-course for a small stream which vanished at intervals under green tunnels of undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest. Indeed, he had an odd feeling as if he were a giant looking over the valley of the pygmies. When he dropped into the hollow, however, the impression was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height of a cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As he began to wander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic curiosity, and saw the water shining in short strips between the great gray boulders and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he fell into quite an opposite vein of fantasy. It was rather as if the earth had opened and swallowed him into a sort of underworld of dreams[2q]. And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.
The man was apparently fishing; or at least was fixed in a fisherman's attitude with more than a fisherman's immobility. March was able to examine the man almost as if he had been a statue for some minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair man, cadaverous, and a little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a high-bridged nose. When his face was shaded with his wide white hat, his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was not fishing.
He was holding, instead of a rod, something that might have been a landing-net which some fishermen use, but which was much more like the ordinary toy net which children carry, and which they generally use indifferently for shrimps or butterflies. He was dipping this into the water at intervals, gravely regarding its harvest of weed or mud, and emptying it out again.
"No, I haven't caught anything," he remarked, calmly, as if answering an unspoken query. "When I do I have to throw it back again; especially the big fish. But some of the little beasts interest me when I get 'em."
"A scientific interest, I suppose?" observed March.
"Of a rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about in society crying stinking fish."
"I suppose it would," said March, with a smile.
"Rather odd to enter a drawing-room carrying a large luminous cod," continued the stranger, in his listless way. "How quaint it would be if one could carry it about like a lantern, or have little sprats for candles. Some of the sea-beasts would really be very pretty like lamp-shades; the blue sea-snail that glitters all over like starlight; and some of the red starfish really shine like red stars. But, naturally, I'm not looking for them here."
March thought of asking him what he was looking for; but, feeling unequal to a technical discussion at least as deep as the deep-sea fishes, he returned to more ordinary topics.
"Delightful sort of hole this is," he said. "This little dell and river here. It's like those places Stevenson talks about, where something ought to happen."
"I know," answered the other. "I think it's because the place itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not merely to exist. Perhaps that's what old Picasso and some of the Cubists are trying to express by angles and jagged lines. Look at that wall like low cliffs that juts forward just at right angles to the slope of turf sweeping up to it. That's like a silent collision. It's like a breaker and the back-wash of a wave."
March looked at the low-browed crag overhanging the green slope and nodded. He was interested in a man who turned so easily from the technicalities of science to those of art; and asked him if he admired the new angular artists.
"As I feel it, the Cubists are not Cubist enough," replied the stranger. "I mean they're not thick enough. By making things mathematical they make them thin. Take the living lines out of that landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but it is of just the other sort. They stand for the unalterable things; the calm, eternal, mathematical sort of truths; what somebody calls the 'white radiance of'——"
He stopped, and before the next word came something had happened almost too quickly and completely to be realized. From behind the overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a railway train; and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of cliff, black against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile gesture, as if to catch a falling tea-cup in a drawing-room.
For the fraction of a flash it seemed to leave the ledge of rock like a flying ship; then the very sky seemed to turn over like a wheel, and it lay a ruin amid the tall grasses below, a line of gray smoke going up slowly from it into the silent air. A little lower the figure of a man with gray hair lay tumbled down the steep green slope, his limbs lying all at random, and his face turned away.
The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and walked swiftly toward the spot, his new acquaintance following him. As they drew near there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a factory, while the man lay so still.
He was unquestionably dead. The blood flowed in the grass from a hopelessly fatal fracture at the back of the skull; but the face, which was turned to the sun, was uninjured and strangely arresting in itself. It was one of those cases of a strange face so unmistakable as to feel familiar. We feel, somehow, that we ought to recognize it, even though we do not. It was of the broad, square sort with great jaws, almost like that of a highly intellectual ape; the wide mouth shut so tight as to be traced by a mere line; the nose short with the sort of nostrils that seem to gape with an appetite for the air. The oddest thing about the face was that one of the eyebrows was cocked up at a much sharper angle than the other. March thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as that dead one. And its ugly energy seemed all the stranger for its halo of hoary hair. Some papers lay half fallen out of the pocket, and from among them March extracted a card-case. He read the name on the card aloud.
"Sir Humphrey Turnbull. I'm sure I've heard that name somewhere."
His companion only gave a sort of a little sigh and was silent for a moment, as if ruminating, then he merely said, "The poor fellow is quite gone," and added some scientific terms in which his auditor once more found himself out of his depth.
"As things are," continued the same curiously well-informed person, "it will be more legal for us to leave the body as it is until the police are informed. In fact, I think it will be well if nobody except the police is informed. Don't be surprised if I seem to be keeping it dark from some of our neighbors round here." Then, as if prompted to regularize his rather abrupt confidence, he said: "I've come down to see my cousin at Torwood; my name is Horne Fisher. Might be a pun on my pottering about here, mightn't it?"
"Is Sir Howard Horne your cousin?" asked March. "I'm going to Torwood Park to see him myself; only about his public work, of course, and the wonderful stand he is making for his principles. I think this Budget is the greatest thing in English history. If it fails, it will be the most heroic failure in English history. Are you an admirer of your great kinsman, Mr. Fisher?"
"Rather," said Mr. Fisher. "He's the best shot I know."
Then, as if sincerely repentant of his nonchalance, he added, with a sort of enthusiasm:
"No, but really, he's a beautiful shot."
As if fired by his own words, he took a sort of leap at the ledges of the rock above him, and scaled them with a sudden agility in startling contrast to his general lassitude. He had stood for some seconds on the headland above, with his aquiline profile under the Panama hat relieved against the sky and peering over the countryside before his companion had collected himself sufficiently to scramble up after him.
The level above was a stretch of common turf on which the tracks of the fated car were plowed plainly enough; but the brink of it was broken as with rocky teeth; broken boulders of all shapes and sizes lay near the edge; it was almost incredible that any one could have deliberately driven into such a death trap, especially in broad daylight.
"I can't make head or tail of it," said March.
"Was he blind? Or blind drunk?"
"Neither, by the look of him," replied the other.
"Then it was suicide."
"It doesn't seem a cozy way of doing it," remarked the man called Fisher. "Besides, I don't fancy poor old Puggy would commit suicide, somehow."
"Poor old who?" inquired the wondering journalist. "Did you know this unfortunate man?"
"Nobody knew him exactly," replied Fisher, with some vagueness. "But one knew him, of course. He'd been a terror in his time, in Parliament and the courts, and so on; especially in that row about the aliens who were deported as undesirables, when he wanted one of 'em hanged for murder. He was so sick about it that he retired from the bench. Since then he mostly motored about by himself; but he was coming to Torwood, too, for the week-end; and I don't see why he should deliberately break his neck almost at the very door. I believe Hoggs—I mean my cousin Howard—was coming down specially to meet him."
"Torwood Park doesn't belong to your cousin?" inquired March.
"No; it used to belong to the Winthrops, you know," replied the other. "Now a new man's got it; a man from Montreal named Jenkins. Hoggs comes for the shooting; I told you he was a lovely shot."
This repeated eulogy on the great social statesman affected Harold March as if somebody had defined Napoleon as a distinguished player of nap. But he had another half-formed impression struggling in this flood of unfamiliar things, and he brought it to the surface before it could vanish.
"Jenkins," he repeated. "Surely you don't mean Jefferson Jenkins, the social reformer? I mean the man who's fighting for the new cottage-estate scheme. It would be as interesting to meet him as any Cabinet Minister in the world, if you'll excuse my saying so."
"Yes; Hoggs told him it would have to be cottages," said Fisher. "He said the breed of cattle had improved too often, and people were beginning to laugh. And, of course, you must hang a peerage on to something; though the poor chap hasn't got it yet. Hullo, here's somebody else."
