I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET
II. THE VANISHING PRINCE
III. THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY
IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
V. THE FAD OF THE FISHERMAN
VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL
VII. THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE
VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE
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. 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. 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
highbridged 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 carrying 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 seabeasts would really be
very pretty like lampshades; 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."
They had started walking in the tracks of the car, leaving it
behind them in the hollow, still humming horribly like a huge insect
that had killed a man. The tracks took them to the corner of the
road, one arm of which went on in the same line toward the distant
gates of the park. It was clear that the car had been driven down the
long straight road, and then, instead of turning with the road to the
left, had gone straight on over the turf to its doom. But it was not
this discovery that had riveted Fisher's eye, but something even more
solid. At the angle of the white road a dark and solitary figure was
standing almost as still as a finger post. It was that of a big man
in rough shooting-clothes, bareheaded, and with tousled curly hair
that gave him a rather wild look. On a nearer approach this first
more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the figure took on
more conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman who happened to
have come out without a hat and without very studiously brushing his
hair. But the massive stature remained, and something deep and even
cavernous about the setting of the eyes redeemed his animal good
looks from the commonplace. But March had no time to study the man
more closely, for, much to his astonishment, his guide merely
observed, "Hullo, Jack!" and walked past him as if he had
indeed been a signpost, and without attempting to inform him of the
catastrophe beyond the rocks. It was relatively a small thing, but it
was only the first in a string of singular antics on which his new
and eccentric friend was leading him.
The man they had passed looked after them in rather a suspicious
fashion, but Fisher continued serenely on his way along the straight
road that ran past the gates of the great estate.
"That's John Burke, the traveler," he condescended to
explain. "I expect you've heard of him; shoots big game and all
that. Sorry I couldn't stop to introduce you, but I dare say you'll
meet him later on."
"I know his book, of course," said March, with renewed
interest. "That is certainly a fine piece of description, about
their being only conscious of the closeness of the elephant when the
colossal head blocked out the moon."
"Yes, young Halkett writes jolly well, I think. What? Didn't
you know Halkett wrote Burke's book for him? Burke can't use anything
except a gun; and you can't write with that. Oh, he's genuine enough
in his way, you know, as brave as a lion, or a good deal braver by
all accounts."
"You seem to know all about him," observed March, with a
rather bewildered laugh, "and about a good many other people."
Fisher's bald brow became abruptly corrugated, and a curious
expression came into his eyes.
"I know too much," he said. "That's what's the
matter with me. That's what's the matter with all of us, and the
whole show; we know too much. Too much about one another; too much
about ourselves. That's why I'm really interested, just now, about
one thing that I don't know."
"And that is?" inquired the other.
"Why that poor fellow is dead."
They had walked along the straight road for nearly a mile,
conversing at intervals in this fashion; and March had a singular
sense of the whole world being turned inside out. Mr. Horne Fisher
did not especially abuse his friends and relatives in fashionable
society; of some of them he spoke with affection. But they seemed to
be an entirely new set of men and women, who happened to have the
same nerves as the men and women mentioned most often in the
newspapers. Yet no fury of revolt could have seemed to him more
utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity. It was like
daylight on the other side of stage scenery.
They reached the great lodge gates of the park, and, to March's
surprise, passed them and continued along the interminable white,
straight road. But he was himself too early for his appointment with
Sir Howard, and was not disinclined to see the end of his new
friend's experiment, whatever it might be. They had long left the
moorland behind them, and half the white road was gray in the great
shadow of the Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray bars
shuttered against the sunshine and within, amid that clear noon,
manufacturing their own midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to
appear in them like gleams of colored windows; the trees thinned and
fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild, irregular
copses in which, as Fisher said, the house-party had been blazing
away all day. And about two hundred yards farther on they came to the
first turn of the road.
At the corner stood a sort of decayed inn with the dingy sign of
The Grapes. The signboard was dark and indecipherable by now, and
hung black against the sky and the gray moorland beyond, about as
inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked like a tavern
for vinegar instead of wine.
"A good phrase," said Fisher, "and so it would be
if you were silly enough to drink wine in it. But the beer is very
good, and so is the brandy."
March followed him to the bar parlor with some wonder, and his dim
sense of repugnance was not dismissed by the first sight of the
innkeeper, who was widely different from the genial innkeepers of
romance, a bony man, very silent behind a black mustache, but with
black, restless eyes. Taciturn as he was, the investigator succeeded
at last in extracting a scrap of information from him, by dint of
ordering beer and talking to him persistently and minutely on the
subject of motor cars. He evidently regarded the innkeeper as in some
singular way an authority on motor cars; as being deep in the secrets
of the mechanism, management, and mismanagement of motor cars;
holding the man all the time with a glittering eye like the Ancient
Mariner. Out of all this rather mysterious conversation there did
emerge at last a sort of admission that one particular motor car, of
a given description, had stopped before the inn about an hour before,
and that an elderly man had alighted, requiring some mechanical
assistance. Asked if the visitor required any other assistance, the
innkeeper said shortly that the old gentleman had filled his flask
and taken a packet of sandwiches. And with these words the somewhat
inhospitable host had walked hastily out of the bar, and they heard
him banging doors in the dark interior.
Fisher's weary eye wandered round the dusty and dreary inn parlor
and rested dreamily on a glass case containing a stuffed bird, with a
gun hung on hooks above it, which seemed to be its only ornament.
"Puggy was a humorist," he observed, "at least in
his own rather grim style. But it seems rather too grim a joke for a
man to buy a packet of sandwiches when he is just going to commit
suicide."
"If you come to that," answered March, "it isn't
very usual for a man to buy a packet of sandwiches when he's just
outside the door of a grand house he's going to stop at."
"No . . . no," repeated Fisher, almost mechanically; and
then suddenly cocked his eye at his interlocutor with a much livelier
expression.
"By Jove! that's an idea. You're perfectly right. And that
suggests a very queer idea, doesn't it?"
There was a silence, and then March started with irrational
nervousness as the door of the inn was flung open and another man
walked rapidly to the counter. He had struck it with a coin and
called out for brandy before he saw the other two guests, who were
sitting at a bare wooden table under the window. When he turned about
with a rather wild stare, March had yet another unexpected emotion,
for his guide hailed the man as Hoggs and introduced him as Sir
Howard Horne.
He looked rather older than his boyish portraits in the
illustrated papers, as is the way of politicians; his flat, fair hair
was touched with gray, but his face was almost comically round, with
a Roman nose which, when combined with his quick, bright eyes, raised
a vague reminiscence of a parrot. He had a cap rather at the back of
his head and a gun under his arm. Harold March had imagined many
things about his meeting with the great political reformer, but he
had never pictured him with a gun under his arm, drinking brandy in a
public house.
"So you're stopping at Jink's, too," said Fisher.
"Everybody seems to be at Jink's."
"Yes," replied the Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Jolly
good shooting. At least all of it that isn't Jink's shooting. I never
knew a chap with such good shooting that was such a bad shot. Mind
you, he's a jolly good fellow and all that; I don't say a word
against him. But he never learned to hold a gun when he was packing
pork or whatever he did. They say he shot the cockade off his own
servant's hat; just like him to have cockades, of course. He shot the
weathercock off his own ridiculous gilded summerhouse. It's the only
cock he'll ever kill, I should think. Are you coming up there now?"
Fisher said, rather vaguely, that he was following soon, when he
had fixed something up; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer left the
inn. March fancied he had been a little upset or impatient when he
called for the brandy; but he had talked himself back into a
satisfactory state, if the talk had not been quite what his literary
visitor had expected. Fisher, a few minutes afterward, slowly led the
way out of the tavern and stood in the middle of the road, looking
down in the direction from which they had traveled. Then he walked
back about two hundred yards in that direction and stood still again.
"I should think this is about the place," he said.
"What place?" asked his companion.
"The place where the poor fellow was killed," said
Fisher, sadly.
"What do you mean?" demanded March.
"He was smashed up on the rocks a mile and a half from here."
"No, he wasn't," replied Fisher. "He didn't fall on
the rocks at all. Didn't you notice that he only fell on the slope of
soft grass underneath? But I saw that he had a bullet in him
already."
Then after a pause he added:
"He was alive at the inn, but he was dead long before he came
to the rocks. So he was shot as he drove his car down this strip of
straight road, and I should think somewhere about here. After that,
of course, the car went straight on with nobody to stop or turn it.
It's really a very cunning dodge in its way; for the body would be
found far away, and most people would say, as you do, that it was an
accident to a motorist. The murderer must have been a clever brute."
"But wouldn't the shot be heard at the inn or somewhere?"
asked March.
"It would be heard. But it would not be noticed. That,"
continued the investigator, "is where he was clever again.
Shooting was going on all over the place all day; very likely he
timed his shot so as to drown it in a number of others. Certainly he
was a first-class criminal. And he was something else as well."
"What do you mean?" asked his companion, with a creepy
premonition of something coming, he knew not why.
"He was a first-class shot," said Fisher. He had turned
his back abruptly and was walking down a narrow, grassy lane, little
more than a cart track, which lay opposite the inn and marked the end
of the great estate and the beginning of the open moors. March
plodded after him with the same idle perseverance, and found him
staring through a gap in giant weeds and thorns at the flat face of a
painted paling. From behind the paling rose the great gray columns of
a row of poplars, which filled the heavens above them with dark-green
shadow and shook faintly in a wind which had sunk slowly into a
breeze. The afternoon was already deepening into evening, and the
titanic shadows of the poplars lengthened over a third of the
landscape.
"Are you a first-class criminal?" asked Fisher, in a
friendly tone. "I'm afraid I'm not. But I think I can manage to
be a sort of fourth-rate burglar."
And before his companion could reply he had managed to swing
himself up and over the fence; March followed without much bodily
effort, but with considerable mental disturbance. The poplars grew so
close against the fence that they had some difficulty in slipping
past them, and beyond the poplars they could see only a high hedge of
laurel, green and lustrous in the level sun. Something in this
limitation by a series of living walls made him feel as if he were
really entering a shattered house instead of an open field. It was as
if he came in by a disused door or window and found the way blocked
by furniture. When they had circumvented the laurel hedge, they came
out on a sort of terrace of turf, which fell by one green step to an
oblong lawn like a bowling green. Beyond this was the only building
in sight, a low conservatory, which seemed far away from anywhere,
like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in fairyland. Fisher
knew that lonely look of the outlying parts of a great house well
enough. He realized that it is more of a satire on aristocracy than
if it were choked with weeds and littered with ruins. For it is not
neglected and yet it is deserted; at any rate, it is disused. It is
regularly swept and garnished for a master who never comes.
Looking over the lawn, however, he saw one object which he had not
apparently expected. It was a sort of tripod supporting a large disk
like the round top of a table tipped sideways, and it was not until
they had dropped on to the lawn and walked across to look at it that
March realized that it was a target. It was worn and weatherstained;
the gay colors of its concentric rings were faded; possibly it had
been set up in those far-off Victorian days when there was a fashion
of archery. March had one of his vague visions of ladies in cloudy
crinolines and gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers revisiting
that lost garden like ghosts.
Fisher, who was peering more closely at the target, startled him
by an exclamation.
"Hullo!" he said. "Somebody has been peppering this
thing with shot, after all, and quite lately, too. Why, I believe old
Jink's been trying to improve his bad shooting here."
"Yes, and it looks as if it still wanted improving,"
answered March, laughing. "Not one of these shots is anywhere
near the bull's-eye; they seem just scattered about in the wildest
way."
"In the wildest way," repeated Fisher, still peering
intently at the target. He seemed merely to assent, but March fancied
his eye was shining under its sleepy lid and that he straightened his
stooping figure with a strange effort.
"Excuse me a moment," he said, feeling in his pockets.
"I think I've got some of my chemicals; and after that we'll go
up to the house." And he stooped again over the target, putting
something with his finger over each of the shot-holes, so far as
March could see merely a dull-gray smear. Then they went through the
gathering twilight up the long green avenues to the great house.
Here again, however, the eccentric investigator did not enter by
the front door. He walked round the house until he found a window
open, and, leaping into it, introduced his friend to what appeared to
be the gun-room. Rows of the regular instruments for bringing down
birds stood against the walls; but across a table in the window lay
one or two weapons of a heavier and more formidable pattern.
"Hullo! these are Burke's big-game rifles," said Fisher.
"I never knew he kept them here." He lifted one of them,
examined it briefly, and put it down again, frowning heavily. Almost
as he did so a strange young man came hurriedly into the room. He was
dark and sturdy, with a bumpy forehead and a bulldog jaw, and he
spoke with a curt apology.
"I left Major Burke's guns here," he said, "and he
wants them packed up. He's going away to-night."
And he carried off the two rifles without casting a glance at the
stranger; through the open window they could see his short, dark
figure walking away across the glimmering garden. Fisher got out of
the window again and stood looking after him.
"That's Halkett, whom I told you about," he said. "I
knew he was a sort of secretary and had to do with Burke's papers;
but I never knew he had anything to do with his guns. But he's just
the sort of silent, sensible little devil who might be very good at
anything; the sort of man you know for years before you find he's a
chess champion."
He had begun to walk in the direction of the disappearing
secretary, and they soon came within sight of the rest of the
house-party talking and laughing on the lawn. They could see the tall
figure and loose mane of the lion-hunter dominating the little group.
"By the way," observed Fisher, "when we were
talking about Burke and Halkett, I said that a man couldn't very well
write with a gun. Well, I'm not so sure now. Did you ever hear of an
artist so clever that he could draw with a gun? There's a wonderful
chap loose about here."
Sir Howard hailed Fisher and his friend the journalist with almost
boisterous amiability. The latter was presented to Major Burke and
Mr. Halkett and also (by way of a parenthesis) to his host, Mr.
Jenkins, a commonplace little man in loud tweeds, whom everybody else
seemed to treat with a sort of affection, as if he were a baby.
The irrepressible Chancellor of the Exchequer was still talking
about the birds he had brought down, the birds that Burke and Halkett
had brought down, and the birds that Jenkins, their host, had failed
to bring down. It seemed to be a sort of sociable monomania.
"You and your big game," he ejaculated, aggressively, to
Burke. "Why, anybody could shoot big game. You want to be a shot
to shoot small game."
"Quite so," interposed Horne Fisher. "Now if only a
hippopotamus could fly up in the air out of that bush, or you
preserved flying elephants on the estate, why, then—"
"Why even Jink might hit that sort of bird," cried Sir
Howard, hilariously slapping his host on the back. "Even he
might hit a haystack or a hippopotamus."
"Look here, you fellows," said Fisher. "I want you
to come along with me for a minute and shoot at something else. Not a
hippopotamus. Another kind of queer animal I've found on the estate.
It's an animal with three legs and one eye, and it's all the colors
of the rainbow."
"What the deuce are you talking about?" asked Burke.
"You come along and see," replied Fisher, cheerfully.
Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are
always seeking for something new. They gravely rearmed themselves
from the gun-room and trooped along at the tail of their guide, Sir
Howard only pausing, in a sort of ecstasy, to point out the
celebrated gilt summerhouse on which the gilt weathercock still stood
crooked. It was dusk turning to dark by the time they reached the
remote green by the poplars and accepted the new and aimless game of
shooting at the old mark.
The last light seemed to fade from the lawn, and the poplars
against the sunset were like great plumes upon a purple hearse, when
the futile procession finally curved round, and came out in front of
the target. Sir Howard again slapped his host on the shoulder,
shoving him playfully forward to take the first shot. The shoulder
and arm he touched seemed unnaturally stiff and angular. Mr. Jenkins
was holding his gun in an attitude more awkward than any that his
satiric friends had seen or expected.
At the same instant a horrible scream seemed to come from nowhere.
It was so unnatural and so unsuited to the scene that it might have
been made by some inhuman thing flying on wings above them or
eavesdropping in the dark woods beyond. But Fisher knew that it had
started and stopped on the pale lips of Jefferson Jenkins, of
Montreal, and no one at that moment catching sight of Jefferson
Jenkins's face would have complained that it was commonplace. The
next moment a torrent of guttural but good-humored oaths came from
Major Burke as he and the two other men saw what was in front of
them. The target stood up in the dim grass like a dark goblin
grinning at them, and it was literally grinning. It had two eyes like
stars, and in similar livid points of light were picked out the two
upturned and open nostrils and the two ends of the wide and tight
mouth. A few white dots above each eye indicated the hoary eyebrows;
and one of them ran upward almost erect. It was a brilliant
caricature done in bright dotted lines and March knew of whom. It
shone in the shadowy grass, smeared with sea fire as if one of the
submarine monsters had crawled into the twilight garden; but it had
the head of a dead man.
"It's only luminous paint," said Burke. "Old
Fisher's been having a joke with that phosphorescent stuff of his."
"Seems to be meant for old Puggy"' observed Sir Howard.
"Hits him off very well."
With that they all laughed, except Jenkins. When they had all
done, he made a noise like the first effort of an animal to laugh,
and Horne Fisher suddenly strode across to him and said:
"Mr. Jenkins, I must speak to you at once in private."
It was by the little watercourse in the moors, on the slope under
the hanging rock, that March met his new friend Fisher, by
appointment, shortly after the ugly and almost grotesque scene that
had broken up the group in the garden.
"It was a monkey-trick of mine," observed Fisher,
gloomily, "putting phosphorus on the target; but the only chance
to make him jump was to give him the horrors suddenly. And when he
saw the face he'd shot at shining on the target he practiced on, all
lit up with an infernal light, he did jump. Quite enough for my own
intellectual satisfaction."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand even now," said
March, "exactly what he did or why he did it."
"You ought to," replied Fisher, with his rather dreary
smile, "for you gave me the first suggestion yourself. Oh yes,
you did; and it was a very shrewd one. You said a man wouldn't take
sandwiches with him to dine at a great house. It was quite true; and
the inference was that, though he was going there, he didn't mean to
dine there. Or, at any rate, that he might not be dining there. It
occurred to me at once that he probably expected the visit to be
unpleasant, or the reception doubtful, or something that would
prevent his accepting hospitality. Then it struck me that Turnbull
was a terror to certain shady characters in the past, and that he had
come down to identify and denounce one of them. The chances at the
start pointed to the host—that is, Jenkins. I'm morally certain now
that Jenkins was the undesirable alien Turnbull wanted to convict in
another shooting-affair, but you see the shooting gentleman had
another shot in his locker."
"But you said he would have to be a very good shot,"
protested March.
"Jenkins is a very good shot," said Fisher. "A very
good shot who can pretend to be a very bad shot. Shall I tell you the
second hint I hit on, after yours, to make me think it was Jenkins?
It was my cousin's account of his bad shooting. He'd shot a cockade
off a hat and a weathercock off a building. Now, in fact, a man must
shoot very well indeed to shoot so badly as that. He must shoot very
neatly to hit the cockade and not the head, or even the hat. If the
shots had really gone at random, the chances are a thousand to one
that they would not have hit such prominent and picturesque objects.
They were chosen because they were prominent and picturesque objects.
They make a story to go the round of society. He keeps the crooked
weathercock in the summerhouse to perpetuate the story of a legend.
And then he lay in wait with his evil eye and wicked gun, safely
ambushed behind the legend of his own incompetence.
"But there is more than that. There is the summerhouse
itself. I mean there is the whole thing. There's all that Jenkins
gets chaffed about, the gilding and the gaudy colors and all the
vulgarity that's supposed to stamp him as an upstart. Now, as a
matter of fact, upstarts generally don't do this. God knows there's
enough of 'em in society; and one knows 'em well enough. And this is
the very last thing they do. They're generally only too keen to know
the right thing and do it; and they instantly put themselves body and
soul into the hands of art decorators and art experts, who do the
whole thing for them. There's hardly another millionaire alive who
has the moral courage to have a gilt monogram on a chair like that
one in the gun-room. For that matter, there's the name as well as the
monogram. Names like Tompkins and Jenkins and Jinks are funny without
being vulgar; I mean they are vulgar without being common. If you
prefer it, they are commonplace without being common. They are just
the names to be chosen to look ordinary, but they're really
rather extraordinary. Do you know many people called Tompkins? It's a
good deal rarer than Talbot. It's pretty much the same with the comic
clothes of the parvenu. Jenkins dresses like a character in Punch.
But that's because he is a character in Punch. I mean he's a
fictitious character. He's a fabulous animal. He doesn't exist.
"Have you ever considered what it must be like to be a man
who doesn't exist? I mean to be a man with a fictitious character
that he has to keep up at the expense not merely of personal talents:
To be a new kind of hypocrite hiding a talent in a new kind of
napkin. This man has chosen his hypocrisy very ingeniously; it was
really a new one. A subtle villain has dressed up as a dashing
gentleman and a worthy business man and a philanthropist and a saint;
but the loud checks of a comical little cad were really rather a new
disguise. But the disguise must be very irksome to a man who can
really do things. This is a dexterous little cosmopolitan guttersnipe
who can do scores of things, not only shoot, but draw and paint, and
probably play the fiddle. Now a man like that may find the hiding of
his talents useful; but he could never help wanting to use them where
they were useless. If he can draw, he will draw absent-mindedly on
blotting paper. I suspect this rascal has often drawn poor old
Puggy's face on blotting paper. Probably he began doing it in blots
as he afterward did it in dots, or rather shots. It was the same sort
of thing; he found a disused target in a deserted yard and couldn't
resist indulging in a little secret shooting, like secret drinking.
You thought the shots all scattered and irregular, and so they were;
but not accidental. No two distances were alike; but the different
points were exactly where he wanted to put them. There's nothing
needs such mathematical precision as a wild caricature. I've dabbled
a little in drawing myself, and I assure you that to put one dot
where you want it is a marvel with a pen close to a piece of paper.
It was a miracle to do it across a garden with a gun. But a man who
can work those miracles will always itch to work them, if it's only
in the dark."
After a pause March observed, thoughtfully, "But he couldn't
have brought him down like a bird with one of those little guns."
"No; that was why I went into the gun-room," replied
Fisher. "He did it with one of Burke's rifles, and Burke thought
he knew the sound of it. That's why he rushed out without a hat,
looking so wild. He saw nothing but a car passing quickly, which he
followed for a little way, and then concluded he'd made a mistake."
There was another silence, during which Fisher sat on a great
stone as motionless as on their first meeting, and watched the gray
and silver river eddying past under the bushes. Then March said,
abruptly, "Of course he knows the truth now."
"Nobody knows the truth but you and I," answered Fisher,
with a certain softening in his voice. "And I don't think you
and I will ever quarrel."
"What do you mean?" asked March, in an altered accent.
"What have you done about it?"
Horne Fisher continued to gaze steadily at the eddying stream. At
last he said, "The police have proved it was a motor accident."
"But you know it was not."
"I told you that I know too much," replied Fisher, with
his eye on the river. "I know that, and I know a great many
other things. I know the atmosphere and the way the whole thing
works. I know this fellow has succeeded in making himself something
incurably commonplace and comic. I know you can't get up a
persecution of old Toole or Little Tich. If I were to tell Hoggs or
Halkett that old Jink was an assassin, they would almost die of
laughter before my eyes. Oh, I don't say their laughter's quite
innocent, though it's genuine in its way. They want old Jink, and
they couldn't do without him. I don't say I'm quite innocent. I like
Hoggs; I don't want him to be down and out; and he'd be done for if
Jink can't pay for his coronet. They were devilish near the line at
the last election. But the only real objection to it is that it's
impossible. Nobody would believe it; it's not in the picture. The
crooked weathercock would always turn it into a joke."
"Don't you think this is infamous?" asked March,
quietly.
"I think a good many things," replied the other. "If
you people ever happen to blow the whole tangle of society to hell
with dynamite, I don't know that the human race will be much the
worse. But don't be too hard on me merely because I know what society
is. That's why I moon away my time over things like stinking fish."
There was a pause as he settled himself down again by the stream;
and then he added:
"I told you before I had to throw back the big fish."