 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Man Alive by G. K. Chesterton. Section 17, Part 2, The Explanations of Innocent Smith. Chapter 2, The Two Currets, or The Burglary Charge, Part 1. Arthur Englewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders of the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together. Both the Jew and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks, and they revealed, by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the yellow, that nothing could be done in the way of the Nile of the document. The letter from the warden was as authentic as the letter from the sub-warden, however regardably different in dignity and social tone. Very few words said Englewood are required to conclude our case in this matter. Surely it is now plain that our client carried his pistol about with the eccentric but innocent purpose of giving a wholesome scare to those whom he regarded as blasphemers. In each case, the scare was so wholesome that the victim himself has dated from it as from a new birth. Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor. He walks the world curing frenzies and not disturbing them. That is the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I put to the prosecutors. That is why they dared not produce a line by anyone who has actually confronted the pistol. All who had actually confronted the pistol confessed that they had profited by it. That was why Smith, though a good shot, never hit anybody. He never hit anybody because he was a good shot. His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of blood. This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts and of all the other facts. No one can possibly explain the warden's conduct except by believing the warden's story. Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of ingenious theories, could find no other theory to cover the case. There are promising perspectives in hypnotism and dual personality, said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily. The science of criminology is in its infancy and— Infancy cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a gesture of enlightenment. Why, that explains it. I repeat, preceded Inglewood, that neither Dr. Pym nor anyone else can account on any other theory but ours for the warden's signature, for the shots missed, and the witnesses missing. The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return of a cockfighting coolness. The defense, he said, omits a coldly colossal fact. They say we produce none of the actual victims. While here's one victim, England's celebrated and stricken Warner, I reckon he's pretty well produced, and they suggest that all the outrages were followed by reconciliation. Well, there's no flies on England's Warner, and he isn't reconciliated much. My learned friend, said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet, must remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy. Dr. Warner would strike the idlest eye as one especially difficult to startle into any recognition of the glory of God. We admit that our client, in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not successful. But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a proposal for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest convenience, and without further fees. Hang it all, Michael cried Gould quite serious for the first time in his life. You might give us a bit of belly sense for a change. What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot, asked Moon sharply? The creature, said Dr. Warner superciliously, asked me with characteristic rationality whether it was my birthday. And you answered with characteristic swank, cried Moon, shooting out a long, lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith, that you didn't keep your birthday. Something like that, assented the doctor. Then continued Moon, he asked you why not, and you said it was because you didn't see that birth was anything to rejoice over, agreed? Now is there anyone who doubts that our tale is true? There was a cold crash of stillness in the room, and Moon said, It is the silence of the people that is the voice of God. Or in Dr. Pym's more civilized language, it is up to him to open the next charge. On this, we claim an acquittal. It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an unprecedented time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the air. It almost seemed as if he had been struck so, as the nurses say, and in the deadly silence, Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the strain with some remark. For the last half hour or so, the imminent criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view of offenses against property as it did of offenses against life. Most murder, he had said, is a variation of homicidal mania, and in the same way, most theft is a version of kleptomania. I cannot entertain any doubt that my learned friends opposite adequately conceive how this must involve a scheme of punishment more tolerant and humane than the cruel methods of ancient codes. They will doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so imminently yawning, so thought arresting, so it was here that he paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to which illusion has been made, and Michael could bear it no longer. Yes, yes, he said impatiently, we admit the chasm. The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten years. The tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for ever. We pass the chasm. It was characteristic of the imminent Dr. Pym in one of his trances of verbal fastidiousness that he went on unconscious not only of his opponent's interruption, but even of his own pause. So stock improving continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, so fraught with real high hopes of the future. Science therefore regards thieves in the abstract, just as it regards murderers. It regards them not as sinners to be punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to be detained and cared for. His first two digits now closed again, as he hesitated. In short, for the required period. But there is something special in the case we investigate here. Cleptomania commonly conjoins itself. I beg pardon, said Michael. I did not ask just now, because to tell the truth I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber with a pinch in his fingers of scentless and delicate dust. But now the things are moving a little more. There is something I should really like to know. I have hung on Dr. Pym's lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call rapture, but I have so far been unable to form any conjecture about what the accused, in the present instance, is supposed to have been gone and done. If Mr. Moon will have patience, said Dr. Pym with dignity, he will find that this was the very point to which my exposition was directed. Cleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction to certain defined materials, and it has been held by no less a man than Harris that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict specialism and very narrow professional outlook of most criminals. One will have the most elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve links placed about in the most conspicuous locations. Another will impede his flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while elastic side boots leave him cold and even sarcastic. The specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than of any brightness or business habit. But there is one kind of depredator to whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply. I allude to our fellow citizen, the housebreaker. It has been maintained by some of our boldest young truth seekers, that the eye of a burglar beyond the back garden wall could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a fork that is insulated in a locked box under the butler's bed. They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science on this point. They declare that diamond links are not left about in conspicuous locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as they were in the great test experiment of Calypso College. We hope this experiment here will be an answer to that young bringing challenge, and we'll bring the burglar once more into line and union with his fellow criminals. Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bee wilderness for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in explosive enlightenment. Oh, I see he cried. You mean that Smith is a burglar? I thought I made it quite adequately lucid, said Mr. Pym, folding up his eyelids. It was typical of this topsy-turvy private trial that all the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression on either side was exasperating and unintelligible to the other. Moon could not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one. All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator continued the American doctor are cases of burglary. Pursuing the same course as in the previous case, we select the indubitable instance from the rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron evidence. I will now call on my colleague Mr. Gould to read a letter we have received from the earnest unspotted cannon of Durham, Cannon Hawkins. Mr. Moles's Gould lipped up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from the earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moles's Gould could imitate a farmyard well. Sir Henry Irving, not so well. Mermi Lloyd, to a point of excellence, and the new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists. But his imitation of cannon Durham was not convincing. Indeed, the sense of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his pronunciation, that it is perhaps better to print it here, as Moon read it, when a little later it was handed across the table. Dear sir, I can scarcely feel surprised that the instance you mentioned, private as it was, should have filtered through our omnivorous journals to the mere populace. For the position I have since attained makes me, I conceive a public character, and this was certainly the most extraordinary incident in a not uneventful, and perhaps not an unimportant career. I am by no means without experience in scenes of civil tumult. I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose League days at Herne Bay, and before I broke what the wilder said has spent many a night at the Christian Social Union. But this other experience was quite inconceivable. I can only describe it as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me as a clergyman to mention. It occurred in the days when I was for a short period a curate at Hoxton, and the other curate, then my colleague, induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must say profanely described, as calculated to promote the kingdom of God. I found on the contrary that it consisted entirely of men in corduroy's and greasy clothes, whose manners were coarse, and their opinions extreme. Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say little. No one can be more convinced than I of the evil of politics in the pulpit, and I never offer my congregation any advice about voting, except in cases in which I feel strongly they are likely to make an erroneous selection. But while I do not mean to touch, at all, upon political or social problems, I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jests, such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as socialism or radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal of a sacred trust. Far be it for me to say a word against the Reverend Raymond Percy, the colleague in question. He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some apparently fascinating. But a clergyman who talks like a socialist, wears his hair like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person, will never rise in his profession or even obtain the admiration of the good and wise. Nor is it for me to utter my personal judgments of the appearance of the people in the hall, yet a glance around the room revealing ranks of debased and envious faces. Man Alive by G. K. Chesterton. Section 18. Part 2. The Explanation of Innocent Smith. Chapter 2. The Two Currets, or the Berglary Charge. Part 2. Adopting said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive. Adopting the Reverend Gentleman's favorite figure of logic, may I say that while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect, he is a blasted old jackass? Really, said Dr. Pym, I protest. You must keep quiet, Michael said Englewood. They have a right to read their story. Chair, chair, chair, cried Gold, rolling about exuberantly on his own, and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all the authority of the Court of Beacon. Oh, don't wake the old lady, said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody good humor. I apologize, I won't interrupt again. Before the little eddy of interruption was ended, the reading of the clergyman's letter was already continuing. The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague of which I will say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the audience were Irish and showed the weakness of that impetuous people. When gathered together into gangs and conspiracies, they seemed to lose altogether that lovable good nature and readiness to accept anything one tells them, which distinguishes them as individuals. With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly, and sat down again. These persons, if not silent, were at least applause-ive during the speech of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level with witticisms about rent and a reserve of labor, confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly. Some hours afterward the storm broke. I had been addressing the meeting for some time, pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes, their insufficient attendance at evening service, their neglect of the harvest festival, and of many other things that might materially help them to improve their lot. It was, I think, about this time that an extraordinary interruption occurred. An enormously powerful man, partly concealed with white plaster, arose in the middle of the hall, and offered in a loud, roaring voice like a bulls, some observations which seemed to be in a foreign language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, condescended to his level by entering into a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be the victor. The meeting began to behave more respectably, for a little. Yet before I had said twelve sentences more, the rush was made for the platform. The enormous plasterer in particular plunged toward us, shaking the earth like an elephant, and I really do not know what would have happened, if a man equally large, but not quite so ill dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away. This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was shoving them back. I do not know what he said, but with shouting and shoving and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the wretched people went roaring down another passage. Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story. When he had got us outside in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane with a very lonely looking lamppost, this giant addressed me as follows. You're well out of that, sir. Now you'd better come along with me. I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we've all been talking about. Come along. And turning his big back abruptly, he let us down the lean old lane with the one lean old lamppost, we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him. He had certainly helped us in a most difficult situation, and as a gentleman I could not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds. Such also was the view of my socialistic colleague, who, with all his dreadful talk of arbitration, is a gentleman also. In fact, he comes of the Staffordshire Percy's, a branch of the old house, and has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family. I cannot but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal advantages with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation, and certainly, but I digress. A fog was coming up the street, and that last lamppost faded behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind. The large man in front of us looked larger and larger in the haze. He did not turn round, but he said with his huge back to us that, all that talking is no good. We want a little practical socialism. I quite agree, said Percy, but I always like to understand things in theory before I put them into practice. Oh, you just leave that to me, said the practical socialist, or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness. I have a way with me. I am a permeator. I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed, so I was sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey for the present. It led us through the most singular ways out of the lane where we were already rather cramped into a paved passage, at the end of which we passed through a wooden gate left open. Then we found ourselves in the increasing darkness and vapor, crossing what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden. I called out to the enormous person going on in front, but he answered obscurely that it was a shortcut. I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading to a higher level of road. My thoughtless colleague ran up it so quickly that I could not otherwise then follow as best I could. The path on which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow. I had never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exegious. Along one side of it, it grew what in the dark and density of air, I first took to be some short, strong thicket of shrubs. Then I saw that they were not short shrubs, they were the tops of tall trees. I, an English gentleman, and a clergyman of the Church of England, was walking along the top of a garden wall like a tomcat. I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps and let loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I could all the time. It's a right-of-way to clear my indefensible informant, it's close to traffic once in a hundred years. Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy, I called out, you are not going on with this black guard. Why, I think so, answered my unhappy colleague flippantly. I think you and I are bigger black guards than he is, whatever he is. I am a burglar, explained the big creature calmly. I am a member of the Fabian society. I take back the wealth stolen by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform fitted to the special occasion. Here a little, there a little. Do you see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof? I am permeating that one tonight. Whether this is a crime or a joke, I cried, I desire to be quit of it. The latter is just behind you, answered the creature with horrible courtesy, and before you go, do let me give you my card. If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit, I should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind would have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall. As it was in the wildness of the moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and ladder, landed in the respectable streets once more. Not before, however, I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts, that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof toward the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy, a priest of God, and what was worse, a gentleman, was crawling up after him. I have never seen either of them since that day. In consequence of this soul-searching experience, I severed my connection with the wildset. I am far from saying that every member of the Christian social union must necessarily be a burglar. I have no right to bring any such charge, but it gave me a hint of what such courses may lead to in many cases, and I saw them no more. I have only to add that the photograph you enclose taken by a Mr. Englewood is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question. When I got home that night, I looked at his card, and he was inscribed there under the name, Innocent Smith, yours faithfully, John Clement Hawkins. Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper. He knew that the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document that Moses Gould, for one, could know more right like a cannon than he could read like one. After handing it back, he rose to offer the defense on the burglary charge. We wish, said Michael, to give all reasonable facilities to the prosecution, especially as it will save time on the whole court. The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they are made. Perjury is a variety of asesia, leading a man to say one thing instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer's cramp, forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of his own. Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea sickness, but it is unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny. Innocent Smith never did commit burglary at all. I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement and ask the prosecution two or three questions. Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent. In the first place continued moon, have you the date of Cannon Hawkins' last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and roofs? Ah, yes, call gold smartly. November 13, 1891. Have you continued moon identified the houses in Hoxton up which they climb? Must have been Lady Smith's terrace out of the high road, answered Gould, with the same clockwork readiness. Well said, Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him. Was there any burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that out. There may well have been, said the Dr. Pymley, after a pause, an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities. Another question proceeded Michael. Cannon Hawkins, in his blood and thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment. Why don't you produce the evidence of the other clergyman who actually followed the burglar and presumably was present at the crime? Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table, as he did when he was especially confident of the clearness of his reply. We have entirely failed, he said, to track the other clergyman who seems to have melted into the ether after Cannon Hawkins had seen him as ascending the gutters and leads. I am fully aware that this may strike many as singular yet upon reflection, I think it will appear pretty natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the can as evidence, a minister of eccentric ways. His connection with England's proudest and fairest does not seemingly prevent the taste for the society of the real low down. On the other hand, the prisoner of Smith is, by general agreement, a man of irresistible fascination. I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Reverend Percy into the crime and forced him to hide his head in the real criminal class. That would fully account for his non-appearance and the failure of all attempts to trace him. It is impossible then to trace him, as Moon. End of Section 18 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Man Alive by G. K. Chesterton Section 19 Part 2 The Explanations of Innocent Smith Chapter 2 The Two Currets, or the Burglary Charge Part 3 Impossible, repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes. You are sure it's impossible? Oh, dry up, Michael, cried Gould irritably. We'd have found him if we could, for you bet you saw the burglary. Don't you start looking for him. Look for your own head in the dustbin. You'll find that after a bit, and his voice died away in grumbling. Arthur directed Michael Moon sitting down. Kindly read Mr. Raymond Percy's letter to the court. Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said to shorten the proceedings as much as possible, began Englewood. I will not read the first part of the letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution to admit the account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as facts are concerned, that given by the first clergyman. We concede then the canon story so far as it goes. This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then, at the point when all three men were standing on the garden wall. As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my mind not to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud of copper fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was violent and simple, yet the thoughts that led up to it were so complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman, and I would have given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road. That God should allow good people to be as beastly stupid as that rose against me like a towering blasphemy. At Oxford I fear I had the artistic temperament rather badly, and artists loved to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern, discipline was a mere decoration. I delighted in the mere divisions of time I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I liked fish, and the fast was made for men who liked meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had fasted for five hundred years, men who had to gnaw fish because they could not get meat and fish bones when they could not get fish. As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the church militant as if it were the church pageant. Hoxton cures that. Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the church militant had not been a pageant, but a riot, and a suppressed riot. There still living patiently in Hoxton were the people to whom the tremendous promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without also being an atheist and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton. On top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned in the marketplace, I should still have had that patience that all good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins, nor any other kind of craft. He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman. That is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his class. He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address. He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said. A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother and that this brother is a major. When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body and soul together, the stampede against our platform began. I took part in his undeserved rescue. I followed his obscure deliverer until, as I have said, we stood together on the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog. Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar and decided in a spasm of inspiration that the burglar was the better man of the two. The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was, and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not. I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belonged to it myself. I knew there was not very much in the lower class, for I had lived with it a long time. Many old texts about the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class. About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder, I was crawling up a low, sloping, blue slate roof after a large man who went leaping in front of me like a gorilla. This upward scramble was short, and we soon found ourselves trampling along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big thoroughfares with chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts. The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body labored. The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed overpowered by sinister spirits. Tall specters with turbans of vapor seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both. I thought dimly of illustrations to the Arabian knights on brown paper with rich but somber tints, showing Jeanne gathering round the seal of Solomon. By the way, what was the seal of Solomon? Nothing to do with sealing wax, really, I suppose, but my muddle fancy felt the thick clouds as being of that heavy and clinging substance of strong opaque color, poured out of boiling pots, and stamped into monstrous emblems. The first effect of the tall turbaned vapors was that discolored look of pea soup or brown coffee of which Londoners commonly speak. But the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a forest of chimney pots, and there stood in every chimney pot as if it were a flower pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of colored vapor. The colors of the smoke were various, for some chimneys were from firesides and some from factories, again from mere rubbish heaps. And yet, though the tins were all varied, they all seemed unnatural, like fumes from a witch's pot. It was as if the shameful and ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate spurt of steam, colored according to the fish or flesh consumed. Here, a glow from underneath were dark red clouds, such as my drift from dark jars of sacrificial blood. There the vapor was darkened to go gray, like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell broth. In another place the smoke was of an awful, opaque ivory, yellow, such as might be the disembodiment of one of their old leprous waxen images. But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulfurous green as clear and crooked as Arabic. Mr. Moles's ghoul once more attempted the arrest of the bus. He attempted to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duque had woken up observed that she was sure it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted down by Moses, with a blue and by Michael, with a red pencil. Inglewood then resumed the reading of the document. Then I read the writings of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern city that makes it. It is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked and vain. Modern England was like a cloud of smoke. It could carry all colors, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuge in the sky. These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind and looked down on it and seen it as a whirlpool, and then we had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny of my own mind. Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals could still ascend like angels. As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one of the big chimney pots that stood at the regular intervals like lampposts along that uplifted and aerial highway. He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace. So far as I could guess from the abyss, full of fog on either side, and the veiled lights of red-brown and old gold glowing through them now and then, we were on the top of one of those long, consecutive and gentile rows of houses which are still to be found, lifting their heads above the poorer districts. The remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders. Probably enough they were entirely untenanted or teneted only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old empty palaces of Italy. Indeed some little time later when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we were walking round a semi-circle of Crescent which fell away below us into one flat square or a wide street below another, like a gigantic stairway in a manner not unknown in the eccentric building of London and looked like the last ledges of the land. But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet. My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky. Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney, he leaned on and leaned on it a little more heavily and the whole chimney pot turned over like the opening top of an ink stand. I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged his criminal approaches long before. The collapse of the big chimney pot ought to have been the culmination of my chaotic feelings, but to tell the truth it produced a sudden sense of comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what connected this abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies. Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys in the harlequin nades of my childhood and was darkly and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses were of laugh and paint and pasteboard and were only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The law-breaking of my companions seemed not only seriously excusable but even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their footscrapers? Their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats that they should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vaporous visions, a heaven of a higher levity. My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible. Something again far off and yet familiar pleased me about this way of invading the houses of men. I thought of little chimney sweeps and the water-babies, but I decided that it was not that. Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime. Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney. Almost at the same instant, the hairy head disappeared into the black hole, but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two afterwards, the hairy head reappeared. It was dark against the more fiery part of the fog, and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends. I jumped into the gulf and as blindly as courteous, for I was still thinking of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such a vertical entrance. In every well-appointed gentleman's house I reflected, there was the front door for the gentleman and the side door for the tradesman, but there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is, so to speak, the underground passage between earth and heaven. By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages, like the Skylark, to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain conventions and a widely distributed lack of courage for climbing, this door was perhaps little used, but Santa Claus's door was really the front door. It was the door fronting the universe. I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret or loft below the roof, and I scrambled down the squat ladder that led us down into a yet larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was halfway down the ladder that I suddenly stood still and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps, as my companion had retraced them from the beginnings of the garden wall. The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses. I remembered why Santa Claus came and why he was welcome. I was brought up in the property classes, and with all their horror of offenses against property, I had heard all the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong. I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times, and there, then, at age of forty-four, halfway down a ladder, in a dark room in the bodily act of burglary, I saw for the first time that theft, after all, is really wrong. It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strange, soft footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part of the bare flooring after a few fumbling efforts lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a light from below and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting-room of the sort that, in larger houses, often leads out of a bedroom and is an adjunct to it. Light, thus breaking from beneath our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust and rust and had doubtless been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend. But I did not look at this for long, for the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness. To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle, by so forgotten a door, was an epic in one's psychology. It was like having found the fourth dimension. My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so subtly and soundlessly that I could do nothing but follow him through for lack of practice and crime. I was by no means soundless. Before the echo of my boots had died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door, half-opened it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening. Then, leaving the door still half-open, he came back into the middle of the room and ran his rowing eyes round its furniture and ornaments. The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human way that makes the wall seem alive. It was a deep and full but slovenly bookcase of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that looked like red goblins stood in a corner and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part. There were three windows high but narrow. After another glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged inside. He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely handsome cut glass decanter containing what looked like port. Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation and revulsions I had felt above. Don't do it! I cried quite incoherently. Santa Claus. Ah! said the burglar as he put the decanter on the table and stood looking at me. You've thought about that, too? I can't express a millionth part of what I thought of, I cried. But it's something like this, oh, can't you see it? Why are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night? He has permitted secrecy, trespass almost treachery, because there are more toys where he has been. What should we feel if there were less? Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take away the children's balls and dolls while they slept? Could a Greek tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening? Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer? Can you think of anything so baze as a toy-stealer? The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes fixed on my face. End of section 19 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Man Alive by G. K. Chesterton Section 20 Part 2 The Explanations of Innocence Smith Chapter 2 The Two Currets The Burglary Charge Part 4 Man, I said, all stealing is toy-stealing. That's why it's really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really respected because of their worthlessness. I know Naboss Vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark. I know Nathan Zulam is really a woolly ball-am on a wooden stand. I did not mind so much as long as I thought of men's things as their valuables. But I dare not put a hand on their vanities. After a moment I added abruptly. Only saints and sages ought to be robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged, but not the poor little worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride. He set out two wine-glasses from the cupboard, filled them both, and lifted one of them with a salutation toward his lips. Don't do it, I cried. It might be the last bottle of some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it. Don't you see there's something sacred in the silliness of such things? It's not the last bottle and answered my criminal calmly. There's plenty more in the cellar. You know the house, then, I said. Too well, he answered, with a sadness so strange, has to have something eerie about it. I'm always trying to forget what I know, and to find what I don't know. He drained his glass. Besides, he added, it will do him good. What will do him good? The wine I'm drinking, said the strange person. Does he drink too much, then, I inquired? No, he answered. Not unless I do. Do you mean I demanded that the owner of this house approves of all you do? God forbid, he answered. But he has to do the same. The dead face of the fog, looking in at all three windows, unreasonably increased the sense of riddle and even terror about this tall, narrow house we had entered out of the sky. I had once more the notion about the gigantic genie. I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces of the dead reds and yellows of Egypt were staring in at each window of our little lamplit room at a lighted stage of marionettes. My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of him and talking with the same, rather creepy, confidentialness. I'm always trying to find him to catch him on awareness. I come in through skylights and trapdoors to find him, but whenever I find him, he is doing what I am doing. I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. There is someone coming, I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it, not from the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bed-chamber which seemed somehow to make it more alarming. Footsteps were coming near. I'm quite unable to say what mystery or monster or double I expected to see when the door was pushed open from within. I am only quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see. Framed in the open doorway stood with an air of great serenity, a rather tall young woman, definitely, though indefinably artistic. Her dress, the color of spring and her hair of autumn leaves, with a face which though still comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as intelligence. All she said was, I didn't hear you come in. I came in another way, said the permeator, somewhat vaguely. I had left my latch-key at home. I got to my feet and a mixture of politeness and mania. I'm really very sorry I cried. I know my position is irregular. Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is? Mine, said the burglar. May I present you to my wife? I doubtfully and somewhat slowly resumed my seat and I did not get out of it until nearly morning. Mrs. Smith, such was the prosaic name of this far-from-prosaic household, lingered a little, talking slightly and pleasantly. She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd mixture of shyness and sharpness as if she knew the world well but was still a little harmlessly afraid of it. Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a husband had left her a little nervous. Anyhow, when she had retired to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary man poured forth his apologia and autobiography over the dwindling wine. He had been sent to Cambridge for a mathematical and scientific rather than classical or literary career. A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools and had bred in him a war between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the face of distinguished Don and driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a water-spout. He had done it solely because the poor Don had professed in a theory, a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Bombarding as he was with revulsion from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles. He did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it. What is more immortal, he would cry, than love and war? Type of all desire and joy. Beer. Fightful battle and conquest. Skittles. There was something in him of what the old world called the solemnity of rebels when they spoke of solemnizing a mere masquerade or wedding banquet. Nevertheless, he was not a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical joker. His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith in itself mystical and even childlike and Christian. I don't deny, he said, that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epics it is necessary to have another kind of priests called poets actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn't enough blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages, looking up an eternal perspective, it might be true that life is a learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as true that death was their only chance of learning to live. His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test that he felt it continually slipping from himself as much as from others. He had the same pistol for himself as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong speed to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial and yet insane details that had once reminded him of the awful subconscious reality. When the dawn had hung on the stone-gutter the sight of his long dangling legs vibrating in the void-like wings somehow awoke the naked satire of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers. The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head which he had so elaborately cultivated and only saved by his legs which he had treated with coldness and neglect. Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording this except to send a telegram to an old friend, by this time a total stranger to say that he had just seen a man with legs and that the man was alive. The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very headlong weir in a canoe by a way of proving to himself that he was alive and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the fact. What was worse he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing boat who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation. He apologized in wild guests through all his wild-wet labours to bring her to the shore, and when he had done so at last he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow with the same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her he completely married her and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently said good-night. They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury. Perhaps indeed that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home. But perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down. I'm a very domestic fellow he explained with gravity, and I have often come to know, rather than be laid for tea. He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total stranger and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of man he was. The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies, and it was found impossible to explain to him that he did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs than he always felt in others' affairs. I know there's a fellow called Smith, he said in his rather weird way, living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I know he is really happy, and yet I could never catch him at it. Sometimes he would of a sudden treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed politeness like a young stranger struck with love at first sight. Sometimes he would extend fear to the very furniture and would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on and climb the staircase as cautiously as the cragsman to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton of reality. Every stare is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said, and at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense and would enter by another way so as to feel like a thief and a robber. He would break and violate his own home as he had done with me that night. It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence of the man who would not die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep the last load of fog was lifting and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world. It will be enough for many to say that I had passed the night with a maniac. The term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being a man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married a man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbors. On this I have but one word to say and I feel it of my honor to say it though no one understands. I believe the maniac was one of those who do not merely come but are sent sent like a great gale upon ships by him who made his angels winds and his messengers of flaming fire. This at least I know for certain whether such men have laughed or wept we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping whether they cursed or blessed the world they have never fitted in. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an adder, but it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear. Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction. For the goodness of good things like the badness of bad things is a prodigy past speech. It is to be pictured rather than spoken. We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels before we feel even in its first faint vibrations the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world. I am yours faithfully Raymond Percy. Olly, Olly, Olly, Olly said Mr. Moose's gold. The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been in an almost religious state of submission and assent. Something had bound them together something in the sacred tradition of the last two words of the letter something also in the touching and boyish embarrassment with which Inglewood had read them. For he had all the thin-skinned reverence of the agnostic. Moose's gold was as good a fellow in his way as ever lived far kinder to his family than more refined men of pleasure simple and steadfast in his admiration a thoroughly wholesome animal and a thoroughly genuine character. But wherever there is conflict crises come in which any soul personal or racial unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces. English reverence Irish mysticism American idealism looked up and saw on the face of Moose a certain smile. It was the smile of the cynic triumphant which has been the toxin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or medieval towns. Olly, Olly, Olly said Moose's gold. Finding that this was not well received he explained further exuberant steepening on historic exuberant features Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when he's corfin' up a fly, he said pleasantly. Don't you see you've bunged up Bull Smith anyhow. If this person's tails, okay. My Smith is odd. He's pretty odd. We find him ill open with Miss Gray who respects in a cab. Well, what about this Mrs. Smith? The cureth talks of. With her blustered shyness transmogrified into blighted sharpness Miss Gray ain't been very sharp but I reckon she'll be pretty shy. Don't be a brute, growled Michael Moon. None could lift their eyes to look at Mary. But Inglewood sent a glance along the table in Innocent Smith. He was still bowed above his paper toys and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or shame. He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and tucked it in elsewhere. Then the wrinkle vanished and he looked relieved. End of Section 20 End of Chapter 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Man Alive by G. K. Chesterton Section 21 Part 2 The Explanations of Innocent Smith Chapter 3 The Round Road or the Desertion Charge Part 1 Pym rose with sincere embarrassment for he was an American and his respect for ladies was real and not at all scientific. Ignoring, he said, the delicate and considerable nightly protests that have been called forth by my colleague's native sense of oration and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable to the grand ruins of a feudal land. I still think my colleague's question by no means devoid of relevancy. The last charge against he accused of burglary, the next charge on the paper is a bigamy and desertion. It does without question appear that the defense in aspiring to rebut this last charge have really admitted the next. Either Innocent Smith is still under a charge of attempted burglary or else that is exploded but he is pretty well fixed for attempted bigamy. It all depends on what view we take of the alleged letter from Curat Pirsi. Under these conditions I feel justified in claiming my right to questions. May I ask how the defense got hold of the letter from Curat Pirsi? Did he come direct from the prisoner? We have had nothing direct from the prisoner, said Moon quietly. The few documents which the defense guarantees came to us from another quarter. From what quarter, asked Dr. Pym. If you insist, answered Moon, we had them from Miss Gray. Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes and instead opened them very wide. Do you really mean to say, he said, that Miss Gray was in possession of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith? Quite so, said Inglewood and sat down. The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks. Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curat Pirsi's narrative is only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents in our own possession. Of these the principal and most certain is the testimony of Innocent Smith's Gardener who was present at the most dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr. Gould, the Gardener, please. Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the Gardener. That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith when they had little house on the edge of Croyton. From the Gardener's tail, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain he had seen the place. It was one of those corners of town or country that one does not forget for it looked like a frontier. The garden hung very high above the lane and its end was steep and sharp, like a fortress. Beyond was a roll of real country with a white patch sprawling across it and the roots, bowls, and branches of great trees writhing and twisting against the sky. But as if to assert that the lane itself was suburban were sharply relieved against that gray and tossing upland a lamppost painted a peculiar yellow-green and a red pillar box that stood exactly at the corner. Inglewood was sure of the place. He had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals bicycle. He had always dimly felt it was a place where something might occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared over the garden bushes above. The Gardener's account, unlike the Curaths, was quite free from decorative adjectives, however many he may have uttered privately when writing it. He simply said that on a particular morning Mr. Smith came out and began to play about with a rake as he often did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child. He had two children. Sometimes he would hook the rake onto the branch of a tree and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in its final agony. Never apparently did he think of putting the rake to any of its proper uses and the Gardener in consequence treated his actions with coldness and brevity. But the Gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he, the Gardener, had come round the corner of the house carrying the hose. Had seen Mr. Smith, standing on the lawn in a striped red and white jacket which might have been his smoking jacket but was quite as like a part of his pajamas, and had heard him then and there call out to his wife who is looking out of the bedroom window onto the garden. He is decisive and very loud expressions. I won't stay here any longer. I've got another wife and much better children a long way from here. My other wife's got redder hair than yours and my other garden's got a much finer situation, and I'm going off to them. With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky, higher than many could have shot an arrow and caught it again. Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and landed on his feet down the lane below and set off for the road without even a hat. Much of the picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental memory of the place. He could see with his mind's eye that big, bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked woodland road and leaving lamppost and pillar box behind. But the gardener, on his own account was quite prepared to swear to the public confession of bigamy to the temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky and the final disappearance of the man up the road. Moreover, being a local man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumors that Smith had embarked on the southeastern coast, nothing was known of him again. This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few but clear phrases in which he opened the defense upon the third charge. So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon on the continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account. I hope you are not so insular, he said, that you will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood's favor we will hear the French innkeeper. Before the company had decided the delicate point, Inglewood was already reading the accounting question. It wasn't French. It seemed to them to run something like this. Yes, sir. I am Dorobin of Dorobin's Café on the sea front at Grasse, rather north of Dunkirk. I am willing to write all I know of the stranger out of the sea. I have no sympathy with the eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim flower bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit beauty to pervade one's whole life, as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with uraniums. My faith, but we should miss the onions. But whether I read things backwards through my memory or whether there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot as yet peers, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening I felt like a poet, like any little rascal of a poet who drinks ebbsynth in the ground to marté. Positively the sea itself looks like ebsynth, the green and bitter and poisonous. I had never known it to look so unfamiliar before. In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely colored high husk where they sell the newspapers and along the sandhills by the shore. There I saw a fishing boat with the brown sails sailing silently from the sea. It was already quite close and out of it clambered a man of monstrous stature who came waiting to shore with the water not up to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men. He leaned on a long raker pole which looked like a trident and made him look like a trident. Wet as he was and with stripes of seaweed clinging to him, he walked across to my cafe and sitting down at a table outside for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep but is seldom demanded. Then the monster with a great politeness invited me to partake of a vermouth before my dinner and we fell into conversation. He had apparently crossed from Kant by a small boat and got at a private bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an easterly direction and not waiting for any of the official boats. He was, he somewhat vaguely explained to the king for a house. When I naturally asked him where the house was he answered that he did not know. It was on an island, it was somewhere to the east or as he expressed it with a hazy anti-impatient gesture. Over there. I asked him how if he did not know the place he would know it when he saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy and became alarmingly minute. He gave a description of a house detailed enough for an island. I had forgotten nearly all the details except the last two which were that the lamppost was painted green and there was a red pillar box at the corner. A red pillar box I cried in the astonishment. Why the place must be in England. I had forgotten he said nodding heavily. That is the island's name. But none to know all my cried testily you've just come from England my boy. They said it was England said conspiratorily. They said it was Kent. The Kentish men are such liars one can't believe anything they say. But here I said you must pardon me. I am elderly and the few mysteries of the young man are beyond me. I go by common sense or at the largest by that extension of applied common sense called science. Science cried the stranger. There is only one good thing science ever discovered. A good thing, good tidings of great joy that the world is round. I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my intelligence. I mean he said that going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already. Is it not even shorter I asked to stop where you are? No, no, no he cried emphatically. That way is long and very weary. At the back of the dawn I shall find the wife I really married and the house that is really mine, and that house will have a greener lamppost and a redder pillar box. Do you he asked with sudden intensity do you never want to rush out of your house in order to find it? No, I think not I replied. Reason tells a man from the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of life. I remain here content to fulfill the life of a man. All my interests are here and most of my friends. And yet he cried starting to his almost terrific height. You made the French Revolution. Pardon me I said, I'm not quite so elderly, relative perhaps? I mean your sort did, exclaimed his personage. Yes, you damn smug settled sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh I know some say it was no good and you're just back where you were before. Why, oh that's just where we all want to be. Back where we were before. That is revolution, going right round. Every revolution, like a repentance, is a return. He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again and then said something indifferent and soothing, but he struck the tiny table with his colossal fist and went on. I am going to have a revolution, not a French revolution but an English Revolution. God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny. The Frenchman march against the citadel of the city together. The Englishman marches to the outskirts of the city and alone. But I am going to turn the world upside down too. I am going to turn myself upside down. I am going to walk upside down in the cursed upside down land of the antipodes where trees and men hang head downward in the sky. But my revolution, like yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy place, the celestial incredible place to place where we were before. With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason, he left from the seat and stowed away into the twilight, swinging his pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment which also pointed to some laws of metal balance. This is all I know of the episode of the man landed from the fishing boat, and I hope it may serve the interests of justice. Except, sir, the assurances of the very high consideration with which I have the honor to be your obedient servant. The next document in our dossier continued in what comes from the town of Krasok in the central plains of Russia and runs as follows. Sir, my name is Paul Nikolovitch. I am the station master at the station near Krasok. The great trains go by across the plains, taking people to China. But very few people get down at the platform where I have to watch. This makes my life rather lonely and I am thrown back much upon the books I have. But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbors, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia, so much has in other parts. Many of the peasants round here have never heard of Bernard Shaw. I am a liberal, and do my best to spread liberal ideas, but since the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult. The revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles of humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books, they were ill acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts though provoked by the tyranny of the government. But now there is a tendency to reproach all intelligence with the memory of them. This is very unfortunate for intelligence. End of Section 21 Chapter 3 The Round Road, or the Desertion Charge Part 2 It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains came through at long intervals that I stood one day watching a train that had come in. Only one person got out of the train far away up at the other end of it, for it was a very long train. It was evening with a cold greenish sky, a little snow had fallen, not enough to whiten the plane, which stretched away the sort of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops of some distant table lands caught the evening light like lakes. As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the train, he grew larger and larger. I thought I had never seen so large a man. But he looked even taller than he was. I think because his shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little. From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole such as peasant's rake in weeds with to burn them. Before he had traversed the full length of the train, he was entangled in one of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution, though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the train. I was just moving to his assistance when he whirled up his rake and laid out right and left with such energy that he came right through them without scathe and strode up to me leaving them staggered and really astonished. Yet when he reached me after so abrupt an assertion of his aim he could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house. There are not many houses to be had round here, I answered the same language. The district has been very disturbed. A revolution, as you know, has recently been suppressed. Any further building? Oh, I don't mean that, he cried. I mean a real house, a live house. It really is a live house, for it runs away from me. I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture moved me profoundly. We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere of folklore, and its unfortunate effects can still be seen in the bright colors of the children's dolls and of the icons. For an instant the idea of a house running away from a man gave me pleasure for the enlightenment of a man moved slowly. You have no other house of your own, I asked. I have left it, he said very sadly. It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women and yet I could not feel it. And so, I said with sympathy you walked straight out the front door like a masculine Nora. Nora, he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian word. I mean Nora in the dolls house, I replied. At this he looked very much astonished and I knew he was an Englishman, for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but Eukases. The dolls house, he cried vehemently why, that's just where Ibsen was so wrong. While the whole aim of a house is to be a real house. Don't you remember when you were a child how those little windows were windows? While the big windows weren't. A child has a dolls house and shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A banker has a real house yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest shriek when their real front door opens inwards. Something from the folklore of my infancy still kept me foolishly silent and before I could speak Nora and was saying a sort of loud whisper. I have found out how to make big things small. I have found out how to turn a house into a dolls house. Get a long way off it. God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift of distance. Once let me see my old brick house standing up quite little against the horizon and I shall want to go back to it again. I shall see the funny little toy lamppost painted green against the gate and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the window. For the windows really open in my dolls house. But why, I ask, should you wish to return to that particular dolls house? Having taken like Nora the bold step against convention having made yourself in the conventional sense of disreputable having dared to be free why should you not take advantage of your freedom? As the greatest modern writers have pointed out what you called your marriage was only your mood. You have a right to leave it all behind you like the clippings of your hair or the pairings of your nails. Having once escaped you have the world before you. Though the words may seem strange to you you are free in Russia. He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the planes where the only moving thing was the long and laboring trail of smoke out of the railway engine violent intent, volcanic and outline. The one hot and heavy cloud of that cold, clear evening of pale green. Yes, he sat with the huge relief. I am free in Russia, you are right. I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again and nobody could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something. His tone was so queer and mystical and impaled to ask him what he meant and of what exactly I had convinced him. You have convinced me, he said, with that same dreamy eye why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his wife and why is it dangerous, I inquired. Why? Because nobody can find him, answered this odd person, and we all want to be found. The most original modern thinkers have remarked, Ibsen, Gorky, that what we want most is to be lost to find ourselves in untrodden paths and to do unprecedented things to break with the past and belong to the future. He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily and looked round on what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene. The dark purple plains, the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of melt-contents. I shall not find the house here, he said. It is still eastward further and further eastward. Then he turned upon me with something like fury and struck the foot of his pole upon the frozen earth and if I do go back to my country, he cried, I may be locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit unconventional in my time. Why, night she stood in a row of ramrods and a silly old oppression army and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs. But the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road I am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out. I am a revolutionist, but don't you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden, to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of? Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get home? No, I answered after due reflection. I don't think I should accept that. Ah, he said with a sort of sigh, then you have explained a second thing to me. What do you mean, I asked? What thing? Why, your revolution has failed, he said. And walking across quite suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at last. And as I saw, the long sneaky tail of it disappear along the darkening flats. I saw no more of him. But though his views are adverse to the best advance thought, he struck me as an interesting person. Would you like to find out if he has produced any literary works? Yours, etc., Paul. There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lies which kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again without interruption that Ingle would open another paper upon his pile. The court will be indulgent, he said, if the next note lacks the special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own way. The celestial principles are permanent. Greeting. I am Wong Hai, and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest of Fu. The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it must be very dull. But I showed him the wrongness of his thought. I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy. And in this I shall doubtless die. But if a man remains in one place and sees that the place changes, the pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade, sometimes red, like garnet. But the night is always ebony, and always returns, said the Emperor Ho. The skybreaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly seen any stirring in the tops of the green pagoda as over a sea when I go to the top of the temple at morning. And yet when he came it was as if an elephant had strayed from the armies of the great kings of India, for palms snapped and bamboos broke, and there came forth in the sunshine before the temple, one taller than the sons of men. Stripes of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival, and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon. Then he went, discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so that they looked like dead men filled with devils. And he spoke our speech, brokenly. He said to me, this is only a temple. I am trying to find a house. And then he told me within delegate haste that the lamp outside his house was green and that there was a red post at the corner of it. I have not seen your house, I dwell in this temple, and I serve the gods. Do you believe in the gods, he asked, with a hunger in his eyes, like the hunger of a dog? And this seemed to me a strange question to ask, for what should a man do except what men have done? My lord, I said it must be good for men to hold up their hands even if the skies are empty, for if there are gods they will be pleased, and if there are none then there are none to be displeased. Sometimes the skies are gold, and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all. So the great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our heads we may think many things. Yes, my lord, and doubt many things. So long as men offer rice at the right season and kindle lanterns at the river it matters little, whether there be gods or no, for these things are not to appease gods but to appease men. He came yet closer to me so that he seemed enormous. His look was very gentle. Break your temple, he said, and your gods will be freed. And I smiling at his simplicity answered, and so if there be no gods I shall have nothing but a broken temple. And at this the giant from whom a light of reason was rolled throughout his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him. And when I asked him for what he should be forgiven he answered, for being right. Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying, he cried. It is a shame that they should be wrong. We are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so many iniquities. It is a shame we should be right after all. And I, still enduring his harmlessness, he and his people were right. And he answered, we are right because we are bound where men should be bound and free where men should be free. We are right because we doubt and destroy laws and customs but we do not doubt our own right to destroy them. For you live by customs but we live by creeds. Behold me, in my country I am called smite. My country is abandoned, my name is defiled because I pursue around the world what really belongs to me. You are as steadfast as the trees because you do not believe. I am as fickle as the tempest because I do believe. I do believe in my own house which I shall find again and at the last remaineth the green lantern and the red post. I said to him, at the last remaineth only wisdom. But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout and rushing forward disappeared among the trees. I have not seen this man again or any other man. The virtues of the wise are of fine brass, long high. The next letter I have to read preceded Arthur Englewood will probably make clear the nature of our client's curious but innocent experiment. It is dated from a mountain village in California and runs as follows. Sir, a person answering to the rather extraordinary description required certainly went some time ago over the high paths of the Sierras on which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationery inhabit. I keep a rudimentary tavern rather rudder than a hut on the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is Louis Harrah and the very name may puzzle you about my nationality. Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one has been for fifteen years without society it is hard to have patriotism and where there is not even a hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father was an Irishman of the fiercest and most free shooting of the old Californian kind. My mother was a Spaniard proud of descent from the old Spanish families around San Francisco yet accused for all that of some ad mixture of red Indian blood. I was well educated and fond of music and books but like many other hybrids I was too good or too bad for the world and after attempting many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage like an Eskimo. I was shapeless in winter like a red Indian. I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers with a great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I had a bowy knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travelers that could climb up to my place. But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did. Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue. I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd effect on the mind. One tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself. Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles. Cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorus. These terraces and towers of rock do not like smaller crests seem to be the end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning. It's huge foundations. We could almost fancy the mountains reaching out above us like a tree of stone and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum. For just as the peaks failed us soaring impossibly far so the stars crowded us as it seemed coming impossibly near the spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than planets circling placidly about it. The end of section 22 This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org Man Alive by G. K. Chesterton Section 23 Part 2 The Explanations of Innocence Smith Chapter 3 The Round Road or The Desertion Charge Part 3 I know there is one angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks. Yes, city against city and citadel against citadel far up into the night. It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass. Broadly speaking only strange men did struggle up the pass but I had never seen one like this before. He carried I cannot conceive why a long dilapidated garden rake all bearded and bedraggled with grasses so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe. His hair which was as long and rank as the grass hung down below his huge shoulders and such clothes as clung about him were rags and tongues of red and yellow so that he had the air being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves. The rake a pitchfork or whatever it was he used sometimes as an Alpenstock sometimes I was told as a weapon I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon for he had and afterward showed me an excellent six-shooter in his pocket but that he said I use only for peaceful purposes I have no notion what he meant he sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from the vineyards below lying with ecstasy over it like one who had traveled long among alien cruel things and found at last something that he knew then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and colored glass that hangs over my door it is old but of no value my grandmother gave it to me long ago she was devout and it happened that the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and the wise men and the star he seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of our ladies blue gown and the big gold star behind that he led me also to look at the thing which I had not done for fourteen years then he slowly went through his eyes from this and looked out eastward where a road fell away below us the sunset sky was a vault of rich velvet fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark mountain amphitheater between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call green finger of a queer volcanic color and wrinkled all over with what looks like indecipherable writing it hung there like a Babylonian pillar or a needle the man silently stretched out his rake in that direction and before he spoke I knew what he meant beyond the great green rock in the purple sky hung a single star a star in the east he said in a strange horse voice like one of our ancient eagles the wise men followed the star and found the house but if I followed the star should I find the house it depends perhaps I said smilingly on whether you are a wise man I refrained from adding that he certainly didn't look at you may judge for yourself he answered I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it it certainly sounds paradoxical I said I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the room he continued and all the time I knew they were walking and talking in another house thousands of miles away under the light of different skies and beyond the series of the seas I love them with a devouring love because they seem not only distant but unattainable never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable but I seemed like a cold ghost therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony nay I did more I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a treadmill do you really mean I cried that you have come right around the world your speech is English you are coming from the west my pilgrimage is not yet accomplished he replied sadly I had become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile something in the word pilgrim awoke down in the roots of my runeus experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world and of something from whence I came I looked again at the little picture lantern at which I had not looked for fourteen years I said in a low tone would have said that we were all in exile and that no earthly house could cure the holy homesickness that forbids us rest he was silent for a long while and watched a single eagle drift out behind the green finger into the darkening void then he said I think your grandmother was right and stood up leaning on his grassy pole I think that must be the reason he said the secret of this life of man so aesthetic and so unappeased but I think there is more to be said I think God has given us the love of special places of a hearth and of a native land for a good reason I dare say I said but what reason because otherwise he said point he has pulled out at the sky and the abyss we might worship that what do you mean I demanded eternity he said in his harsh voice the largest of the idols the mightiest of the rivals of God you mean pantheism and infinity and all that I suggested I mean he said with an increasing vehemence that if there be a house from me in heaven it will either have a green lamp post and a hedge or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp post and a hedge I mean that God made me love one spot and serve it all things however wild in praise of it so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the suffestries that paradise is somewhere and not anywhere is something and not anything and I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp post after all with which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the perilous paths below alone with the eagles but since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen and I wonder whether America will endure yours faithfully Lewis Harrah after a short silence Englewood said and finally we desire to put in as evidence the following document this is to say that I am Ruth Davis and have been house made to Mrs. Smith that the laurels in Croydon for the last six months when I came the lady was alone with two children she was not a widow but her husband was away she was left with plenty of money and did not seem disturbed about him though she often hope he would be back soon she said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good one evening last week I was bringing the tea things out onto the lawn when I nearly dropped them the end of a long rake was suddenly stuck over the hedge and planted like a jumping pole and over the hedge just like a monkey on a stick came a huge horrible man all hairy and ragged like Robinson Caruso I screamed out but my mistress didn't even get out of her chair but smiled and said he wanted shaving then he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup of tea and then I realized this must be Mr. Smith himself he has stopped here ever since and does not really give us much trouble though I sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head Ruth Davis PS I forgot to say that he looked around at the garden and said very loud and strong oh what a lovely place you've got just as if he'd never seen it before the room had been growing dark and drowsy the afternoon sun sent one heavy shaft of powder gold across it which fell with an intangible solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray for the younger woman had left the court before the more recent of the investigations Mrs. Duke was still asleep and Edison Smith looking like a large hunchback in the twilight was bending closer and closer to his paper toys but the five men really engaged in the controversy and concerned not to convince the tribunal but to convince each other still sat round the table and asked about the possibility of public safety suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another cocked his little legs up against the table tipped his chair backwards so far as to be in direct danger of falling over emitted a startling and prolonged whistle like a steam engine and asserted that it was all his eye when I asked Moon what was all his eye he banged down behind the books again and answered with considerable excitement all those fairy tales he'd been reading out he said oh don't talk to me I ain't literary in that but I know fairy tales when I hear them I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical bits and felt inclined to go out for B and S but we're living in the west Amstead and not in Alley and long and the short of it is that some things happen and some things don't happen those are the things that don't happen I thought said Moon gravely that we clearly explained oh yes old chap you quite clearly explained ascended Mr. Gould with extraordinary you would explain an elephant off the doorstep you would I ain't a clever chap like you but I ain't a born natural Michael Moon and when there's an elephant on my doorstep I don't listen to no explanations it's got a trunk I says my trunk you says I'm fond of traveling and it changed us me good but the blasted things got toughs I says don't look a gift for us in the mouth you says but thank the goodness and the grace that on your birth is smiled but it's nearly as big as the house I says that's the blooming perspective you says and the sacred magic of distance why the elephants trumpeting like the day of judgment I says that your own conscience are talking to you Moses Gould you says in a grieve and tender voice well I've got a conscience as much as you I don't believe most of the things they tell you in church on Sundays and I don't believe these ear things anymore because you does about them as if you was in church I believe an elephants a great big ugly dangerous beast and I believe Smith's another do you mean to say as Tanglewood that you still doubt the evidence of exculpation that we have brought forward yes I do still doubt it said Gould warmly it's all a bit too far fetched and some of it a bit too far off how can we test all those tales how can we drop in and buy the pink anon at the railway station at Koski waski or whatever it was how can we go and do a gargle at the saloon bar on top of the Sierra Mountains but anybody can go and see Bunting's boarding house at Worthing Moon regarded him with an expression of real and assumed surprise anyone continued Gould can call on Mr. Tripp it is a comforting thought replied Michael with a restraint but why should anyone call on Mr. Tripp for just exactly the same reason cried excited Moses hammering on the table with both hands for just exactly the same reason that he should communicate with Mr. Zanbury and Moodle of Paternoster Row and with Gridley's I-Class Academy at Indon and with Old Lady Bullington who lives at Penge again to go at once to the moral roots of life said Michael why is it among the duties of man to communicate with Old Lady Bullington who lives at Penge it ain't one of the duties of man said Gould nor one of his pleasures either I can tell you she takes the cramput as Lady Bullington at Penge but it's one of the duties of a prosecutor pursuing the innocent, blameless, butterfly career of your friend Smith and it's the same with all the others I mentioned but why do you bring in these people here asking for wood why? because we got proof enough to sink a steamboat rowed Moses because I got the papers in my very end because your precious innocent is a black guard and ohm smasher and those are the ohms he smashed I don't set up for a holy man but I would have all those poor girls on my conscience for something and I think a chap that's capable of deserting and perhaps killing them all is about capable of cracking a crib or shooting an old schoolmaster so I don't care much about the other yarns one way or the other I think said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough that we are approaching this matter rather irregularly this is really the fourth charge on the charge sheet and perhaps I had better put it before you in an ordered and scientific manner nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence of the darkening room End of Chapter 3 End of Section 23