 Chapter 4 The Wild Weddings or The Polygamy Charge. A modern man said Dr. Cyrus Pym must, if he be thoughtful, approach the problem of marriage with some caution. Marriage is a stage, doubtless a suitable stage, in the long advance of mankind toward a goal which we cannot as yet conceive, which we are not perhaps as yet fitted even to desire. What gentleman is the ethical position of marriage? Have we outlived it? Outlived it? Broke out, moon? Why, nobody's ever survived it. Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve, and all as dead as mutton. This is, no doubt, an interpolation jocular in his character, said Dr. Pym frigidly. I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon's mature and ethical view of marriage. I can tell, said Michael savagely, out of the gloom. Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honor should decline. Michael, said Arthur Englewood in a low voice. You must keep quiet. Mr. Moon said Pym, with exquisite good temper, probably regards the institution in a more antiquated manner. Probably he would make it stringent and uniform. He would treat divorce in some great soul of steel, the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salthring Robinson, exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or laborer who scoots from his wife. Science has views broader and more humane. Just as murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction, just as theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct for variety. A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy. Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower, as there is doubtless for the intermittent groaning which appears to afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment. Our own world, scorning winter-bottom, has even dared to say for a certain rare and fine physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of females, as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males. In any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all authoritative inquirers. Such a type, if the widow over Negres does in many ascertained cases espouse and second noses, an albino, such a type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female pentagonian, will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct, the consoling figure of an Eskimo. To such a type there can be no doubt that the prisoner belongs. If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute any slight excuse for a man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses. Earlier in the inquiry the defense showed real chivalraic ideality, in admitting half our story without further dispute. We should like to acknowledge and imitate so imminently large hearted a style by conceding also that the story told by Curit Pircey about the canoe, the weir, and the young wife seems to be substantially true. Apparently Smith did marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat. It only remains to be considered whether it would not have been kinder of him to have murdered her instead of marrying her. In confirmation of this fact I can now concede to the defense an unquestionable record of such a marriage. So, saying he handed across to Michael a cutting from the maiden head Gazette, which distinctly recorded the marriage of the daughter of a coach, a tutor well known in the place to Mr. Innocent Smith, late to Brakespear College, Cambridge, when Dr. Pim presumed it was realized that his face had grown at once both tragic and triumphant. I pause upon this preliminary fact he said seriously because this fact alone would give us the victory, were we aspiring after victory and not after truth. As far as the personal and domestic problem holds us, that problem is solved. Dr. Warner and I entered this house at an instant of highly emotional difficulty. England's Warner has entered many houses to save humankind from sickness. This time he entered to save an innocent lady from walking pestilence. Smith was just about to carry away a young girl from this house. His cab and bag were at the very door. He had told her she was going to await the marriage license at the house of his aunt. That aunt continued Cyrus Pim, his face darkening grandly. That visionary aunt had been the dancing will of the wisp who had led many a high-sold maiden to her doom. Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word when he said, Aunt, there glowed about her all the merry mountain high morality of the Anglo-Saxon home. Kettles began to hum pussy-cats to purr in that very wild cab that was being driven to destruction. Anglewood looked up to find, to his astonishment, as many another denzine of the eastern hemisphere has found, that the American was not only perfectly serious, but was really eloquent in effecting when the difference of the hemispheres was adjusted. It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at least represented himself to one innocent female of this house as an eligible bachelor, being in fact a married man. I agree with my colleague, Mr. Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this. As to whether what our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical value indeed, science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation. But what hesitation can there be about the baseness of a citizen who ventures by brutal experiments upon living females to anticipate the verdict of science on such a point? The woman mentioned by Curit Puri, as living with Smith and Highbury, may or may not be the same as the lady he married and made in head. If one short, sweet spell of constancy and heart repose interrupts the plunging toward of his profligate life, we will not deprive him of their long past possibility. After that conjectural day to last, he seems to have plunged deeper and deeper into the shaking quagmires of infidelity and shame. Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no more light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral effect. After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer, he continued, The first instance of the accused repeated any regular nuptials, he exclaimed, comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expressed herself with high haughtiness, which must be excused in those who look out upon all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep. The communication she has sent us runs as follows. Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference is made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail. The girl, Polly Green, was a perfectly adequate dressmaker and lived in the village for about two years. Her unattached condition was bad for her as well as for the general morality of the village. Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it to be understood that she favored the marriage of the young woman. The villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon, came forward in several cases, and all would have been well had it not been for the deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl Green herself. Lady Bullingdon supposes that where there is a village there must be a village idiot, and in her village it seems there was one of these wretched creatures. Lady Bullingdon not only saw him once, she is quite aware that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual idiots and the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes. She noticed, however, the startling smallness of his head in comparison to the rest of his body, and indeed the fact of his having appeared upon election day wearing the rosette of both the two opposing parties appeared to Lady Bullingdon to put the matter quite beyond doubt. Lady Bullingdon was astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question. Lady Bullingdon's nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point, telling him that he was a donkey to dream of such things, and actually received, along with an imbecile grin, the answer that donkeys generally go after carrots. But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she was actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man in a far superior position to her own. Lady Bullingdon could not, of course, countenance such an arrangement for a moment, and the two unhappy persons escaped for a clandestine marriage. Lady Bullingdon cannot exactly recall the man's name but thinks it was Smith. He was always called in the village the innocent. Later Lady Bullingdon believes he murdered Green in a mental outbreak. The next communication preceded him is more conspicuous for brevity, but I am of the opinion that he will adequately confate the upshot. It is dated from the offices of Mrs. Hanbury and Boodle publishers, and it is as follows. Sir, yours received and contents noted. Rumor re-typewriter possibly refers to a Miss Blake or similar name left here nine years ago to marry an organ grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious and attracted police attention. Goh worked excellently till about October 1907, when apparently went mad. Record was written at the time part of which I enclose, yours, etc., W-trip. The fuller statement runs as follows. On October 12th a letter was sent from this office to Mrs. Bernarda and Duke Bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Duke, it was found to contain the following. Sir, our trip will call at three, as we wish to know whether it is really decided, gibberish. To this Mr. Duke, a person of a playful mind returned to the answer, sir. I am in a position to give it as my most decided opinion, that it is not really decided, that, gibberish. Yours, etc., J-Juke. On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the original letter sent from him and found that the typewriter had indeed substituted these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated to her. Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl fearing that she was in an unbalanced state and was not much reassured when she merely remarked that she always went like that when she heard the barrel organ. Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series of most improbable statements, as that she was engaged to the barrel organ man, that he was in the habit of serenading her on that instrument, and that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the typewriter in the style of King Richard and Blondel. And that the organ man's musical ear was so exquisite in his admiration of herself so ardent that he could detect the note of the different letters on the machine and was enraptured by them as by a melody. To all these statements, of course, our Mr. Trip and the rest of us only paid that sort of assent that is paid to those persons who must, as quickly as possible, be put in the charge of their relations. But on our conducting the lady downstairs, her story received the most startling and even as the aspirating confirmation. For the organ rider, an enormous man with a small head and a manifestly, a fellow lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the office doors like a battering ram and was boisterously demanding his alleged fiance. When I myself came on the scene, he was flinging his great ape-like arms about and reciting a poem to her. But we were used to lunatics coming and reciting poems in our office and we were not quite prepared for what followed. The actual verse he uttered began, I think, O vivid and violent head ringed, but he never got any further. Mr. Trip made a sharp movement towards him and the next moment the giant picked up the poor lady, typewriter like a doll, sat her on top of the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office doors and raced away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow. I put the police upon the matter but no trace of the amazing pair could be found. I was sorry myself for the lady was not only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position. As I am leaving the service of Mr. Sanbury and Boodle, I put these things in a record and leave it with them, signed Aubrey Clark, publisher's reader. And the last document, said Pym complacently, is from one of those high-sold women who have in this age introduced your English girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics and every form of ideality. Dear Sir, she writes, I have no objection to telling you the facts about the absurd incident you mentioned, though I would ask you to communicate them with some caution. For such things, however, entertaining in the abstract are not always auxiliary to the success of a girl's school. The truth is this, I wanted someone to deliver a lecture on a philological or historical question, a lecture which, while containing solid educational matter, should be a little more popular and entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term. I remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere or other an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name, an essay which showed considerable knowledge of deniology and topography. I wrote to him, asking if he would come and give us a bright address upon English surnames, and he did it. It was very bright, almost too bright. To put the matter otherwise, by the time that he was half-way through it, it became apparent to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally and entirely off his head. He began rationally enough by dealing with the two departments of place names and trade names, and he said quite rightly, I dare say, that the loss of all significance in names was an instance of the deadening of civilization. But then he went on calmly to maintain that every man who had a place name ought to go live in that place, and that every man who had a trade name ought to instantly adopt that trade. That people named after colors should always dress in those colors, and that people named after trees or plants such as beech or rose ought to surround and decorate themselves with these vegetables. In a slight discussion that arose afterwards among the elder girls, the difficulties of the proposal were clearly and even eagerly pointed out. It was urged, for instance, by Miss Young Husband, that it was substantially impossible for her to play the part assigned to her. Miss Man was in a similar dilemma from which no modern views on the sexes could apparently extricate her, and some young ladies, whose names happened to be low, coward and craven, were quite enthusiastic against the idea. But all this happened afterwards. What happened at the crucial moment was that the lecturer produced several horseshoes and a large iron hammer from his bag, announced his immediate intention of setting up a smithy in the neighborhood, and called on everyone to rise in the same cause as for heroic revolution. The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched man, but I must confess that by an accident this very intercession produced the worst explosion of his insanity. He was waving the hammer and wildly demanding the names of everybody, and it so happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers, was wearing a brown dress, a reddish brown dress that went quite nicely enough with the warmer color of her hair, as well she knew. She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know about those things. But when our maniac discovered that we really had a Miss Brown D-Fix blew up like a powder magazine. And there, in the presence of all the mistresses and the girls, he publicly proposed to the lady in the red brown dress. You can imagine the effect of such a scene at an all-girl school. At least if you fail to imagine it, I certainly fail to describe it. Of course the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can think of it now as a joke. There was only one curious detail, which I will tell you, but I should desire you to consider it a little more confidential than the rest. Miss Brown, who was an excellent girl in every way, did quite suddenly and surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards. I should never have thought that her head would be the one to be really turned, by so absurd an excitement. Believe me, yours faithfully ain't a gridly. I think, said Pim, with a really convincing simplicity and seriousness that these letters speak for themselves. Mr. Moon rose for the last time and gave no hint of whether his native gravity was mixed with his native ironing. Throughout this inquiry, he said, but especially in this closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument. I mean the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy women apparently seduced by Smith. There is no sort of proof they were murdered, but that implication is perpetually made when the question is asked as to how they died. Or when they died. Or whether they died. But I am interested in another analogous question, that of how they were born and when they were born and whether they were born. Do not misunderstand me. I do not dispute the existence of these women or the veracity of those who have witnessed to them. I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of these victims, the maiden-head girl, is described as having any home or a house. All the rest are borders or birds of passage, a guest, a solitary dressmaker, a bachelor girl doing typewriting. Lady Bullington looking from her turrets, which she bought from the Whartons with the old soap-boilers money when she jumped at marrying an unsuccessful gentleman from Ulster. Lady Bullington looked out from those turrets, did really see an object which she describes as green. Mr. Trip of Hanbury and Boodle pulled to Smith. Ms. Gridley thought idealistic, is absolutely honest. She did house-feed and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded in decoying away. We admit that all these women really lived, but we still ask whether they were ever born. Oh, crikey, said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement. There could hardly interpose Pym with a quiet smile be a better instance of the neglect of true scientific process. The scientist, when once convinced of vitality and consciousness, would infer from these the previous process of generation. End of Section 24. 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 25 Part 2 The Explanations of Innocent Smith Chapter 4 The Wild Weddings or the Polygamy Charge Part 2 If these gals said Gould impatiently, if these gals were all alive, all alive, oh, I had chance of fiver they were all born. You'd lose your fiver, said Michael, speaking gravely out of the gloom. All those admirable ladies were alive. They were more alive than they looked like with Smith. They were all quite definitely alive, but only one of them was ever born. Are you asking us to believe, began Dr. Pym? I am asking you a second question, said Moon, sternly. Can the court now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance? Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe, the relations of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave of a lust for variety of negris and then to an albino, first to a Patagonian giantus and then to a tiny Eskimo. But is there any evidence of such variety here? Is there any trace of a gigantic Patagonian in the story? Was the typewriter an Eskimo? So picturesque a circumstance would not surely have escaped remark. Was Lady Bullingdon's dressmaker a negris? A voice in my bosom answers, no. Here would think a negris so conspicuous as to be almost socialistic and would feel something a little rakeish, even about an albino. But was there, in Smith's taste, any set variety as the learned doctor describes? So far as our slight materials go, the very opposite seems to be the case. We have only one actual description of any of the prisoner's wives, the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic curate. Her dress was the color of spring and the hair of autumn leaves. Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colors, some of which would be rather startling in hair, green, for instance. But I think such an expression would be most naturally used of the shades from red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their coppery-colored hair do frequently wear light artistic greens. Now, when we come to the next wife, we find the eccentric lover when told he is a donkey, answering that donkeys always wear carrots, a remark which Lady Bulling didn't evidently regard it as pointless and part of the natural table-talk of a village idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we suppose that Polly's hair was red. Passing on to the next wife, the one he took from the girl's school, we find Miss Gridley noticing that the schoolgirl in question wore a reddish-brown dress that went quite enough with the warmer color of her hair. In other words, lastly, the romantic organ grinder declaimed in the office some poetry that only got as far as the words, O Vivid in Violet Head, ringed, but I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets will enable us to guess that ringed with the glory of red or ringed with his passionate red was the line that rhymed to head. In this case, once more, therefore there is good reason to suppose that Smith fell in reddish-red hair. Rather, he said looking down at the table, rather like Miss Gray's hair. Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready with one of his more pedantic interpretations, but Moses Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose with an expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence in his brilliant eyes. Mr. Moon's contention at present is even ephoracious inconsistent with the lunatico criminal view of I. Smith which we have nailed to the mast. Science has long anticipated such a complication. An incurable attraction to a particular type of physical woman is one of the commonest of criminal perversities and when not considered narrowly but in the light of induction of an evolution. At this late stage, said Michael Moon very quietly, he has been pressing me throughout the proceedings by saying that induction and evolution may go and boil themselves. The missing link and all that is well enough for kids but I am talking about things we know here. All we know of the missing link is that he is missing and he won't be missed either. I know all about his human head and his horrid tail. They belong to a very old game called Heads I Win, Tales You Lose. If you do find the fellow's bones it proved he lived a long while ago. If you don't find his bones it proves how long ago he lived. That is the game you've been playing with this Smith affair because Smith's head is small for his shoulders you call him microcephalus. If it had been large you'd have called it water on the brain. The word regalus seemed pretty various. Variety was the sign of madness. Now because it's turning out to be a bit monochrome now monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a grown up person and I am jolly well going to get some of the advantages too. And with all politeness I propose not to be bullied with long words instead of short reasons or consider your business a triumphant progress and always finding out that you were wrong. Having relieved myself of these feelings I have merely to add that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more beautiful than the Parthenon or the Monument on Bunker's Hill and that I propose to resume and conclude my remarks on the many marriages of Mr. Innocent Smith. Besides this red hair there is another unifying thread peculiar and suggestive about the names of these women. Mr. Trip you will remember said he thought the typewriter's name was Blake but could not remember exactly. I suggest that it might have been black and in that case we have a curious series. Ms. Green in Lady Bulling's Village Ms. Brown at the Hendon School Ms. Black at the Publishers a cohort of colors as it were which ends up with Ms. Gray at Beacon House West Hampstead. Amid a dead silence what is the meaning of this queer coincidence about colors? Personally I cannot doubt for a moment that these names are purely arbitrary names assumed as part of some general scheme or joke. I think it very probable that they were taken from a series of costumes that Polly Green only meant Polly or Mary went in green and that Mary Gray only means Mary or Polly Dr. Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pellet. Do you actually mean to suggest he cried? Yes said Michael I do mean to suggest that Innocent Smith has had many wooings and many weddings for all I know but he has had only one wife she was sitting on that chair an hour ago and is now talking to Ms. Duke in the garden. Smith has behaved here as he has on hundreds of other occasions upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle. It is odd and extravagant in the modern world but not more than any other principle plainly applied in the modern world would be his principle can be quite simply stated he refuses to die while he is still alive he seeks to remind himself by every electric shock to the intellect that he is still a man alive for this reason he fires bullets at his best friends for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property for this reason he goes plotting around a whole planet to get back to his own home and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty and leaving her about so to speak at schools, boarding houses and places of business he seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value and the perils that should be run for her sake so far his motives are clear enough but perhaps his convictions are not quite so clear I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom of all this I am by no means sure that I believe in myself but I am quite sure that it is worth the man's uttering and defending living in an entangled civilization we have come to think certain things wrong which are not wrong at all we have come to think outbreak and exuberance banging and barging rotting and wrecking wrong in themselves they are not merely pardonable they are unimpeachable there is nothing wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend so long as you do not mean to hit him it is no more wrong than throwing a pebble at the sea less for you do occasionally hit the sea there is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney pot and breaking through a roof so long as you are not injuring the life or property of other men it is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from the top let's choose to open a packing case from the bottom there is nothing wicked about walking round the world it is no more wicked than walking round the garden and coming back to your own house and there is nothing wicked about picking up your wife here and there and everywhere if forsaking all others you keep only to her so long as you both shall live it is as innocent as playing a game of hide and seek in the garden you associate such acts with black guardism by a mere snobbish association seen going into a pawnbroker's or a public house you think there is something squalid and commonplace about such a connection you are mistaken this man's spiritual power has been precisely this that he has distinguished between custom and creed he has broken the conventions but he has kept the commandments it is if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling hell and only played for trouser buttons it is as if you found a man making a clandestine appointment with a lady at Covent Garden Ball and then you found it was his grandmother everything is ugly and discreditable except the facts everything is wrong about him except he has done no wrong it will then be asked why does Innocent Smith continue far into his middle age of farcical existence that exposes him to so many false charges to this I merely answer that he does it because he is really happy because he really is hilarious because he really is a man and alive he is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all and if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible follies I have a very simple answer to that though it is one that will not be approved there is but one answer and I am sorry you don't like it if Innocent is happy it is because he is Innocent if he can divide the conventions it is just because he can keep the commandments it is just because he does not want to kill but to excite life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy it is just because he does not want to steal because he does not covet his neighbor's goods that he has captured the trick oh how we all long for it the trick of coveting his own goods it is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoon if he had really murdered a man if he had really deserted a woman he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love letter was like a song at least not a comic song do not imagine please that any such attitude is easy to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies I am an Irishman and a certain sorrow is my bones bred either of the persecutions of my creed or of my creed itself speaking singly I feel as if man was tied to tragedy and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt but if there is a way out then by Christ and St. Patrick this is a way out this is a way out if one could keep as happy as a child or a dog it would be by being as innocent as a child or as sinless as a dog barely and brutally to be good that may be the road and he may have found it well well well I see a look of skepticism on the face of my old friend Moses Mr. Gould doesn't know that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man marry No said Gould with an unusual and convincing gravity I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man marry well said Michael quietly will you tell me one thing which of us has ever tried it a silence ensued rather like the silence of some long geological epic which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type that arose at last in the stillness a massive figure that the other man had almost completely forgotten well gentlemen said Dr. Warner cheerfully I've been pretty well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery for a couple of days but it seems to be wearing rather thin and I am engaged for a city dinner among the hundred flowers of futility on both sides I was unable to detect any sort of reason why a lunatic should be allowed to shoot me in the back garden on his head and gone out sailing placidly to the garden gate while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him but really the bullet missed you by several feet and another voice added the bullet missed him by several years there was a long and mainly unmeaning silence and then moon said suddenly we have been sitting with a ghost Dr. Herbert Warner died years ago end of section 25 end of chapter 4 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 26 part 2 the explanations of Innocence Smith chapter 5 how the great wind went from Beacon House Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamond slowly up and down the garden they were silent and the sun had set such spaces of daylight as remained open in the west were of a warm tinted white which can be compared to nothing but a cream cheese and the lines of plumy cloud that ran across him had a soft but vivid violet bloom and faded away into a dove-like gray and seemed to melt and mount into Mary's dark gray figure until she seemed clothed with the garden and the skies there was something in these last quiet colors that gave her a setting and a supremacy and the twilight which concealed Diana's statelier figure and Rosamond's braver array exhibited and emphasized her leaving her the lady of the garden and alone when they spoke at last that a conversation long fall and silent was being revived but where is your husband taking you asked Diana in her practical voice to an aunt said Mary that's just the joke there really is an aunt and we left the children with her when I arranged to be turned out of the other boarding house down the road we never take more than a week of this kind of holiday but sometimes we take two of them together does the aunt mind much and what's that other word you know what Goliath was but I've known many aunts who would think it well silly silly cried Mary with a great heartiness oh my Sunday hat I should think it was silly but what do you expect he really is a good man and it might have been snakes or something snakes inquired Rosamond with a slightly puzzled interest Uncle Harry kept snakes and the auntie let him have them in his pockets but not in the bedroom and you began Diana knitting her dark brows a little oh I do as auntie did said Mary as long as we're not away from the children more than a fortnight together I play the game he calls me man alive and you must write it all one word or he's quite flustered but if men want things like that began Diana oh what's the good of talking why one might as well be a leading novelist or some other sort of thing there aren't any men there are no such people there's a man and whoever he is he's quite different so there is no safety said Diana in a low voice oh I don't know answered Mary lightly enough there's only two things generally true of them at certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us there is a gale getting up said Rosamond suddenly look at those trees over there a long way off and the clouds going quicker I know what you're thinking about said Mary and don't you be silly fools don't you listen to the lady novelists you go down the king's highway for God's truth it is God's yes my dear Michael will often be extremely untidy Arthur Inglewood will be worse he'll be untidy but what else are all the trees and the clouds for you silly kittens the clouds and the trees are all waving about said Rosamond there is a storm coming and it makes me feel quite excited somehow Michael is really rather like a storm he frightens me and makes me happy don't you be frightened said Mary all over these men have one advantage they are the sort that go out a sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves along the path and they could hear the fire off trees roaring faintly I mean said Mary there are the kind that look outwards and get interested in the world it doesn't matter a bit whether it's arguing or bicycling or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old innocent does stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you when poor old Adam had gone out gardening Arthur will go out gardening the other sort came along and worms himself in nasty old snake you agree with your aunt said Rosamond smiling no snakes in the bedroom I didn't agree with my aunt very much replied Mary simply but I think she was right until Aunt Uncle Harry collect dragons and griffons so long as it got him out of the house almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house and the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold the golden gates were burst open and the enormous Smith who had set like a clumsy statue for so many hours came flying and turned cart wheels down the lawn and shouting acquitted, acquitted echoing the cry Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamond and wildly swung her into a few steps of what was supposed to be walls but the company knew innocent and Michael by this time it was far more extraordinary that Arthur Englewood walked straight up to Diana and kissed her as if it had been his sister's birthday even Dr. Pym though he refrained from dancing looked on with a real benevolence for indeed the whole of the absurd revelation had disturbed him less than the others he half supposed that such irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions were part of the medieval memories of the old land while the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets window after window was lighted up in the house within and before the company broken with laughter and the buffeting of the wind had groped their way into the house again they saw that the great apish figure of innocent Smith had clambered out his own attic window and roaring again and again beacon house whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the wood fire below of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke he was evident enough to have been seen from three counties but when the wind died down and the party at the top of their evening's merry month looked again for merry and for him they were not to be found the end of part 2 chapter 5 section 26 the end of men alive