DP Tool Club 12/CD_ASCQ_12_0294.iso/vrac/manaliv1.zip/MAN-01.TXT

Text File | 1994-01-15 | 26KB | 507 lines

                           Part I

                The Enigmas of Innocent Smith



















                          Chapter I

                   How the Great Wind Came
                       to Beacon House


A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable
happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with
it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of
the sea.  In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man
like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow.  In the
inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke
like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some
professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive,
or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure
Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark.  But everywhere it
bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of
crisis across the world.  Many a harassed mother in a mean
backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the
clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if
she had hanged her five children.  The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into
them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half
remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the
elves still dwelt in the homes of men.  Many an unnoticed
girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the
hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind
rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a
balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint cloud far beyond,
and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode
heaven in a fairy boat.  Many a dusty clerk or cleric,
plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for the
hundredth time that they were like the plumes of a hearse;
when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them
round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic
wings.  There was in it something more inspired and
authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for
this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.
   The flying blast struck London just where it scales the
northern heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as
Edinburgh.  It was round about this place that some poet,
probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets
gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped
mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it
has never been able to shake off.  At some stage of those
heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and
almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the
western end, so that the last building, a boarding
establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the
sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like the
prow of some deserted ship.
   The ship, however, was not wholly deserted.  The
proprietor of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of
those helpless persons upon whom fate wars in vain; she
smiled vaguely both before and after all her calamities; she
was too soft to be hurt.  But by the aid (or rather under
the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains
of a clientele, mostly of young but listless folks.  And
there were actually five inmates standing disconsolately
about the garden when the great gale broke at the base of
the terminal tower behind them, as the sea bursts against
the base of an outstanding cliff.
   All day that hill of houses over London had been domed
and sealed up with cold cloud.  Yet three men and two girls
had at last found even the gray and chilly garden more
tolerable than the black and cheerless interior.  When the
wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left
and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold.
The burst of light released and the burst of air blowing
seemed to come almost simultaneously; and the wind
especially caught everything in a throttling violence.  The
bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair.  Every
shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the
collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting
and exterminating element.  Now and again a twig would snap
and fly like a bolt from an arbalist.  The three men stood
stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against a
wall.  The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to
speak truly, they were blown into the house.  Their two
frocks, blue and white, looked like two big broken flowers,
driving and drifting upon the gale.  Nor is such a poetic
fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic
about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and
unlifting day.  Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from
fairyland.  It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong
end of the day.
   The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a
white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might
have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.
She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a
friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather
boisterous.  On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and
rather good-looking; but she had not married, perhaps
because there was always a crowd of men round her.  She was
not fast (though some might have called her vulgar), but she
gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once
popular and inaccessible.  A man felt as if he had fallen in
love with Cleopatra, or as if he were asking for a great
actress at the stage door.  Indeed, some theatrical spangles
seemed to cling about Miss Hunt: she played the guitar and
the mandoline; she always wanted charades; and with that
great rending of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a
girlish melodrama swell again within her.  To the crashing
orchestration of the air the clouds rose like the curtain of
some long-expected pantomime.
   Nor, oddly enough, was the girl in blue entirely
unimpressed by this apocalypse in a private garden; though
she was one of most prosaic and practical creatures alive.
She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous niece whose
strength alone upheld that mansion of decay.  But as the
gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they
took on the monstrous mushroom contours of Victorian
crinolines, a sunken memory stirred in her that was almost
romance -- a memory of a dusty volume of _Punch_ in an
aunt's house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops and
croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they
were a part.  This half-perceptible fragrance in her
thoughts faded almost instantly, and Diana Duke entered the
house even more promptly than her companion.  Tall, slim,
aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.  In
body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are
at once long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even
like an innocent snake.  The whole house revolved on her as
on a rod of steel.  It would be wrong to say that she
commanded; for her own efficiency was so impatient that she
obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.  Before
electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door,
before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight
cork, it was done already with the silent violence of her
slim hands.  She was light; but there was nothing leaping
about her lightness.  She spurned the ground, and she meant
to spurn it.  People talk of the pathos and failure of plain
women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful
woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
   "It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman
in white, going to the looking-glass.
   The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her
gardening gloves, and then went to the sideboard and began
to spread out an afternoon cloth for tea.
   "Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund
Hunt, with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and
speeches had always been safe for an encore.
   "Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke; "but I dare
say that it sometimes more important."
   Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a
spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person.
She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be
a big wind to blow your head off."
   There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more
and more from the sundering clouds, filled the room with
soft fire and painted the dull walls with ruby and gold.
   "Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's
easier to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."
   "Oh, don't talk about such rubbish," said Diana with
savage sharpness.
   Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but
the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men who
stood their ground might also have considered the problem of
hats and heads.  And, indeed, their position, touching hats,
was somewhat typical of them.  The tallest of the three
abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to
charge as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house
behind him.  The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw
hat at all angles, and ultimately held it in his hand.  The
third had no hat, and, by his attitude, seemed never to have
had one in his life.  Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy
wand to test men and women, for there was much of the three
men in this difference.
   The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of
silkiness and solidity.  He was a big, bland, bored and (as
some said) boring man, with flat fair hair and handsome
heavy features; a prosperous young doctor by the name of
Warner.  But if his blondness and blandness seemed at first
a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool.  If
Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money, he
was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame.
His treatise on "The Probable Existence of Pain in the
Lowest Organisms" had been universally hailed by the
scientific world as at once solid and daring.  In short, he
undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not his fault if
they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze
with a poker.
   The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific
amateur in a small way, and worshipped the great Warner with
a solemn freshness.  It was, in fact, at his invitation that
the distinguished doctor was present; for Warner lived in no
such ramshackle lodging-house, but in a professional palace
in Harley Street.  This young man was really the youngest
and best looking of the three.  But he was one of those
persons, both male and female, who seem doomed to be
good-looking and insignificant.  Brown-haired,
high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose the delicacy of
his features in a sort of blur of brown and red as he stood
blushing and blinking against the wind.  He was one of those
obvious unnoticeable people: every one knew that he was
Arthur Inglewood, unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent,
living on a little money of his own, and hiding himself in
the two hobbies of photography and cycling.  Everybody knew
him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the glare of
golden sunset there was something about him indistinct, like
one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.
   The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely
sporting clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him
look all the leaner.  He had a long ironical face,
blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the blue
chin of an actor.  An Irishman he was, an actor he was not,
except in the old days of Miss Hunt's charades, being, as a
matter of fact, an obscure and flippant journalist named
Michael Moon.  He had once been hazily supposed to be
reading for the Bar; but (as Warner would say with his
rather elephantine wit) it was mostly at another kind of bar
that his friends found him.  Moon, however, did not drink,
nor even frequently get drunk; he simply was a gentleman who
liked low company.  This was partly because company is
quieter than society: and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid
(as apparently he did), it was chiefly because the barmaid
did the talking.  Moreover he would often bring other talent
to assist her.  He shared that strange trick of all men of
his type, intellectual and without ambition -- the trick of
going about with his mental inferiors.  There was a small
resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house,
a little man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused
Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar,
like the owner of a performing monkey.
   The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that
cloudy sky grew clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber
seemed to open in heaven.  One felt one might at last find
something lighter than light.  In the fullness of this
silent effulgence all things collected their colours again:
the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold.
One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to
another, and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.
   "Inglewood," said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the
bird, "have you any friends?"
   Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a
broad beaming face, said, --
   "Oh yes, I go out a great deal."
   Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real
informant, who spoke a moment after in a voice curiously
cool, fresh and young, as coming out of that brown and even
dusty interior.
   "Really," answered Inglewood, "I'm afraid I've lost touch
with my old friends.  The greatest friend I ever had was at
school, a fellow named Smith.  It's odd you should mention
it, because I was thinking of him to-day, though I haven't
seen him for seven or eight years.  He was on the science
side with me at school -- a clever fellow though queer; and
he went up to Oxford when I went to Germany.  The fact is,
it's rather a sad story.  I often asked him to come and see
me, and when I heard nothing I made inquiries, you know.  I
was shocked to learn that poor Smith had gone off his head.
The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course, some saying he
had recovered again; but they always say that.  About a year
ago I got a telegram from him myself.  The telegram, I'm
sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt."
   "Quite so," assented Dr. Warner stolidly; "insanity is
generally incurable."
   "So is sanity," said the Irishman, and studied him with a
dreary eye.
   "Symptoms?" asked the doctor.  "What was this telegram?"
   "It's a shame to joke about such things," said Inglewood,
in his honest, embarrassed way; "the telegram was Smith's
illness, not Smith.  The actual words were, `Man found alive
with two legs.'"
   "Alive with two legs," repeated Michael, frowning.
"Perhaps a version of alive and kicking?  I don't know much
about people out of their senses; but I suppose they ought
to be kicking."
   "And people in their senses?" asked Warner, smiling.
   "Oh, they ought to be kicked," said Michael with sudden
heartiness.
   "The message is clearly insane," continued the
impenetrable Warner.  "The best test is a reference to the
undeveloped normal type.  Even a baby does not expect to
find a man with three legs."
   "Three legs," said Michael Moon, "would be very
convenient in this wind."
   A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost
thrown them off their balance and broken the blackened trees
in the garden.  Beyond, all sorts of accidental objects
could be seen scouring the wind-scoured sky -- straws,
sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a disappearing
hat.  Its disappearance, however, was not final; after an
interval of minutes they saw it again, much larger and
closer, a white panama, towering up into the heavens like a
balloon, staggering to and fro for an instant like a
stricken kite, and then settling in the centre of their own
lawn as falteringly as a fallen leaf.
   "Somebody's lost a good hat," said Dr. Warner shortly.
   Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden
wall, flying after the fluttering panama.  It was a big
green umbrella.  After that came hurtling a huge yellow
Gladstone bag, and after that came a figure like a flying
wheel of legs, as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
   But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six
legs, it alighted upon two, like the man in the queer
telegram.  It took the form of a large light-haired man in
gay green holiday clothes.  He had bright blonde hair that
the wind brushed back like a German's, a flushed eager face
like a cherub's, and a prominent pointing nose, a little
like a dog's.  His head, however, was by no means cherubic
in the sense of being without a body.  On the contrary, on
his vast shoulders and shape generally gigantesque, his head
looked oddly and unnaturally small.  This gave rise to a
scientific theory (which his conduct fully supported) that
he was an idiot.
   Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward.
His life was full of arrested half gestures of assistance.
And even this prodigy of a big man in green, leaping the
wall like a bright green grasshopper, did not paralyze that
small altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost
hat.  He was stepping forward to recover the green
gentleman's head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar
like a bull's.
   "Unsportsmanlike!" bellowed the big man.  "Give it fair
play, give it fair play!"  And he came after his own hat
quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes.  The hat had
seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious
langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and
rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of
a ~pas de quatre~.  The eccentric went bounding after it
with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of
which it was not always easy to pick up the thread: "Fair
play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns...
quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats...
old English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat
at bay... mangled hounds... Got him!"
   As the winds rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt
into the sky on his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the
vanishing hat, missed it, and pitched sprawling face
foremost on the grass.  The hat rose over him like a bird in
triumph.  But its triumph was premature; for the lunatic,
flung forward on his hands, threw up his boots behind, waved
his two legs in the air like symbolic ensigns (so that they
thought again of the telegram), and actually caught the hat
with his feet.  A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split
the welkin from end to end.  The eyes of all the men were
blinded by the invisible blast, as by a strange, clear
cataract of transparency rushing between them and all
objects about them.  But as the large man fell back in a
sitting posture and solemnly crowned himself with the hat,
Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, that he had been
holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.
   While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping
energy, another short cry was heard, beginning very
querulous, but ending very quick, swallowed in abrupt
silence.  The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner's official
hat sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an
airship, and in almost cresting a garden tree was caught in
the topmost branches.  Another hat was gone.  Those in that
garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy of
things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away
next.  Before they could speculate, the cheering and
hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up the tree,
swinging himself from fork to fork with his strong, bent,
grasshopper legs, and still giving forth his gasping,
mysterious comments.
   "Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries
perhaps... owls nesting in the hat... remotest generations
of owls... still usurpers... gone to heaven... man in the
moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs to
depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it
up!"
   The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the
thundering wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full
sunshine like a bonfire.  The green, fantastic human figure,
vivid against its autumn red and gold, was already among its
highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did not
break with the weight of his big body.  He was up there
among the last tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars
of evening, still talking to himself cheerfully,
reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps.  He might
well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had
gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a
football, swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up
the tree like a rocket.  The other three men seemed buried
under incident piled on incident -- a wild world where one
thing began before another thing left off.  All three had
the first thought.  The tree had been there for the five
years they had known the boarding-house.  Each one of them
was active and strong.  No one of them had even thought of
climbing it.  Beyond that, Inglewood felt first the mere
fact of colour.  The bright brisk leaves, the bleak blue
sky, the wild green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally
of something glowing in his infancy, something akin to a
gaudy man on a golden tree; perhaps it was only painted
monkey on a stick.  Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more
of a humourist, was touched on a tenderer nerve, half
remembered the old, young theatricals with Rosamund, and was
amused to find himself almost quoting Shakespeare --

        "For valour.  Is not love a Hercules,
         Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?"

   Even the immovable man of science had a bright,
bewildered sensation that the Time Machine had given a great
jerk, and gone forward with rather rattling rapidity.
   He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened
next.  The man in green, riding the frail topmost bough like
a witch on a very risky broomstick, reached up and rent the
black hat from its airy nest of twigs.  It had been broken
across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage, a
tangle of branches had torn and scored and scratched it in
every direction, a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it
like a concertina; nor can it be said that the obliging
gentleman with the sharp nose showed any adequate tenderness
for its structure when he finally unhooked it from its
place.  When he had found it, however, his proceedings were
by some counted singular.  He waved it with a loud whoop of
triumph, and then immediately appeared to fall backwards off
the tree, to which, however, he remained attached by his
long strong legs, like a monkey swung by his tail.  Hanging
thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely
proceeded to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his
brows.  "Every man a king," explained the inverted
philosopher, "every hat (consequently) a crown.  But this is
a crown out of heaven."
   And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who,
however, moved away with great abruptness from the hovering
diadem; not seeming, strangely enough, to wish for his
former decoration in its present state.
   "Wrong, wrong!" cried the obliging person hilariously.
"Always wear uniform, even if it's shabby uniform!
Ritualists may always be untidy.  Go to a dance with soot on
your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front.  Huntsman wears
old coat, but old pink coat.  Wear a topper, even if it's
got no top.  It's the symbol that counts, old cock.  Take
your hat, because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed
all off by the bark, dears, and its brim not the least bit
curled; but for old sakes' sake it is still, dears, the
nobbiest tile in the world."
   Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or
smashed the shapeless silk hat over the face of the
disturbed physician, and fell on his feet among the other
men, still talking, beaming and breathless.
   "Why don't they make more games out of wind?" he asked in
some excitement.  "Kites are all right, but why should it
only be kites?  Why, I thought of three other games for a
windy day while I was climbing that tree.  Here's one of
them: you take a lot of pepper --"
   "I think," interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness,
"that your games are already sufficiently interesting.  Are
you, may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour, or a
travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim?  How and why do you
display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing
trees in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?"
   The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of
it, appeared to grow confidential.
   "Well, it's a trick of my own," he confessed candidly.
"I do it by having two legs."
   Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of
this scene of folly, started and stared at the newcomer with
his short-sighted eyes screwed up and his high colour
slightly heightened.
   "Why, I believe you're Smith," he cried with his fresh,
almost boyish voice; and then after an instant's stare, "and
yet I'm not sure."
   "I have a card, I think," said the unknown, with baffling
solemnity -- "a card with my real name, my titles, offices,
and true purpose on this earth."
   He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a
scarlet card-case, and as slowly produced a very large
card.  Even in the instant of its production, they fancied
it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary
gentlemen.  But it was there only for an instant; for as it
passed from his fingers to Arthur's, one or other slipped
his hold.  The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried
away the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the
universe; and that great western wind shook the whole house
and passed.