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                         Chapter II

                      The Two Curates;
                   or, the Burglary Charge


Arthur Inglewood 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 denial of the document.  The letter
from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and
social tone.
   "Very few words," said Inglewood, "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 distributing 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 any one who had
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 per-spectives 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," proceeded Inglewood, "that neither Dr. Pym
nor any one 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 cock-fighting coolness.  "The defence," he said,
"omits a coldly colossal fact.  They say we produce none of
the actual victims.  Wal, here is one victim -- England's
celebrated and stricken Warner.  I reckon he is pretty well
produced.  And they suggest that all the outrages were
followed by reconciliation.  Wal, 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 specially 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."
   "'Ang it all, Michael," cried Gould, quite serious for
the first time in his life, "you might give us a bit of
bally sense for a chinge."
   "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 any one who doubts
that our tale is true?"
   There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon
said, "Pax populi vox Dei; 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 deathly silence
Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the strain with some
remark.  For the last half-hour or so the eminent
criminologist had been explaining that science took the same
view of offences against property as id did of offences
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 con-ceive how this
must involve a scheme of punishment more tol'rant and humane
than the cruel methods of ancient codes.  They will
doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently
yawning, so thought-arresting, so --"  It was here that he
paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to which
allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it no longer.
   "Yes, yes," he said impatiently, "we admit the chasm.
The old cruel codes accused a man of theft and sent 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 eminent 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 closed again
as he hesitated) -- "in short, for the required period.  But
there is something special in the case we investigate here.
Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself --"
   "I beg pardon," said Michael; "I did not ask just now
because, to tell the truth, I really though Dr. Pym, though
seemingly vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a
pinch in his fingers of scentless and delicate dust.  But
now that 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 and gone and done."
   "If Mr. Moon will have patience," said Pym with dignity,
"he will find that this was the very point to which my
exposition was di-rected.  Kleptomania, 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 vurry narrow professional outlook of most
criminals.  One will have an irresistible physical impulsion
towards pearl sleeve-links, while he passes over the most
elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links, placed about in
the most con-spicuous locations.  Another will impede his
flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while
elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic.  The
specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of
insanity than of any brightness of business habits; 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 ringing challenge, and will bring the
burglar once more into line and union with his fellow
criminals."
   Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black
bewilderment 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 ad'quately 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 Canon of Durham, Canon
Hawkins."
   Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read
the letter from the earnest and unspotted Hawkins.  Moses
Gould could imitate a farmyard well, Sir Henry Irving not so
well, Marie 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 a Canon of 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 surprise that the
incident you mention, 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 with the wilder set, have 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 corduroys 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
politic in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation any
advice about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly
that 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 jest, such discredited nostrums of dissipated
demagogues as Socialism or Radicalism partakes of the
character of the betrayal of a sacred trust.  Far be it from
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 judgements of the appearance of
the people in the hall.  Yet a glance round the room,
revealing ranks of debased and envious faces --"

   "Adopting," said Moon explosively, for he was getting
restive -- "adopting the reverend gentleman's favourite
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 Inglewood; "they
have a right to read their story."
   "Chair!  Chair!  Chair!" cried Gould, rolling about
exuberantly in 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-humour.  "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 seem 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 applausive
during the speech of Mr. Percy.  He descended to their level
with witticisms about rent and a reserve of labour.
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 enormous, powerful
man, partly concealed with white plaster, arose in the
middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud, roaring voice,
like a bull's) some observations which seemed to be in a
foreign language.  Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague,
descended to his level by entering into a duel of repartee,
in which he appeared to be the victor.  The meeting began to
behave more respectfully for a little; yet before I had said
twelve sentences more the rush was made for the platform.
The enormous plasterer, in particular, plunged towards 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 don't know what he said,
but, what 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 lamp-
post, this giant addressed me as follows: `You are 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 led us down the lean old lane with the one
lean old lamp-post, 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 Percies, 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 lost lamp-
post 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, `All that talking's 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'm 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
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.  We then found
ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour, 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 short cut.
   "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 companion ran up it so quickly that I could not
do otherwise than 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 exiguous.
Along one side of 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
clergyman of the Church of England -- I was walking along
the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.
   "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,"' declared my indefensible
informant.  `It's closed to traffic once in a hundred
years.'
   "`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!' I called out; `you are not going
on with this blackguard?'
   "`Why, I think so,' answered my unhappy colleague
flippantly.  `I think you and I are bigger blackguards than
he is, whatever he is.'
   "`I am a burglar,' explained the big creature quite
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 and there a little.  Do you see
that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof?  I'm
permeating that one to-night.'
   "`Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I cried, `I desire
to be quit of it.'
   "`The ladder 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 towards 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 wild set.  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. Inglewood, 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 of 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 no
more write like a canon than he could read like one.  After
handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary
charge.
   "We wish," said Michael, "to give all reasonable
facilities to the prosecution; especially as it will save
the time of 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 aphasia, 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 Canon Hawkins's last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing
up the walls and roofs?"
   "Ho, yuss!" called out Gould smartly.  "November
thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."
   "Have you," continued Moon, "identified the houses in
Hoxton up which they climbed?"
   "Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,"
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 doctor primly, after
a pause, "an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities."
   "Another question," proceeded Michael.  "Canon 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 specially 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
Canon Hawkins had seen him as-cending the gutters and the
leads.  I am fully aware that this may strike many as
sing'lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will appear
pretty natural to a bright thinker.  This Mr. Raymond Percy
is admittedly, by the canon's evidence, a minister of
eccentric ways.  His con-nection with England's proudest and
fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society
of the real low-down.  On the other hand, the prisoner Smith
is, by general agreement, a man of irr'sistible
fascination.  I entertain no doubt that Smith led the
Revered Percy into the crime and forced him to hide his head
in the real crim'nal 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?" asked Moon.
   "Impossible," repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
   "You are sure it's impossible?"
   "Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould, irritably.  "We'd 'ave
found 'im if we could, for you bet 'e saw the burglary.
Don't YOU start looking for 'im.  Look for your own 'ead 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 Inglewood, "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 the facts are
concerned, that given by the first clergyman.  We concede,
then, the canon's 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
own 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 bestially stupid as that -- rose
against me like a towering blasphemy.
   "At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather
badly; and artists love to be limited.  I liked the church
as a pretty pattern; discipline was mere decoration.  I
delighted in mere divisions of time; I liked eating fish on
Friday.  But then I like fish; and the fast was made for men
who like 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 being also an atheist -- and a
pessimist.  Nobody but the devil could want to conserve
Hoxton.
   "On the 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 market-place, 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 belong to it
myself; I knew there was not so 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 the large man, who went leaping in front of me like a
gorilla.
   "This upward scramble was short, and we soon found
ourselves tramping 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
laboured.  The sky and all those things that are commonly
clear seemed overpowered by sinister spirits.  Tall spectres
with turbans of vapour seemed to stand higher than sun or
moon, eclipsing both.  I thought dimly of illustrations to
the `Arabian Nights' on brown paper with rich but sombre
tints, showing genii 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 muddled fancy
felt the thick clouds as being of that heavy and clinging
substance, of strong opaque colour, poured out of boiling
pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
   "The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that
discoloured look of pea-soup or coffee brown 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 coloured vapour.  The colours of the smoke were
various; for some chimneys were from firesides and some from
factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.  And yet,
though the tints 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, coloured according to the
fish or flesh consumed.  Here, aglow from underneath, were
dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of
sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo 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, sulphurous green, as clear and crooked as
Arabic --"

   Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the
'bus.  He was understood to suggest that the reader should
shorten the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.
Mrs. Duke, who 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 writing 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 colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain.  It was
our weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse 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 in 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 lamp-posts 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 abysses, full of fog on either side, and the veiled
lights of red brown and old gold glowing through them now
and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to
be found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the
remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative
builders.  Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted,
or tenanted only by such small clans of the poor as gather
also in the old emptied palaces of Italy.  Indeed, some 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 wide street below
another, like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in
the eccentric building of London, and looking like the last
ledges of the land.  But a cloud sealed the giant stairway
as yet.
   "My speculation about the sullen skyscape, however, were
interrupted by something as unexpected as the moon fallen
from the sky.  Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from
the chimney he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more
heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over like the
opening top of an inkstand.  I remembered the short ladder
leaning against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged
his criminal approach 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 harlequinades of my childhood, and
was darkly and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of
unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses were of lath
and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled
in and out of by policemen and pantaloons.  The law-breaking
of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but
even comically excusable.  Who were all these pompous
preposterous people with their footmen and their
foot-scrapers, 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 mountain of vapourous visions, the 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, for, 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 Curtius, for I was still thinking of
Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical
entrance.
   "In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected,
there was the front door for the gentlemen, and the side
door for the tradesmen; 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 scrambled down the squat
ladder that let us down into a yet larger loft below.  Yet
it was not till I was half-way 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 beginning of the garden wall.  The name of Santa
Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses.  I
remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.
   "I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all
their horror of offences 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 then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way down
a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglary, I saw
suddenly for the first time that theft, after all, is really
wrong.
   "It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed
the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across the
lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part of the
bare flooring and, 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 large 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 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 epoch in
one's psychology.  It was like having found a fourth
dimension.
   "My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so
suddenly and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow
him; though, for lack of practice in 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 roving blue eye round
its furniture and ornament.  The room was comfortably lined
with books in that rich and human way that makes the walls
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
look 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 revulsion 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've 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 is 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
base 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.
   "`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 respected because of their worthlessness.  I
know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark.  I know
Nathan's ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden
stand.  That is why I could not take them away.  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 upon 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 wineglasses from the cupboard, filled
them both, and lifted one of them with a salutation towards
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,' 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 as to
have something eerie about it.  `I am 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
unreasonable increased a 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 genii --
I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds and
yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our
little lamp-lit room as 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 am always trying to find him -- to catch him
unawares.  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
some one 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 bedchamber (which seemed somehow to make it more
alarming), footsteps were coming nearer.  I am 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 colour 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'd left my latchkey at home.'
   "I got to my feet in 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 till 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 with a view to a
mathematical and scientific, rather than a classical or
literary, career.  A starless nihilism was then the
philosophy of the schools; and it 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 very face
of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the
window and cling to a waterspout.  He had done it solely
because the poor don had professed in theory a preference
for non-existence.  For this very unacademic type of
argument he had been sent down.  Vomiting 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 careless.  His practical
jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones.  Though not an
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.  Type of all battle and conquest --
skittles.'
   "There was something in him of what the old world called
the solemnity of revels -- 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 epochs 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 blood
enough 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 don 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 school friend (by this time a total stranger) to say
that he had just seen a man with two 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 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, and one who had
provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation.
He apologized in wild gasps 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 and `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 am a very domestic fellow,' he explained with
gravity, `and have often come in through a broken window
rather than be late 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 a 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 her that he did it in order to feel the same
interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other
people's.
   "`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 can 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 this
poetic fear to the very furniture; would seem to apologize
to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as
cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of
their skeleton of reality.  Every stair 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 a
night with a maniac.  What other 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
neighbour's!  On this I have but one word to say, and I feel
it of my honour 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 a 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 it.  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."

   "Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Mr. Moses Gould.
   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 all 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.  Moses Gould 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 admirations, 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 Moses a certain
smile.  It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has
been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or
mediaeval towns.
   "Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Moses Gould.
   Finding that this was not well received, he explained
further, exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant
features.
   "Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when 'e's
corfin' up a fly," he said pleasantly.  "Don't you see
you've bunged up old Smith anyhow.  If this parson's tale's
O. K. -- why, Smith is 'ot.  'E's pretty 'ot.  We find him
elopin' with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab.  Well,
what abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her
blarsted shyness -- transmigogrified into a 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 at 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 ship and
tucked it in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he
looked relieved.