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                         Chapter III

                       The Round Road;
                  or, the Desertion Charge


Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American,
and his respect for ladies was real, and not at all
scientific.
   "Ignoring," he said, "the delicate and considerable
knightly protests that have been called forth by my
colleague's native sense of oration, and apologizing to all
for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable to the
grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my colleague's
question by no means devoid of rel'vancy.  The last charge
against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge on
the paper is of bigamy and desertion.  It does without
question appear that the defence, in aspiring to rebut the
last charge, have really admitted the next.  Either Innocent
Smith is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else
that is exploded; but he is pretty well fixed for attempted
bigamy.  It all depends on what view we take of the alleged
letter from Curate Percy.  Under these conditions I feel
justified in claiming my right to questions.  May I ask how
the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy?  Did
it come direct from the prisoner?"
   "We have had nothing direct from the prisoner," said Moon
quietly.  "The few documents which the defence guarantees
came to us from another quarter."
   "From what quarter?" asked Dr. Pym.
   "If you insist," answered Moon, "we had them from Miss
Gray.
   Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and,
instead, opened them very wide.
   "Do you really mean to say," he said, "that Miss Gray was
in possession of this document testifying to a previous Mrs.
Smith?"
   "Quite so," said Inglewood, and sat down.
   The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and
painful voice, and then with visible difficulty continued
his opening remarks.
   "Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate
Percy's narrative is only too crushingly confirmed by other
and shocking documents in our own possession.  Of these the
principal and most certain is the testimony of Innocent
Smith's gardener, who was present at the most dramatic and
eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity.  Mr.
Gould, the gardener, please."
   Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to
present the gardener.  That functionary explained that he
had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith when they had a
little house on the edge of Croydon.  From the gardener's
tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain
he had seen the place.  It was one of those corners of town
or country that one does not forget, for it looked like a
frontier.  The garden hung very high above the lane, and its
end was steep and sharp, like a fortress.  Beyond was a roll
of real country, with a white path sprawling across it, and
the roots, boles, and branches of great gray trees writhing
and twisting against the sky.  But as if to assert that the
lane itself was suburban, were sharply relieved against that
gray and tossing upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar
yellow-green and a red pillar-box that stood exactly at the
corner.  Inglewood was sure of the place; he had passed it
twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle; he had
always dimly felt it was a place where something might
occur.  But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face
of his frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time
have appeared over the garden bushes above.  The gardener's
account, unlike the curate's, was quite free from decorative
adjectives, however many he may have uttered privately while
writing it.  He simply said that on a particular morning Mr.
Smith came out and began to play about with a rake, as he
often did.  Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest
child (he had two children); sometimes he would hook the
rake on to the branch of a tree, and hoist himself up with
horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in its
final agony.  Never, apparently, did he think of putting the
rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener, in
consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity.
But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning
in October he (the gardener) had come round the corner of
the house carrying the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on
the lawn in a striped red and white jacket (which might have
been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part of his
pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his
wife, who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the
garden, these decisive and very loud expressions --
   "I won't stay here any longer.  I've got another wife and
much better children a long way from here.  My other wife's
got redder hair than yours, and my other garden's got a much
finer situation; and I'm going off to them."
   With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far
up into the sky, higher than many could have shot an arrow,
and caught it again.  Then he cleared the hedge at a leap,
and alighted on his feet down in the lane below, and set off
up the road without even a hat.  Much of the picture was
doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental memory of the
place.  He could see with his mind's eye that big
bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the
crooked woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box
behind.  But the gardener, on his own account, was quite
prepared to swear to the public confession of bigamy, to the
temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky, and the
final disappearance of the man up the road.  Moreover, being
a local man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumours
that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast, nothing
was known of him again.
   This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by
Michael Moon in the few but clear phrases in which he opened
the defence upon the third charge.  So far from denying that
Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared upon the
Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own
account.  "I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that
you will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much
as that of an English gardener.  By Mr. Inglewood's favour
we will hear the French innkeeper."
   Before the company had decided the delicate point
Inglewood was already reading the account in question.  It
was in French.  It seemed to them to run something like
this: --

   "Sir, -- Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-
front at Gras, rather north of Dunquerque.  I am willing to
write all I know of the stranger out of the sea.
   "I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets.  A man of
sense looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be
beautiful, such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette.
One does not permit beauty to pervade one's whole life, just
as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or cover all
the fields with geraniums.  My faith, but we should miss the
onions!
   "But whether I read things backwards through my memory,
or whether there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which
the eye of science cannot as yet pierce, it is the
humiliating fact that on that particular evening I felt like
a poet -- like any little rascal of a poet who drinks
absinthe in the mad Montmartre.
   "Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green
and bitter and poisonous.  I had never known it look
unfamiliar before.  In the sky was that early and stormy
darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and the wind
blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where
they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the
shore.  There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail
standing in silently from the sea.  It was already quite
close, and out of it clambered a man of monstrous stature,
who came wading to shore with the water not up to his knees,
though it would have reached the hips of many men.  He
leaned on a long rake or forked pole, which looked like a
trident, and made him look like a Triton.  Wet as he was,
and with strips of seaweed clinging to him, he walked across
to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside, asked for
cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom
demanded.  Then the monster, with great politeness, invited
me to partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell
into conversation.  He had apparently crossed from Kent by a
small boat got at a private bargain because of some odd
fancy he had for passing promptly in an easterly direction,
and not waiting for any of the official boats.  He was, he
somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house.  When I
naturally asked where the house was, he answered that he did
not know: it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east;
or, as he expressed it with a hazy and yet impatient
gesture, `over there.'
   "I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would
know it when he saw it.  Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy,
and became alarmingly minute.  He gave a description of the
house detailed enough for an auctioneer.  I have forgotten
nearly all the details except the last two, which were that
the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red
pillar-box at the corner.
   "`A red pillar-box!' I cried in astonishment.  `Why, the
place must be in England!'
   "`I had forgotten,' he said, nodding heavily.  `That is
the island's name.'
   "`But, nom du nom,' I cried testily, `you've just come
from England, my boy.'
   "`They SAID it was England,' said my imbecile,
conspiratorially.  `They said it was Kent.  But those
Kentish men are such liars one can't believe anything they
say.'
   "`Monsieur,' I said, `you must pardon me.  I am elderly,
and the ~fumisteries~ of the young men are beyond me.  I go
by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension of
applied common sense called science.'
   "`Science!' cried the stranger.  `There is only one good
thing science ever discovered -- a good thing, good tidings
of great joy -- that the world is round.'
   "I told him with civility that his words conveyed no
impression to my intelligence.  `I mean,' he said, `that
going right round the world is the shortest way to where you
are already.'
   "`Is it not even shorter,' I asked, `to stop where you
are?'
   "`No, no, no!' he cried emphatically.  `That way is long
and very weary.  At the end of the world, at the back of the
dawn, I shall find the wife I really married and the house
that is really mine.  And that house will have a greener
lamp-post and a redder pillar-box.  Do you,' he asked with a
sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush out of your
house in order to find it?'
   "`No, I think not,' I replied; `reason tells a man from
the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of
life.  I remain here, content to fulfil the life of man.
All my interests are here, and most of my friends, and --'
   "`And yet,' he cried, starting to his almost terrific
height, `you made the French Revolution!'
   "`Pardon me," I said, `I am not quite so elderly.  A
relative perhaps.'
   "`I mean your sort did!' exclaimed this personage.  `Yes,
your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French
Revolution.  Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you're
just back where you were before.  Why, blast it all, that's
just where we all want to be -- back where we were before!
That is revolution -- going right round.  Every revolution,
like every repentance, is a return.'
   "He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his
seat again, and then said something indifferent and
soothing; but he struck the tiny table with his colossal
fist and went on.
   "`I am going to have a revolution, not a French
Revolution, but an English Revolution.  God has given to
each tribe its own type of mutiny.  The Frenchmen march
against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman
marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone.  But I am
going to turn the world upside down too.  I'm going to turn
myself upside down.  I'm going to walk upside down in the
cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes, where trees and men
hang head downward in the sky.  But my revolution, like
yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy
place -- the celestial, incredible place -- the place where
we were before.'
   "With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled
with reason, he leapt from the seat and strode away into the
twilight, swinging his pole and leaving behind him an
excessive payment, which also pointed to some loss of mental
balance.  This is all I know of the episode of the man
landed from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the
interests of justice. -- Accept, Sir, the assurances of the
very high consideration, with which I have the honour to be
your obedient servant,
                                            "Jules Durobin."

   "The next document in our dossier," continued Inglewood,
"comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of
Russia, and runs as follows: --

   "Sir, -- My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the
stationmaster at the station near Crazok.  The great trains
go by across the plains taking people to China, but very few
people get down at the platform where I have to watch.  This
makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon
the books I have.  But I cannot discuss these very much with
my neighbours, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this
part of Russia so much as in other parts.  Many of the
peasants round here have never heard of Bernard Shaw.
   "I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas;
but since the failure of the revolution this has been even
more difficult.  The revolutionists committed many acts
contrary to the pure principles of humanitarianism, with
which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books, they were ill
acquainted.  I did not approve of these cruel acts, though
provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there is
a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of
them.  This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.
   "It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a
few trains came through at long intervals, that I stood one
day watching a train that had come in.  Only one person got
out of the train, far away up at the other end of it, for it
was a very long train.  It was evening, with a cold,
greenish sky.  A little snow had fallen, but not enough to
whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort of sad purple
in all directions, save where the flat tops of some distant
tablelands caught the evening light like lakes.  As the
solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the
train he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen
so large a man.  But he looked even taller than he was, I
think, because his shoulders were very big and his head
comparatively little.  From the big shoulders hung a
tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty white, very
thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole such
as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.
   "Before he had traversed the full length of the train he
was entangled in one of those knots of rowdies that were the
embers of the extinct revolution, though they mostly
disgraced themselves upon the government side.  I was just
moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and
laid out right and left with such energy that he came
through them without scathe and strode right up to me,
leaving them staggered and really astonished.
   "Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of
his aim, he could only say rather dubiously in French that
he wanted a house.
   "`There are not many houses to be had round here,' I
answered in the same language, `the district has been very
disturbed.  A revolution, as you know, has recently been
suppressed.  Any further building --'
   "`Oh! I don't mean that,' he cried; `I mean a real house
-- a live house.  It really is a live house, for it runs
away from me.'
   "`I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or
gesture moved me profoundly.  We Russians are brought up in
an atmosphere of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can
still be seen in the bright colours of the children's dolls
and of the ikons.  For an instant the idea of a house
running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the
enlightenment of man moves slowly.
   "`Have you no other house of your own?' I asked.
   "`I have left it,' he said very sadly.  `It was not the
house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it.  My wife
was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.'
   "`And so,' I said with sympathy, `you walked straight out
of the front door, like a masculine Nora.'
   "`Nora?' he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to
be a Russian word.
   "`I mean Nora in "The Doll's House,"' I replied.
   "At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he
was an Englishman; for Englishmen always think that Russians
study nothing but `ukases.'
   "`"The Doll's House"!' he cried vehemently; `why, that is
just where Ibsen was so wrong!  Why, the whole aim of a
house is to be a doll's house.  Don't you remember, when you
were a child, how those little windows WERE windows, while
the big windows weren't.  A child has a doll's house, and
shrieks when a front door opens inwards.  A banker has a
real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to
emit the faintest shriek when their real front doors open
inwards.'
   "Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me
foolishly silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman
had leaned over and was saying in a sort of loud whisper, `I
have found out how to make a big thing small.  I have found
out how to turn a house into a doll's house.  Get a long way
off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by his great
gift of distance.  Once let me see my old brick house
standing up quite little against the horizon, and I shall
want to go back to it again.  I shall see the funny little
toy lamp-post painted green outside the gate, and all the
dear little people like dolls looking out of the window.
For the windows really open in my doll's house.'
   "`But why?' I asked, `should you wish to return to that
particular doll's house?  Having taken, like Nora, the bold
step against convention, having made yourself in the
conventional sense disreputable, having dared to be free,
why should you not take advantage of your freedom?  As the
greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called
your marriage was only your mood.  You have a right to leave
it all behind, like the clippings of your hair or the
parings of your nails.  Having once escaped, you have the
world before you.  Though the words may seem strange to you,
you are free in Russia.'
   "He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the
plains, where the only moving thing was the long and
labouring trail of smoke out of the railway engine, violet
in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot and heavy cloud of
that cold clear evening of pale green.
   "`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia.
You are right.  I could really walk into that town over
there and have love all over again, and perhaps marry some
beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could ever find
me.  Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'
   "His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled
to ask him what he meant, and of what exactly I had
convinced him.
   "`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy
eye, `why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run
away from his wife.'
   "`And why is it dangerous?' I inquired.
   "`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd
person, `and we all want to be found.'
   "`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked, `Ibsen,
Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all say rather that what we
want most is to be lost: to find ourselves in untrodden
paths, and to do unprecedented things: to break with the
past and belong to the future.'
   "He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and
looked round on what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate
scene -- the dark purple plains, the neglected railroad, the
few ragged knots of the malcontents.  `I shall not find the
house here,' he said.  `It is still eastward -- further and
further eastward.'
   "Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and
struck the foot of his pole upon the frozen earth.
   "`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be
locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house.  I have
been a bit unconventional in my time!  Why, Nietzsche stood
in a row of ramrods in the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw
takes temperance beverages in the suburbs; but the things I
do are unprecedented things.  This round road I am treading
is an untrodden path.  I do believe in breaking out; I am a
revolutionist.  But don't you see that all these real leaps
and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back
to Eden -- to something we have had, to something at least
we have heard of?  Don't you see one only breaks the fence
or shoots the moon in order to get HOME?'
   "`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I
should accept that.'
   "`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have
explained a second thing to me.'
   "`What do you mean?' I asked; `what thing?'
   "`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking
across quite suddenly to the train he got into it just as it
was steaming away at last.  And I saw the long snaky tail of
it disappear along the darkening flats.
   "I saw no more of him.  But though his views were adverse
to the best advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting
person: I should like to find out if he has produced any
literary works. -- Yours, etc.,
                                      "Paul Nickolaiovitch."

   There was something in this odd set of glimpses into
foreign lives which kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it
had hitherto been, and it was again without interruption
that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile.  "The
Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks
the special ceremonies of our letter-writing.  It is
ceremonious enough in its own way: --

   "The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting. -- I
am Wong-Hi, and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my
family in the forest of Fu.  The man that broke through the
sky and came to me said that it must be very dull, but I
showed him the wrongness of his thought.  I am indeed in one
place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy,
and in this I shall doubtless die.  But if a man remain in
one place he shall see that the place changes.  The pagoda
of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees, like a
yellow pagoda above many green pagodas.  But the skies are
sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like
jade, and sometimes red like garnet.  But the night is
always ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
   "The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had
hardly seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over
which I look as over a sea, when I go to the top of the
temple at morning.   And yet when he came, it was as if an
elephant had strayed from the armies of the great kings of
India.  For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came
forth in the sunshine before the temple one taller than the
sons of men.
   "Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a
carnival, and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it
like the teeth of a dragon.  His face was white and
discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so that
they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke our
speech brokenly.
   "He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to
find a house.'  And then he told me with indelicate haste
that the lamp outside his house was green, and that there
was a red post at the corner of it.
   "`I have not seen your house or any houses,' I answered.
`I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.'
   "`Do you believe in the gods?' he asked with hunger in
his eyes, like the hunger of dogs.  And this seemed to me a
strange question to ask, for what should a man do except
what men have done?
   "`My Lord,' I said, `it must be good for men to hold up
their hands even if the skies are empty.  For if there are
gods, they will be pleased, and if there are none, then
there are none to be displeased.  Sometimes the skies are
gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony, but the
trees and the temple stand still under all.  So the great
Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things
with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds,
with our heads we may think many things: yes, my Lord, and
doubt many things.  So long as men offer rice at the right
season, and kindle lanterns at the right hour, it matters
little whether there be gods or no.  For these things are
not to appease gods, but to appease men.'
   "He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous;
yet his look was very gentle.
   "`Break your temple,' he said, `and your gods will be
freed.'
   "And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered: `And so, if
there be no gods, I shall have nothing but a broken temple.'
   "And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason
was withheld threw out his mighty arms and asked me to
forgive him.  And when I asked him for what he should be
forgiven he answered: `For being right.'
   "`Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and
satisfying,' he cried, `it is a shame that they should be
wrong.  We are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so
many iniquities -- it is a shame that we should be right
after all.'
   "And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he
thought that he and his people were right.
   "And he answered: `We are right because we are bound
where men should be bound, and free where men should be
free.  We are right because we doubt and destroy laws and
customs -- but we do not doubt our own right to destroy
them.  For you live by customs, but we by creeds.  Behold
me!  In my country I am called Smip.  My country is
abandoned, my name is defiled, because I pursue across the
world what really belongs to me.  You are steadfast as the
trees because you do not believe.  I am as fickle as the
tempest because I do believe.  I do believe in my own house,
which I shall find again.  And at the last remaineth the
green lantern and the red post.'
   "I said to him: `At the last remaineth only wisdom.'
   "But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout,
and rushing forward disappeared among the trees.  I have not
seen this man again nor any other man.  The virtues of the
wise are of fine brass.
                                                  "Wong-Hi."

   "The next letter I have to read," proceeded Arthur
Inglewood, "will probably make clear the nature of our
client's curious but innocent experiment.  It is dated from
a mountain village in California, and runs as follows: --

   "Sir, -- A person answering to the rather extraordinary
description required certainly went, some time ago, over the
high pass of the Sierras on which I live and of which I am
probably the sole stationary inhabitant.  I keep a
rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on the very top
of this specially steep and threatening pass.  My name is
Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my
nationality.  Well, it puzzles me a great deal.  When one
has been for fifteen years without society it is hard to
have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it is
difficult to invent a nation.  My father was an Irishman of
the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian
kind.  My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the
old Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for
all that of some admixture of Red Indian blood.  I was well
educated and fond of music and books.  But, like many other
hybrids, I was too good or too bad for the world; and after
attempting many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient
though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the
mountains.  In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a
savage.  Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a
Red Indian, I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of
leather trousers, with a great straw hat as big as a parasol
to defend me from the sun.  I had a bowie knife at my belt
and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a
pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that
could climb up to my place.  But I promise you I never
looked as mad as that man did.  Compared with him I was
Fifth Avenue.
   "I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras
has an odd effect on the mind; one tends to think of those
lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but rather as
pillars holding up heaven itself.  Straight cliffs sail up
and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that
they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags
collect a mere glitter of phosphorous.  These terraces and
towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the
end of the world.  Rather they seem to be its awful
beginning: its huge foundations.  We could almost fancy the
mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and
carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.  For
just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the
stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.
The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at
the earth than planets circling placidly about it.
   "All this may have driven me mad: I am not sure.  I know
there is one angle of the road down the pass where the rock
leans out a little, and on windy nights I seem to hear it
clashing overhead with other rocks -- yes, city against city
and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.  It was
on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the
pass.  Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up
the pass.  But I had never seen one like this one before.
   "He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated
garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so
that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.
His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down
below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about
him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had
the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or
autumn leaves.  The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was,
he used sometimes as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told)
as a weapon.  I do not know why he should have used it as a
weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me, an excellent
six-shooter in his pocket.  `But THAT,' he said, `I use only
for peaceful purposes.'  I have no notion what he meant.
   "He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank
some wine from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy
over it like one who had travelled long among alien, cruel
things and found at last something that he knew.  Then he
sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and
coloured glass that hangs over my door.  It is old, but of
no value; my grandmother gave it me long ago: she was
devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a
crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.
He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our
Lady's blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led
me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for
fourteen years.
   "Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked
out eastward where the road fell away below us.  The sunset
sky was a vault of rich violet, fading away into mauve and
silver round the edges of the dark mountain ampitheatre; and
between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and
went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call
Green Finger.  Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all
over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there
like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
   "The man silently stretched out his rake in that
direction, and before he spoke I knew what he meant.  Beyond
the great green rock in the purple sky hung a single star.
   "`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice
like one of our ancient eagles'.  `The wise men followed the
star and found the house.  But if I followed the star,
should I find the house?'
   "`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you
are a wise man.'  I refrained from adding that he certainly
didn't look it.
   "`You may judge for yourself,' he answered.  `I am a man
who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be
away from it.'
   "`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.
   "`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them
moving about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I
knew they were walking and talking in another house
thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies,
and beyond the series of the seas.  I loved them with a
devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but
unattainable.  Never did human creatures seem so dear and so
desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost.  I loved them
intolerably; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet
for a testimony.  Nay, I did more.  I spurned the world
under my feet so that it swung full circle like a
treadmill.'
   "`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right
round the world?  Your speech is English, yet you are coming
from the west.'
   "`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied
sadly.  `I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an
exile.'
   "Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
not looked for fourteen years.
   "`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said
that we were all in exile, and that no earthly house could
cure the holy home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
   "He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle
drift out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
   "Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and
stood up leaning on his grassy pole.  `I think that must be
the reason,' he said -- `the secret of this life of man, so
ecstatic and so unappeased.  But I think there is more to be
said.  I think God has given us the love of special places,
of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.'
   "`I dare say,' I said.  `What reason?'
   "`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at
the sky and the abyss, `we might worship that.'
   "`What do you mean?' I demanded.
   "`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of
the idols -- the mightiest of the rivals of God.'
   "`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I
suggested.
   "`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if
there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a
green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive
and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge.  I mean that
God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things
however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be
a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries,
that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something
and not anything.  And I would not be so very much surprised
if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after
all.'
   "With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down
the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the
eagles.  But since he went a fever of homelessness will
often shake me.  I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud
cabins I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will
endure. -- Yours faithfully,
                                               "Louis Hara."

   After a short silence Inglewood said: "And, finally, we
desire to put in as evidence the following document: --

   "This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been
housemaid to Mrs. I. Smith at `The Laurels' in Croydon for
the last six months.  When I came the lady was alone, with
two children; she was not a widow, but her husband was
away.  She was left with plenty of money and did not seem
disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back
soon.  She said he was rather eccentric and a little change
did him good.  One evening last week I was bringing the
tea-things out on to the lawn when I nearly dropped them.
The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck over the hedge,
and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge, just
like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all
hairy and ragged like Robinson Crusoe.  I screamed out, but
my mistress didn't even get out of her chair, but smiled and
said he wanted shaving.  Then he sat down quite calmly at
the garden table and took a cup of tea, and then I realized
that this must be Mr. Smith himself.  He has stopped here
ever since and does not really give much trouble, though I
sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head.
                                                "Ruth Davis.
   "P.S. -- I forgot to say that he looked round at the
garden and said, very loud and strong: `Oh, what a lovely
place you've got;' just as if he'd never seen it before."

   The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon
sun sent one heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which
fell with an intangible solemnity upon the empty seat of
Mary Gray, for the younger women had left the court before
the more recent of the investigations.  Mrs. Duke was still
asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a huge hunchback in
the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper
toys.  But the five men really engaged in the controversy,
and concerned not to convince the tribunal but to convince
each other, still sat round the table like the Committee of
Public Safety.
   Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on
top of another, cocked his little legs up against the table,
tipped his chair backwards so far as to be in direct danger
of falling over, emitted a startling and prolonged whistle
like a steam engine, and asserted that it was all his eye.
   When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down
behind the books again and answered with considerable
excitement, throwing his papers about.  "All those fairy-
tales you've been reading out," he said.  "Oh! don't talk to
me!  I ain't littery and that, but I know fairy-tales when I
hear 'em.  I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical
bits and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S.  But we're
living in West 'Ampstead and not in 'Ell; and the long and
the short of it is that some things 'appen and some things
don't 'appen.  Those are the things that don't 'appen."
   "I thought," said Moon gravely, "that we quite clearly
explained --"
   "Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained," assented
Mr. Gould with extraordinary volubility.  "You'd explain an
elephant off the doorstep, you would.  I ain't a clever chap
like you; but I ain't a born natural, Michael Moon, and when
there's an elephant on my doorstep I don't listen to no
explanations.  `It's got a trunk,' I says. -- `My trunk,'
you says: `I'm fond of travellin', and a change does me
good.' -- `But the blasted thing's got tusks,' I says. --
`Don't look a gift 'orse in the mouth,' you says, `but thank
the goodness and the graice that on your birth 'as smiled.'
-- `But it's nearly as big as the 'ouse,' I says. -- `That's
the bloomin' perspective,' you says, `and the sacred magic
of distance.' -- `Why, the elephant's trumpetin' like the
Day of Judgement,' I says. -- `That's your own conscience
a-talking to you, Moses Gould,' you says in a grive and
tender voice.  Well, I 'ave got a conscience as much as
you.  I don't believe most of the things they tell you in
church on Sundays; and I don't believe these 'ere things any
more because you goes on about 'em as if you was in church.
I believe an elephant's a great big ugly dingerous beast --
and I believe Smith's another."
   "Do you mean to say," asked Inglewood, "that you still
doubt the evidence of exculpation we have brought forward?"
   "Yes, I do still doubt it," said Gould warmly.  "It's all
a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off.
'Ow can we test all those tales?  'Ow can we drop in and buy
the `Pink 'Un' at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or
whatever it was?  'Ow can we go and do a gargle at the
saloon-bar on top of the Sierra Mountains?  But anybody can
go and see Bunting's boarding-house at Worthing."
   Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed
surprise.
   "Any one," continued Gould, "can call on Mr. Trip."
   "It is a comforting thought," replied Michael with
restraint; "but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?"
   "For just exactly the sime reason," cried the excited
Moses, hammering on the table with both hands, "for just
exactly the sime reason that he should communicate with
Messrs. 'Anbury and Bootle of Paternoster Row and with Miss
Gridley's 'igh class Academy at 'Endon, and with old Lady
Bullingdon who lives at Penge."
   "Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life," said
Michael, "why is it among the duties of man to communicate
with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge?"
   "It ain't one of the duties of man," said Gould, "nor one
of his pleasures, either, I can tell you.  She takes the
crumpet, does Lady Bullingdon at Penge.  But it's one of the
duties of a prosecutor pursuin' the innocent, blameless
butterfly career of your friend Smith, and it's the sime
with all the others I mentioned."
   "But why do you bring in these people here?" asked
Inglewood.
   "Why!  Because we've got proof enough to sink a
steamboat," roared Moses; "because I've got the papers in my
very 'and; because your precious Innocent is a blackguard
and 'ome smasher, and these are the 'omes he's smashed.  I
don't set up for a 'oly man; but I wouldn't 'ave all those
poor girls on my conscience for something.  And I think a
chap that's capable of deserting and perhaps killing 'em all
is about capable of cracking a crib or shootin' an old
schoolmaster -- so I don't care much about the other yarns
one way or another."
   "I think," said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough, "that
we are approaching this matter rather irregularly.  This is
really the fourth charge on the charge sheet, and perhaps I
had better put it before you in an ordered and scientific
manner."
   Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence
of the darkening room.