Bab Bab 8 · THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE

. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE

It was on the sunny veranda of a seaside hotel, overlooking a

pattern of flower beds and a strip of blue sea, that Horne Fisher

and Harold March had their final explanation, which might be called

an explosion.

Harold March had come to the little table and sat down at it with a

subdued excitement smoldering in his somewhat cloudy and dreamy blue

eyes. In the newspapers which he tossed from him on to the table

there was enough to explain some if not all of his emotion. Public

affairs in every department had reached a crisis. The government

which had stood so long that men were used to it, as they are used

to a hereditary despotism, had begun to be accused of blunders and

even of financial abuses. Some said that the experiment of

attempting to establish a peasantry in the west of England, on the

lines of an early fancy of Horne Fisher's, had resulted in nothing

but dangerous quarrels with more industrial neighbors. There had

been particular complaints of the ill treatment of harmless

foreigners, chiefly Asiatics, who happened to be employed in the new

scientific works constructed on the coast. Indeed, the new Power

which had arisen in Siberia, backed by Japan and other powerful

allies, was inclined to take the matter up in the interests of its

exiled subjects; and there had been wild talk about ambassadors and

ultimatums. But something much more serious, in its personal

interest for March himself, seemed to fill his meeting with his

friend with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.

Perhaps it increased his annoyance that there was a certain unusual

liveliness about the usually languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary

image of him in March's mind was that of a pallid and bald-browed

gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as prematurely

bald. He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a

pessimist in the language of a lounger. Even now March could not be

certain whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of

sunshine, or that effect of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that

is always visible on the parade of a marine resort, relieved against

the blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a flower in his buttonhole,

and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane with something

almost like the swagger of a fighter. With such clouds gathering

over England, the pessimist seemed to be the only man who carried

his own sunshine.

"Look here," said Harold March, abruptly, "you've been no end of a

friend to me, and I never was so proud of a friendship before; but

there's something I must get off my chest. The more I found out, the

less I understood how you could stand it. And I tell you I'm going

to stand it no longer."

Horne Fisher gazed across at him gravely and attentively, but rather

as if he were a long way off.

"You know I always liked you," said Fisher, quietly, "but I also

respect you, which is not always the same thing. You may possibly

guess that I like a good many people I don't respect. Perhaps it is

my tragedy, perhaps it is my fault. But you are very different, and

I promise you this: that I will never try to keep you as somebody to

be liked, at the price of your not being respected."

"I know you are magnanimous," said March after a silence, "and yet

you tolerate and perpetuate everything that is mean." Then after

another silence he added: "Do you remember when we first met, when

you were fishing in that brook in the affair of the target? And do

you remember you said that, after all, it might do no harm if I

could blow the whole tangle of this society to hell with dynamite."

"Yes, and what of that?" asked Fisher.

"Only that I'm going to blow it to hell with dynamite," said Harold

March, "and I think it right to give you fair warning. For a long

time I didn't believe things were as bad as you said they were. But

I never felt as if I could have bottled up what you knew, supposing

you really knew it. Well, the long and the short of it is that I've

got a conscience; and now, at last, I've also got a chance. I've

been put in charge of a big independent paper, with a free hand, and

we're going to open a cannonade on corruption."

"That will be--Attwood, I suppose," said Fisher, reflectively.

"Timber merchant. Knows a lot about China."

"He knows a lot about England," said March, doggedly, "and now I

know it, too, we're not going to hush it up any longer. The people

of this country have a right to know how they're ruled--or, rather,

ruined. The Chancellor is in the pocket of the money lenders and has

to do as he is told; otherwise he's bankrupt, and a bad sort of

bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and actresses behind it. The

Prime Minister was in the petrol-contract business; and deep in it,

too. The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs. When you

say that plainly about a man who may send thousands of Englishmen to

die for nothing, you're called personal. If a poor engine driver

gets drunk and sends thirty or forty people to death, nobody

complains of the exposure being personal. The engine driver is not a

person."

"I quite agree with you," said Fisher, calmly. "You are perfectly

right."

"If you agree with us, why the devil don't you act with us?"

demanded his friend. "If you think it's right, why don't you do

what's right? It's awful to think of a man of your abilities simply

blocking the road to reform."

"We have often talked about that," replied Fisher, with the same

composure. "The Prime Minister is my father's friend. The Foreign

Minister married my sister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my

first cousin. I mention the genealogy in some detail just now for a

particular reason. The truth is I have a curious kind of

cheerfulness at the moment. It isn't altogether the sun and the sea,

sir. I am enjoying an emotion that is entirely new to me; a happy

sensation I never remember having had before."

"What the devil do you mean?"

"I am feeling proud of my family," said Horne Fisher.

Harold March stared at him with round blue eyes, and seemed too much

mystified even to ask a question. Fisher leaned back in his chair in

his lazy fashion, and smiled as he continued.

"Look here, my dear fellow. Let me ask a question in turn. You

imply that I have always known these things about my unfortunate

kinsmen. So I have. Do you suppose that Attwood hasn't always known

them? Do you suppose he hasn't always known you as an honest man who

would say these things when he got a chance? Why does Attwood

unmuzzle you like a dog at this moment, after all these years? I

know why he does; I know a good many things, far too many things.

And therefore, as I have the honor to remark, I am proud of my

family at last."

"But why?" repeated March, rather feebly.

"I am proud of the Chancellor because he gambled and the Foreign

Minister because he drank and the Prime Minister because he took a

commission on a contract," said Fisher, firmly. "I am proud of them

because they did these things, and can be denounced for them, and

know they can be denounced for them, and are _standing firm for all

that_. I take off my hat to them because they are defying blackmail,

and refusing to smash their country to save themselves. I salute

them as if they were going to die on the battlefield."

After a pause he continued: "And it will be a battlefield, too, and

not a metaphorical one. We have yielded to foreign financiers so

long that now it is war or ruin, Even the people, even the country

people, are beginning to suspect that they are being ruined. That is

the meaning of the regrettable incidents in the newspapers."

"The meaning of the outrages on Orientals?" asked March.

"The meaning of the outrages on Orientals," replied Fisher, "is that

the financiers have introduced Chinese labor into this country with

the deliberate intention of reducing workmen and peasants to

starvation. Our unhappy politicians have made concession after

concession; and now they are asking concessions which amount to our

ordering a massacre of our own poor. If we do not fight now we shall

never fight again. They will have put England in an economic

position of starving in a week. But we are going to fight now; I

shouldn't wonder if there were an ultimatum in a week and an

invasion in a fortnight. All the past corruption and cowardice is

hampering us, of course; the West country is pretty stormy and

doubtful even in a military sense; and the Irish regiments there,

that are supposed to support us by the new treaty, are pretty well

in mutiny; for, of course, this infernal coolie capitalism is being

pushed in Ireland, too. But it's to stop now; and if the government

message of reassurance gets through to them in time, they may turn

up after all by the time the enemy lands. For my poor old gang is

going to stand to its guns at last. Of course it's only natural that

when they have been whitewashed for half a century as paragons,

their sins should come back on them at the very moment when they are

behaving like men for the first time in their lives. Well, I tell

you, March, I know them inside out; and I know they are behaving

like heroes. Every man of them ought to have a statue, and on the

pedestal words like those of the noblest ruffian of the Revolution:

'Que mon nom soit fletri; que la France soit libre.'"

"Good God!" cried March, "shall we never get to the bottom of your

mines and countermines?"

After a silence Fisher answered in a lower voice, looking his friend

in the eyes.

"Did you think there was nothing but evil at the bottom of them?" he

asked, gently. "Did you think I had found nothing but filth in the

deep seas into which fate has thrown me? Believe me, you never know

the best about men till you know the worst about them. It does not

dispose of their strange human souls to know that they were

exhibited to the world as impossibly impeccable wax works, who never

looked after a woman or knew the meaning of a bribe. Even in a

palace, life can be lived well; and even in a Parliament, life can

be lived with occasional efforts to live it well. I tell you it is

as true of these rich fools and rascals as it is true of every poor

footpad and pickpocket; that only God knows how good they have tried

to be. God alone knows what the conscience can survive, or how a man

who has lost his honor will still try to save his soul."

There was another silence, and March sat staring at the table and

Fisher at the sea. Then Fisher suddenly sprang to his feet and

caught up his hat and stick with all his new alertness and even

pugnacity.

"Look here, old fellow," he cried, "let us make a bargain. Before

you open your campaign for Attwood come down and stay with us for

one week, to hear what we're really doing. I mean with the Faithful

Few, formerly known as the Old Gang, occasionally to be described as

the Low Lot. There are really only five of us that are quite fixed,

and organizing the national defense; and we're living like a

garrison in a sort of broken-down hotel in Kent. Come and see what

we're really doing and what there is to be done, and do us justice.

And after that, with unalterable love and affection for you, publish

and be damned."

Thus it came about that in the last week before war, when events

moved most rapidly, Harold March found himself one of a sort of

small house party of the people he was proposing to denounce. They

were living simply enough, for people with their tastes, in an old

brown-brick inn faced with ivy and surrounded by rather dismal

gardens. At the back of the building the garden ran up very steeply

to a road along the ridge above; and a zigzag path scaled the slope

in sharp angles, turning to and fro amid evergreens so somber that

they might rather be called everblack. Here and there up the slope

were statues having all the cold monstrosity of such minor ornaments

of the eighteenth century; and a whole row of them ran as on a

terrace along the last bank at the bottom, opposite the back door.

This detail fixed itself first in March's mind merely because it

figured in the first conversation he had with one of the cabinet

ministers.

The cabinet ministers were rather older than he had expected to find

them. The Prime Minister no longer looked like a boy, though he

still looked a little like a baby. But it was one of those old and

venerable babies, and the baby had soft gray hair. Everything about

him was soft, to his speech and his way of walking; but over and

above that his chief function seemed to be sleep. People left alone

with him got so used to his eyes being closed that they were almost

startled when they realized in the stillness that the eyes were wide

open, and even watching. One thing at least would always make the

old gentleman open his eyes. The one thing he really cared for in

this world was his hobby of armored weapons, especially Eastern

weapons, and he would talk for hours about Damascus blades and Arab

swordmanship. Lord James Herries, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,

was a short, dark, sturdy man with a very sallow face and a very

sullen manner, which contrasted with the gorgeous flower in his

buttonhole and his festive trick of being always slightly

overdressed. It was something of a euphemism to call him a

well-known man about town. There was perhaps more mystery in the

question of how a man who lived for pleasure seemed to get so little

pleasure out of it. Sir David Archer, the Foreign Secretary, was the

only one of them who was a self-made man, and the only one of them

who looked like an aristocrat. He was tall and thin and very

handsome, with a grizzled beard; his gray hair was very curly, and

even rose in front in two rebellious ringlets that seemed to the

fanciful to tremble like the antennae of some giant insect, or to

stir sympathetically with the restless tufted eyebrows over his

rather haggard eyes. For the Foreign Secretary made no secret of his

somewhat nervous condition, whatever might be the cause of it.

"Do you know that mood when one could scream because a mat is

crooked?" he said to March, as they walked up and down in the back

garden below the line of dingy statues. "Women get into it when

they've worked too hard; and I've been working pretty hard lately,

of course. It drives me mad when Herries will wear his hat a little

crooked--habit of looking like a gay dog. Sometime I swear I'll

knock it off. That statue of Britannia over there isn't quite

straight; it sticks forward a bit as if the lady were going to

topple over. The damned thing is that it doesn't topple over and be

done with it. See, it's clamped with an iron prop. Don't be

surprised if I get up in the middle of the night to hike it down."

They paced the path for a few moments in silence and then he

continued. "It's odd those little things seem specially big when

there are bigger things to worry about. We'd better go in and do

some work."

Horne Fisher evidently allowed for all the neurotic possibilities of

Archer and the dissipated habits of Herries; and whatever his faith

in their present firmness, did not unduly tax their time and

attention, even in the case of the Prime Minister. He had got the

consent of the latter finally to the committing of the important

documents, with the orders to the Western armies, to the care of a

less conspicuous and more solid person--an uncle of his named Horne

Hewitt, a rather colorless country squire who had been a good

soldier, and was the military adviser of the committee. He was

charged with expediting the government pledge, along with the

concerted military plans, to the half-mutinous command in the west;

and the still more urgent task of seeing that it did not fall into

the hands of the enemy, who might appear at any moment from the

east. Over and above this military official, the only other person

present was a police official, a certain Doctor Prince, originally a

police surgeon and now a distinguished detective, sent to be a

bodyguard to the group. He was a square-faced man with big

spectacles and a grimace that expressed the intention of keeping his

mouth shut. Nobody else shared their captivity except the hotel

proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face, one or two

of his servants, and another servant privately attached to Lord

James Herries. He was a young Scotchman named Campbell, who looked

much more distinguished than his bilious-looking master, having

chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with large but fine

features. He was probably the one really efficient person in the

house.

After about four days of the informal council, March had come to

feel a sort of grotesque sublimity about these dubious figures,

defiant in the twilight of danger, as if they were hunchbacks and

cripples left alone to defend a town. All were working hard; and he

himself looked up from writing a page of memoranda in a private room

to see Horne Fisher standing in the doorway, accoutered as if for

travel. He fancied that Fisher looked a little pale; and after a

moment that gentleman shut the door behind him and said, quietly:

"Well, the worst has happened. Or nearly the worst."

"The enemy has landed," cried March, and sprang erect out of his

chair.

"Oh, I knew the enemy would land," said Fisher, with composure.

"Yes, he's landed; but that's not the worst that could happen. The

worst is that there's a leak of some sort, even from this fortress

of ours. It's been a bit of a shock to me, I can tell you; though I

suppose it's illogical. After all, I was full of admiration at

finding three honest men in politics. I ought not to be full of

astonishment if I find only two."

He ruminated a moment and then said, in such a fashion that March

could hardly tell if he were changing the subject or no:

"It's hard at first to believe that a fellow like Herries, who had

pickled himself in vice like vinegar, can have any scruple left. But

about that I've noticed a curious thing. Patriotism is not the first

virtue. Patriotism rots into Prussianism when you pretend it is the

first virtue. But patriotism is sometimes the last virtue. A man

will swindle or seduce who will not sell his country. But who

knows?"

"But what is to be done?" cried March, indignantly.

"My uncle has the papers safe enough," replied Fisher, "and is

sending them west to-night; but somebody is trying to get at them

from outside, I fear with the assistance of somebody inside. All

I can do at present is to try to head off the man outside; and I

must get away now and do it. I shall be back in about twenty-four

hours. While I'm away I want you to keep an eye on these people and

find out what you can. Au revoir." He vanished down the stairs; and

from the window March could see him mount a motor cycle and trail

away toward the neighboring town.

On the following morning, March was sitting in the window seat of

the old inn parlor, which was oak-paneled and ordinarily rather

dark; but on that occasion it was full of the white light of a

curiously clear morning--the moon had shone brilliantly for the

last two or three nights. He was himself somewhat in shadow in the

corner of the window seat; and Lord James Herries, coming in hastily

from the garden behind, did not see him. Lord James clutched the

back of a chair, as if to steady himself, and, sitting down abruptly

at the table, littered with the last meal, poured himself out a

tumbler of brandy and drank it. He sat with his back to March, but

his yellow face appeared in a round mirror beyond and the tinge of it

was like that of some horrible malady. As March moved he started

violently and faced round.

"My God!" he cried, "have you seen what's outside?"

"Outside?" repeated the other, glancing over his shoulder at the

garden.

"Oh, go and look for yourself," cried Herries in a sort of fury.

"Hewitt's murdered and his papers stolen, that's all."

He turned his back again and sat down with a thud; his square

shoulders were shaking. Harold March darted out of the doorway into

the back garden with its steep slope of statues.

The first thing he saw was Doctor Prince, the detective, peering

through his spectacles at something on the ground; the second was

the thing he was peering at. Even after the sensational news he had

heard inside, the sight was something of a sensation.

The monstrous stone image of Britannia was lying prone and face

downward on the garden path; and there stuck out at random from

underneath it, like the legs of a smashed fly, an arm clad in a

white shirt sleeve and a leg clad in a khaki trouser, and hair of

the unmistakable sandy gray that belonged to Horne Fisher's

unfortunate uncle. There were pools of blood and the limbs were

quite stiff in death.

"Couldn't this have been an accident?" said March, finding words at

last.

"Look for yourself, I say," repeated the harsh voice of Herries, who

had followed him with restless movements out of the door. "The

papers are gone, I tell you. The fellow tore the coat off the corpse

and cut the papers out of the inner pocket. There's the coat over

there on the bank, with the great slash in it."

"But wait a minute," said the detective, Prince, quietly. "In that

case there seems to be something of a mystery. A murderer might

somehow have managed to throw the statue down on him, as he seems to

have done. But I bet he couldn't easily have lifted it up again.

I've tried; and I'm sure it would want three men at least. Yet we

must suppose, on that theory, that the murderer first knocked him

down as he walked past, using the statue as a stone club, then

lifted it up again, took him out and deprived him of his coat, then

put him back again in the posture of death and neatly replaced the

statue. I tell you it's physically impossible. And how else could he

have unclothed a man covered with that stone monument? It's worse

than the conjurer's trick, when a man shuffles a coat off with his

wrists tied."

"Could he have thrown down the statue after he'd stripped the

corpse?" asked March.

"And why?" asked Prince, sharply. "If he'd killed his man and got

his papers, he'd be away like the wind. He wouldn't potter about in

a garden excavating the pedestals of statues. Besides--Hullo, who's

that up there?"

High on the ridge above them, drawn in dark thin lines against the

sky, was a figure looking so long and lean as to be almost spidery.

The dark silhouette of the head showed two small tufts like horns;

and they could almost have sworn that the horns moved.

"Archer!" shouted Herries, with sudden passion, and called to him

with curses to come down. The figure drew back at the first cry,

with an agitated movement so abrupt as almost to be called an antic.

The next moment the man seemed to reconsider and collect himself,

and began to come down the zigzag garden path, but with obvious

reluctance, his feet falling in slower and slower rhythm. Through

March's mind were throbbing the phrases that this man himself had

used, about going mad in the middle of the night and wrecking the

stone figure. Just so, he could fancy, the maniac who had done such

a thing might climb the crest of the hill, in that feverish dancing

fashion, and look down on the wreck he had made. But the wreck he

had made here was not only a wreck of stone.

When the man emerged at last on to the garden path, with the full

light on his face and figure, he was walking slowly indeed, but

easily, and with no appearance of fear.

"This is a terrible thing," he said. "I saw it from above; I was

taking a stroll along the ridge."

"Do you mean that you saw the murder?" demanded March, "or the

accident? I mean did you see the statue fall?"

"No," said Archer, "I mean I saw the statue fallen."

Prince seemed to be paying but little attention; his eye was riveted

on an object lying on the path a yard or two from the corpse. It

seemed to be a rusty iron bar bent crooked at one end.

"One thing I don't understand," he said, "is all this blood. The

poor fellow's skull isn't smashed; most likely his neck is broken;

but blood seems to have spouted as if all his arteries were severed.

I was wondering if some other instrument . . . that iron thing, for

instance; but I don't see that even that is sharp enough. I suppose

nobody knows what it is."

"I know what it is," said Archer in his deep but somewhat shaky

voice. "I've seen it in my nightmares. It was the iron clamp or prop

on the pedestal, stuck on to keep the wretched image upright when it

began to wobble, I suppose. Anyhow, it was always stuck in the

stonework there; and I suppose it came out when the thing

collapsed."

Doctor Prince nodded, but he continued to look down at the pools of

blood and the bar of iron.

"I'm certain there's something more underneath all this," he said at

last. "Perhaps something more underneath the statue. I have a huge

sort of hunch that there is. We are four men now and between us we

can lift that great tombstone there."

They all bent their strength to the business; there was a silence

save for heavy breathing; and then, after an instant of the

tottering and staggering of eight legs, the great carven column of

rock was rolled away, and the body lying in its shirt and trousers

was fully revealed. The spectacles of Doctor Prince seemed almost to

enlarge with a restrained radiance like great eyes; for other things

were revealed also. One was that the unfortunate Hewitt had a deep

gash across the jugular, which the triumphant doctor instantly

identified as having been made with a sharp steel edge like a razor.

The other was that immediately under the bank lay littered three

shining scraps of steel, each nearly a foot long, one pointed and

another fitted into a gorgeously jeweled hilt or handle. It was

evidently a sort of long Oriental knife, long enough to be called a

sword, but with a curious wavy edge; and there was a touch or two of

blood on the point.

"I should have expected more blood, hardly on the point," observed

Doctor Prince, thoughtfully, "but this is certainly the instrument.

The slash was certainly made with a weapon shaped like this, and

probably the slashing of the pocket as well. I suppose the brute

threw in the statue, by way of giving him a public funeral."

March did not answer; he was mesmerized by the strange stones that

glittered on the strange sword hilt; and their possible significance

was broadening upon him like a dreadful dawn. It was a curious

Asiatic weapon. He knew what name was connected in his memory with

curious Asiatic weapons. Lord James spoke his secret thought for

him, and yet it startled him like an irrelevance.

"Where is the Prime Minister?" Herries had cried, suddenly, and

somehow like the bark of a dog at some discovery.

Doctor Prince turned on him his goggles and his grim face; and it

was grimmer than ever.

"I cannot find him anywhere," he said. "I looked for him at once,

as soon as I found the papers were gone. That servant of yours,

Campbell, made a most efficient search, but there are no traces."

There was a long silence, at the end of which Herries uttered

another cry, but upon an entirely new note.

"Well, you needn't look for him any longer," he said, "for here he

comes, along with your friend Fisher. They look as if they'd been

for a little walking tour."

The two figures approaching up the path were indeed those of Fisher,

splashed with the mire of travel and carrying a scratch like that of

a bramble across one side of his bald forehead, and of the great and

gray-haired statesman who looked like a baby and was interested in

Eastern swords and swordmanship. But beyond this bodily recognition,

March could make neither head nor tail of their presence or

demeanor, which seemed to give a final touch of nonsense to the

whole nightmare. The more closely he watched them, as they stood

listening to the revelations of the detective, the more puzzled he

was by their attitude--Fisher seemed grieved by the death of his

uncle, but hardly shocked at it; the older man seemed almost openly

thinking about something else, and neither had anything to suggest

about a further pursuit of the fugitive spy and murderer, in spite

of the prodigious importance of the documents he had stolen. When

the detective had gone off to busy himself with that department of

the business, to telephone and write his report, when Herries had

gone back, probably to the brandy bottle, and the Prime Minister had

blandly sauntered away toward a comfortable armchair in another part

of the garden, Horne Fisher spoke directly to Harold March.

"My friend," he said, "I want you to come with me at once; there is

no one else I can trust so much as that. The journey will take us

most of the day, and the chief business cannot be done till

nightfall. So we can talk things over thoroughly on the way. But I

want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my hour."

March and Fisher both had motor bicycles; and the first half of

their day's journey consisted in coasting eastward amid the

unconversational noise of those uncomfortable engines. But when they

came out beyond Canterbury into the flats of eastern Kent, Fisher

stopped at a pleasant little public house beside a sleepy stream;

and they sat down to eat and to drink and to speak almost for the

first time. It was a brilliant afternoon, birds were singing in the

wood behind, and the sun shone full on their ale bench and table;

but the face of Fisher in the strong sunlight had a gravity never

seen on it before.

"Before we go any farther," he said, "there is something you ought

to know. You and I have seen some mysterious things and got to the

bottom of them before now; and it's only right that you should get

to the bottom of this one. But in dealing with the death of my uncle

I must begin at the other end from where our old detective yarns

began. I will give you the steps of deduction presently, if you want

to listen to them; but I did not reach the truth of this by steps of

deduction. I will first of all tell you the truth itself, because I

knew the truth from the first. The other cases I approached from the

outside, but in this case I was inside. I myself was the very core

and center of everything."

Something in the speaker's pendent eyelids and grave gray eyes

suddenly shook March to his foundations; and he cried, distractedly,

"I don't understand!" as men do when they fear that they do

understand. There was no sound for a space but the happy chatter of

the birds, and then Horne Fisher said, calmly:

"It was I who killed my uncle. If you particularly want more, it

was I who stole the state papers from him."

"Fisher!" cried his friend in a strangled voice.

"Let me tell you the whole thing before we part," continued the

other, "and let me put it, for the sake of clearness, as we used to

put our old problems. Now there are two things that are puzzling

people about that problem, aren't there? The first is how the

murderer managed to slip off the dead man's coat, when he was

already pinned to the ground with that stone incubus. The other,

which is much smaller and less puzzling, is the fact of the sword

that cut his throat being slightly stained at the point, instead of

a good deal more stained at the edge. Well, I can dispose of the

first question easily. Horne Hewitt took off his own coat before he

was killed. I might say he took off his coat to be killed."

"Do you call that an explanation?" exclaimed March. "The words seem

more meaningless, than the facts."

"Well, let us go on to the other facts," continued Fisher, equably.

"The reason that particular sword is not stained at the edge with

Hewitt's blood is that it was not used to kill Hewitt."

"But the doctor," protested March, "declared distinctly that the

wound was made by that particular sword."

"I beg your pardon," replied Fisher. "He did not declare that it

was made by that particular sword. He declared it was made by a

sword of that particular pattern."

"But it was quite a queer and exceptional pattern," argued March;

"surely it is far too fantastic a coincidence to imagine--"

"It was a fantastic coincidence," reflected Horne Fisher. "It's

extraordinary what coincidences do sometimes occur. By the oddest

chance in the world, by one chance in a million, it so happened that

another sword of exactly the same shape was in the same garden at

the same time. It may be partly explained, by the fact that I

brought them both into the garden myself . . . come, my dear fellow;

surely you can see now what it means. Put those two things together;

there were two duplicate swords and he took off his coat for

himself. It may assist your speculations to recall the fact that I

am not exactly an assassin."

"A duel!" exclaimed March, recovering himself. "Of course I ought

to have thought of that. But who was the spy who stole the papers?"

"My uncle was the spy who stole the papers," replied Fisher, "or who

tried to steal the papers when I stopped him--in the only way I

could. The papers, that should have gone west to reassure our

friends and give them the plans for repelling the invasion, would in

a few hours have been in the hands of the invader. What could I do?

To have denounced one of our friends at this moment would have been

to play into the hands of your friend Attwood, and all the party of

panic and slavery. Besides, it may be that a man over forty has a

subconscious desire to die as he has lived, and that I wanted, in a

sense, to carry my secrets to the grave. Perhaps a hobby hardens

with age; and my hobby has been silence. Perhaps I feel that I have

killed my mother's brother, but I have saved my mother's name.

Anyhow, I chose a time when I knew you were all asleep, and he was

walking alone in the garden. I saw all the stone statues standing in

the moonlight; and I myself was like one of those stone statues

walking. In a voice that was not my own, I told him of his treason

and demanded the papers; and when he refused, I forced him to take

one of the two swords. The swords were among some specimens sent

down here for the Prime Minister's inspection; he is a collector,

you know; they were the only equal weapons I could find. To cut an

ugly tale short, we fought there on the path in front of the

Britannia statue; he was a man of great strength, but I had somewhat

the advantage in skill. His sword grazed my forehead almost at the

moment when mine sank into the joint in his neck. He fell against

the statue, like Caesar against Pompey's, hanging on to the iron

rail; his sword was already broken. When I saw the blood from that

deadly wound, everything else went from me; I dropped my sword and

ran as if to lift him up. As I bent toward him something happened

too quick for me to follow. I do not know whether the iron bar was

rotted with rust and came away in his hand, or whether he rent it

out of the rock with his apelike strength; but the thing was in his

hand, and with his dying energies he swung it over my head, as I

knelt there unarmed beside him. I looked up wildly to avoid the

blow, and saw above us the great bulk of Britannia leaning outward

like the figurehead of a ship. The next instant I saw it was leaning

an inch or two more than usual, and all the skies with their

outstanding stars seemed to be leaning with it. For the third second

it was as if the skies fell; and in the fourth I was standing in the

quiet garden, looking down on that flat ruin of stone and bone at

which you were looking to-day. He had plucked out the last prop that

held up the British goddess, and she had fallen and crushed the

traitor in her fall. I turned and darted for the coat which I knew

to contain the package, ripped it up with my sword, and raced away

up the garden path to where my motor bike was waiting on the road

above. I had every reason for haste; but I fled without looking back

at the statue and the body; and I think the thing I fled from was

the sight of that appalling allegory.

"Then I did the rest of what I had to do. All through the night and

into the daybreak and the daylight I went humming through the

villages and markets of South England like a traveling bullet, till

I came to the headquarters in the West where the trouble was. I was

just in time. I was able to placard the place, so to speak, with the

news that the government had not betrayed them, and that they would

find supports if they would push eastward against the enemy. There's

no time to tell you all that happened; but I tell you it was the day

of my life. A triumph like a torchlight procession, with torchlights

that might have been firebrands. The mutinies simmered down; the men

of Somerset and the western counties came pouring into the market

places; the men who died with Arthur and stood firm with Alfred. The

Irish regiments rallied to them, after a scene like a riot, and

marched eastward out of the town singing Fenian songs. There was all

that is not understood, about the dark laughter of that people, in

the delight with which, even when marching with the English to the

defense of England, they shouted at the top of their voices, 'High

upon the gallows tree stood the noble-hearted three . . . With

England's cruel cord about them cast.' However, the chorus was 'God

save Ireland,' and we could all have sung that just then, in one

sense or another.

"But there was another side to my mission. I carried the plans of

the defense; and to a great extent, luckily, the plans of the

invasion also. I won't worry you with strategics; but we knew where

the enemy had pushed forward the great battery that covered all his

movements; and though our friends from the West could hardly arrive

in time to intercept the main movement, they might get within long

artillery range of the battery and shell it, if they only knew

exactly where it was. They could hardly tell that unless somebody

round about here sent up some sort of signal. But, somehow, I rather

fancy that somebody will."

With that he got up from the table, and they remounted their

machines and went eastward into the advancing twilight of evening.

The levels of the landscape were repeated in flat strips of floating

cloud and the last colors of day clung to the circle of the horizon.

Receding farther and farther behind them was the semicircle of the

last hills; and it was quite suddenly that they saw afar off the dim

line of the sea. It was not a strip of bright blue as they had seen

it from the sunny veranda, but of a sinister and smoky violet, a

tint that seemed ominous and dark. Here Horne Fisher dismounted once

more.

"We must walk the rest of the way," he said, "and the last bit of

all I must walk alone."

He bent down and began to unstrap something from his bicycle. It was

something that had puzzled his companion all the way in spite of

what held him to more interesting riddles; it appeared to be several

lengths of pole strapped together and wrapped up in paper. Fisher

took it under his arm and began to pick his way across the turf. The

ground was growing more tumbled and irregular and he was walking

toward a mass of thickets and small woods; night grew darker every

moment. "We must not talk any more," said Fisher. "I shall whisper

to you when you are to halt. Don't try to follow me then, for it

will only spoil the show; one man can barely crawl safely to the

spot, and two would certainly be caught."

"I would follow you anywhere," replied March, "but I would halt,

too, if that is better."

"I know you would," said his friend in a low voice. "Perhaps you're

the only man I ever quite trusted in this world."

A few paces farther on they came to the end of a great ridge or

mound looking monstrous against the dim sky; and Fisher stopped with

a gesture. He caught his companion's hand and wrung it with a

violent tenderness, and then darted forward into the darkness. March

could faintly see his figure crawling along under the shadow of the

ridge, then he lost sight of it, and then he saw it again standing

on another mound two hundred yards away. Beside him stood a singular

erection made apparently of two rods. He bent over it and there was

the flare of a light; all March's schoolboy memories woke in him,

and he knew what it was. It was the stand of a rocket. The confused,

incongruous memories still possessed him up to the very moment of a

fierce but familiar sound; and an instant after the rocket left its

perch and went up into endless space like a starry arrow aimed at

the stars. March thought suddenly of the signs of the last days and

knew he was looking at the apocalyptic meteor of something like a

Day of judgment.

Far up in the infinite heavens the rocket drooped and sprang into

scarlet stars. For a moment the whole landscape out to the sea and

back to the crescent of the wooded hills was like a lake of ruby

light, of a red strangely rich and glorious, as if the world were

steeped in wine rather than blood, or the earth were an earthly

paradise, over which paused forever the sanguine moment of morning.

"God save England!" cried Fisher, with a tongue like the peal of a

trumpet. "And now it is for God to save."

As darkness sank again over land and sea, there came another sound;

far away in the passes of the hills behind them the guns spoke like

the baying of great hounds. Something that was not a rocket, that

came not hissing but screaming, went over Harold March's head and

expanded beyond the mound into light and deafening din, staggering

the brain with unbearable brutalities of noise. Another came, and

then another, and the world was full of uproar and volcanic vapor

and chaotic light. The artillery of the West country and the Irish

had located the great enemy battery, and were pounding it to pieces.

In the mad excitement of that moment March peered through the storm,

looking again for the long lean figure that stood beside the stand

of the rocket. Then another flash lit up the whole ridge. The figure

was not there.

Before the fires of the rocket had faded from the sky, long before

the first gun had sounded from the distant hills, a splutter of

rifle fire had flashed and flickered all around from the hidden

trenches of the enemy. Something lay in the shadow at the foot of

the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man

who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Who Knew Too Much, by G.K. Chesterton