Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 316
The prosecuting counsel, springing up with theatrical indignation, demanded the meaning of this insinuation.
“I imagine,” said the judge somewhat severely, “that the prisoner implies that the witness did not know exactly what he had lost.”
“Yes,” said Alan Nadoway, and there was something odd and arresting in the roll of his deep voice; “I do mean to imply that he did not know exactly what he had lost.”
Then, turning to the witness, he said briskly: “Did you go to the Pig and Whistle and stand drinks all round, in a regular festive style?”
“My lord,” exploded the prosecuting counsel, “I must emphatically protest against the prisoner wantonly aspersing the character of the witness.”
“Aspersing his character! Why, I am glorifying his character!” cried Nadoway warmly. “I am exalting and almost deifying his character! I am pointing out that he exercised on a noble scale the ancient virtue of hospitality. If I say you give very good dinners, am I aspersing your character? If you ask six other barristers to lunch, and do them well, do you conceal it like a crime? Are you ashamed of your handsome hospitality, Mr. Hamble? Are you a miser and a man-hater?”
“Oh, no, sir,” said Mr. Hamble, who appeared slightly dazed.
“Are you an enemy of the human race, Mr. Hamble?”
“Well, no, sir,” said Mr. Hamble, almost modestly. “No, certainly not, sir,” he added more firmly.
“You always, I take it,” went on the prisoner, “feel friendly to your fellow-creatures, and especially your chosen companions. You would always do them a good turn or stand them a drink, if you could.”
“I hope so, sir,” said the virtuous bookmaker.
“You do not always do it, of course,” went on Alan smoothly, “because you are not always in a position to do so. Why did you do so on this occasion?”
“Well,” admitted Mr. Hamble, a little puzzled, “I suppose I must have been rather flush that evening.”
“Immediately after being robbed?” said Nadoway. “Thank you, that is all I want to ask.”
Mr. Isidor Green, professional teacher of the violin, with long, stringy hair and a coat faded to bottle-green, was certainly as vague as the policeman had represented him. During the examination in chief, he got through well enough by saying that he certainly had a sort of feeling as if his pockets were being rifled; but even under Nadoway’s comparatively gentle and sympathetic cross examination he became extraordinarily hazy. It seemed that he had eventually, with the assistance of two or three friends of superlative mathematical talent, reached the firm conclusion that he still possessed 4s. 7d. after he had been robbed. But the light thus thrown upon the robbery was a little dimmed by the fact that he had then realized, for the first time, that he had never had any notion of what he possessed before he was robbed.
“My thoughts are considerably concentrated on my artistic work,” he said, with not a little dignity. “It is possible that my wife might know.”
“An admirable idea, Mr. Green,” said Alan Nadoway heartily. “As a matter of fact, I am calling your wife as a witness for the defence.”
Everybody stared, but it was plain that Nadoway was serious, and with a gravity tinged with courtliness he proceeded to summon his own witnesses, who actually were no other than the two wives of the two witnesses for the prosecution.
The wife of the violinist was a straightforward and, save for one point, a simple bearer of testimony. She was a solid, jolly looking woman, like a superior cook; probably just the right woman to look after the unmathematical Mr. Green. She said in a comfortable voice that she knew all about Isidor’s money — what there was of it; that he was a good husband with no extravagant tastes and had certainly had 2s. 8d. in his pocket that afternoon.
“In that case, Mrs. Green,” said Alan, “it would seem that your husband’s taste in mathematical friends is as eccentric as his taste in mathematics. He and his friends finally added it up and brought it out as 4s. 7d.”
“Well, he’s a genius,” she said with some pride. “He could bring out anythink as anythink.”
Mrs. Harry Hamble was a very different type; and, by comparison with Mr. Harry Hamble, a somewhat depressing one. She had the long, sallow features and sour mouth not unknown in the wives of those who find refuge in the Pig and Whistle. Asked by Nadoway whether the date in question counted for anything in her domestic memories, she answered grimly: “It orter ‘ave if ‘e’d told me. ‘E must ‘ave ‘ad a raise in wages and not told me.”
“I understand,” Nadoway asked, “that he treated several of his friends to drinks that afternoon?”
“Treated!” cried the amiable lady, in a withering voice. “Treated to drinks! Cadged for drinks, more likely! ‘E got all the drinks ‘e could for nothink, I daresay. But ‘e didn’t pay for nobody else’s.”
“And how do you know that?” asked the prisoner.
“‘Cos he brought back his usual wages and a bit more,” said Mrs. Hamble, as if this alone were a sufficient grievance.
“This is all very puzzling,” said the judge and leaned back in his chair.
“I think I can explain it,” said Alan Nadoway, “if your lordship will allow me to go into the box for two minutes, before I wind up for the defence.”
There was no official difficulty, of course, about the prisoner appearing in both capacities.
Alan Nadoway took the oath and stood gazing at the prosecuting counsel with gloomy composure.
“Do you deny,” asked the barrister, “that you were caught by the policeman with your hand in the pockets of these people?”
“No,” said Nadoway, mournfully shaking his head. “Oh, no.”
“This is very extraordinary,” said the examiner. “I understood that you were pleading Not Guilty.”
“Yes,” said Nadoway sadly. “Oh, yes.”
“What on earth does all this mean?” said the judge in sudden irritation.
“My lord,” said Alan Nadoway, “I can put it all straight in five words. Only in this court one can’t put things straight; one has to do what you call prove them. Well, it’s all simple enough. I did put my hands in their pockets. Only I put money in their pockets, instead of taking it out. And if you look at it, you’ll see that explains everything.”
“But why in the world should you do such a crazy thing?” asked the judge.
“Ah,” said Nadoway; “I’m afraid that would take longer to explain, and perhaps this isn’t the best place to explain it.”
The explanation of the practical problem was indeed set forth in further detail, in the final speech which the prisoner made in his own defence. He pointed out the obvious solution of the first problem; the abrupt disappearance of the first victim. He, that nameless economist, was a much shrewder person than the festive Mr. Hamble or the artistic Mr. Green. One glance at his pockets had shown him that he had got somebody else’s money in addition to his own. A dark familiarity with the police led him to doubt strongly whether he would ultimately be allowed to keep it. He had therefore vanished with the presence of mind of a magician or a fairy. Mr. Hamble, in a hazier state of conviviality, had been mildly surprised at finding more and more pocket-money flowing from his pockets, and, to his everlasting credit, had dedicated it largely to the entertainment of his friends. But even after that, there was a little more than his normal salary left, to raise sinister doubts in the mind of his wife. Lastly, incredible as it may seem, Mr. Green and his friends did eventually arrive at a correct calculation of the number of coins in his pocket. And if it was in excess of his wife’s estimate, it was for the simple reason that more coins had been added, since she sent him out, carefully brushed and buttoned up, in the morning. Everything, in fact, supported the prisoner’s strange contention — that he had filled pockets and not emptied them.
Amid a dazed silence, the judge could only find it possible to charge the jury to acquit, and the jury acquitted. But Mr. Alan Nadoway made a very rapid dart out of court, eluding journalists and friends and especially his family. For one thing, he had seen two pinch-faced men with spectacles, who looked as if they might be psychologists.
VI
THE CLEANSING OF THE NAME
The trial and acquittal of Alan Nadoway in a court of law was only an epilogue to the real drama. He would perhaps have said that it was only a harlequinade at the end of the fairy play. The real concluding scene and curtain had taken place on that green stage of “The Lawns”, which Millicent, oddly enough, had always felt to be like a sort of stage scenery, stiff and yet extravagant, with the jagged outlines of the foreign plants like the jaws of sharks and the low line of bow windows like the motor-goggles of a monster. With all its grotesqueness there had always mingled in her mind something almost operatic and yet genuine; something of real sentiment or passion that there was in the Victorian nineteenth century, despite all that is said of Victorian primness and restraint. It was that essentially innocent, that faulty but not cynical thing, the Romantic Movement. The man standing before her, with his quaint and foreign half-beard, had about him something indescribable that belonged to Alfred de Musset or to Chopin. She did not know in what sort of harmony these fanciful thoughts were mingling, but she knew that the music was like an old tune.
She had just said the words: “I cannot bear the silence, because it is unjust. It is unjust to you.”
And he had answered: “It is because it is unjust to me that it is just. That is the whole story; though I suppose you would call it a strange story.”
“I do not mind your talking in riddles,” answered Millicent Milton steadily, “but I want you to understand something more. It is unjust to me.”
After a silence he said in a low voice: “Yes; that is what has got me. That is what has broken me across. I’ve come up against something bigger than the whole plan I made for my life. Well, I suppose I shall have to tell you my story.”
“I thought,” she said with a faint smile, “that you had already told me your story.”
“Yes,” replied Alan; “I told you my story all right. All quite true, with nothing but the important things left out.”
“Well,” said Millicent, “I should certainly like to hear it with the important things put in.”
“The difficulty is,” he said, “that the important things can’t be described. The words all go wrong when you describe such things. They were bigger than shipwrecks or desert islands, but they all happened inside my head.”
After a silence he resumed, more slowly, like a man trying to find new words.
“When I was drowning in the Pacific, I think I had a Vision. I rose for the third time to the top of a great wave and I saw a Vision. I think that what I saw was Religion.”
Something in the involuntary mental movements of the English Lady was halted and almost chilled. She felt faintly antagonistic to some associations, she hardly knew what. She was herself reverently, if rather vaguely, attached to a High Church tradition, but she only half realized the prejudice that had stirred in her. Men who come from the colonies and the ends of the earth, and say they have got religion, almost always mean that they have “found Jesus” or been to a revivalist meeting somewhere; and the whole thing seemed socially incongruous with his culture and hers. It was not in the least like Alfred de Musset.
With the uncanny clairvoyance of the mystic he seemed to seize on her passing doubt and said cheerfully:
“Oh, I don’t mean that I met a Baptist missionary. There are two kinds of missionaries: the right kind and the wrong kind, and they’re both wrong. At least they’re both wrong as to the thing I am thinking about. The stupid missionaries say the savages grovel in the mud before mud idols, and will all go to hell for idolatry unless they turn teetotallers and wear billycock hats. The intelligent missionaries say the savages have great possibilities and often quite a high moral code, which is quite true, but isn’t the point. What they don’t see is that very often the savages have really got hold of religion, and that lots of people with a high moral code don’t know what religion means. They would run screaming with terror, if they got so much as a glimpse of Religion. It’s an awful thing.
“I learnt something about it from the lunatic with whom I lived on the desert island. I told you he had practically gone mad, as well as gone native. But there was something to learn from him, that can’t be learnt from ethical societies and popular preachers. The poor fellow had floated to shore by hanging on to a queer, old-fashioned umbrella, that happened to have the head carved in a grotesque face, and when he came raving out of his delirium, so far as he ever came out of it, he regarded the umbrella as the god that had saved him, and stuck it up in a sort of shrine and grovelled before it and offered it sacrifices. That’s the point. . . . Sacrifices. When he was hungry he would burn some of his food before it. When he was thirsty, he would still pour out some of the native beer that he brewed. I believe he might have sacrificed me to his idol. I’m sure he would have sacrificed himself. I don’t mean” — he spoke more slowly still and very thoughtfully— “I don’t exactly mean that the cannibals are right, or human sacrifice or all that. They’re wrong — if you come to think of it — they’re really wrong, because people don’t want to be eaten. But if I want to be sacrificed who is going to stop me? Nobody, not God himself, will stop me, if I want to suffer injustice. To forbid me to suffer injustice would be the greatest injustice of all.”
“You are rather disconnected,” she said, “but I begin to have a glimmering of what you mean. I presume you don’t mean that you saw from the top of the wave the vision of the divine umbrella.”
“And do you think,” he asked, “that what I saw was a picture of angels playing harps out of the Family Bible? What I saw, so far as I can be said to have merely seen anything, was my father sitting at the head of the table, in some great dinner or directors’ meeting, and perhaps everybody drinking his health in champagne, while he sat gravely smiling, with his glass of water beside him, because he is a strict temperance man. Oh, my God!”
“Well,” said Millicent, the smile rising slowly to the surface again; “it certainly seems rather different from heaven and the harps.”
“But I,” went on Alan, “was lost like loose seaweed and sinking like a stone, to be forgotten in the slime under the sea.”
“It was horribly hard,” she said in a trembling voice.
To her surprise he answered with a rather jarring laugh.
“Do you think I mean that I envied him?” he cried. “That would be a rum way of realizing religion. It was all the other way. From the top of the wave I looked down and saw him with a clear horror of pity. From the top of the wave I prayed, for one passionate instant, that my miserable death might avail to deliver him from that hell.
“Horrible hospitality, horrible courtesy, horrible compliments and congratulations, praise and publicity and popularity of the old firm, the old sound business traditions, and the sun of success high in heaven and glittering everywhere on one great ghastly whited sepulchre of human hypocrisy. And I knew that within, it was full of dead men’s bones, of men who had died of drink or starvation or despair, in prisons and workhouses and asylums, because this hateful thing had ruined a hundred businesses to build one. Horrible robbery, horrible tyranny, horrible triumph. And most horrible of all, to add to all the horrors, that I loved my father.
“He had been good to me when I was little, and when he was poorer and simpler, and as a boy I began by making hero-worship of his success. The first great coloured advertisements were to me what coloured toy-books are to other children. They were a fairy tale, but, alas, the one fairy tale one could not continue to believe. So there I was, feeling what I felt and yet knowing what I knew. You have to love as I loved and hate as I hated, before you see afar off the thing called Religion, and the other name of it is Human Sacrifice.”
“But surely,” said Millicent, “things are ever so much better with the business now.”
“Yes,” he said, “things are better and that is what makes it worse. That is the worst of all.”
He paused a moment and went on in a lower key:
“Jack and Norman are good fellows, as good as they can be,” he said; “they have done their best, but for what? Their best to make the best of it. To cover it up. To put a new coat of whitewash on the whited sepulchre. Things are to be forgotten, things are to be dropped out of conversation, things are to be thought better of — more charitably — after all it’s an old story now. But that’s nothing to do with what things are, in the world where things are, and always are; in the world of heaven and hell. Nobody has apologized. Nobody has confessed. Nobody has done penance. And in that moment, from the top of the wave, I cried to God that I might do penance, if it were only by dying in the sea. . . . Oh, don’t you understand? Don’t you understand how shallow all these moderns are, when they tell you there is no such thing as Atonement or Expiation, when that is the one thing for which the whole heart is sick before the sins of the world? The whole universe was wrong, while the lie of my father flourished like the green bay-tree. It was not respectability that could redeem it. It was religion, expiation, sacrifice, suffering. Somebody must be terribly good, to balance what was so bad. Somebody must be needlessly good, to weigh down the scales of that judgement. He was cruel and got credit for it. Somebody else must be kind and get no credit for it. Don’t you understand?”
“Yes, I begin to understand,” she said. “I think you are rather incredible.”
“I swore in that moment,” said Alan, “that I would be called everything that he ought to be called. I would have the name of a thief, because he deserved it. I would be despised and rejected and perhaps go to jail, because I chose after that fashion to be my father. Yes, I would inherit. I would be his heir.”
