He had been indeed unusually cheerful all the morning, possibly because it was a beautiful day, possibly for more personal reasons; and had drawn near to the rendezvous through the trim suburban avenues with a step of unusual animation. He saw the worthy confectioner himself, stepping out of a villa of a social shade faintly superior to his own; a young woman with a crown of braided brown hair, and a good grave face, came with him down the garden path. Gale had little difficulty in identifying the young lady interested in church work. The poet gazed at the pale squares of lawn and the few thin and dwarfish trees with quite a sentimental interest, almost as if it were a romance of his own; nor did his universal good humour fail him even when he encountered, a few lamp-posts further down the road, the saturnine and somewhat unsympathetic countenance of Mr. Hiram Hatt. The lover was still lingering at the garden gate, after the fashion of his kind, and Hatt and Gale walked more briskly ahead of him towards his home. To Hatt the poet made the somewhat irrelevant remark: “Do you understand that desire to be one of the lovers of Cleopatra?”

  Mr. Hatt, the secretary, indicated that, had he nourished such a desire, his appearance on the historical scene would have lacked something of true American hustle and punctuality.

  “Oh, there are plenty of Cleopatras still,” answered Gale; “and plenty of people who have that strange notion of being the hundredth husband of an Egyptian cat. What could have made a man of real intellect, like that fellow’s brother, break himself all up for a woman like Hertha Hathaway?”

  “Well, I’m all with you there,” said Hatt. “I didn’t say anything about the woman, because it wasn’t my business; but I tell you, sir, she was just blue ruin and vitriol. Only the fact that I didn’t mention her seems to have set your friend the solicitor off on another dance of dark suspicions. I swear he fancies she and I were mixed up in something; and probably had to do with the disappearance of Phineas Salt.”

  Gale looked hard at the man’s hard face for a moment and then said irrelevantly: “Would it surprise you to find him at Margate?”

  “No; nor anywhere else,” replied Hatt. “He was restless just then and drifted about into the commonest crowds. He did no work lately; sometimes sat and stared at a blank sheet of paper as if he had no ideas.”

  “Or as if he had too many,” said Gabriel Gale.

  With that they turned in at the confectioner’s door: and found Dr. Garth already in the outer shop, having only that moment arrived. But when they penetrated to the parlour, they came on a figure that gave them, indescribably, a cold shock of sobriety. The lawyer was already seated in that gimcrack room, resolutely and rather rudely, with his top hat on his head, like a bailiff in possession; but they all sensed something more sinister, as of the bearer of the bowstring.

  “Where is Mr. Joseph Salt?” he asked. “He said he would be home at eleven.”

  Gale smiled faintly and began to fiddle with the funny little ornaments on the mantelpiece. “He is saying farewell,” he said. “Sometimes it is rather a long word to say.”

  “We must begin without him,” said Gunter. “Perhaps it is just as well.”

  “You mean you have bad news for him?” asked the doctor, lowering his voice. “Have you the last news of his brother?”

  “I believe it may fairly be called the last news,” answered the lawyer dryly. “In the light of the latest discoveries…Mr. Gale, I should be much obliged if you would leave off fidgeting with those ornaments and sit down. There is something that somebody has got to explain.”

  “Yes,” replied Gale rather hazily. “Isn’t this what he has got to explain?”

  He picked up something from the mantelpiece and put it on the central table. It was a very absurd object to be stared at thus, as an exhibit in a grim museum of suicide or crime. It was a cheap, childish, pink and white mug, inscribed in large purple letters, “A Present from Margate.”

  “There is a date inside,” said Gale, looking down dreamily into the depths of this remarkable receptacle. “This year. And we’re still at the beginning of the year, you know.”

  “Well, it may be one of the things,” said the solicitor. “But I have got some other Presents from Margate.”

  He took a sheaf of papers from his breast-pocket and laid them out thoughtfully on the table before he spoke.

  “Understand, to begin with, that there really is a riddle and the man really has vanished. Don’t imagine a man can easily melt into a modern crowd; the police have traced his car on the road and could have traced him, if he had left it. Don’t imagine anybody can simply drive down country roads throwing corpses out of cars. There are always a lot of fussy people about, who notice a little thing like that. Whatever he did, sooner or later the explanation would probably be found; and we have found it.”

  Gale put down the mug abruptly and stared across, still open-mouthed, but as it were more dry-throated, coughing and stammering now with a real eagerness.

  “Have you really found out?” he asked. “Do you know all about the Purple Jewel?”

  “Look here!” cried the doctor, as if with a generous indignation; “this is getting too thick. I don’t mind being in a mystery, but it needn’t be a melodrama. Don’t say that we are after the Rajah’s Ruby. Don’t say, oh, don’t say, that it is in the eye of the god Vishnu.”

  “No,” replied the poet. “It is in the eye of the Beholder.”

  “And who’s he?” asked Gunter. “I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, but there may have been a theft involved. Anyhow, there was more than a theft.”

  He sorted out from his papers two or three photographs of the sort that are taken casually with hand-cameras in a holiday crowd. As he did so he said:

  “Our investigations at Margate have not been fruitless; in fact they have been rather fruitful. We have found a witness, a photographer on Margate beach, who testifies to having seen a man corresponding to Phineas Salt, burly and with a big red beard and long hair, who stood for some time on an isolated crag of white chalk, which stands out from the cliff, and looked down at the crowds below. Then he descended by a rude stairway cut in the chalk and, crossing a crowded part of the beach, spoke to another man who seemed to be an ordinary clerk or commonplace holiday-maker; and, after a little talk, they went up to the row of bathing-sheds, apparently for the purpose of having a dip in the sea. My informant thinks they did go into the sea; but cannot be quite so certain. What he is quite certain of is that he never saw the red-bearded man again, though he did see the common-place clean-shaven man, both when he returned in his bathing-suit and when he resumed his ordinary, his very ordinary, clothes. He not only saw him, but he actually took a snapshot of him, and there he is.”

  He handed the photograph to Garth, who gazed at it with slowly rising eyebrows. The photograph represented a sturdy man with a bulldog jaw but rather blank eyes, with his head lifted, apparently staring out to sea. He wore very light holiday clothes, but of a clumsy, unfashionable cut; and, so far as he could be seen under the abrupt shadow and rather too jaunty angle of his stiff straw hat, his hair was of some light colour. Only, as it happened, the doctor had no need to wait for the development of colour photography. For he knew exactly what colour it was. He knew it was a sort of sandy red; he had often seen it, not in the photograph, but on the head where it grew. For the man in the stiff straw hat was most unmistakably Mr. Joseph Salt, the worthy confectioner and new social ornament to the suburb of Croydon.

  “So Phineas went down to Margate to meet his brother,” said Garth. “After all, that’s natural enough in one way. Margate is exactly the sort of place his brother would go to.”

  “Yes; Joseph went there on one of those motor-charabanc expeditions, with a whole crowd of other trippers, and he seems to have returned the same night on the same vehicle. But nobody knows when, where or if his brother Phineas returned.”

  “I rather gather from your tone,” said Garth very gravely, “that you think his brother Phineas never did return.”

  “I think his brother never will return,” said the lawyer, “unless it happens (by a curious coincidence) that he was drowned while bathing and his body is some day washed up on the shore. But there’s a strong current running just there that would carry it far away.”

  “The plot thickens, certainly,” said the doctor. “All this bathing business seems to complicate things rather.”

  “I am afraid,” said the lawyer, “that it simplifies them very much.”

  “What,” asked Garth sharply. “Simplifies?”

  “Yes,” said the other, gripping the arms of his chair and rising abruptly to his feet. “I think this story is as simple as the story of Cain and Abel. And rather like it”.

  There was a shocked silence, which was at length broken by Gale, who was peering into the Present from Margate, crying or almost crowing, in the manner of a child.

  “Isn’t it a funny little mug! He must have bought it before he came back in the charabanc. Such a jolly thing to buy, when you have just murdered your own brother.”

  “It does seem a queer business,” said Dr. Garth frowning. “I suppose one might work out some explanation of how he did it. I suppose a man might drown another man while they were bathing, even off a crowded beach like that. But I’m damned if I can understand why he did it. Have you discovered a motive as well as a murder?”

  “The motive is old enough and I think obvious enough,” answered Gunter. “We have in this case all the necessary elements of a hatred, of that slow and corroding sort that is founded on jealousy. Here you had two brothers, sons of the same insignificant Midland tradesman; having the same education, environment, opportunities; very nearly of an age, very much of one type, even of one physical type, rugged, red-haired, rather plain and heavy, until Phineas made himself a spectacle with that big Bolshevist beard and bush of hair; not so different in youth but that they must have had ordinary rivalries and quarrels on fairly equal terms. And then see the sequel. One of them fills the world with his name, wears a laurel like the crown of Petrach, dines with kings and emperors and is worshipped by women like a hero on the films. The other… isn’t it enough to say that the other has had to go on slaving all his life in a room like this?”

  “Don’t you like the room?” inquired Gale with the same simple eagerness. “Why, I think some of the ornaments are so nice!”

  “It is not yet quite clear,” went on Gunter, ignoring him, “how the pastry-cook lured the poet down to Margate and a dip in the sea. But the poet was admittedly rather random in his movements just then, and too restless to work; and we have no reason to suppose that he knew of the fraternal hatred or that he in any way reciprocated it. I don’t think there would be much difficulty in swimming with a man beyond the crowd of bathers and holding him under water, till you could send his body adrift on a current flowing away from the shore. Then he went back and dressed and calmly took his place in the charabanc.”

  “Don’t forget the dear little mug,” said Gale softly. “He stopped to buy that and then went home. Well, it’s a very able and thorough explanation and reconstruction of the crime, my dear Gunter, and I congratulate you. Even the best achievements have some little flaw; and there’s only one trifling mistake in yours. You’ve got it the wrong way round.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the other quickly.

  “Quite a small correction,” explained Gale. “You think that Joseph was jealous of Phineas. As a matter of fact, Phineas was jealous of Joseph.”

  “My dear Gale, you are simply playing the goat,” said the doctor very sharply and impatiently. “And let me tell you I don’t think it’s a decent occasion for doing it. I know all about your jokes and fancies and paradoxes, but we’re all in a damned hard position, sitting here in the man’s own house, and knowing we’re in the house of a murderer.”

  “I know… it’s simply infernal,” said Gunter, his stiffness shaken for the first time; and he looked up with a shrinking jerk, as if he half expected to see the rope hanging from that dull and dusty ceiling.

  At the same moment the door was thrown open and the man they had convicted of murder stood in the room. His eyes were bright like a child’s over a new toy, his face was flushed to the roots of his fiery hair, his broad shoulders were squared backwards like a soldier’s; and in the lapel of his coat was a large purple flower, of a colour that Gale remembered in the garden-beds of the house down the road. Gale had no difficulty in guessing the reason of this triumphant entry.

  Then the man with the buttonhole saw the tragic faces on the other side of the table and stopped, staring.

  “Well,” he said at last, in a rather curious tone. “What about your search?”

  The lawyer was about to open his locked lips with some such question as was once asked of Cain by the voice out of the cloud, when Gale interrupted him by flinging himself backwards in a chair and emitting a short but cheery laugh.

  “I’ve given up the search,” said Gale gaily. “No need to bother myself about that any more.”

  “Because you know you will never find Phineas Salt,” said the tradesman steadily.

  “Because I have found him,” said Gabriel Gale. Dr. Garth got to his feet quickly and remained staring at them with bright eyes.

  “Yes,” said Gale, “because I am talking to him.” And he smiled across at his host, as if he had just been introduced.

  Then he said rather more gravely: “Will you tell us all about it, Mr. Phineas Salt? Or must I guess it for you all the way through?”

  There was a heavy silence.

  “You tell the story,” said the shopkeeeper at last. “I am quite sure you know all about it.”

  “I only know about it,” answered Gale gently, “because I think I should have done the same thing myself. It’s what some call having a sympathy with lunatics… including literary men.”

  “Hold on for a moment,” interposed the staring Mr. Gunter. “Before you get too literary, am I to understand that this gentleman who owns this shop, actually is the poet, Phineas Salt? In that case, where is his brother?”

  “Making the Grand Tour, I imagine,” said Gale. “Gone abroad for a holiday, anyhow; a holiday which will be not the less enjoyable for the two thousand five hundred pounds that his brother gave him to enjoy himself with. His slipping away was easy enough; he only swam a little bit further along the shore to where they had left another suit of clothes. Meanwhile our friend here went back and shaved off his beard and effected the change of appearance in the bathing-tent. He was quite sufficiently like his brother to go back with a crowd of strangers. And then, you will doubtless note, he opened a new shop in an entirely new neighbourhood.”

  “But why?” cried Garth in a sort of exasperation. “In the name of all the saints and angels, why? That’s what I can’t make any sense of.”

  “I will tell you why,” said Gabriel Gale, “but you won’t make any sense of it.”

  He stared at the mug on the table for a moment and then said: “This is what you would call a nonsense story; and you can only understand it by understanding nonsense; or, as some politely call it, poetry. The poet Phineas Salt was a man who had made himself master of everything, in a sort of frenzy of freedom and omnipotence. He had tried to feel everything, experience everything, imagine everything that could be or could not be. And he found, as all such men have found, that that illimitable liberty is itself a limit. It is like the circle, which is at once an eternity and a prison. He not only wanted to do everything. He wanted to be everybody. To the Pantheist God is everybody: to the Christian He is also Somebody. But this sort of Pantheist will not narrow himself by a choice. To want everything is to will nothing. Mr. Hatt here told me that Phineas would sit staring at a blank sheet of paper; and I told him it was not because he had nothing to write about, but because he could write about anything. When he stood on that cliff and looked down on that mazy crowd, so common and yet so complex, he felt he could write ten thousand tales and then that he could write none; because there was no reason to choose one more than another.

  “Well, what is the step beyond that? What comes next? I tell you there are only two steps possible after that. One is the step over the cliff; to cease to be. The other is to be somebody, instead of writing about everybody. It is to become incarnate as one real human being in that crowd; to begin all over again as a real person. Unless a man be born again…

  “He tried it and found that this was what he wanted; the things he had not known since childhood; the silly little lower middle-class things; to have to do with lollipops and ginger-beer; to fall in love with a girl round the corner and feel awkward about it; to be young. That was the only paradise still left virgin and unspoilt enough, in the imagination of a man who has turned the seven heavens upside down. That is what he tried as his last experiment, and I think we can say it has been a success.”

  “Yes,” said the confectioner with a stony satisfaction, “it has been a great success.”

  Mr. Gunter, the solicitor, rose also with a sort of gesture of despair. “Well, I don’t think I understand it any better for knowing all about it,” he said; “but I suppose it must be as you say. But how in the world did you know it yourself?”

  “I think it was those coloured sweets in the window that set me off,” said Gale. “I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so pretty. Sweets are better than jewellery: the children are right. For they have the fun of eating rubies and emeralds. I felt sure they were speaking to me in some way. And then I realized what they were saying. Those violet or purple raspberry drops were as vivid and glowing as amethysts, when you saw them from inside the shop; but from outside, with the light on them, they would look quite dingy and dark. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other things, gilded or painted with opaque colours, that would have looked much more gay in the shop-window, to the customer looking in at it. Then I remembered the man who said he must break into the cathedral to see the coloured windows from inside, and I knew it in an instant. The man who had arranged that shop-window was not a shopkeeper. He was not thinking of how things looked from the street, but of how they looked to his own artistic eye from inside. From there he saw purple jewels. And then, thinking of the cathedral, of course I remembered something else. I remembered what the poet had said about the Double Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury; and how when he had all the earthly glory, he had to have the exact opposite. St. Phineas of Croydon is also living a Double Life.”