Quite suddenly he turned at right angles from the pavement, hurled himself, bag and all, into the middle of the road and appeared to pin or throttle the gentleman with the beard and the large hat. He was the shorter man of the two, but his spring was like a black cat’s and he had all the advantage of youthful energy and the surprise. The tall man went staggering backwards towards the opposite pavement, but the next moment he had broken away from his mysterious enemy and started hitting back at him with refreshing vigour. At this moment a car coming from over the hill obscured for a moment the girl’s view of the conflict, and when the space was clear again, it underwent yet a third change. The man in black, whose top-hat was now stuck somewhat askew on his head, but who still feverishly clasped his bag, appeared to be trying to break contact, in the military phrase, and to be disinclined to continue what he had so wantonly begun. He retreated slightly, waving hand and bag in what not even a girl, at such a distance, could mistake for motions of pugilism; they appeared to be rather motions of expostulation. As, however, the tall man, now hatless and with hair and beard flying, seemed bent on pursuing his vengeance, the other suddenly hurled away his bag, tucked up his neat cuff’s and proceeded to slog into the other in an entirely new, vigorous and scientific manner. All this had taken less than half a minute to happen, but by this time the girl was running up the street as fast as she could, leaving a staring confectioner with a small brown-paper parcel dangling from his finger. For, as it happened, Miss Enid Windrush took a certain interest in the tall man with the long beard, an interest which many will rightly rebuke as antiquated and superstitious, but from which she had never been able entirely to emancipate herself. He was her father.

  By the time she arrived on the scene, or possibly because she had arrived on the scene, the violence of the pantomime had somewhat abated, but both sides were still panting and snorting with the passions of war. The wearer of the top-hat, on closer inspection, revealed himself as a young man with dark hair, whose square face and square shoulders had a touch of the Napoleonic; for the rest he looked quite respectable and rather reticent than otherwise, and there was certainly nothing about him to explain his antic of attack.

  Nor indeed did he appear to think that the explanation was required from him.

  “Well!” he said, breathing hard, “of all the blasted old fools! . . . Of all the damned doddering old donkeys. . . .”

  “This man,” declared Windrush with fiery hauteur, “criminally assaulted me in the middle of the road for no reason whatever and—”

  “That’s what he says!” cried the young man in a sort of triumphant derision. “For no reason whatever! And in the middle of the road! Oh, my green-eyed grandmother!”

  “Well, what reason?” began Miss Windrush, making an attempt to intervene.

  “Why, because he was in the middle of the road, of course!” exploded the young man. “He’d have been in the middle of Kensal Green Cemetery pretty soon. And, speaking generally, I should say he ought to be in the middle of Hanwell Asylum now. He must have escaped from there, I should think, to go stravaging up the middle of a modern road like that, and turning his back to admire the landscape, as if he were alone in the Sahara. Why, every reasonably modern village idiot knows that the motorists can’t see what’s on the other side of this hill when they come over it, and if I hadn’t happened to hear the car—”

  “The car!” said the artist with a grave and severe astonishment, as one who convicts a child of romancing. “What car?” He turned round in a lordly manner and surveyed the street. “Where is this car?” he said sarcastically.

  “By the rate it was going at, I should say it was about seven miles away,” said the other.

  “Why, of course it’s quite true,” said Enid, as a light broke upon her. “There was a car that came very fast over the hill, just as you—”

  “Just as I committed my criminal assault,” said the young man in the top-hat.

  Walter Windrush was a gentleman and, what is by no means always the same thing, a man who valued a reputation for handsome behaviour. But he would have been more than human, if he had found it easy to adjust rapidly his relations to a gentleman, who had first flung him across the road and then, on his retaliating, started pommelling him like a pugilist, and to behold instantly in the same being, and veiled in the same face and form, a beloved friend and saviour to whom he must now dedicate his whole life in gratitude. His acknowledgements were a little dazed and halting, but his daughter was in a position to be more magnanimous and hearty. Upon rational reconsideration, she rather liked the look of the young man, for neatness and respectability do not always displease ladies who have seen a good deal of the sublime liberty of the artistic life. Also, she had not been seized suddenly by the throat in the middle of the road.

  Cards and courtesies began to be exchanged; the young man learned with surprise that he had insulted or rescued a distinguished man of letters; and the other learned that his insulter or rescuer was a young doctor, whose brass plate they had seen somewhere in the neighbourhood, inscribed with the name of John Judson.

  “Oh, if you’re a doctor,” said the poet, joking in a rather jerky fashion, “I’m sure you’ve been guilty of grossly unprofessional conduct. You ought to be reported to the Medical Council for taking the bread out of my doctor’s mouth. I thought you medical men only stopped to count the accidents in the street and put them down on the credit side of the ledger. Why, if I had been half killed with the car, you could have finished me off with an operation.”

  It seemed destined, from the first, that these two somewhat controversial characters should always say the wrong thing to each other. The young doctor smiled grimly, but there was a gleam of battle in his eye as he answered:

  “Oh, I think we generally try to save anybody, in the street or the gutter or anywhere. Of course I didn’t know I was saving a poet; I thought I was only saving an ordinary useful citizen.”

  It must be admitted with regret that this was a sample of the common conversations between the two. And, curiously enough, those conversations became rather common. To all appearance, they met only to argue, and yet they were always meeting. For some reason or other, Dr. Judson was continually coming round to the poet’s house on one pretext or another, and the poet never failed in hospitality, though it had so strange a ring of hostility. It may be explained in part by the fact that each had met for the first time his complete antithesis and his completely convinced antagonist. Windrush was a man in the old tradition of Shelley or Walt Whitman. He was a poet to whom poetry seemed almost synonymous with liberty. If he had enclosed a wild tree in a tame suburban garden, it was by his account that it might be the last thing really allowed to grow wild. If he walked in a solitary path secluded by high walls, it was apparently by the instinct that has led many a squire to fence in a wilderness and call it a park. He liked loneliness because it was the only perfect form of doing as he liked. He regarded all the mechanical civilization that had spread around him as a mere materialistic slavery, and, as far as possible, treated it as if it were not there; even, as we have seen, to the extent of standing in the middle of a main road with his back to a motor-car.

  Dr. Judson was the sort of man of whom his more foolish friends say that he will get on, because he believes in himself. This was probably a slander on him. He did not merely believe in himself; he believed in things requiring far more faith; in things which some think far more incredible and difficult to believe. He believed in modern organization and machinery and the division of labour and the authority of the specialist. Above all, he believed in his job; in his art and science and profession. He was one of an advanced school, propounding many daring theories, especially in the department of psychology and psycho-analysis. Enid Windrush began to notice his name appended to letters in the ordinary papers, and then to articles in the scientific papers. He had the simplicity to carry his highly modern monomanias into private life, and propounded them to her for hours at a time, striding up and down the artistic drawing-room, while Windrush was wandering round his private garden engaged in perennial tree-worship. The walking up and down was characteristic, for the second definite impression which Judson produced, after the impression of professional primness and dullness of attire, was the impression of a bubbling and even restless energy. Sometimes he had, with characteristic directness, broken out in remonstrance against the poet himself upon his own poetical eccentricity: the Tree, which the poet always talked of as the type of radiating energy in the universe.

  “But what’s the good of it?” Judson would cry out of the depths of dark exasperation. “What’s the use of having a thing like that?”

  “Why, no use whatever,” replied his host. “I suppose it is quite useless as you understand use. But even if art and poetry have no use, it does not follow that they have no value.”

  “But look here,” the doctor would start in again, scowling painfully. “I don’t see the value of it as art and poetry — let alone reason or sense. What’s the beauty of one dingy old tree stuck in the middle of bricks and mortar? Why, if you abolished it, you’d have room for a garage and you could go and see all the woods and forests in England — every blessed tree between Cornwall and Caithness.”

  “Yes,” retorted Windrush, “and wherever I went, I should see petrol-pumps instead of trees. That is the logical end of your great progress of science and reason — and a damned illogical end to a damned unreasonable progress. Every spot of England is to be covered with petrol stations, so that people can travel about and see more petrol stations.”

  “It’s only a question of knowing their way about when they travel about,” insisted the doctor. “People born in the motoring age have got a new motor-sense, and they don’t mind these things so much as you think. I suppose that’s the real difference between the generations.”

  “All right,” said the elder gentleman tartly. “Let us say you have all the motor-sense, and we have all the horse-sense.”

  “Well,” said the other, also with a sharpened accent. “If you’d had a little more motor-sense, or any sort of sense, you wouldn’t have been so bally near killed the other day.”

  “If there were no motors at all,” answered the poet calmly, “there would have been nothing to kill me.”

  And then Dr. Judson would lose his temper and say the poet was cracked, and then he would apologize to the poet’s daughter and say that of course the poet was a gentleman of the old school and had a right to be rather old-fashioned. But she, he would assert, with more earnest appeal, ought to have more sympathy with the future and the new hopes of the world. Then he would leave the house boiling with protests and arguing with invisible persons all the way home. For he really was a man profoundly convinced of the prospects and prophesies of science. He had a great many theories of his own, which he was only too anxious to throw out to the world in general. He was accused by his more playful friends of inventing diseases that nobody had ever experienced, in order to cure them by discoveries that nobody could ever explain. Superficially, he was indeed one with all the faults of a man of action, including the temptation of ambition. But for all that, there was a dark but busy cell in his inmost brain, where thought for thought’s sake went on in an almost dangerous degree of turmoil and intensity. Anyone who could have looked into that dim whirlpool might have guessed that there could arise out of it, in some strange hour of stress, a thing like a monster.

  Enid Windrush was a sufficient contrast to this intellectualism and secrecy, and seemed always walking in the sunlight. She was healthy, hearty and athletic, and in her tastes she might have been the shining incarnation of her father’s frustrated love of the open country and the tall trees. She was more conscious of her body than her soul, and expressed in the suburban substitutes of tennis and golf and the swimming-bath, what might have been a native love of country sports. And yet it may be that in her also there was, at odd moments, a touch of her father’s more transcendental fancy. Anyhow, it is true that long afterwards, when this story was ended, she stood again in the sunlight and looked back at those earlier days through a storm of black and brain-racking mysteries, and of horror truly piled upon horror. And looking back at this beginning of her story, she wondered if there were something in the old notion of omens and prefiguring signs. She wondered whether the whole of her riddle would not have been clear to her, from first to last, if she could have read it in those two dark figures dancing and fighting on the sunlit road against the white cloud; like two living letters of an alphabet struggling to spell out a word.

  III

  THE TRESPASSER IN THE GARDEN

  For various causes, which accumulated in his dark and brooding brain for the next day or two, Dr. Judson eventually summoned up all his courage and decided to go and consult Doone.

  That he referred to him in his mind in this fashion indicated no familiarity, but rather the reverse of familiarity. The person in question had, of course, passed at some period through the more or less human phases of being Mr. Doone and Dr. Doone and then Professor Doone, before he rose into the higher magnificence of being Doone. Men said Doone just as men said Darwin. It soon became something of an affectation, if not an affront, to say Professor Darwin or Mr. Charles Darwin. And it was now fully twenty years since Professor Doone had published the great work on the parallel diseases of anthropoids and men, which had made him the most famous scientific man in England, and one of the four or five most famous in Europe. But Judson had been one of his pupils when he was still practising medicine at the head of a great hospital. And Judson fancied that the fact might give him a slight advantage in one of those incessant arguments of his, in which the name of Doone had cropped up in a disputed point. To explain how it had cropped up, and how it had come to seem so important, it is necessary to return once more (after the habit of Dr. Judson) to the house of the poet Windrush.

  When last Dr. Judson had paid a call there, he had found the one thing in the world calculated to annoy him more than he was already annoyed. He had, in fact, found another young man installed in the family circle, and learned that he was a next-door neighbour who very frequently dropped in for a chat. It may already have been darkly hinted that, whatever were the real sins or virtues of Dr. Judson (and he was full of many rather deep and unexplored possibilities) he did not possess a very good temper. He chose, for some mysterious reason or other, to take a dislike to the other young man. He did not like the way in which two wisps of his long, fair hair lay on his cheek in a suggestion of incipient side whiskers; he did not like the way in which he smiled politely while other people were talking. He did not like the way he talked himself, in a large and indifferent manner, about art, science or sport as if all subjects were equally important or unimportant; or the way in which he apologized alternately to the poet and the doctor for doing so. Lastly, the doctor faintly disapproved of the fact that the visitor was about two and a half inches taller than himself, and also of the (infernally affected) stoop with which he almost redressed the difference. If the doctor had known as much about his own psychology as he did about everybody else’s, he might have understood the symptoms better. There is normally only one condition in which a man dislikes another man for all that is repulsive and all that is attractive about him.

  The name of the gentleman from next door appeared to be Wilmot, and there was nothing to indicate that he had anything to do in the world except collect impressions of a cultivated sort. He was interested in poetry, which might serve to explain his having found favour with the poet. Unfortunately, he was also interested in science; and this did not by any means find favour with the scientific man. There is nothing that exasperates a passionate specialist and believer in specialism so much as somebody graciously informing him of the elements of his own subject, especially when (as sometimes happens) they are the elements which the specialist himself started to explode and abolish ten years before. The doctor’s protest was vehement to the verge of rudeness, and he declared that certain notions about Arboreal Man had been exposed as nonsense when Doone first began to write. It need hardly be said that Doone, being a great man of science, was almost universally praised in the newspapers for saying something very like the opposite of what he actually said in his books and lectures. Judson had attended the lectures; Judson had read the books; but Wilmot had read the newspapers. This naturally gave Wilmot a great advantage in discussion before any modern cultivated audience.

  The debate had arisen out of a chance boast of the poet touching his early experiments as a painter. He showed them some old rhythmic designs of a decorative sort; and said he had often practised drawing with both hands simultaneously; and had sometimes begun to detect the beginnings of a difference or independence in the action of the two hands.

  “So you might end up, I suppose,” said Wilmot smiling, “by drawing a caricature of your publisher with one hand while you worked out the details of a piece of town-planning with the other.”

  “A new version,” said Judson rather grimly, “of not letting your left hand know what your right hand doeth. If you ask me, I should say it was a damned dangerous trick.”

  “I should have thought,” said the strange gentleman languidly, “that your friend Doone would have approved of a man using two hands, since his sacred ancestor the monkey actually uses four.”