“Quite so,” said Colonel Grimm, politely. “I will excuse you from exhibiting the blacking. And now, what is to happen?”

  The chief conspirator seemed to be still sunken in a sort of reverie. At last he said:

  “I felt that all revolutions had failed through treason or disunion among the revolutionists. I resolved that the others should not betray me. I did not foresee that I might betray the others. But after all, this rebellion has also ended in betrayal. Colonel Grimm, I give up my confederates. The great poet Sebastian is captured and hanged; the great soldier Casc is captured and hanged; Phocus and Loeb are captured and hanged. You can see them hanging-on hat-pegs.”

  Then he added, with a bow of profound modesty:

  “But their humble tool, John Conrad, has the pardon of the King.”

  Grimm once more sprang erect with a ringing curse which cracked and turned to a laugh. Then he said:

  “John Conrad, you are a devil, but I shouldn’t wonder if you brought it off after all. Clovis the Third may have forgotten that he is still a king, but somewhere in his stale memories he remembers that he is still a gentleman. Go on your way, Grand Duke of Pavonia; it is possible that you know the way to go! After all, you have done what you said you would do, and kept your own word in your own way.”

  “Yes,” said Conrad, with a new sobriety, “it is the only thing worth calling The Word.”

  It has been already explained that Pavonia possessed a modern and enlightened Government; and in the light of this fact it may seem a strain on the reader’s credulity to say that it did actually keep its word to the eccentric footman. The politicians and the financiers made some difficulties, feeling that the keeping of promises must not become a habit. But for once the King put his foot down, not without a faint and far-off jingle of the ancient spurs and sword. He said it was a point of purely personal honour, but there was a rumour that his niece had a good deal to do with it.

  EPILOGUE OF THE PRESSMAN

  The Thief, the Quack, the Murderer and the Traitor, had made their confessions of crime to Mr. Pinion of the Comet somewhat more briefly and personally than the same tales have been recorded here. Nevertheless, they took a tolerably long time from start to finish, and throughout the whole of that time Mr. Pinion had preserved an air of polite attention and had not interrupted by so much as a word.

  When they were over, he coughed slightly and said: “Well, gentlemen, I’m sure I’ve been very much interested in your remarkable narratives. But I suppose most of us get misrepresented a bit from time to time. I hope you’ll do me the honour, gentlemen, of allowing that I haven’t pumped you, or prompted you, or stuck my oar in anyway, but have enjoyed your hospitality without taking advantage of it.”

  “I am sure,” said the doctor heartily, “nobody could possibly have been more patient and considerate.”

  “I only ask,” proceeded Mr. Pinion, in his gentle tones, “because in the newspaper world of my own country I am known as the Bloody Battering-Ram, also the Home-Wrecker, the Heart-Searcher and occasionally as Jack the Ripper, because of my unscrupulous ripping-up of the most sacred secrets of private life. Headlines such as ‘Bull-Dog Pinion Pins President’, or ‘Home-Wrecker Has Scalp of Screaming Secretary’, are common on the brighter news-pages of my native state. The story is still told of how I hung on to Judge Grogan by one leg, when he was climbing into the aeroplane.”

  “Well,” said the doctor, “I own I never should have guessed it of you. Nobody would think you’d ever done a thing like that.”

  “I never did,” replied Mr. Pinion calmly. “Judge Grogan and I had a perfectly friendly conversation at his own country residence at his own request. But each of us has got to keep up his own professional reputation, whether it’s as a Murderer, a Robber or a Reporter.”

  “Do you mean,” asked the big man intervening, “that you didn’t really batter or wreck or rip anything or anybody?”

  “Well, not quite so much as you murdered anybody,” answered the American in his guarded tone. “But I have to let on that I’ve been horribly rude to everybody, or I’d lose my professional prestige and perhaps my job. As a matter of fact, I generally find I can get anything I want by being polite. My experience is,” he added mildly and gravely, “that most folks are only too ready to talk about themselves.”

  The four men around him looked at each other and then broke into a laugh.

  “That’s certainly one for us,” said the doctor. “You’ve certainly got our stories out of us and done it by being perfectly polite. Do you really mean to say that if you publish them, you’d have to pretend you could only do it by being rude?”

  “I guess so,” said Mr. Pinion, nodding gravely. “If I publish your story, I’d have to say I broke down the door of Dr. Judson’s surgery as he was bandaging somebody with his throat cut, and just wouldn’t let him finish till he’d told me his life-story. I’d have to pretend Mr. Nadoway was just off to his dying mother, when I boarded his car and got his views on Capital versus Labour. I’d be obliged to burgle the third gentleman’s house or wreck the fourth gentleman’s train, or do something to show my editor I’m a real live wire of a reporter. Of course you never need to do it really, you can do most things by decent manners and talking to people at appropriate times. Or rather,” and he again suppressed a smile, “letting them talk to you.”

  “Do you think,” asked the big man thoughtfully, “that that sort of sensationalism really impresses the public?”

  “I don’t know,” said the journalist. “I should rather think not. It impresses the editor, and that’s what I’ve got to think about.”

  “But, if you’ll excuse me, don’t you mind yourself,” pursued the other. “Don’t you mind everybody from Maine to Mexico calling you a Bloody Battering-Ram when you’re really a perfectly normal and well-educated gentleman?”

  “Well,” said the journalist, “I suppose, as I say, that most of us are misunderstood one way or another.”

  There was a momentary silence at the table, and then Dr. Judson turned in his chair with a sort of jerk and said:

  “Gentlemen, I beg to propose Mr. Lee Pinion as a member of the Club.”

  THE END

  THE PARADOXES OF MR. POND

  This is Chesterton’s final collection of detective stories, which was published after his death in 1936. Of the eight mysteries, seven were first printed in the Storyteller magazine, whilst The Unmentionable Man appeared in this collection for the first time.

  The stories concern a civil servant named Mr. Pond, who is described as an ordinary man with a habit of startling those that meet him with paradoxical statements. He seems unaware of the oddness of his remarks, and his friend Sir Hubert Wotton explains: “he looks a very sedentary, scientific little cuss... but he’s really had very extraordinary experiences. He doesn’t talk about them; he doesn’t want to talk about them... but when, in the course of talking in the abstract he comes on some concrete thing that he has actually done - well, I can only say he crumples it up. He tries to crush it into a small space and it simply sounds contradictory. Almost every one of those crazy sentences simply stands for one of the adventures in what would be called by most people a very unadventurous life.”

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  THE THREE HORSEMEN OF APOCALYPSE

  THE CRIME OF CAPTAIN GAHAGAN

  WHEN DOCTORS AGREE

  POND THE PANTALOON

  THE UNMENTIONABLE MAN

  RING OF LOVERS

  THE TERRIBLE TROUBADOUR

  A TALL STORY

  THE THREE HORSEMEN OF APOCALYPSE

  The curious and sometimes creepy effect which Mr. Pond produced upon me, despite his commonplace courtesy and dapper decorum, was possibly connected with some memories of childhood; and the vague verbal association of his name. He was a Government official who was an old friend of my father; and I fancy my infantile imagination had somehow mixed up the name of Mr. Pond with the pond in the garden. When one came to think of it, he was curiously like the pond in the garden. He was so quiet at all normal times, so neat in shape and so shiny, so to speak, in his ordinary reflections of earth and sky and the common daylight. And yet I knew there were some queer things in the pond in the garden. Once in a hundred times, on one or two days during the whole year, the pond would look oddly different; or there would come a flitting shadow or a flash in its flat serenity; and a fish or a frog or some more grotesque creature would show itself to the sky. And I knew there were monsters in Mr. Pond also: monsters in his mind which rose only for a moment to the surface and sank again. They took the form of monstrous remarks, in the middle of all his mild and rational remarks. Some people thought he had suddenly gone mad in the midst of his sanest conversation. But even they had to admit that he must have suddenly gone sane again.

  Perhaps, again, this foolish fantasy was fixed in the youthful mind because, at certain moments, Mr. Pond looked rather like a fish himself. His manners were not only quite polite but quite conventional; his very gestures were conventional, with the exception of one occasional trick of plucking at his pointed beard which seemed to come on him chiefly when he was at last forced to be serious about one of his strange and random statements. At such moments he would stare owlishly in front of him and pull his beard, which had a comic effect of pulling his mouth open, as if it were the mouth of a puppet with hairs for wires. This odd, occasional opening and shutting of his mouth, without speech, had quite a startling similarity to the slow gaping and gulping of a fish. But it never lasted for more than a few seconds, during which, I suppose, he swallowed the unwelcome proposal of explaining what on earth he meant.

  He was talking quite quietly one day to Sir Hubert Wotton, the well-known diplomatist; they were seated under gaily-striped tents or giant parasols in our own garden, and gazing towards the pond which I had perversely associated with him. They happened to be talking about a part of the world that both of them knew well, and very few people in Western Europe at all: the vast flats fading into fens and swamps that stretch across Pomerania and Poland and Russia and the rest; right away, for all I know, into the Siberian deserts. And Mr. Pond recalled that, across a region where the swamps are deepest and intersected by pools and sluggish rivers, there runs a single road raised on a high causeway with steep and sloping sides: a straight path safe enough for the ordinary pedestrian, but barely broad enough for two horsemen to ride abreast. That is the beginning of the story.

  It concerned a time not very long ago, but a time in which horsemen were still used much more than they are at present, though already rather less as fighters than as couriers. Suffice it to say that it was in one of the many wars that have laid waste that part of the world — in so far as it is possible to lay waste such a wilderness. Inevitably it involved the pressure of the Prussian system on the nation of the Poles, but beyond that it is not necessary to expound the politics of the matter, or discuss its rights and wrongs here. Let us merely say, more lightly, that Mr. Pond amused the company with a riddle.

  “I expect you remember hearing,” said Pond, “of all the excitement there was about Paul Petrowski, the poet from Cracow, who did two things rather dangerous in those days: moving from Cracow and going to live in Poznan; and trying to combine being a poet with being a patriot. The town he was living in was held at the moment by the Prussians; it was situated exactly at the eastern end of the long causeway; the Prussian command having naturally taken care to hold the bridgehead of such a solitary bridge across such a sea of swamps. But their base for that particular operation was at the western end of the causeway; the celebrated Marshal Von Grock was in general command; and, as it happened, his own old regiment, which was still his favourite regiment, the White Hussars, was posted nearest to the beginning of the great embanked road. Of course, everything was spick and span, down to every detail of the wonderful white uniforms, with the flame-coloured baldrick slung across them; for this was just before the universal use of colours like mud and clay for all the uniforms in the world. I don’t blame them for that; I sometimes feel the old epoch of heraldry was a finer thing than all that epoch of imitative colouring, that came in with natural history and the worship of chameleons and beetles. Anyhow, this crack regiment of cavalry in the Prussian service still wore its own uniform; and, as you will see, that was another element in the fiasco. But it wasn’t only the uniforms; it was the uniformity. The whole thing went wrong because the discipline was too good. Grock’s soldiers obeyed him too well; so he simply couldn’t do a thing he wanted.”

  “I suppose that’s a paradox,” said Wotton, heaving a sigh. “Of course, it’s very clever and all that; but really, it’s all nonsense, isn’t it? Oh, I know people say in a general way that there’s too much discipline in the German army. But you can’t have too much discipline in an army.”

  “But I don’t say it in a general way,” said Pond plaintively. “I say it in a particular way, about this particular case. Grock failed because his soldiers obeyed him. Of course, if one of his soldiers had obeyed him, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But when two of his soldiers obeyed him — why, really, the poor old devil had no chance.”

  Wotton laughed in a guttural fashion. “I’m glad to hear your new military theory. You’d allow one soldier in a regiment to obey orders; but two soldiers obeying orders strikes you as carrying Prussian discipline a bit too far.”

  “I haven’t got any military theory. I’m talking about a military fact,” replied Mr. Pond placidly. “It is a military fact that Grock failed, because two of his soldiers obeyed him. It is a military fact that he might have succeeded, if one of them had disobeyed him. You can make up what theories you like about it afterwards.”

  “I don’t go in much for theories myself,” said Wotton rather stiffly, as if he had been touched by a trivial insult.

  At this moment could be seen striding across the sun-chequered lawn, the large and swaggering figure of Captain Gahagan, the highly incongruous friend and admirer of little Mr. Pond. He had a flaming flower in his buttonhole and a grey top-hat slightly slanted upon his ginger-haired head; and he walked with a swagger that seemed to come out of an older period of dandies and duellists, though he himself was comparatively young. So long as his tall, broad-shouldered figure was merely framed against the sunlight, he looked like the embodiment of all arrogance. When he came and sat down, with the sun on his face, there was a sudden contradiction of all this in his very soft brown eyes, which looked sad and even a little anxious.

  Mr. Pond, interrupting his monologue, was almost in a twitter of apologies: “I’m afraid I’m talking too much, as usual; the truth is I was talking about that poet, Petrowski, who was nearly executed in Poznan — quite a long time ago. The military authorities on the spot hesitated and were going to let him go, unless they had direct orders from Marshal Von Grock or higher; but Marshal Von Grock was quite determined on the poet’s death; and sent orders for his execution that very evening. A reprieve was sent afterwards to save him; but as the man carrying the reprieve died on the way, the prisoner was released, after all.”

  “But as—” repeated Wotton mechanically.

  “The man carrying the reprieve,” added Gahagan somewhat sarcastically.

  “Died on the way,” muttered Wotton.

  “Why then, of course, the prisoner was released,” observed Gahagan in a loud and cheerful voice. “All as clear as clear can be. Tell us another of those stories, Grandpapa.”

  “It’s a perfectly true story,” protested Pond, “and it happened exactly as I say. It isn’t any paradox or anything like that. Only, of course, you have to know the story to see how simple it is.”

  “Yes,” agreed Gahagan. “I think I should have to know the story, before realizing how simple it is.”

  “Better tell us the story and have done with it,” said Wotton shortly.

  Paul Petrowski was one of those utterly unpractical men who are of prodigious importance in practical politics. His power lay in the fact that he was a national poet but an international singer. That is, he happened to have a very fine and powerful voice, with which he sang his own patriotic songs in half the concert halls of the world. At home, of course, he was a torch and trumpet of revolutionary hopes, especially then, in the sort of international crisis in which practical politicians disappear, and their place is taken by men either more or less practical than themselves. For the true idealist and the real realist have at least the love of action in common. And the practical politician thrives by offering practical objections to any action. What the idealist does may be unworkable, and what the man of action does may be unscrupulous; but in neither trade can a man win a reputation by doing nothing. It is odd that these two extreme types stood at the two extreme ends of that one ridge and road among the marshes — the Polish poet a prisoner in the town at one end, the Prussian soldier a commander in the camp at the other.