“Yes; I cared more for that dirty rag of vanity, worse than any vice, than I did for any vices. How many men have sold their souls to be admired by fools? I nearly did it, merely to be suspected by fools. To be the dangerous man, the dark horse, the man of whom families should be afraid — that is the sort of abject ambition for which I wasted so much of my life, and nearly lost the fulfilment of my love. I dawdled, I lounged about, because I could not give up a bad name. And, by God, it nearly hanged the dog.”

  “That is what I supposed,” said Mr. Pond in his most prime and polite manner. And then Gahagan broke out again:

  “I was better than I seemed. But what did that mean, except the spiritual blasphemy that I wanted to seem worse than I was? What could it mean, except that, far worse than one who practised vice, I admired it? Yes, admired it in myself; even when it wasn’t there. I was the new hypocrite; but mine was the homage that virtue pays to vice.”

  “I understand, however,” said Mr. Pond, in that curiously cold and distant tone, which had yet a very soothing effect on everybody, “that you are now effectually cured.”

  “I am cured,” said Gahagan grimly. “But it took two dead men and a gallows to cure me. But the point is, what was I cured of? You have diagnosed it exactly right, my dear doctor, if I may call you so. I could not give up the secret pleasure of being slandered.”

  “By this time, however,” said Mr. Pond, “other considerations have come in and induced you to support the insupportable charge of virtue.”

  Gahagan suddenly laughed, harshly and yet, somehow, heartily. Some would count his first comment a peculiar extension of the laugh. “I went to confession and the rest of it this morning,” he said, “and in a vaguer sort of way I’ve come to confession to you. To confess that I didn’t kill the man. To confess that I never made love to the man’s wife. In short, to confess that I was a humbug. To confess that I am not a dangerous man . . . well, anyhow, after I’d done all that, I went on whistling, and as happy as a bird, to — well, I think you know where I went to. There’s a girl I ought to have fixed things up with long ago; and I always wanted to do it; that’s the paradox. But a damned sight sillier paradox than any of your paradoxes, Pond.”

  Mr. Pond laughed gently, as he generally did when somebody had told him, at considerable length, all that he knew already. And he was not so old, nor despite his manner so cold, as not to form some sort of guess about the actual termination of the rather exasperating romance of Captain Gahagan.

  This story started with some statements about the way in which stories tend to get into a tangle, one tale being mixed up with another tale, especially when they are true tales. This story also started, and ought also presumably to stop, with the very extraordinary tragedy and scandal in the house of Lord Crome, when that promising young politician, Mr. Pitt-Palmer, unaccountably tumbled down dead. It ought really to end with a proper account of his impressive public funeral; of the chorus of praise devoted to him in the Press; and the stately compliments laid on his tomb like flowers from the leaders of all the parties in Parliament; from those eloquent words of the Leader of the Opposition beginning “Much as we may have differed in politics,” to those (if possible) still more eloquent observations of the Leader of the House, beginning “Confident as I am that our cause is independent even of the noblest personality, I yet have to lament, etc.”

  Anyhow, it is really very irrelevant to the central plot of this story that it should stray from the funeral of Pitt-Palmer to the wedding of Gahagan. It will be enough to say that, as already hinted, the actual effect of this shocking incident on Gahagan was to drive him back to an old love; an old love who was still conveniently young. A certain Miss Violet Varney was at that time prominent on the stage; the word “prominent” has been selected with some care from other possible adjectives. In the general view of society, Miss Joan Varney was the sister of Miss Violet Varney. In the perverse and personal view of Captain Gahagan, Miss Violet Varney was the sister of Miss Joan Varney; nor was he eager to insist on this relationship. He loved Joan but he did not even like Violet; but there is no need to enter on the entanglements of that other story here. Are not all these things written in the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel?

  It is enough to say that on that particular morning, swept clear and shining after the storm, Captain Gahagan came out of the church in the little by-street and very cheerfully took the road to the house of the Varney family, where he found Miss Joan Varney pottering about in the garden with a spud, and told her several things of some importance to both of them. When Miss Violet Varney heard that her younger sister was engaged to Captain Gahagan, she went off with admirable promptitude to a theatrical club and got engaged to one of the numerous noodles of more or less noble birth who could be used for the purpose. She very sensibly broke off this engagement about a month afterwards; but she got her engagement into the society papers first.

  THE TERRIBLE TROUBADOUR

  “In nature you must go very low to find things that go so high.”

  This was commonly included by collectors among the Paradoxes of Mr. Pond; for it came towards the end of a rather dull and eminently sensible discourse, and it made no sense. And these were recognized as the stigmata of the stylistic methods of Mr. Pond. But in this case, as a fact, he had plagiarized from his old acquaintance Dr. Paul Green, author of The Dog or the Monkey, Studies in the Domestication of Anthropoids, Notes on Neanderthal Development, etc., etc.

  Dr. Paul Green was a smallish man, pale, slender and slightly lame; but his activity, even in bodily movement, was relatively remarkable, and his mind moved as quickly as a quick-firing gun.

  It was this old acquaintance who, on one sunny afternoon, came out of Mr. Pond’s past to bring him shocking and even nerve-shattering news; a report as alarming as the report of a gun.

  But when Mr. Pond was told, on such very solid authority, that his friend Captain Gahagan was an escaped murderer, after all, he said, “Tut, tut.” He was given to what is called understatement; of which he knew the Greek name, but did not employ it needlessly. The conversation, indeed, had opened casually enough, turning from the doctor’s health to the doctor’s hobby of studying animal habits. A little light talk about Eohippus; some airy badinage about Homo Kanensis; a little bright back-chat about Vialleton’s Études sur les Reflexes des Animaux Tétrapodes; rising to a certain sharpness of dialogue, for on this point of Darwin and Natural Selection the two friends had never agreed.

  “I never can see,” said Mr. Pond, “how a change, that might have helped an animal if it came quickly, could have helped him if it came slowly. And came to his great-grandchild, long after he ought to have perished without leaving any grandchildren. It might be better if I had three legs, say, in order to stand firmly on two while kicking a fellow bureaucrat with the third. It might be better if I had three legs; but it wouldn’t be better if I only had a rudimentary leg.”

  “It might be better if I had two legs,” said the doctor grimly, “instead of one lame leg that is hardly a leg at all. And yet I find it fairly useful.”

  Mr. Pond, who was commonly very tactful, chid himself softly for tactlessness in forgetting that his old acquaintance was lame. But, at least, he was far too tactful to apologize, or even too obviously to change the subject.

  He proceeded in his mild and fluent way: “I mean that till a leg is long enough to run or climb, it would only be an extra weight for the runner or climber to carry.”

  “It’s pretty queer,” said the doctor, “that we should have started off talking about running and climbing. I didn’t come here to discuss Darwinism or anything half so sane and sensible. But if you think I’m suspect, as the atrocious atheist, I may explain that I don’t want you just now to listen to me, but to my friend the vicar of Hanging Burgess, the Reverend Cyprian Whiteways, whose views are probably quite as anti-scientific as your own. I don’t suppose he’s a Darwinian; but, anyhow, I promised to introduce him to you, and he wants to tell you about things that happened rather later than the later Stone Age.”

  “Then, what do you mean,” asked Pond, “by talking about running and climbing?”

  “I meant, I am sorry to say,” replied Dr. Green, “that the vicar has a pretty bad story about that friend of yours, Captain Gahagan, whose legs seem to be very good at climbing, and still better at running away.”

  “It’s a serious thing,” said Pond, gravely, “to accuse a soldier of running away.”

  “It’s a much more serious thing of which the vicar accuses him,” said Green. “He accuses him of climbing a balcony and shooting a rival, and then running away. But it’s not my story; I’m not the story, but only the introduction.”

  “Climbing a balcony,” mused Mr. Pond; “for a vicar it sounds rather a romantic story.”

  “I know,” said the doctor, “the sort of story that begins with a rope-ladder and ends with a rope.”

  Mr. Pond, as he heard the unequal step of his lame friend echoing away down the paved paths of the garden, relapsed into a gloomy mood. He was quite willing to accept his medical friend merely as a letter of introduction. But it was a rather black-edged and tragic sort of letter of introduction. Whatever story the Rev. Cyprian was going to tell, it was another story against his unfortunate friend Peter Gahagan. And Gahagan was so very unfortunate as to suggest to some a wild doubt about whether he was merely unfortunate. Some had the sudden and horrible thought that, perhaps, he was fortunate. Twice before, he had been mixed up in matters involving a mysterious and violent death; with, at least, a savour of murder. In both cases he had been cleared. But three is an unlucky number.

  Finally, the Rev. Cyprian Whiteways was a shock; a shock because of his frankness and fair-mindedness.

  Mr. Pond would never, at any time, have stooped to the stupid idea that clergymen are stupid. He did not take his ideas of real life from farces like The Private Secretary. But the Rev. Cyprian was so very much the reverse of stupid; a man with a rugged face like old red sandstone; and, indeed, he suggested a rock of that rich colouring which glows with the past; he carried his English countryside with him in an indescribable suggestion of depth and background; he could not talk of common things without, somehow, suggesting the weather or the turn of night or day; he was a born descriptive writer who only talked. But nobody could doubt that it was truth; or, at least, truthfulness.

  It was so substantial a witness who told Mr. Pond in considerable detail the black and bloody story of Gahagan’s hidden sin. And the curious effect of all this on Mr. Pond was to make him jump up briskly with a broad smile of relief on his bearded and somewhat owlish visage; declaring with unusual cheeriness that it was quite all right, they had only to ask Gahagan himself, and he would tell them all about it. Confrontation, it was sometimes called.

  As for Dr. Green, with the letter of introduction, his job was done, and he was somewhat impatient of Pond’s formalities; he stumped off, merely warning the vicar that he had better have a lawyer, if he was to confront that plausible Irish rogue.

  So, when the scientist was already far away, reabsorbed in the study of a pithecanthropos as a pet, all that remained of his intervention was a solicitor named Luke Little, very much on the spot.

  Mr. Pond’s friend, Sir Hubert Wotton, the well-known diplomatist, took the chair; but Mr. Little did not mind who took chairs so long as he took charge.

  “This is a very irregular inquiry, gentlemen,” he said. “Only a special assurance would have induced me to place my client’s case before it. Sir Hubert and Mr. Pond declare, I understand, that an explanation will be demanded here and now.”

  Then he added: “It is a painful matter, as I think Mr. Pond will agree.”

  “It is a very painful matter, indeed,” replied Pond, gravely, “that an old friend of mine should be under suspicion of a horrible action.”

  His friend, Wotton, looked at Pond for a moment with a frosty stare of surprise; but he stared a great deal more when he was startled by Gahagan himself, speaking, suddenly, for the first and last time in all the first hours of the interview.

  “Yes,” he said, with a grim and inscrutable visage. “It is certainly a horrible story.”

  “In any case, then,” resumed the lawyer, “I can now ask my client, without prejudice, to repeat the story.”

  “It’s an ugly story,” said the clergyman in his honest way, “and I’ll tell it as shortly as I can.”

  Pond had heard the story, already, told in a way at once looser and more elaborate, and allowing of more descriptive detail or inference than the statement made under such very legal supervision. But even as he heard it again in more exact form, he could not get rid of a feeling that the scene described was unnaturally vivid to him, but with the vividness of a nightmare.

  There was no particular reason, at that stage, for comparing the story to a nightmare; except that the two principal incidents happened at night.

  They happened in the vicar’s garden, close to the balcony of the vicar’s house; and perhaps the impression, which was rather like an oppression, was somehow connected with another night darkening the night; a living night of vegetation; for it was suggested, throughout, that the balcony was loaded with pots and palms and clutched by climbing plants with heavy and pendent leaves.

  Perhaps, after all, it was only some vague, verbal association with the name of Hanging Burgess; as if the mystery were somehow associated with the hanging gardens of Babylon. Perhaps, again, it was partly the irrational trail of the talk with Dr. Green, with his creed of blind growth and a groping life-force in a godless dark; for Green developed his view of development with every fancy from botany as well as biology.

  On the whole, however, Mr. Pond concluded that his own queer mood was the result of the one fact, which it had really been necessary to describe in detail. For the vicar had been obliged to explain, on both occasions, in order to make his tale intelligible, that the front of the balcony was scaled from below by a titanic, tropical creeper, with ribbed and interlaced limbs and large, fantastic leaves. It is not altogether an exaggeration to say that the creeper was the principal character in the story.

  “This business happened during the Great War,” explained the clergyman, “when my daughter and I were living in my house at Hanging Burgess. But the two houses on each side of us were empty, due to the drainage of human material common at the time. At least, they were both empty for a considerable period, though they were handsome houses with large gardens, sloping down to the river. Then my friend Dr. Green came down to be my next-door neighbour and prosecute his scientific researches in a quiet place. He was writing a book, you know, on the domestication of animals; dogs and cats and pet marmosets and monkeys, and so on; and my daughter, who is interested in such pets, helped him a little with his work.

  “It is a happy time to look back upon, for us who were old cronies; perhaps because it was a quiet time.

  “And then our solitude was broken, as it seemed by accident, and all the trouble and tragedy began.

  “First of all, a young artist of the name of Albert Ayres rented the house next door, though he seemed to want it mostly for a base in which to leave his baggage, for he was wandering over the country making sketches; and it is only fair, as you will see presently, to admit that he did say, once, that he would start straight away next morning on one of his sketching tours. I mean that we cannot, in any case, actually prove what became of him. Unfortunately, I know only too well what became of him.

  “He was an interesting individual; perhaps a little too like the old notion of an artist; the sort one can hardly call either carelessly or carefully picturesque; with a halo of yellow hair which the sympathetic might connect with Galahad and the unsympathetic with Struwwelpeter. Mind you, there was nothing about him effeminate, and nothing false about his position in relation to the war. He had been invalided out, and what he was doing was a necessary job and not a funk-hole; and, at the moment, he was enjoying a short and very well-earned holiday.

  “It is only fair to Captain Gahagan to say that, even in their subsequent quarrel, even in the last, blackest days of hatred, and, I hope, of madness, which ended in murder, the Captain never sneered at his rival upon that point, or assumed anything like the swagger of khaki. But, at the time, Captain Gahagan was still in khaki, having a very short leave from the front, which he was supposed to spend at the neighbouring inn, but did spend mostly in my house.

  “You will understand my reluctance in speaking of the matter; the fact that he was on short leave may have given a certain impatience to his rather headlong courtship of my daughter, for it could be called nothing else. Some say that women do not specially object to that; but I would much prefer not to presume on any speculations about that matter. But to deal entirely with the facts. They are as follows:

  “One evening, just after sunset, or about dusk, I was walking in my garden with the doctor, and we were joined, shortly afterwards, by Albert Ayres. I had just asked my friend Green to drop in and take some dinner with us; but he happened to be rather exhausted with a heavy day of his scientific work; he looked pale and tired; and he declined in a rather distant and distracted manner. In fact, I thought he was looking ill.”

  “He has not very good health,” interposed Mr. Pond, suddenly. “He doesn’t go about very much. You must remember he is lame.” The others stared at him again, as if not seeing any importance in the interruption; and again they were still more puzzled by his further comment; for he added quite calmly:

  “The clue to all this mystery is the fact that Dr. Green is lame.”

  “I have not the wildest notion what you mean,” said the vicar of Hanging Burgess briskly. “But, anyhow, I had better get on and tell you what really happened; and you will see that it certainly had nothing to do with either lameness or Dr. Green.

  “In strolling round the garden we had paused under the giant creeper that grows out of the flower-bed and shoots right up to the balcony; and Ayres was just remarking on its unique strength and luxuriousness, when we all had a sort of a shock. For we saw the whole creeper move and twist like a monstrous serpent, in that still garden; every limb of it heaved and writhed and the whole framework of its foliage was shaken as by some impossibly localized earthquake. Then we saw that long legs like a giant’s were swinging downwards and kicking wildly above our heads; and Captain Gahagan, missing his last foothold, fell on his feet on the gravel path and faced us with a broad grin.