“‘Pray forgive me,’ he said,’ I have been paying an afternoon call. I dropped in to tea, or perhaps I should say, hopped up to tea; and I have just dropped out again.’

  “I told him, perhaps a little frigidly, that we were always pleased to receive visitors, but that they generally came in by the front door. He asked me, in a rather brazen way, if I had no poetic sympathy with Romeo and the romance of climbing balconies. I preferred not to reply; but my friend, the doctor, was staring curiously at the creeper, probably in some freak of his merely botanical curiosity; and he said, with his faintly acid humour: ‘Isn’t there rather a satire on Romeo in the fact that a weed like that can climb a balcony? It isn’t quite so common to see a tropical plant ringing the bell and coming in at the front door. Climbing doesn’t seem a safe way of classifying. In nature, you must go very low to find things that go so high.’”

  Mr. Pond sat up abruptly and seemed to exhale a breath; but all he said was, “I thought so.”

  “The artist named Ayres,” continued the vicar, “seemed more annoyed than either of us at this absurd adventure; and his comment was really much more provocative, though he only said, coolly: ‘Well, it looks an easy thing to climb; as easy as a great, green ladder. I fancy I could climb it myself, if it came to that.’

  “Then I realized for the first lime, for I’m rather slow in these things, that Gahagan was glaring at him, as he answered sharply: ‘Am I to understand that it may come to that?’ And then I realized that they were both glaring at each other; and I guessed, for the first time, why they hated each other; and what was the meaning of that scene in my quiet garden.

  “Well, I will get on as quickly as I can to the culmination of these rash boasts, or challenges, of the two tragic rivals. For, indeed, I do not know which of them had the worst tragedy. Night had fallen and the moon had risen, though it was not very much later, cutting up the shady garden into a new pattern of shadows, when I happened to look out of my study window, which is on an upper floor.

  “I was smoking and reading a book, when a noise like a dog barking, or rather howling, made me put my head, more or less carelessly, out of the window; I assumed that it was one of Dr. Green’s dogs and did not think much of the matter; subconsciously, perhaps, something spectral about the moonstruck garden and the mood that it stirred, or some more mysterious premonition of what was to follow, made the howl sound more hollow and even horrible than it really was.

  “A clear moon was rising high behind me; most of the shady garden was in all the denser shade; but there were large, pale patches and squares of moonshine on the paths and the wall in front of me, cut out as sharply as the pasteboard frame of some shadow-pantomime. Perhaps the parallel seized on my fancy, partly because light and shadow were thus bent or doubled into different planes, vertical or horizontal, like the black and white paper from which children cut out the figures for such a play. Anyhow, I did think, instantly and very vividly, of a shadow-pantomime; and, the next instant, I saw one of the pantomime figures passing in black silhouette across the wall.

  “I knew at once whose shadow it was. Of course, it was drawn out and distorted; you know how deceptive shadows are; but I could see the straggling tufts that reminded one of Struwwelpeter; and I think I told you before that Ayres, the artist, was a little too like the traditional artist who hasn’t had his hair cut. Also, he affected that sort of languid stoop that such artists assume; and there was the high-shouldered stoop exaggerated, as shadows do exaggerate.

  “The next moment, another of these dark caricatures had appeared on the wall; and it was even more unmistakable. It was also more active; it was not only a shadow-pantomime but — in a pretty creepy sense — a knockabout pantomime.”

  “Shadows are very deceptive,” said Mr. Pond; and again his friends stared at him, not because his intervention was important, but because it seemed trivial and totally unnecessary. But before he relapsed again into silence, he added:

  “The most deceptive thing about a shadow is that it may be quite accurate.”

  “Well, really!” exploded Wotton; but his moderately mild explosion was overshadowed by one of the abrupt movements which once or twice moved the gigantic Gahagan to overwhelming but rather baffling gestures, to detached and yet outrageous interventions. He turned to his accuser with a bow of overbearing courtesy, or even courtliness, and said:

  “You need not be alarmed, sir. That is one of Mr. Pond’s paradoxes. We are all very proud of our Pond and of his paradoxes. Try them in your bath. Pond’s paradoxes are in every home. What would Mother do without Pond’s—”

  “Don’t be a fool, Gahagan!” said Hubert Wotton; and his voice had a ring of steel which his friends had always respected. There was a silence, in which Mr. Pond said simply:

  “I never uttered a paradox in my life. What I said was a truism.”

  The vicar of Hanging Burgess looked considerably baffled, but did not lose his composure, and continued his story.

  “I’m afraid all this seems to me rather off the point; especially as I haven’t come to the point. I mean the point of my story. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether the shadows were deceptive or not; because I saw the real people a minute or two afterwards. It’s true I only saw one of them for a minute, you might say for a flash; but the other I saw plainly enough.

  “The first figure, the long-haired figure I had already identified with the artist, ran very quickly across the moonlit patch and vanished into the vast shadow of the creeper that climbed the balcony; but there is no doubt that he began to climb the creeper.

  “The second figure stood for a moment, staring, in the full stare of the moon; and there was no doubt about him at all. It was Captain Gahagan, in khaki, and he already had his big service revolver in his hand. In a high, unnatural voice he cried after and cursed the other unfortunate troubadour, who had climbed his romantic rope-ladder of leaves, exactly as he had climbed it himself.

  “At that instant the whole situation became finally clear; for I saw the hairy head of the unfortunate artist rising out of the tangle of tropical leaves, in shadow, but all the more unmistakable for being haloed in the moonshine. But the same moonshine fell full on the face of the Captain, as glaring as a photographic portrait; and it glared with a frightful grin or grimace of hatred.”

  Mr. Pond again interposed gently, but with the general effect of a jerk: “You say it was hatred. Are you sure it was not horror?”

  The vicar was very intelligent, and thought before he answered, even when he did not in the least understand. Then he said: “I think so. Besides, why should Captain Gahagan be horrified merely at seeing Mr. Ayres?”

  “Perhaps,” said Pond, after a pause, “because he had not had his hair cut.”

  “Pond!” said Wotton very sharply. “Do you fancy this is a case for jokes? You seem to have forgotten that you said, yourself, it was a painful matter.”

  “I said it was a painful matter,” said Pond, “to think a horrible thing was done by an old friend.” Then he said, after one of his sudden pauses: “But I wasn’t thinking of Gahagan.”

  The stupefied vicar seemed to have given up everything but the stubborn pursuit of his story.

  “As I have told you, Captain Gahagan cursed his rival from below, and called on him to come down; but he did not attempt to climb the creeper himself, though he had already shown how quickly he could do it. Unfortunately, he did something else; which he could do much more quickly. I saw the blue flash of the pistol-barrel in the moon, as he lifted it; and then the red flash; and then a puff of smoke detached itself and climbed the sky, like a cloud; and the man on the green ladder fell crashing like a stone through the thrashing great leaves to the dark space below.

  “I could not see so clearly what was happening in that dark space; but I knew, for all practical purposes, that the man was dead; for his slayer laid hold of one leg of the corpse and dragged it away down the darkling and descending paths of the garden. And when I heard a distant splash, I knew he had thrown the corpse into the river.

  “Well, as I told you before, that is my very serious testimony to what I saw and knew; but I give it only from a sense of social duty to any individuals who may be involved; I admit the circumstances are such that legal proof would be very difficult now.

  “Albert Ayres had entirely disappeared by next morning; but it is true, as I have said, that he had once spoken of going off on a sketching-tour very early.

  “Captain Gahagan had also entirely disappeared by next morning; but I believe it is true that his leave was practically up, that in any case he had to return to the front; and it was utterly hopeless to raise a question — which would, already, be called a doubtful question — at a moment when every man was needed, when common convicts were already working out their expiation in the field; and when all information had to be hampered, and a veil hung between us and all that vast labyrinth called ‘somewhere in France.’ But hearing that, for personal reasons, it was essential that Captain Gahagan should be asked to clear or explain his record, I have brought the matter up again now. And I have stated nothing that I did not see.”

  “You have stated it very clearly,” said Mr. Pond. “More clearly than you know. But even on the clearest moonlight night, as we agreed, shadows can be very deceptive.”

  “You’ve said that before,” said Sir Hubert rather irritably.

  “And, as I have also said before,” observed the unruffled Mr. Pond, “a shadow is most misleading when it is precisely correct.”

  Silence suddenly fell on the group; and the silence became more and more tense, for, after these random shots, which seemed so very random, fired by Mr. Pond as he retired from the argument, everyone felt that nothing could now delay the main action. For some time it looked rather like inaction; for Gahagan, who had been growing gloomier and gloomier, still sat kicking his heels, as if he had nothing to say. And indeed, when sharply called on by Sir Hubert for his statement, he was, at first, understood to declare seriously, not to say grimly, that he had nothing to say.

  “What can I say, except what they call pleading guilty? What can I say, except that I did do a horrible thing; I did commit a hateful crime; and my sin is ever before me.”

  The solicitor seemed suddenly to bristle with electric needles of a sort of cold excitement.

  “Pardon me, pardon me!” he cried. “Before you say any more, before you say a word more, it must be understood that it may be necessary to take note of it in a legal manner. On some minor matters we are permitted a certain discretion; but if we are to listen to an actual confession of murder—”

  Gahagan shouted; he shouted so loud that the others were almost too surprised to notice that it was a shout of laughter, but not very genial laughter.

  “What!” he cried. “Do you think I’m confessing to a murder? Oh, this is getting tiresome! Of course I never committed any murder. I said I committed a crime; but it’s not to any damned little lawyer that I have to apologize for it.”

  He swung round, facing the clergyman; and his whole bodily and mental attitude seemed to alter; so that, when he spoke at last, it was like a new man speaking.

  “I mean, it’s for you. What can I say to you? It’s personal for you; I mean, it’s real. It’s no good talking at large about such things. It’s no good hiding in a crowd; or saying that the crime was committed by a lot of poor devils on leave from hell; to whom a holiday was heaven; only it was a very earthly paradise; a little too like a Moslem paradise. I did make love to your daughter when I had no right to, for I didn’t really know my own mind. None of us had any mind on those holidays from hell. And it’s true that I did have a rival. It’s true I was in a rage with my rival; I’m still in a rage with him, when I think of what he did. Only—” He paused, as with a new embarrassment.

  “Go on,” said Mr. Pond gently.

  “Only my rival wasn’t the artist with the long hair,” said Gahagan.

  Hubert Wotton again looked up sharply, with a frowning stare; but he spoke quietly as he directed Gahagan to tell his story properly from the start.

  “I had better start,” said Gahagan, “where the other story started: just about the time when we both heard the howl of a dog in the dark garden. I may explain that I was actually staying with Ayres, the artist, for that night; we had become quite good friends, really; though there may have been a bit of romantic swagger about the troubadour business at an earlier time.

  “I was packing up and sorting out some of my light luggage; that is how I happened to be cleaning my service revolver. Ayres was looking through some of his sketch-books; and I left him at it when I went out, just as Mr. Whiteways looked out, in casual curiosity, over that sudden noise in the night. Only I heard what he did not hear. I not only heard what sounded like the howl of a dog, but I also heard a whistle, such as a man uses when calling a dog.

  “Also, I saw what he did not see. For an instant, in a gap in the trellis and tracery of a vine, I saw, very white in the moonlight, the face of Paul Green, that distinguished man of science. He is distinguished and he looks distinguished; I remember thinking, at the time, what a fine head he had, and that the silver moulding of his features under the moon made them quite beautiful. I had a reason for having my attention thus arrested by that silvery mask, for, at that precise moment, it wore a sort of smile of hatred that turned one’s blood cold.

  “Then the face vanished; and again my experience was much like the vicar’s, except that I did not see everything which happened just behind my back. But I swung round in time to see that somebody had run across the path, and begun to climb the creeper. He climbed it very quickly, much quicker than I had done, but it was not easy to see him or recognize him in the dark shadow of the leaves.

  “I had an idea that he was long in the limbs and had the sort of high-shouldered stoop that has been described; then I saw, as the vicar did, the head emerge clear of the foliage, only outlined by the moon with a sort of bristly halo of hair. Only then, for the second time that night, I saw what the vicar did not see. The Romeo, the climbing troubadour, turned his head, and, for a moment, I saw it in profile, a black shape against the moon. And I said to myself: ‘My God! It’s a dog, after all.’”

  The vicar echoed the invocation faintly; the lawyer made a sharp movement as if to intervene; and Wotton told his friend rather brusquely to go on; which had the effect of producing a sort of abrupt languor, alarmingly like a disposition to leave off.

  “Rather interesting man, Marco Polo,” said Captain Gahagan, in a vaguely conversational tone. “I think it was Marco Polo, the Venetian; anyhow, it was one of those early mediæval travellers. You know everybody used to say they told nothing but tall stories about mandrakes and mermaids; but, in many cases, it has been found since that their tall tales were true. Anyhow, this chap said there were men walking about with the heads of dogs. Now, if you’ll look at one of the larger apes, like the baboon, you’ll see that his head really is very like a dog’s; not nearly so much like a man’s as the head of one of the smaller monkeys.”

  Mr. Little, the lawyer, was rapidly turning over some of his papers, with a shrewd frown and a sharp, alert manner.

  “One moment, Captain Gahagan,” he interposed. “I have a fancy that you are rather a traveller, yourself; and have picked up travellers’ tales in many different places. It looks to me as if you had picked up this one in the Rue Morgue.”

  “I wish I had,” replied the Captain.

  “In the story there,” pursued the solicitor, “I think there was an escaped anthropoid ape who disobeyed his master and would not return.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Pond, in a low voice, rather like a groan. “But in this case it was not disobeying its master.”

  “You had better tell the rest of this story, Pond,” said the Captain, with one of his curious collapses into irresponsible repose. “You evidently guessed the real story, I don’t know how, before I began to tell it.”

  Mr. Little appeared to be somewhat annoyed, and snapped out: “I consider the Captain told this curious tale, for what it is worth, in a very melodramatic and misleading manner. I have it, in my notes, that he certainly said that ‘Somebody ran across the path and began to climb the creeper.’”

  “I was quite pedantically correct,” said Gahagan, waving his hand, condescendingly. “I was careful to state that some body ran and climbed. I attempted no theological or metaphysical speculations about the soul of an ape.”

  “But this is perfectly ghastly!” cried the clergyman, who was deeply shaken. “Are you sure the thing I saw was an ape?”

  “I was quite close,” said the Captain. “I saw the shape and you only saw the shadow.”

  “No,” said Pond softly, “he saw the shape and could not believe it because it was the shadow. That is what I meant by saying a shadow can deceive by accuracy. Nine times out of ten, a shadow is out of drawing. But it can happen, in special circumstances, that it is an exact silhouette. Only we always expect it to be distorted; and so we are deceived by its not being distorted. The vicar was not surprised that the hairy, high-shouldered Mr. Ayres should throw a shadow looking like a shambling hunchback or a bristly, humped figure. But in reality it was a bristly, humped figure. I guessed that when he first said, just afterwards, that your own figure was much more unmistakable. Why should it be unmistakable, unless the other was a mistake?”

  “From where I was, there could be no mistake,” said Gahagan. “I knew it was an ape, and I guessed it was from the cages or kennels of the eminent biologist next door. I had a wild hope it might have been meant as some ghastly joke; but I wasn’t taking any risks; I happen to know that sort of anthropoid is no joke. At the best, he might easily bite and then — well, there were all sorts of nightmare notions half-formed in one’s mind.