The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton (beach read book txt) 📕

seemed to hear the newcomers; it seemed almost as if he had not realized that the return of the light revealed his brooding attitude. Then he started in a guilty fashion, and when he saw the elder of the two strangers, his pale face seemed to turn a shade paler.

“Why it’s Horne Fisher!” and then after a pause he said in a low voice, “I’m in the devil of a hole, Fisher.”

“There does seem a bit of a mystery to be cleared up,” observed the gentleman so addressed.

“It will never be cleared up,” said the pale Symon. “If anybody could clear it up, you could. But nobody could.”

“I rather think I could,” said another voice from outside the group, and they turned in surprise to realize that the man in the black robe had spoken again.

“You!” said the colonel, sharply. “And how do you propose to play the detective?”

“I do not propose to play the detective,” answered the other, in a clear voice like a bell. “I propose to play the magician. One of the magicians you show up in India, Colonel.”

No one spoke for a moment, and then Horne Fisher surprised everybody by saying, “Well, let’s go upstairs, and this gentleman can have a try.”

He stopped Symon, who had an automatic finger on the button, saying: “No, leave all the lights on. It’s a sort of safeguard.”

“The thing can’t be taken away now,” said Symon, bitterly.

“It can be put back,” replied Fisher.

Twyford had already run upstairs for news of his vanishing nephew, and he received news of him in a way that at once puzzled and reassured him. On the floor above lay one of those large paper darts which boys throw at each other when the schoolmaster is out of the room. It had evidently been thrown in at the window, and on being unfolded displayed a scrawl of bad handwriting which ran: “Dear Uncle; I am all right. Meet you at the hotel later on,” and then the signature.

Insensibly comforted by this, the clergyman found his thoughts reverting voluntarily to his favorite relic, which came a good second in his sympathies to his favorite nephew, and before he knew where he was he found himself encircled by the group discussing its loss, and more or less carried away on the current of their excitement. But an undercurrent of query continued to run in his mind, as to what had really happened to the boy, and what was the boy’s exact definition of being all right.

Meanwhile Horne Fisher had considerably puzzled everybody with his new tone and attitude. He had talked to the colonel about the military and mechanical arrangements, and displayed a remarkable knowledge both of the details of discipline and the technicalities of electricity. He had talked to the clergyman, and shown an equally surprising knowledge of the religious and historical interests involved in the relic. He had talked to the man who called himself a magician, and not only surprised but scandalized the company by an equally sympathetic familiarity with the most fantastic forms of Oriental occultism and psychic experiment. And in this last and least respectable line of inquiry he was evidently prepared to go farthest; he openly encouraged the magician, and was plainly prepared to follow the wildest ways of investigation in which that magus might lead him.

“How would you begin now?” he inquired, with an anxious politeness that reduced the colonel to a congestion of rage.

“It is all a question of a force; of establishing communications for a force,” replied that adept, affably, ignoring some military mutterings about the police force. “It is what you in the West used to call animal magnetism, but it is much more than that. I had better not say how much more. As to setting about it, the usual method is to throw some susceptible person into a trance, which serves as a sort of bridge or cord of communication, by which the force beyond can give him, as it were, an electric shock, and awaken his higher senses. It opens the sleeping eye of the mind.”

“I’m suspectible,” said Fisher, either with simplicity or with a baffling irony. “Why not open my mind’s eye for me? My friend Harold March here will tell you I sometimes see things, even in the dark.”

“Nobody sees anything except in the dark,” said the magician.

Heavy clouds of sunset were closing round the wooden hut, enormous clouds, of which only the corners* could be seen in the little window, like purple horns and tails, almost as if some huge monsters were prowling round the place. But the purple was already deepening to dark gray; it would soon be night.

“Do not light the lamp,” said the magus with quiet authority, arresting a movement in that direction. “I told you before that things happen only in the dark.”

How such a topsy-turvy scene ever came to be tolerated in the colonel’s office, of all places, was afterward a puzzle in the memory of many, including the colonel. They recalled it like a sort of nightmare, like something they could not control. Perhaps there was really a magnetism about the mesmerist; perhaps there was even more magnetism about the man mesmerized. Anyhow, the man was being mesmerized, for Horne Fisher had collapsed into a chair with his long limbs loose and sprawling and his eyes staring at vacancy; and the other man was mesmerizing him, making sweeping movements with his darkly draped arms as if with black wings. The colonel had passed the point of explosion, and he dimly realized that eccentric aristocrats are allowed their fling. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he had already sent for the police, who would break up any such masquerade, and with lighting a cigar, the red end of which, in the gathering darkness, glowed with protest.

“Yes, I see pockets,” the man in the trance was saying. “I see many pockets, but they are all empty. No; I see one pocket that is not empty.”

There was a faint stir in the stillness, and the magician said, “Can you see what is in the pocket?”

“Yes,” answered the other; “there are two bright things. I think they are two bits of steel. One of the pieces of steel is bent or crooked.”

“Have they been used in the removal of the relic from downstairs?”

“Yes.”

There was another pause and the inquirer added, “Do you see anything of the relic itself?”

“I see something shining on the floor, like the shadow or the ghost of it. It is over there in the corner beyond the desk.”

There was a movement of men turning and then a sudden stillness, as of their stiffening, for over in the corner on the wooden floor there was really a round spot of pale light. It was the only spot of light in the room. The cigar had gone out.

“It points the way,” came the voice of the oracle. “The spirits are pointing the way to penitence, and urging the thief to restitution. I can see nothing more.” His voice trailed off into a silence that lasted solidly for many minutes, like the long silence below when the theft had been committed. Then it was broken by the ring of metal on the floor, and the sound of something spinning and falling like a tossed halfpenny.

“Light the lamp!” cried Fisher in a loud and even jovial voice, leaping to his feet with far less languor than usual. “I must be going now, but I should like to see it before I go. Why, I came on purpose to see it.”

The lamp was lit, and he did see it, for St. Paul’s Penny was lying on the floor at his feet.

“Oh, as for that,” explained Fisher, when he was entertaining March and Twyford at lunch about a month later, “I merely wanted to play with the magician at his own game.”

“I thought you meant to catch him in his own trap,” said Twyford. “I can’t make head or tail of anything yet, but to my mind he was always the suspect. I don’t think he was necessarily a thief in the vulgar sense. The police always seem to think that silver is stolen for the sake of silver, but a thing like that might well be stolen out of some religious mania. A runaway monk turned mystic might well want it for some mystical purpose.”

“No,” replied Fisher, “the runaway monk is not a thief. At any rate he is not the thief. And he’s not altogether a liar, either. He said one true thing at least that night.”

“And what was that?” inquired March.

“He said it was all magnetism. As a matter of fact, it was done by means of a magnet.” Then, seeing they still looked puzzled, he added, “It was that toy magnet belonging to your nephew, Mr. Twyford.”

“But I don’t understand,” objected March. “If it was done with the schoolboy’s magnet, I suppose it was done by the schoolboy.”

“Well,” replied Fisher, reflectively, “it rather depends which schoolboy.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“The soul of a schoolboy is a curious thing,” Fisher continued, in a meditative manner. “It can survive a great many things besides climbing out of a chimney. A man can grow gray in great campaigns, and still have the soul of a schoolboy. A man can return with a great reputation from India and be put in charge of a great public treasure, and still have the soul of a schoolboy, waiting to be awakened by an accident. And it is ten times more so when to the schoolboy you add the skeptic, who is generally a sort of stunted schoolboy. You said just now that things might be done by religious mania. Have you ever heard of irreligious mania? I assure you it exists very violently, especially in men who like showing up magicians in India. But here the skeptic had the temptation of showing up a much more tremendous sham nearer home.”

A light came into Harold March’s eyes as he suddenly saw, as if afar off, the wider implication of the suggestion. But Twyford was still wrestling with one problem at a time.

“Do you really mean,” he said, “that Colonel Morris took the relic?”

“He was the only person who could use the magnet,” replied Fisher. “In fact, your obliging nephew left him a number of things he could use. He had a ball of string, and an instrument for making a hole in the wooden floor—I made a little play with that hole in the floor in my trance, by the way; with the lights left on below, it shone like a new shilling.” Twyford suddenly bounded on his chair. “But in that case,” he cried, in a new and altered voice, “why then of course— You said a piece of steel—?”

“I said there were two pieces of steel,” said Fisher. “The bent piece of steel was the boy’s magnet. The other was the relic in the glass case.”

“But that is silver,” answered the archaeologist, in a voice now almost unrecognizable.

“Oh,” replied Fisher, soothingly, “I dare say it was painted with silver a little.”

There was a heavy silence, and at last Harold March said, “But where is the real relic?”

“Where it has been for five years,” replied Horne Fisher, “in the possession of a mad millionaire named Vandam, in Nebraska. There was a playful little photograph about him in a society paper the other day, mentioning his delusion, and saying he was always being taken in about relics.”

Harold March frowned at the tablecloth; then, after an interval, he said: “I think I understand your notion of how the thing was actually done; according to that, Morris just made a hole and fished it up with