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

occasionally to be described as the Low Lot. There are really only five of us that are quite fixed, and organizing the national defense; and we’re living like a garrison in a sort of broken-down hotel in Kent. Come and see what we’re really doing and what there is to be done, and do us justice. And after that, with unalterable love and affection for you, publish and be damned.”

Thus it came about that in the last week before war, when events moved most rapidly, Harold March found himself one of a sort of small house party of the people he was proposing to denounce. They were living simply enough, for people with their tastes, in an old brown-brick inn faced with ivy and surrounded by rather dismal gardens. At the back of the building the garden ran up very steeply to a road along the ridge above; and a zigzag path scaled the slope in sharp angles, turning to and fro amid evergreens so somber that they might rather be called everblack. Here and there up the slope were statues having all the cold monstrosity of such minor ornaments of the eighteenth century; and a whole row of them ran as on a terrace along the last bank at the bottom, opposite the back door. This detail fixed itself first in March’s mind merely because it figured in the first conversation he had with one of the cabinet ministers.

The cabinet ministers were rather older than he had expected to find them. The Prime Minister no longer looked like a boy, though he still looked a little like a baby. But it was one of those old and venerable babies, and the baby had soft gray hair. Everything about him was soft, to his speech and his way of walking; but over and above that his chief function seemed to be sleep. People left alone with him got so used to his eyes being closed that they were almost startled when they realized in the stillness that the eyes were wide open, and even watching. One thing at least would always make the old gentleman open his eyes. The one thing he really cared for in this world was his hobby of armored weapons, especially Eastern weapons, and he would talk for hours about Damascus blades and Arab swordmanship. Lord James Herries, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a short, dark, sturdy man with a very sallow face and a very sullen manner, which contrasted with the gorgeous flower in his buttonhole and his festive trick of being always slightly overdressed. It was something of a euphemism to call him a well-known man about town. There was perhaps more mystery in the question of how a man who lived for pleasure seemed to get so little pleasure out of it. Sir David Archer, the Foreign Secretary, was the only one of them who was a self-made man, and the only one of them who looked like an aristocrat. He was tall and thin and very handsome, with a grizzled beard; his gray hair was very curly, and even rose in front in two rebellious ringlets that seemed to the fanciful to tremble like the antennae of some giant insect, or to stir sympathetically with the restless tufted eyebrows over his rather haggard eyes. For the Foreign Secretary made no secret of his somewhat nervous condition, whatever might be the cause of it.

“Do you know that mood when one could scream because a mat is crooked?” he said to March, as they walked up and down in the back garden below the line of dingy statues. “Women get into it when they’ve worked too hard; and I’ve been working pretty hard lately, of course. It drives me mad when Herries will wear his hat a little crooked— habit of looking like a gay dog. Sometime I swear I’ll knock it off. That statue of Britannia over there isn’t quite straight; it sticks forward a bit as if the lady were going to topple over. The damned thing is that it doesn’t topple over and be done with it. See, it’s clamped with an iron prop. Don’t be surprised if I get up in the middle of the night to hike it down.”

They paced the path for a few moments in silence and then he continued. “It’s odd those little things seem specially big when there are bigger things to worry about. We’d better go in and do some work.”

Horne Fisher evidently allowed for all the neurotic possibilities of Archer and the dissipated habits of Herries; and whatever his faith in their present firmness, did not unduly tax their time and attention, even in the case of the Prime Minister. He had got the consent of the latter finally to the committing of the important documents, with the orders to the Western armies, to the care of a less conspicuous and more solid person—an uncle of his named Horne Hewitt, a rather colorless country squire who had been a good soldier, and was the military adviser of the committee. He was charged with expediting the government pledge, along with the concerted military plans, to the half-mutinous command in the west; and the still more urgent task of seeing that it did not fall into the hands of the enemy, who might appear at any moment from the east. Over and above this military official, the only other person present was a police official, a certain Doctor Prince, originally a police surgeon and now a distinguished detective, sent to be a bodyguard to the group. He was a square-faced man with big spectacles and a grimace that expressed the intention of keeping his mouth shut. Nobody else shared their captivity except the hotel proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face, one or two of his servants, and another servant privately attached to Lord James Herries. He was a young Scotchman named Campbell, who looked much more distinguished than his bilious-looking master, having chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with large but fine features. He was probably the one really efficient person in the house.

After about four days of the informal council, March had come to feel a sort of grotesque sublimity about these dubious figures, defiant in the twilight of danger, as if they were hunchbacks and cripples left alone to defend a town. All were working hard; and he himself looked up from writing a page of memoranda in a private room to see Horne Fisher standing in the doorway, accoutered as if for travel. He fancied that Fisher looked a little pale; and after a moment that gentleman shut the door behind him and said, quietly:

“Well, the worst has happened. Or nearly the worst.”

“The enemy has landed,” cried March, and sprang erect out of his chair.

“Oh, I knew the enemy would land,” said Fisher, with composure. “Yes, he’s landed; but that’s not the worst that could happen. The worst is that there’s a leak of some sort, even from this fortress of ours. It’s been a bit of a shock to me, I can tell you; though I suppose it’s illogical. After all, I was full of admiration at finding three honest men in politics. I ought not to be full of astonishment if I find only two.”

He ruminated a moment and then said, in such a fashion that March could hardly tell if he were changing the subject or no:

“It’s hard at first to believe that a fellow like Herries, who had pickled himself in vice like vinegar, can have any scruple left. But about that I’ve noticed a curious thing. Patriotism is not the first virtue. Patriotism rots into Prussianism when you pretend it is the first virtue. But patriotism is sometimes the last virtue. A man will swindle or seduce who will not sell his country. But who knows?”

“But what is to be done?” cried March, indignantly.

“My uncle has the papers safe enough,” replied Fisher, “and is sending them west to-night; but somebody is trying to get at them from out. side, I fear with the assistance of somebody in. side. All I can do at present is to try to head off the man outside; and I must get away now and do it. I shall be back in about twenty-four hours. While I’m away I want you to keep an eye on these people and find out what you can. Au revoir.” He vanished down the stairs; and from the window March could see him mount a motor cycle and trail away toward the neighboring town.

On the following morning, March was sitting in the window seat of the old inn parlor, which was oak-paneled and ordinarily rather dark; but on that occasion it was full of the white light of a curiously clear morning— the moon had shone brilliantly for the last two or three nights. He was himself somewhat in shadow in the corner of the window seat; and Lord James Herries, coming in hastily from the garden behind, did not see him. Lord James clutched the back of a chair, as if to steady himself, and, sitting down abruptly at the table, littered with the last meal, poured himself out a tumbler of brandy and drank it. He sat with his back to March, but his yellow face appeared in a round mirror beyon and the tinge of it was like that of some horrible malady. As March moved he started violently and faced round.

“My God!” he cried, “have you seen what’s outside?”

“Outside?” repeated the other, glancing over his shoulder at the garden.

“Oh, go and look for yourself,” cried Herries in a sort of fury. “Hewitt’s murdered and his papers stolen, that’s all.”

He turned his back again and sat down with a thud; his square shoulders were shaking. Harold March darted out of the doorway into the back garden with its steep slope of statues.

The first thing he saw was Doctor Prince, the detective, peering through his spectacles at something on the ground; the second was the thing he was peering at. Even after the sensational news he had heard inside, the sight was something of a sensation.

The monstrous stone image of Britannia was lying prone and face downward on the garden path; and there stuck out at random from underneath it, like the legs of a smashed fly, an arm clad in a white shirt sleeve and a leg clad in a khaki trouser, and hair of the unmistakable sandy gray that belonged to Horne Fisher’s unfortunate uncle. There were pools of blood and the limbs were quite stiff in death.

“Couldn’t this have been an accident?” said March, finding words at last.

“Look for yourself, I say,” repeated the harsh voice of Herries, who had followed him with restless movements out of the door. “The papers are gone, I tell you. The fellow tore the coat off the corpse and cut the papers out of the inner pocket. There’s the coat over there on the bank, with the great slash in it.”

“But wait a minute,” said the detective, Prince, quietly. “In that case there seems to be something of a mystery. A murderer might somehow have managed to throw the statue down on him, as he seems to have done. But I bet he couldn’t easily have lifted it up again. I’ve tried; and I’m sure it would want three men at least. Yet we must suppose, on that theory, that the murderer first knocked him down as he walked past, using the statue as a stone club, then lifted it up again, took him out and deprived him of his coat, then put him back again in the posture of death and neatly replaced the statue. I tell you it’s physically impossible. And how else could he have unclothed a man covered with that stone monument? It’s