“The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes fixed on my face.
“‘Man!’ I said, ‘all stealing is toy-stealing. That’s why it’s really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really respected because of their worthlessness. I know Naboth’s vineyard is as painted as Noah’s Ark. I know Nathan’s ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand. That is why I could not take them away. I did not mind so much, as long as I thought of men’s things as their valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.’
“After a moment I added abruptly, ‘Only saints and sages ought to be robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride.’
“He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both, and lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.
“‘Don’t do it!’ I cried. ‘It might be the last bottle of some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it. Don’t you see there’s something sacred in the silliness of such things?’
“‘It’s not the last bottle,’ answered my criminal calmly; ‘there’s plenty more in the cellar.’
“‘You know the house, then?’ I said.
“‘Too well,’ he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have something eerie about it. ‘I am always trying to forget what I know– and to find what I don’t know.’ He drained his glass. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘it will do him good.’
“‘What will do him good?’
“‘The wine I’m drinking,’ said the strange person.
“‘Does he drink too much, then?’ I inquired.
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘not unless I do.’
“‘Do you mean,’ I demanded, ‘that the owner of this house approves of all you do?’
“‘God forbid,’ he answered; ‘but he has to do the same.’
“The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows unreasonable increased a sense of riddle, and even terror, about this tall, narrow house we had entered out of the sky. I had once more the notion about the gigantic genii– I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our little lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes. My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of him, and talking with the same rather creepy confidentialness.
“‘I am always trying to find him–to catch him unawares. I come in through skylights and trapdoors to find him; but whenever I find him–he is doing what I am doing.’
“I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. ‘There is some one coming,’ I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it. “Not from the stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber (which seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were coming nearer. I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster, or double, I expected to see when the door was pushed open from within. I am only quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.
“Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity, a rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic– her dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves, with a face which, though still comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as intelligence. All she said was, ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
“‘I came in another way,’ said the Permeator, somewhat vaguely. ‘I’d left my latchkey at home.’
“I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania. ‘I’m really very sorry,’ I cried. ‘I know my position is irregular. Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose house this is.?’
“‘Mine,’ said the burglar, ‘May I present you to my wife?’
“I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat; and I did not get out of it till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith (such was the prosaic name of this far from prosaic household) lingered a little, talking slightly and pleasantly. She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd mixture of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well, but was still a little harmlessly afraid of it. Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a husband had left her a little nervous. Anyhow, when she had retired to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary man poured forth his apologia and autobiography over the dwindling wine.
“He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a war between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it. ‘What is more immortal,’ he would cry, ‘than love and war? Type of all desire and joy–beer. Type of all battle and conquest–skittles.’
“There was something in him of what the old world called the solemnity of revels–when they spoke of ‘solemnizing’ a mere masquerade or wedding banquet. Nevertheless he was not a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical joker. His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.
“‘I don’t deny,’ he said, ‘that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t enough blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages looking up an eternal perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as true that death was their only chance of learning to live.’
“His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt it continually slipping from himself as much as from others. He had the same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong speed to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial and yet insane details that had once reminded him of the awful subconscious reality. When the don had hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs, vibrating in the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers. The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head, which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and neglect. Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording this, except to send a telegram to an old friend (by this time a total stranger) to say that he had just seen a man with two legs; and that the man was alive.
“The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation. He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her; and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently and ‘good-night.’
“They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury. Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down. ‘I am a very domestic fellow,’ he explained with gravity, ‘and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.’