Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest’s concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously to her any more than she listened seriously to any one. And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet wider and almost whirling gestures of explanation with his huge hat and bag, apologized for having entered by the wall instead of the front door. He was understood to put it down to an unfortunate family tradition of neatness and care of his clothes.
“My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,” he said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke. “She never liked me to lose my cap at school. And when a man’s been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to him.”
Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good mother; but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.
“You’ve got a funny idea of neatness,” she said, “if it’s jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees. A man can’t very well climb a tree tidily.”
“He can clear a wall neatly,” said Michael Moon; “I saw him do it.”
Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment. “My dear young lady,” he said, “I was tidying the tree. You don’t want last year’s hats there, do you, any more than last year’s leaves? The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn’t manage the hat; that wind, I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants. You can’t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you ever had a spring cleaning?”
“Oh yes, sir,” said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly. “You will find everything of that sort quite nice.” For the first time she had heard two words that she could understand.
Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm of calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said that he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked: and the silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through these cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room. Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his head against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that the tall house was much shorter than it used to be.
Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend–or his new friend, for he did not very clearly know which he was. The face looked very like his old schoolfellow’s at one second and very unlike at another. And when Inglewood broke through his native politeness so far as to say suddenly, “Is your name Smith?” he received only the unenlightening reply, “Quite right; quite right. Very good. Excellent!” Which appeared to Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe accepting a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.
Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood watched the other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all the impotent attitudes of the male friend. Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling accuracy with which he climbed a tree–throwing things out of his bag as if they were rubbish, yet managing to distribute quite a regular pattern all round him on the floor.
As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner (he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.
“Like the day of judgement,” he said, throwing a bottle so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end. “People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy; not sure... I think things are too close together... packed up; for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun’s a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth’s a star, too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach; ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study... feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag is unpacked... may all be put in our right places then.”
Here he stopped, literally for breath–throwing a shirt to the other end of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly beyond it. Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with an increasing doubt.
In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith’s holiday luggage, the less one could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it was that almost everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason; what is secondary with every one else was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary, and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious. He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker, but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork. He also exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red, and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent, supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages. He was therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham claret from the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice) do not drink. It was only then that he observed that all six bottles had those bright metallic seals of various tints, and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the three primary and three secondary colours: red, blue, and yellow; green, violet and orange. There grew upon Inglewood an almost creepy sense of the real childishness of this creature. For Smith was really, so far as human psychology can be, innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he loved the stickiness of gum, and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake. To this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window. He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made the giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.
As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as a formal Christian name or a moral description he could not remember. He was just about to venture another question, when there was a knock at the door, and the short figure of Mr. Gould offered itself, with the melancholy Moon, standing like his tall crooked shadow, behind him. They had drifted up the stairs after the other two men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.
“Hope there’s no intrusion,” said the beaming Moses with a glow of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
“The truth is,” said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy, “we thought we might see if they had made you comfortable. Miss Duke is rather–”
“I know,” cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag; “magnificent, isn’t she? Go close to her–hear military music going by, like Joan of Arc.”
Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has just heard a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains one small and forgotten fact. For he remembered how he had himself thought of Jeanne d’Arc years ago, when, hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the boarding-house. Long since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr. Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless human types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as a timid, insufficient, and “weak” type, who would never marry; to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady’s daughter. And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly, as if he had heard those distant drums.
“She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural,” said Moon, glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling, like the conical hood of a dwarf.
“Rather a small box for you, sir,” said the waggish Mr. Gould.
“Splendid room, though,” answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his head inside his Gladstone bag. “I love these pointed sorts of rooms, like Gothic. By the way,” he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way, “where does that door lead to?”
“To certain death, I should say,” answered Michael Moon, staring up at a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic. “I don’t think there’s a loft there; and I don’t know what else it could lead to.” Long before he had finished his sentence the man at the door in the ceiling, swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after a struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished. Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it like a whole county upside down.