The Man Who Knew Too Much

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THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
By Gilbert K. Chesterton




CONTENTS

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH:
I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET
II. THE VANISHING PRINCE
III. THE SOUL OF THE SCHOOLBOY
IV. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
V. THE FAD OF THE FISHERMAN
VI. THE HOLE IN THE WALL
VII. THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE
VIII. THE VENGEANCE OF THE STATUE




THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

I. THE FACE IN THE TARGET

Harold March, the rising reviewer and social critic, was walking
vigorously across a great tableland of moors and commons, the
horizon of which was fringed with the far-off woods of the famous
estate of Torwood Park. He was a good-looking young man in tweeds,
with very pale curly hair and pale clear eyes. Walking in wind and
sun in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to
remember his politics and not merely try to forget them. For his
errand at Torwood Park was a political one; it was the place of
appointment named by no less a person than the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Sir Howard Horne, then introducing his so-called
Socialist budget, and prepared to expound it in an interview with so
promising a penman. Harold March was the sort of man who knows
everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also
knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general
culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was
living in.

Abruptly, in the middle of those sunny and windy flats, he came upon
a sort of cleft almost narrow enough to be called a crack in the
land. It was just large enough to be the water-course for a small
stream which vanished at intervals under green tunnels of
undergrowth, as if in a dwarfish forest. Indeed, he had an odd
feeling as if he were a giant looking over the valley of the
pygmies. When he dropped into the hollow, however, the impression
was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height of a
cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As he began
to wander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic
curiosity, and saw the water shining in short strips between the
great gray boulders and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he
fell into quite an opposite vein of fantasy. It was rather as if the
earth had opened and swallowed him into a sort of underworld of
dreams. And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against
the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather
like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions
proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.

The man was apparently fishing; or at least was fixed in a
fisherman's attitude with more than a fisherman's immobility. March
was able to examine the man almost as if he had been a statue for
some minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair man,
cadaverous, and a little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a
highbridged nose. When his face was shaded with his wide white hat,
his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But
the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see
that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a
certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even
headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a
short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was
not fishing.

He was holding, instead of a rod, something that might have been a
landing-net which some fishermen use, but which was much more like
the ordinary toy net which children carry, and which they generally
use indifferently for shrimps or butterflies. He was dipping this
into the water at intervals, gravely regarding its harvest of weed
or mud, and emptying it out again.

"No, I haven't caught anything," he remarked, calmly, as if
answering an unspoken query. "When I do I have to throw it back
again; especially the big fish. But some of the little beasts
interest me when I get 'em."

"A scientific interest, I suppose?" observed March.

"Of a rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange
fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena
of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about in
society carrying stinking fish."

"I suppose it would," said March, with a smile.

"Rather odd to enter a drawing-room carrying a large luminous cod,"
continued the stranger, in his listless way. "How quaint it would
be if one could carry it about like a lantern, or have little sprats
for candles. Some of the seabeasts would really be very pretty like
lampshades; the blue sea-snail that glitters all over like
starlight; and some of the red starfish really shine like red stars.
But, naturally, I'm not looking for them here."

March thought of asking him what he was looking for; but, feeling
unequal to a technical discussion at least as deep as the deep-sea
fishes, he returned to more ordinary topics.

"Delightful sort of hole this is," he said. "This little dell and
river here. It's like those places Stevenson talks about, where
something ought to happen."

"I know," answered the other. "I think it's because the place
itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not merely to exist.
Perhaps that's what old Picasso and some of the Cubists are trying
to express by angles and jagged lines. Look at that wall like low
cliffs that juts forward just at right angles to the slope of turf
sweeping up to it. That's like a silent collision. It's like a
breaker and the back-wash of a wave."

March looked at the low-browed crag overhanging the green slope and
nodded. He was interested in a man who turned so easily from the
technicalities of science to those of art; and asked him if he
admired the new angular artists.

"As I feel it, the Cubists are not Cubist enough," replied the
stranger. "I mean they're not thick enough. By making things
mathematical they make them thin. Take the living lines out of that
landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a
mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but it is of
just the other sort. They stand for the unalterable things; the
calm, eternal, mathematical sort of truths; what somebody calls the
'white radiance of'--"

He stopped, and before the next word came something had happened
almost too quickly and completely to be realized. From behind the
overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a railway train;
and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of cliff, black
against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in
some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile
gesture, as if to catch a falling tea-cup in a drawing-room.

For the fraction of a flash it seemed to leave the ledge of rock
like a flying ship; then the very sky seemed to turn over like a
wheel, and it lay a ruin amid the tall grasses below, a line of gray
smoke going up slowly from it into the silent air. A little lower
the figure of a man with gray hair lay tumbled down the steep green
slope, his limbs lying all at random, and his face turned away.

The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and walked swiftly toward
the spot, his new acquaintance following him. As they drew near
there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead
machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a factory,
while the man lay so still.

He was unquestionably dead. The blood flowed in the grass from a
hopelessly fatal fracture at the back of the skull; but the face,
which was turned to the sun, was uninjured and strangely arresting
in itself. It was one of those cases of a strange face so
unmistakable as to feel familiar. We feel, somehow, that we ought to
recognize it, even though we do not. It was of the broad, square
sort with great jaws, almost like that of a highly intellectual ape;
the wide mouth shut so tight as to be traced by a mere line; the
nose short with the sort of nostrils that seem to gape with an
appetite for the air. The oddest thing about the face was that one
of the eyebrows was cocked up at a much sharper angle than the
other. March thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as
that dead one. And its ugly energy seemed all the stranger for its
halo of hoary hair. Some papers lay half fallen out of the pocket,
and from among them March extracted a card-case. He read the name on
the card aloud.

"Sir Humphrey Turnbull. I'm sure I've heard that name somewhere."

His companion only gave a sort of a little sigh and was silent for a
moment, as if ruminating, then he merely said, "The poor fellow is
quite gone," and added some scientific terms in which his auditor
once more found himself out of his depth.

"As things are," continued the same curiously well-informed person,
"it will be more legal for us to leave the body as it is until the
police are informed. In fact, I think it will be well if nobody
except the police is informed. Don't be surprised if I seem to be
keeping it dark from some of our neighbors round here." Then, as if
prompted to regularize his rather abrupt confidence, he said: "I've
come down to see my cousin at Torwood; my name is Horne Fisher.
Might be a pun on my pottering about here, mightn't it?"

"Is Sir Howard Horne your cousin?" asked March. "I'm going to
Torwood Park to see him myself; only about his public work, of
course, and the wonderful stand he is making for his principles. I
think this Budget is the greatest thing in English history. If it
fails, it will be the most heroic failure in English history. Are
you an admirer of your great kinsman, Mr. Fisher?"

"Rather," said Mr. Fisher. "He's the best shot I know."

Then, as if sincerely repentant of his nonchalance, he added, with a
sort of enthusiasm:

"No, but really, he's a _beautiful_ shot."

As if fired by his own words, he took a sort of leap at the ledges
of the rock above him, and scaled them with a sudden agility in
startling contrast to his general lassitude. He had stood for some
seconds on the headland above, with his aquiline profile under the
Panama hat relieved against the sky and peering over the countryside
before his companion had collected himself sufficiently to scramble
up after him.

The level above was a stretch of common turf on which the tracks of
the fated car were plowed plainly enough; but the brink of it was
broken as with rocky teeth; broken boulders of all shapes and sizes
lay near the edge; it was almost incredible that any one could have
deliberately driven into such a death trap, especially in broad
daylight.

"I can't make head or tail of it," said March. "Was he blind? Or
blind drunk?"

"Neither, by the look of him," replied the other.

"Then it was suicide."

"It doesn't seem a cozy way of doing it," remarked the man called
Fisher. "Besides, I don't fancy poor old Puggy would commit suicide,
somehow."

"Poor old who?" inquired the wondering journalist. "Did you know
this unfortunate man?"

"Nobody knew him exactly," replied Fisher, with some vagueness. "But
one _knew_ him, of course. He'd been a terror in his time, in
Parliament and the courts, and so on; especially in that row about
the aliens who were deported as undesirables, when he wanted one of
'em hanged for murder. He was so sick about it that he retired from
the bench. Since then he mostly motored about by himself; but he was
coming to Torwood, too, for the week-end; and I don't see why he
should deliberately break his neck almost at the very door. I
believe Hoggs--I mean my cousin Howard--was coming down specially to
meet him."

"Torwood Park doesn't belong to your cousin?" inquired March.

"No; it used to belong to the Winthrops, you know," replied the
other. "Now a new man's got it; a man from Montreal named Jenkins.
Hoggs comes for the shooting; I told you he was a lovely shot."

This repeated eulogy on the great social statesman affected Harold
March as if somebody had defined Napoleon as a distinguished player
of nap. But he had another half-formed impression struggling in this
flood of unfamiliar things, and he brought it to the surface before
it could vanish.

"Jenkins," he repeated. "Surely you don't mean Jefferson Jenkins,
the social reformer? I mean the man who's fighting for the new
cottage-estate scheme. It would be as interesting to meet him as any
Cabinet Minister in the world, if you'll excuse my saying so."

"Yes; Hoggs told him it would have to be cottages," said Fisher.
"He said the breed of cattle had improved too often, and people were
beginning to laugh. And, of course, you must hang a peerage on to
something; though the poor chap hasn't got it yet. Hullo, here's
somebody else."

They had started walking in the tracks of the car, leaving it behind
them in the hollow, still humming horribly like a huge insect that
had killed a man. The tracks took them to the corner of the road,
one arm of which went on in the same line toward the distant gates
of the park. It was clear that the car had been driven down the long
straight road, and then, instead of turning with the road to the
left, had gone straight on over the turf to its doom. But it was not
this discovery that had riveted Fisher's eye, but something even
more solid. At the angle of the white road a dark and solitary
figure was standing almost as still as a finger post. It was that of
a big man in rough shooting-clothes, bareheaded, and with tousled
curly hair that gave him a rather wild look. On a nearer approach
this first more fantastic impression faded; in a full light the
figure took on more conventional colors, as of an ordinary gentleman
who happened to have come out without a hat and without very
studiously brushing his hair. But the massive stature remained, and
something deep and even cavernous about the setting of the eyes
redeemed his animal good looks from the commonplace. But March had
no time to study the man more closely, for, much to his
astonishment, his guide merely observed, "Hullo, Jack!" and walked
past him as if he had indeed been a signpost, and without attempting
to inform him of the catastrophe beyond the rocks. It was relatively
a small thing, but it was only the first in a string of singular
antics on which his new and eccentric friend was leading him.

The man they had passed looked after them in rather a suspicious
fashion, but Fisher continued serenely on his way along the straight
road that ran past the gates of the great estate.

"That's John Burke, the traveler," he condescended to explain. "I
expect you've heard of him; shoots big game and all that. Sorry I
couldn't stop to introduce you, but I dare say you'll meet him later
on."

"I know his book, of course," said March, with renewed interest.
"That is certainly a fine piece of description, about their being
only conscious of the closeness of the elephant when the colossal
head blocked out the moon."

"Yes, young Halkett writes jolly well, I think. What? Didn't you
know Halkett wrote Burke's book for him? Burke can't use anything
except a gun; and you can't write with that. Oh, he's genuine enough
in his way, you know, as brave as a lion, or a good deal braver by
all accounts."

"You seem to know all about him," observed March, with a rather
bewildered laugh, "and about a good many other people."

Fisher's bald brow became abruptly corrugated, and a curious
expression came into his eyes.

"I know too much," he said. "That's what's the matter with me.
That's what's the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know
too much. Too much about one another; too much about ourselves.
That's why I'm really interested, just now, about one thing that I
don't know."

"And that is?" inquired the other.

"Why that poor fellow is dead."

They had walked along the straight road for nearly a mile,
conversing at intervals in this fashion; and March had a singular
sense of the whole world being turned inside out. Mr. Horne Fisher
did not especially abuse his friends and relatives in fashionable
society; of some of them he spoke with affection. But they seemed to
be an entirely new set of men and women, who happened to have the
same nerves as the men and women mentioned most often in the
newspapers. Yet no fury of revolt could have seemed to him more
utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity. It was like
daylight on the other side of stage scenery.

They reached the great lodge gates of the park, and, to March's
surprise, passed them and continued along the interminable white,
straight road. But he was himself too early for his appointment with
Sir Howard, and was not disinclined to see the end of his new
friend's experiment, whatever it might be. They had long left the
moorland behind them, and half the white road was gray in the great
shadow of the Torwood pine forests, themselves like gray bars
shuttered against the sunshine and within, amid that clear noon,
manufacturing their own midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to
appear in them like gleams of colored windows; the trees thinned and
fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild, irregular
copses in which, as Fisher said, the house-party had been blazing
away all day. And about two hundred yards farther on they came to
the first turn of the road.

At the corner stood a sort of decayed inn with the dingy sign of The
Grapes. The signboard was dark and indecipherable by now, and hung
black against the sky and the gray moorland beyond, about as
inviting as a gallows. March remarked that it looked like a tavern
for vinegar instead of wine.

"A good phrase," said Fisher, "and so it would be if you were silly
enough to drink wine in it. But the beer is very good, and so is the
brandy."

March followed him to the bar parlor with some wonder, and his dim
sense of repugnance was not dismissed by the first sight of the
innkeeper, who was widely different from the genial innkeepers of
romance, a bony man, very silent behind a black mustache, but with
black, restless eyes. Taciturn as he was, the investigator succeeded
at last in extracting a scrap of information from him, by dint of
ordering beer and talking to him persistently and minutely on the
subject of motor cars. He evidently regarded the innkeeper as in
some singular way an authority on motor cars; as being deep in the
secrets of the mechanism, management, and mismanagement of motor
cars; holding the man all the time with a glittering eye like the
Ancient Mariner. Out of all this rather mysterious conversation
there did emerge at last a sort of admission that one particular
motor car, of a given description, had stopped before the inn about
an hour before, and that an elderly man had alighted, requiring some
mechanical assistance. Asked if the visitor required any other
assistance, the innkeeper said shortly that the old gentleman had
filled his flask and taken a packet of sandwiches. And with these
words the somewhat inhospitable host had walked hastily out of the
bar, and they heard him banging doors in the dark interior.

Fisher's weary eye wandered round the dusty and dreary inn parlor
and rested dreamily on a glass case containing a stuffed bird, with
a gun hung on hooks above it, which seemed to be its only ornament.

"Puggy was a humorist," he observed, "at least in his own rather
grim style. But it seems rather too grim a joke for a man to buy a
packet of sandwiches when he is just going to commit suicide."

"If you come to that," answered March, "it isn't very usual for a
man to buy a packet of sandwiches when he's just outside the door of
a grand house he's going to stop at."

"No . . . no," repeated Fisher, almost mechanically; and then
suddenly cocked his eye at his interlocutor with a much livelier
expression.

"By Jove! that's an idea. You're perfectly right. And that suggests
a very queer idea, doesn't it?"

There was a silence, and then March started with irrational
nervousness as the door of the inn was flung open and another man
walked rapidly to the counter. He had struck it with a coin and
called out for brandy before he saw the other two guests, who were
sitting at a bare wooden table under the window. When he turned
about with a rather wild stare, March had yet another unexpected
emotion, for his guide hailed the man as Hoggs and introduced him as
Sir Howard Horne.

He looked rather older than his boyish portraits in the illustrated
papers, as is the way of politicians; his flat, fair hair was
touched with gray, but his face was almost comically round, with a
Roman nose which, when combined with his quick, bright eyes, raised
a vague reminiscence of a parrot. He had a cap rather at the back of
his head and a gun under his arm. Harold March had imagined many
things about his meeting with the great political reformer, but he
had never pictured him with a gun under his arm, drinking brandy in
a public house.

"So you're stopping at Jink's, too," said Fisher. "Everybody seems
to be at Jink's."

"Yes," replied the Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Jolly good
shooting. At least all of it that isn't Jink's shooting. I never
knew a chap with such good shooting that was such a bad shot. Mind
you, he's a jolly good fellow and all that; I don't say a word
against him. But he never learned to hold a gun when he was packing
pork or whatever he did. They say he shot the cockade off his own
servant's hat; just like him to have cockades, of course. He shot
the weathercock off his own ridiculous gilded summerhouse. It's the
only cock he'll ever kill, I should think. Are you coming up there
now?"

Fisher said, rather vaguely, that he was following soon, when he had
fixed something up; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer left the
inn. March fancied he had been a little upset or impatient when he
called for the brandy; but he had talked himself back into a
satisfactory state, if the talk had not been quite what his literary
visitor had expected. Fisher, a few minutes afterward, slowly led
the way out of the tavern and stood in the middle of the road,
looking down in the direction from which they had traveled. Then he
walked back about two hundred yards in that direction and stood
still again.

"I should think this is about the place," he said.

"What place?" asked his companion.

"The place where the poor fellow was killed," said Fisher, sadly.

"What do you mean?" demanded March.

"He was smashed up on the rocks a mile and a half from here."

"No, he wasn't," replied Fisher. "He didn't fall on the rocks at
all. Didn't you notice that he only fell on the slope of soft grass
underneath? But I saw that he had a bullet in him already."

Then after a pause he added:

"He was alive at the inn, but he was dead long before he came to the
rocks. So he was shot as he drove his car down this strip of
straight road, and I should think somewhere about here. After that,
of course, the car went straight on with nobody to stop or turn it.
It's really a very cunning dodge in its way; for the body would be
found far away, and most people would say, as you do, that it was an
accident to a motorist. The murderer must have been a clever brute."

"But wouldn't the shot be heard at the inn or somewhere?" asked
March.

"It would be heard. But it would not be noticed. That," continued
the investigator, "is where he was clever again. Shooting was going
on all over the place all day; very likely he timed his shot so as
to drown it in a number of others. Certainly he was a first-class
criminal. And he was something else as well."

"What do you mean?" asked his companion, with a creepy premonition
of something coming, he knew not why.

"He was a first-class shot," said Fisher. He had turned his back
abruptly and was walking down a narrow, grassy lane, little more
than a cart track, which lay opposite the inn and marked the end of
the great estate and the beginning of the open moors. March plodded
after him with the same idle perseverance, and found him staring
through a gap in giant weeds and thorns at the flat face of a
painted paling. From behind the paling rose the great gray columns
of a row of poplars, which filled the heavens above them with
dark-green shadow and shook faintly in a wind which had sunk slowly
into a breeze. The afternoon was already deepening into evening, and
the titanic shadows of the poplars lengthened over a third of the
landscape.

"Are you a first-class criminal?" asked Fisher, in a friendly tone.
"I'm afraid I'm not. But I think I can manage to be a sort of
fourth-rate burglar."

And before his companion could reply he had managed to swing himself
up and over the fence; March followed without much bodily effort,
but with considerable mental disturbance. The poplars grew so close
against the fence that they had some difficulty in slipping past
them, and beyond the poplars they could see only a high hedge of
laurel, green and lustrous in the level sun. Something in this
limitation by a series of living walls made him feel as if he were
really entering a shattered house instead of an open field. It was
as if he came in by a disused door or window and found the way
blocked by furniture. When they had circumvented the laurel hedge,
they came out on a sort of terrace of turf, which fell by one green
step to an oblong lawn like a bowling green. Beyond this was the
only building in sight, a low conservatory, which seemed far away
from anywhere, like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in
fairyland. Fisher knew that lonely look of the outlying parts of a
great house well enough. He realized that it is more of a satire on
aristocracy than if it were choked with weeds and littered with
ruins. For it is not neglected and yet it is deserted; at any rate,
it is disused. It is regularly swept and garnished for a master who
never comes.