Manalive

G >> G. K. Chesterton >> Manalive


"It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period,
a curate at Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague,
induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must say
profanely described, as calculated to promote the kingdom
of God. I found, on the contrary, that it consisted entirely
of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse
and their opinions extreme.

"Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest
respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say little.
No one can be more convinced than I of the evil of politics
in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation any advice
about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly that they
are likely to make an erroneous selection. But, while I do
not mean to touch at all upon political or social problems,
I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest,
such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism
or Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal
of a sacred trust. Far be it from me to say a word against
the Reverend Raymond Percy, the colleague in question.
He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some apparently fascinating;
but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist, wears his hair
like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person,
will never rise in his profession, or even obtain the admiration
of the good and wise. Nor is it for me to utter my personal
judgements of the appearance of the people in the hall.
Yet a glance round the room, revealing ranks of debased
and envious faces--"

"Adopting," said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive--"adopting
the reverend gentleman's favourite figure of logic, may I say that
while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect,
he is a blasted old jackass."

"Really!" said Dr. Pym; "I protest."

"You must keep quiet, Michael," said Inglewood; "they have a right
to read their story."

"Chair! Chair! Chair!" cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in his own;
and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all
the authority of the Court of Beacon.

"Oh, don't wake the old lady," said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody
good-humour. "I apologize. I won't interrupt again."

Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading
of the clergyman's letter was already continuing.

"The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
will say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the audience
were Irish, and showed the weakness of that impetuous people.
When gathered together into gangs and conspiracies they seem
to lose altogether that lovable good-nature and readiness to accept
anything one tells them which distinguishes them as individuals."


With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly,
and sat down again.


"These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the speech
of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level with witticisms about rent
and a reserve of labour. Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such
words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly. Some hours
afterward the storm broke. I had been addressing the meeting for some time,
pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes, their insufficient
attendance at evening service, their neglect of the Harvest Festival, and of
many other things that might materially help them to improve their lot.
It was, I think, about this time that an extraordinary interruption occurred.
An enormous, powerful man, partly concealed with white plaster,
arose in the middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud, roaring voice,
like a bull's) some observations which seemed to be in a foreign language.
Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague, descended to his level by entering into
a duel of repartee, in which he appeared to be the victor. The meeting
began to behave more respectfully for a little; yet before I had said twelve
sentences more the rush was made for the platform. The enormous plasterer,
in particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like an elephant;
and I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally large,
but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was shoving
them back. I don't know what he said, but, what with shouting and shoving
and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the wretched people
went roaring down another passage.

"Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story. When he had got
us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as follows:
`You're well out of that, sir; now you'd better come along with me.
I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we've all
been talking about. Come along!' And turning his big back abruptly,
he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old lamp-post,
we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him. He had certainly
helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman, I could
not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds.
Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with all
his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also. In fact,
he comes of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house
and has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family.
I cannot but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal
advantages with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation,
and certainly--but I digress.

"A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post
faded behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind.
The large man in front of us looked larger and larger in the haze.
He did not turn round, but he said with his huge back to us,
`All that talking's no good; we want a little practical Socialism.'

"`I quite agree,' said Percy; `but I always like to understand things
in theory before I put them into practice.'

"`Oh, you just leave that to me,' said the practical Socialist,
or whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness.
`I have a way with me. I'm a Permeator.'

"I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed,
so I was sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey
for the present. It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane,
where we were already rather cramped, into a paved passage,
at the end of which we passed through a wooden gate left open.
We then found ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour,
crossing what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden.
I called out to the enormous person going on in front, but he answered
obscurely that it was a short cut.

"I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading
to a higher level of road. My thoughtless colleague ran up it so
quickly that I could not do otherwise than follow as best I could.
The path on which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow.
I had never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous.
Along one side of it grew what, in the dark and density of air,
I first took to be some short, strong thicket of shrubs. Then I saw
that they were not short shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees.
I, an English gentleman and clergyman of the Church of England--I was
walking along the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.

"I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps,
and let loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I
could all the time.

"`It's a right-of-way,' declared my indefensible informant.
`It's closed to traffic once in a hundred years.'

"`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!' I called out; `you are not going
on with this blackguard?'

"`Why, I think so,' answered my unhappy colleague flippantly.
`I think you and I are bigger blackguards than he is,
whatever he is.'

"`I am a burglar,' explained the big creature quite calmly.
`I am a member of the Fabian Society. I take back the wealth stolen
by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform
fitted to the special occasion--here a little and there a little.
Do you see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof?
I'm permeating that one to-night.'

"`Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I cried, `I desire to be quit of it.'

"`The ladder is just behind you,' answered the creature
with horrible courtesy; `and, before you go, do let me give
you my card.'

"If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I
should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind
would have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall.
As it was, in the wildness of the moment, I put it in my
waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and ladder,
landed in the respectable streets once more. Not before, however,
I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts--
that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards
the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and,
what was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him.
I have never seen either of them since that day.

"In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my
connection with the wild set. I am far from saying that every
member of the Christian Social Union must necessarily be a burglar.
I have no right to bring any such charge. But it gave me a hint
of what such courses may lead to in many cases; and I saw them no more.

"I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a
Mr. Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question.
When I got home that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed
there under the name of Innocent Smith.--Yours faithfully,
"John Clement Hawkins."


Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper. He knew that
the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that Moses Gould
(for one) could no more write like a canon than he could read like one.
After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary charge.

"We wish," said Michael, "to give all reasonable facilities to
the prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court.
The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all
those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they
are made. Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say
one thing instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer's cramp,
forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of his own.
Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is
unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny.
Innocent Smith never did commit burglary at all.

"I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement,
and ask the prosecution two or three questions."

Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.

"In the first place," continued Moon, "have you the date of Canon Hawkins's
last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and roofs?"

"Ho, yus!" called out Gould smartly. "November thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."

"Have you," continued Moon, "identified the houses in Hoxton up
which they climbed?"

"Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,"
answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.

"Well," said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, "was there any burglary
in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that out."

"There may well have been," said the doctor primly, after a pause,
"an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities."

"Another question," proceeded Michael. "Canon Hawkins, in his
blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment.
Why don't you produce the evidence of the other clergyman,
who actually followed the burglar and presumably was present
at the crime?"

Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table,
as he did when he was specially confident of the clearness
of his reply.

"We have entirely failed," he said, "to track the other clergyman,
who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had
seen him as-cending the gutters and the leads. I am fully aware
that this may strike many as sing'lar; yet, upon reflection,
I think it will appear pretty natural to a bright thinker.
This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the canon's evidence,
a minister of eccentric ways. His con-nection with England's proudest
and fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society
of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith is,
by general agreement, a man of irr'sistible fascination.
I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into the crime
and forced him to hide his head in the real crim'nal class.
That would fully account for his non-appearance, and the failure
of all attempts to trace him."

"It is impossible, then, to trace him?" asked Moon.

"Impossible," repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.

"You are sure it's impossible?"

"Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould, irritably. "We'd 'ave found
'im if we could, for you bet 'e saw the burglary. Don't YOU
start looking for 'im. Look for your own 'ead in the dustbin.
You'll find that--after a bit," and his voice died away in grumbling.

"Arthur," directed Michael Moon, sitting down, "kindly read
Mr. Raymond Percy's letter to the court."

"Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much
as possible," began Inglewood, "I will not read the first part
of the letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution
to admit the account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies,
as far as facts are concerned, that given by the first clergyman.
We concede, then, the canon's story so far as it goes.
This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient
to the court. I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then, at the point
when all three men were standing on the garden wall:--


"As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind
not to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud
of copper fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was
violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so
complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now.
I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have
given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road.
That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--
rose against me like a towering blasphemy.

"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly;
and artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time;
I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast
was made for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men
who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because
they could not get meat--and fish-bones when they could not get fish.
As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated
the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that.
Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant
had not been a pageant, but a riot--and a suppressed riot.
There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom
the tremendous promises had been made. In the face of that I had
to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious.
In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist--
and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.

"On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton men,
excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should
have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned
in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people.
But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins--nor any other kind of craft.
He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter
or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman;
that is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his class.
He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address.
He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said.
A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother, and that this
brother is a major.

"When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body
and convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body
and soul together, the stampede against our platform began.
I took part in his undeserved rescue, I followed his
obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we stood together
on the wall above the dim gardens, already clouding with fog.
Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and decided, in a spasm
of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of the two.
The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was--
and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.
I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to
it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class,
for I had lived with it a long time. Many old texts about
the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought
that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class.
About the time Hawkins let himself down the ladder I was crawling
up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof after the large man, who went
leaping in front of me like a gorilla.

"This upward scramble was short, and we soon found
ourselves tramping along a broad road of flat roofs,
broader than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here
and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts.
The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat
swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body laboured.
The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed
overpowered by sinister spirits. Tall spectres with turbans of vapour
seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both.
I thought dimly of illustrations to the `Arabian Nights'
on brown paper with rich but sombre tints, showing genii
gathering round the Seal of Solomon. By the way, what was
the Seal of Solomon? Nothing to do with sealing-wax really,
I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour,
poured out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.

"The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak.
But the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average
of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in
great cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose
a forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it
were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.
The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from
firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.
And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural,
like fumes from a witch's pot. It was as if the shameful and ugly
shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate
spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed.
Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift
from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another
place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might
be the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images.
But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green,
as clear and crooked as Arabic--"

Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the 'bus.
He was understood to suggest that the reader should shorten
the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke,
who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice,
and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue,
and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood then resumed
the reading of the document.


"Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern
city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always
wicked and vain.

"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry
all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our
weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.
These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.
We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it,
and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it as a sink.
It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.
Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals
could still ascend like angels.

"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped
by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals
like lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway.
He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was
merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.
So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side,
and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through
them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be
found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains
of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.
Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old
emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some little time later,
when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we
were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away
below us into one flat square or wide street below another,
like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric
building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.
But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.

"My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.
Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney
he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole
chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an inkstand.
I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt
sure he had arranged his criminal approach long before.

"The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden sense
of comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what connected this
abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies.
Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys
in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally
comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses
were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled
in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The law-breaking of my companion
seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable.
Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their
foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they
should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them?
One would suppose that property was a serious thing. I had reached,
as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions,
the heaven of a higher levity.

"My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced
chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower, for,
tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible.
Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way
of invading the houses of men. I thought of little chimney-sweeps,
and `The Water Babies;' but I decided that it was not that.
Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy
trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.
Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.

"Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black hole;
but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two afterwards,
the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the fog,
and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me
to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends.
I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking
of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.

"In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected, there was
the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen;
but there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is,
so to speak, the underground passage between earth and heaven.
By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages--like the skylark--
to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.
Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack
of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.
But Santa Claus's door was really the front door:
it was the door fronting the universe.