Speaker 1: The face in the target. Harold March, the rising reviewer
and social critic, was walking vigorously across a great table
land 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 Horn, 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
doorfish 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 laxidaisical, with heavy eyelids and a high bridged nose.
When a space was shaded with his white, wide 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 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 them a scientific interest, I suppose, observed March of
a rather amateurist. Sort of a rather amateurish sort, I fear,
answered the strange fig shman. 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 odds inner 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 sea
beasts would really be very pretty, like lamp shades, 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 backwash 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 that, 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 seemed 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
seemed 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 Horn Fisher. Might
be upon all my pottering about here, mightn't it is,
Sir Howard Horn, your cousin, asked March, I'm going to
Torwood Park to see him myself, only about his public work,
of course, in 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, mister Fisher? Rather, said mister Fisher,
He's the best shot I know. Then, as if sincerely
repentant of his nonchalance, he added, with this 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 head ledges of the rock above him, and scaled them
with a sudden agility and startling contrast to his general lassitude.
He had stood for some seconds on the headland above,
with his aquiline profile under the panama that 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 faded 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, in
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, acquired March. No 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. Hello, 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 when 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, bare headed, and
with tussled, 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 Hello, Jack, and walked past him
as if he had indeed been a sign post, and
without attempting to inform him of the catastrophe beyond the rocks.
It was relatively a small thing, but it was all
only the first and 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 Halkit writes,
jolly well, I think, what didn't you know? Halkit 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 mart 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. Mister Hornfisher 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 happen 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, and the great shadow of the Torwood pine
forests themselves, like gray bars, shuddered 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 in 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 the 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 and 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 contained eating
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 is 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 inner locutor 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 Hogs
and introduced him as Sir Howard Horn. 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 Jinks, too, said Fisher. Everybody seems to be
at Jinks, Yes, replied the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Jolly
good shooting, at least all of it. That isn't jink shooting.
I never knew a chap with such good shooting. That
was such a bad shot, mind you. He's a jolly
good fellow in 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 summer house. 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 estate. If the talk had not
been quite what his literary visitor had expected, Fisher, a
few minutes afterwards, 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's ye 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 end, 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
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 in the
beginning of the open moors. March plotted 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 deep in 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
a fairyland. Fisher knew that lonely look of the outlying
parts of a great house swell 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. Looking over the lawn, however,
he saw one object which he had not apparently expected.
It was a sort of tripods supporting a large disk
like the round top of a table, tipped sideways. And
it was not until they had dropped onto the lawn
and walked across to look at it that March realized
that it was a target. It was worn and weather stained,
the gay colors of its concentric rings were faded. Possibly
it had been set up in those far off Victorian
days when there was a fashion of archery. March had
one of his vague visions of ladies in cloudy crinolines
and gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers, revisiting that lost
garden like ghosts. Fisher, who was peering more closely at
the target, startled him by an exclamation. Hello, he said,
somebody has been peppering. The sing was shot, after all,
and quite lately too. Why I believe old Jink's been
trying to improve his bad shooting here, Yes, and it
looks as if it still wanted improving, answer March, laughing.
Not one of these shots is anywhere near the bull's eye.
They seemed just scattered about in the wildest way. In
the wildest way, repeated Fisher, still peering intently at the target.
He seemed merely two ascent, but March fancied his eye
was shining under its sleepy lid, and that he straightened
his stooping figure with a strange effort. Excuse me a moment,
he said, feeling in his pockets, I think I've got
some of my chemicals. And after that will go up
to the house. And he stooped again over the target,
putting something with his finger over each of the shotthles,
so far as March could see, merely a dull gray smear.
Then they went through the gathering twilight up the long
green avenues to the Great House. Here again, however, the
eccentric investigator did not enter by the front door. He
walked around the house until he found a window open, and,
leaping into it, introduced his friend to what appeared to
be the gun room. Rows of the regular instruments for
bringing down birds stood against the walls, but across the
table in the window lay one or two weapons of
a heavier and more formidable pattern. Hello, these are Burke's
big game rifles, said Fisher. I never knew he kept
them here. He lifted one of them, examined it briefly,
and put it down again, frowning heavily. Almost as he
did so, a strange young man came hurriedly into the room.
He was dark and sturdy, with a bumpy forehead and
a bulldog jaw, and he spoke with a kurt apology.
I left Major Burke's guns here, he said, and he
wants them packed up. He's going away tonight. And he
carried off the two rifles without casting a glance at
the stranger. Through the open window, they could see his short,
dark figure walking away across the glimmering garden. Fisher got
out of the window again and stood looking after him.
That's Halcott whom I told you about. He said, I
knew he was the sort of secretary and had to
do with Burke's papers, but I never knew he had
anything to do with his guns. But he's just the
sort of silent, sensible little devil who might be very
good at anything, the sort of man you know for
years before you find he's a chess champion. He had
begun to walk in the direction of the disappearing secretary,
and they soon came within sight of the rest of
the house party, talking and laughing on the lawn. They
could see the tall figure and loose mane of the
lion hunter dominating the little group. By the way, observed Fisher.
When we were talking about Burke and Halcott, I said
that a man couldn't very well right with a gun. Well,
I'm not so sure. Now. Did you ever hear of
an artist so clever that he could draw with a gun?
There's a wonderful chap loose about here, Sir Howard hailed
Fisher and his friend the journalist, with almost boisterous amiability.
The latter was presented to Major Burke and mister Halcott,
and also, by way of a parenthesis, to his host,
mister Jenkins, a commonplace little man in loud tweeds, whom
everybody else seemed to treat with a sort of affection,
as if he were a baby. The irrepressible Chancellor of
the Exchequer was still talking about the birds he had
brought down, the birds that Burke and Halcott had brought down,
and the birds that Jenkins, their host, had failed to
bring down. It seemed to be a sort of sociable monomania.
You and your big game, he ejaculated aggressively to Burke.
Why anybody could shoot big game? You want to be
a shot to shoot small game? Quite so, interposed Hornfisher. Now,
if only a hippopotamus could fly up in the air
out of that bush, or you preserved flying elephants on
the estate, Why then, why even Jink might hit that
sort of bird, cried Sir Howard, hilariously slapping his host
on the back. Even he might hit a haystack or
a hippopotamus. Look here, you fellows, said Fisher. I want
you to come along with me for a minute and
shoot at something else, not a hippopotamus, another kind of
queer animal I found on the estate. It's an animal
with three legs in one eye, and it's all the
colors of the rainbow. What the deuce are you talking about,
asked Burke. You come along and see, replied Fisher cheerfully.
Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are always
seeking for something new. They gravely rearmed themselves from the
gun room and trooped along with the tail of their guide,
Sir Howard, only pausing in a sort of ecstasy to
point out the celebrated guilt summer house on which the
gilt weather cock still stood crooked. It was dusk turning
to dark by the time they reached the remote green
by the poplars and accepted the new and aimless game
of shooting at the old mark. The last light seemed
to fade from the lawn, and the poplars against the sunset,
were like great plumes upon a purple hearse. When the
futile procession finally curved round and came out in front
of the target, Sir Howard again slapped his host on
the shoulder, shoving him playfully forward to take the first shot.
The shoulder and arm he touched seemed unnaturally stiff and angular,
Mister Jenkins holding his gun in an attitude more awkward
than any that his satiric friends had seen or expected.
At the same instant, a horrible scream seemed to come
from nowhere. It was so unnatural and so unsuited to
the scene that it might have been made by some
inhuman thing flying on wings above them, or eavesdropping in
the dark woods beyond. But Fisher knew that it had
started and stopped on the pale lips of Jefferson Jenkins
of Montreal, and no one at that moment catching sight
of Jefferson Jenkins's face would have complained that it was commonplace.
The next moment, a torrent of guttural but good humored
oaths came from Major Burke as he and the two
other men saw what it was in front of them.
The target stood up in the dim grass like a
dark goblin, grinning at them, and it was literally grinning.
It had two eyes like stars, and in similar livid
points of light were picked out the two upturned and
open nostrils, and the two ends of the wide and
tight mouth. A few white dots above each eye indicated
the hoary eyebrows, and one of them ran upward almost
direct It was a brilliant caricature done in bright dotted lines,
and March knew of whom it shone in the shadowy
grass with sea fire, as if one of the submarine
monsters had crawled into the twilight garden. But it had
the head of a dead man. It's only luminous paint,
said Burke. Old Fisher's been having a joke with that
phosphorescent stuff of his. Seems to be meant for old Puggy,
observed Sir Howard hits him off very well with that.
They all laughed, except Jenkins. When they had all done,
he made a noise like the first effort of an
animal to laugh and horn. Fisher suddenly strode across to
him and said, mister Jenkins, I must speak to you
at once in private. It was by the little water
course in the moors, on the slope under the hanging rock,
that March met his new friend Fisher by appointment, shortly
after the ugly and almost grotesque scene that had broken
up the group in the garden. It was a monkey
trick of mine, observed Fisher, gloomily, putting phosphorus on the target.
But the only chance to make him jump was to
give him the horrors. Suddenly, and when he saw the
face he had shot out shining on the target, he
practiced on all lit up with an infernal light. He
did jump quite enough for my own intellectual satisfaction. I'm
afraid I don't quite understand even now, said March, exactly
what he did or why he did it. You ought to,
replied Fisher, with his rather jeery smile. For you gave
me the first suggestion yourself. Oh yes you did, and
it was a very shrewd one. You said a man
wouldn't take sandwiches with him to dine in a great house.
It was quite true, and the inference was that though
he was going there, he didn't mean to dine there,
or at any rate, that he might not be dining there.
It occurred to me at once that he probably expected
the visit to be unpleasant, or the reception doubtful, or
something that would prevent his accepting hospitality. Then it struck
me that Turnbull was a terror to certain shady characters
in the past, and that he had come down to
identify and denounce one of them. The chances at the
start pointed to the host, that is Jenkins. I'm morally
certain now that Jenkins was the undesirable alien. Turnbull wanted
to convict in another shooting affair. But you see, the
shooting gentleman had another shot in his locker. But you
said he would have to be a very good shot,
protested March. Jenkins is a very good shot, said Fisher,
A very good shot who can pretend to be a
very bad shot? Shall I tell you the second hint
I hit on after yours to make me think it
was Jenkins. It was my cousin's account of his bad shooting.
He'd shot a cockade off a hat and a weathercock
off a building. Now, in fact, a man must shoot
very well, indeed to shoot so badly as that he
must shoot very neatly to hit the cockade and not
the head or even the hat. If the shots had
really gone at random, the chances are a thousand to
one that they would not have hit such prominent and
picturesque objects. They were chosen because they were prominent in
picturesque objects. They make a story to go the round
of society. He keeps the crooked weathercock in the summer
House to perpetuate the story of a legend. And then
he lay in wait with his evil eye and wicked guns,
safely ambushed behind the legend of his own incompetence. But
there is more than that. There is the Summer House itself.
I mean, there is the whole thing. There's all the
Jenkins gets chafed about the gilding and the gaudy colors
and all the vulgarity that's supposed to stamp him as
an upstart. Now, as a matter of fact, upstarts generally
don't do this. God knows. There's enough of them in society,
and one knows them well enough, and this is the
very last thing they do. They're generally only too keen
to know the right thing and do it, And they
instantly put themselves, body and soul into the hands of
art decorators and art experts who the whole thing for them.
There's hardly another millionaire alive who has the moral courage
to have a gilt monogram on a chair like that
one in the gun room. For that matter, there's the
name as well as the monogram. Names like Tompkins and
Jenkins and Jinks are funny without being vulgar. I mean
they are vulgar without being common, if you prefer it.
They are a commonplace without being common. They are just
the names to be chosen to look ordinary, but they're
really rather extraordinary. Do you know many people called Tompkins.
It's a good deal rarer than Talbot. It's pretty much
the same with the comic clothes of the parvenu. Jenkins
dresses like a character in the Punch. But that's because
he is a character in Punch. I mean he's a
fictitious character. He's a fabulous animal. He doesn't exist. Have
you ever considered what it must be like to be
a man who doesn't exist? I mean, to be a
man with a fictitious character that he has to keep
up at the expense, not merely of personal talents, to
be a new kind of hypocrite hiding a talent and
a new kind of napkin. This man has chosen his
hypocrisy very ingeniously. It was really a new one. A
subtle villain has dressed up as a dashing gentleman and
a worthy business man, and a philanthropist and a saint.
But the loud checks of a comical little cad were
really rather a new disguise. But the disguise must be
very irksome to a man who can really do things.
This is a dexterous little cosmopolitan gutters knipe who can
do scores of things, not only shoot, but draw and
paint and probably play the fiddle. Now, a man like
that may find the hiding of his talents useful, but
he could never help wanting to use them where they
were useless. If he can draw, he will draw absent
mindedly on blotting paper. I suspect this rascal has often
drawn poor old Puggy's face on blotting paper. Probably he
began doing it in blots, as he afterward did it
in dots, or rather shots. It was the same sort
of thing. He found a disused target in a deserted
yard and couldn't resist indulging in a little secret shooting,
like secret drinking. You thought the shots all scattered in
irregular and so they were, but not accidental. No two
distances were alike, but the different points were exactly where
he wanted to put them. There's nothing needs such mathematical
precision as a wild caricature. I dabbled a little in
drawing myself, and I assure you that to put one
dot where you want it is of marvel with a
pen close to a piece of paper. It was a
miracle to do it across a garden with a gun.
But a man who can work those miracles will always
itch to work them, if it's only in the dark.
After a pause, March observed thoughtfully, but he couldn't have
brought him down like a bird with one of those
little guns. No, that was why I went into the
gun room, replied Fisher. He did it with one of
Burke's rifles, and Burke thought he knew the sound of it.
That's why he rushed out without a hat, looking so wild.
He saw nothing but a car passing quickly, which he
followed for a little way, and then concluded he'd made
a mistake. There was another silence, during which Fisher sat
on a great stone, as motionless as on their first meeting,
and watched the gray and silver river eddying pass under
the bushes. Then March said, abruptly, of course he knows
the truth. Now, nobody knows the truth but you and I,
answered Fisher, with a certain softening in his voice. And
I don't think you and I will ever quarrel. What
do you mean, asked March in an altered accent. What
have you done about it? Horn Fisher continued to gaze
steadily at the eddying stream. At last, he said, the
police have proved it was a motor accident, but you
know it was not. I told you that. I know
too much, replied Fisher, with his eye on the river.
I know that, and I know a great many other things.
I know the atmosphere and the way the whole thing works.
I know this fellow has succeeded in making himself something
incurably commonplace in comic. I know you can't get up
a persecution of old Tool or little Titch. If I
were to tell Hogs or halk It that Old Jink
was an assassin, they would almost die of laughter before
my eyes. Oh, I don't say their laughter's quite innocent,
though it's genuine in its way. They want old Jink
and they couldn't do without him. I don't say I'm
quite innocent. I like Hogs. I don't want him to
be down and out, and he'd be done for if
Jink can't pay for his coronet. They were devilish near
the line at the last election, but the only real
objection to it is that it's impossible. Nobody would believe it. It's
not in the picture. The crooked weathercock would always turn
it into a joke. Don't you think this is infamous,
asked March quietly. I think a good many things, replied
the other. If you people ever happen to blow the
whole tangle of society to hell with dynam I don't
know that the human race will be much the worse.
But don't be too hard on me, merely because I
know what society is. That's why I moon away my time.
Everything's like stinking fish. There was a pause as he
settled himself down again by the stream, and then he added,
I told you before I had to throw back the
big fish. End of the face and the target by G. K.
Chesterton