MR CALHOUN KIDD was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal1 American daily called the Western Sun—also humorously described as the “Rising Sunset”. This was in allusion2 to a great journalistic declaration (attributed to Mr Kidd himself) that “he guessed the sun would rise in the west yet, if American citizens did a bit more hustling3.” Those, however, who mock American journalism4 from the standpoint of somewhat mellower5 traditions forget a certain paradox6 which partly redeems7 it. For while the journalism of the States permits a pantomimic vulgarity long past anything English, it also shows a real excitement about the most earnest mental problems, of which English papers are innocent, or rather incapable8. The Sun was full of the most solemn matters treated in the most farcical way. William James figured there as well as “Weary Willie,” and pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.
Thus, when a very unobtrusive Oxford9 man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called the Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged10 weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois’s theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary11 universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named “Catastrophism”. But many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted12, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently13 written by an illiterate14 maniac15, headlines such as “Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks”—or “Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois.” And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious16 visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.
That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening. The last of a summer sunset clung about Cumnor and the low wooded hills; the romantic Yankee was both doubtful of his road and inquisitive17 about his surroundings; and seeing the door of a genuine feudal18 old-country inn, The Champion Arms, standing19 open, he went in to make inquiries20.
In the bar parlour he rang the bell, and had to wait some little time for a reply to it. The only other person present was a lean man with close red hair and loose, horsey-looking clothes, who was drinking very bad whisky, but smoking a very good cigar. The whisky, of course, was the choice brand of The Champion Arms; the cigar he had probably brought with him from London. Nothing could be more different than his cynical21 negligence22 from the dapper dryness of the young American; but something in his pencil and open notebook, and perhaps in the expression of his alert blue eye, caused Kidd to guess, correctly, that he was a brother journalist.
“Could you do me the favour,” asked Kidd, with the courtesy of his nation, “of directing me to the Grey Cottage, where Mr Boulnois lives, as I understand?”
“It’s a few yards down the road,” said the red-haired man, removing his cigar; “I shall be passing it myself in a minute, but I’m going on to Pendragon Park to try and see the fun.”
“What is Pendragon Park?” asked Calhoun Kidd.
“Sir Claude Champion’s place—haven’t you come down for that, too?” asked the other pressman, looking up. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”
“I have come to see Mr Boulnois,” said Kidd.
“I’ve come to see Mrs Boulnois,” replied the other. “But I shan’t catch her at home.” And he laughed rather unpleasantly.
“Are you interested in Catastrophism?” asked the wondering Yankee.
“I’m interested in catastrophes23; and there are going to be some,” replied his companion gloomily. “Mine’s a filthy24 trade, and I never pretend it isn’t.”
With that he spat25 on the floor; yet somehow in the very act and instant one could realize that the man had been brought up as a gentleman.
The American pressman considered him with more attention. His face was pale and dissipated, with the promise of formidable passions yet to be loosed; but it was a clever and sensitive face; his clothes were coarse and careless, but he had a good seal ring on one of his long, thin fingers. His name, which came out in the course of talk, was James Dalroy; he was the son of a bankrupt Irish landlord, and attached to a pink paper which he heartily27 despised, called Smart Society, in the capacity of reporter and of something painfully like a spy.
Smart Society, I regret to say, felt none of that interest in Boulnois on Darwin which was such a credit to the head and hearts of the Western Sun. Dalroy had come down, it seemed, to snuff up the scent28 of a scandal which might very well end in the Divorce Court, but which was at present hovering29 between Grey Cottage and Pendragon Park.
Sir Claude Champion was known to the readers of the Western Sun as well as Mr Boulnois. So were the Pope and the Derby Winner; but the idea of their intimate acquaintanceship would have struck Kidd as equally incongruous. He had heard of (and written about, nay30, falsely pretended to know) Sir Claude Champion, as “one of the brightest and wealthiest of England’s Upper Ten”; as the great sportsman who raced yachts round the world; as the great traveller who wrote books about the Himalayas, as the politician who swept constituencies with a startling sort of Tory Democracy, and as the great dabbler31 in art, music, literature, and, above all, acting32. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous33 culture and restless publicity34—, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent35 one. There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity36 that we convey by the word “dilettante”.
That faultless falcon37 profile with purple-black Italian eye, which had been snap-shotted so often both for Smart Society and the Western Sun, gave everyone the impression of a man eaten by ambition as by a fire, or even a disease. But though Kidd knew a great deal about Sir Claude—a great deal more, in fact, than there was to know—it would never have crossed his wildest dreams to connect so showy an aristocrat38 with the newly-unearthed founder39 of Catastrophism, or to guess that Sir Claude Champion and John Boulnois could be intimate friends. Such, according to Dalroy’s account, was nevertheless the fact. The two had hunted in couples at school and college, and, though their social destinies had been very different (for Champion was a great landlord and almost a millionaire, while Boulnois was a poor scholar and, until just lately, an unknown one), they still kept in very close touch with each other. Indeed, Boulnois’s cottage stood just outside the gates of Pendragon Park.
But whether the two men could be friends much longer was becoming a dark and ugly question. A year or two before, Boulnois had married a beautiful and not unsuccessful actress, to whom he was devoted40 in his own shy and ponderous41 style; and the proximity42 of the household to Champion’s had given that flighty celebrity43 opportunities for behaving in a way that could not but cause painful and rather base excitement. Sir Claude had carried the arts of publicity to perfection; and he seemed to take a crazy pleasure in being equally ostentatious in an intrigue44 that could do him no sort of honour. Footmen from Pendragon were perpetually leaving bouquets45 for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois; balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air rendering46 of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet it was needless to name.
“I don’t think it can go on without a smash,” said the young man with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. “Old Boulnois may be squared—or he may be square. But if he’s square he’s thick—what you might call cubic. But I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“He is a man of grand intellectual powers,” said Calhoun Kidd in a deep voice.
“Yes,” answered Dalroy; “but even a man of grand intellectual powers can’t be such a blighted47 fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall be following myself in a minute or two.”
But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda48, betook himself smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded; the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate49, studded here and there with a star, but lighter50 on the left side of the sky, with the promise of a rising moon.
The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched51, as it were, in a square of stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge52. Finding the name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that the hour of the “Thinker’s” appointment had just struck, he went in and knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious53 than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a porter’s lodge. A dog-kennel54 and a beehive stood outside, like symbols of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation55 of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified56.
“Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir,” he said, “but he has been obliged to go out suddenly.”
“But see here, I had an appointment,” said the interviewer, with a rising voice. “Do you know where he went to?”
“To Pendragon Park, sir,” said the servant, rather sombrely, and began to close the door.
Kidd started a little.
“Did he go with Mrs—with the rest of the party?” he asked rather vaguely57.
“No, sir,” said the man shortly; “he stayed behind, and then went out alone.” And he shut the door, brutally58, but with an air of duty not done.
The American, that curious compound of impudence59 and sensitiveness, was annoyed. He felt a strong desire to hustle60 them all along a bit and teach them business habits; the hoary61 old dog and the grizzled, heavy-faced old butler with his prehistoric62 shirt-front, and the drowsy63 old moon, and above all the scatter-brained old philosopher who couldn’t keep an appointment.
“If that’s the way he goes on he deserves to lose his wife’s purest devotion,” said Mr Calhoun Kidd. “But perhaps he’s gone over to make a row. In that case I reckon a man from the Western Sun will be on the spot.”
And turning the corner by the open lodge-gates, he set off, stumping64 up the long avenue of black pine-woods that pointed65 in abrupt66 perspective towards the inner gardens of Pendragon Park. The trees were as black and orderly as plumes67 upon a hearse; there were still a few stars. He was a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven68 colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in Scott’s great tragedy; the smell of something that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns69, of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably70 sad because it is strangely unreal.
More than once, as he went up that strange, black road of tragic71 artifice72, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere73 echo of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains74 of his reason, that there really were other feet upon the road. He thought hazily75 of ghosts; and was surprised how swiftly he could see the image of an appropriate and local ghost, one with a face as white as Pierrot’s, but patched with black. The apex76 of the triangle of dark-blue sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy—more—he hesitated for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter—Catastrophism.
More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter77 of the incongruous; it is a tune78 to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang79 of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale.
Over the black pine-wood came flying and flashing in the moon a naked sword—such a slender and sparkling rapier as may have fought many an unjust duel80 in that ancient park. It fell on the pathway far in front of him and lay there glistening81 like a large needle. He ran like a hare and bent82 to look at it. Seen at close quarters it had rather a showy look: the big red jewels in the hilt and guard were a little dubious83. But there were other red drops upon the blade which were not dubious.
He looked round wildly in the direction from which the dazzling missile had come, and saw that at this point the sable84 facade85 of fir and pine was interrupted by a smaller road at right angles; which, when he turned it, brought him in full view of the long, lighted house, with a lake and fountains in front of it. Nevertheless, he did not look at this, having something more interesting to look at.
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden, was one of those small picturesque86 surprises common in the old landscape gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome87 of grass, like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal88 fin26 of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw something else clinging to it also, for one wild moment—the figure of a man.
Though he saw it there only for a moment, though it was outlandish and incredible in costume, being clad from neck to heel in tight crimson8............