The Club of Queer Trades, G. K. Chesterton [leveled readers .TXT] 📗

as best he could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor was a sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense waste-paper basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the knees in them, as in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg stuck right through a sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it ludicrously, like some fantastic trouser frill.

Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies, might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in it as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil, somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows’ huge fists and those of the footman were battering Basil’s sunken head like an anvil, but nothing could get the giant’s ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his own head was forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right leg of his captor was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and fro with a purple face. Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the ceiling shook together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to fill the floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows like battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and another in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between them they secured him easily. The man who had hold of me let go and turned to his rescue, but I leaped up like a spring released, and, to my infinite satisfaction, knocked the fellow down. The other footman, bleeding at the mouth and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the room. My late captor, without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the battle was won. Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the pinioned Mr Burrows.

To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.

“And now, gentlemen,” he said, “since you have got your own way, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us what the deuce all this is?”

“This,” said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive, “this is what we call the survival of the fittest.”

Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he sang out quite coolly:

“Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.”

“All right,” said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured way in an armchair. “Don’t hurry for us,” he said, glancing round at the litter of the room, “we have all the illustrated papers.”

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil’s voice continuing conversationally:

“And now, Mr Burrows,” he said, settling himself sociably in the chair, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on with that amusing argument. I’m sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the floor, and, as I told you before, I’ve no more notion why you are there than the man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public.”

“Precisely,” said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. “I hold that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can be…”

And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy. Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper into the under-world of that mysterious house, which, perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human secret locked below.

The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry, the servants’ hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted room.

Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an abyss:

“Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are free.”

For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman, drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.

“Has anybody got a match?” said Rupert grimly. “I fancy we have come pretty near the end of this business.”

I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare, yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped, leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical—an iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of the captive.

At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one place; at the place where Rupert’s knife had torn a great opening in the wood about an hour before.

“Madam,” said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, “permit me to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue.”

The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:

“Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had rescued me?”

“Yes, madam,” said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. “We have very satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled affairs with them very satisfactorily.”

The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.

“What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?” she cried.

“We persuaded them, my dear madam,” said Rupert, laughing, “by knocking them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?”

To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat by the window.

“Do I understand,” she said, with the air of a person about to begin knitting, “that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?”

“We have,” said Rupert proudly; “we have resisted their oppression and conquered it.”

“Oh, thanks,” answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.

A considerable pause followed.

“The road is quite clear for you, madam,” said Rupert pleasantly.

The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us for an instant.

“But what about Greenwood and Burrows?” she said. “What did I understand you to say had become of them?”

“They are lying on the floor upstairs,” said Rupert, chuckling. “Tied hand and foot.”

“Well, that settles it,” said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang into her seat again, “I must stop where I am.”

Rupert looked bewildered.

“Stop where you are?” he said. “Why should you stop any longer where you are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?”

“The question rather is,” said the old lady, with composure, “what power can force me to go anywhere else?”

We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.

At last I said, “Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you here?”

“I suppose you don’t intend to tie me up,” she said, “and carry me off? I certainly shall not go otherwise.”

“But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, “we heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”

“Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive grimly. “I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”

“Some sense of honour?” repeated Rupert, and the last light of intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with rolling eyes.

He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. “Can we do nothing for you, madam?” I said forlornly.

“Why,” said the lady, “if you are particularly anxious to do me a little favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.”

Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the sitting-room and scene of battle.

“Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,” Mr Burrows was saying, lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; “but we must consider the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality…”

“Basil,” cried Rupert, gasping, “she won’t come out.”

“Who won’t come out?” asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted in an argument.

“The lady downstairs,” replied Rupert. “The lady who was locked up. She won’t come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these fellows loose.”

“And a jolly sensible suggestion,” cried Basil, and with a bound he was on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds with hands and teeth.

“A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood.”

In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on