by G.K. Chesterton

We have all had dreams or memories about some gang of pirates, grim to the point of the grotesque, as they were in the story-books of childhood, who yet pointed with awe, and almost with horror, at some super-pirate in the background; a solitary and sinister figure, compared with whose unsearchable wickedness they were all as in­nocent as an infant school. Such was the attitude of the hard-headed and acquisitive business men of Bison City, Ill., U.S.A., towards a certain Mr. Crake, who had committed the Unpardonable Sin.

He committed it at a luncheon party of the B.B.B., supposed by some to stand for “Better and Brighter Bisons,” but by the more moderate for “Better and Brighter Business.” The room in the large hotel was already decorated with American flags and also with bright bunches of Ameri­can ladies, the beauty and fashion of Bison City, who were allowed to lean over the stone balustrade of the gallery and look down on the Bi­sons feeding. But the Bisons themselves were rather late, as is the habit of the brisk business-like salesmen of those parts; and for some time there was only one lean, leathery, bilious-looking man, whose profound gloom was relieved by a large disc or label on his coat, inscribed, “Call me Johnny.” After a time, however, similar revellers arrived with simi­lar decorations; notably a light-haired withered little man, whose label bore the blazon of, “Please, I’m Tom,” and a very hearty, heavy man, with dark sleek hair, whose disc was adorned with the words, “Oh, Boy, I’m Little Frankie.” As the seats gradually filled up, it was seen that all the guests were decked with such gay proclamations, except two. One of these was evidently a guest of importance from outside: a compact, carefully dressed man, with yellow hair, which shone like yel­low soap. The other sat further down the table, dark and angular, with a hatched face, which was yet somehow handsome, and a rather sullen expression. This was John P. Crake; but there was no invitation, either in his dress or his demeanour, to call him Johnny.

He was far from being an outcast, however; his fellow-townsmen being only too delighted to recite the precise number of dollars which he made every week in the biggest business in that neighbourhood. For Americans, who are accused of loving money, have this most gen­erous trait: that they can actually love each other’s money. They were ready to put it down to his being “sick,” in the American sense, if he really failed to rejoice in the eloquence round him. That anybody could be sick of it, in the English sense, never crossed their minds. He heard the big dark Bison still orating: “. . . A man like that’s just God’s own American citizen and won’t stay down. He goes right out for the highest ideal in sight. He won’t stay ‘put’ with ten thousand dollars when there’s twenty thousand dollars knocking around. Now we figure that about the highest ideal going is this Service. . . .” As in a dream, Crake heard the voice change, and knew that the yellow­haired politician was speaking: “. . . Here on false pretences, gentle­men. I am not a Bison. Nor was George Washington; but he would have been. (Cheers.) Wasn’t it just this ideal of Service. . . .” There were more cheers, silence, a little commotion, and Crake heard his own name. Everybody was looking at him; the fat dark man was waving florid compliments at him; they wanted a speech; a speech from the first citizen of Bison City. He refused. They cheered and hammered the table as if he had accepted. He refused again. They called for him again. The man from Washington, shining all over with diplomacy and yellow soap, insinuated his persuasion; could not be expected to leave Bison City without hearing its greatest American citizen. John P. Crake boiled with black indescribable rage and shot suddenly and rigidly to his feet. He began in a harsh jarring voice:

“Gentlemen. We’re all here to tell lies, and I’ll begin with that one. Gentlemen.” He gazed round at the somewhat startled audience and went on: “We all tell lies in business, because we only want to make money; but I can’t see why the hell we should tell lies for fun in the lunch hour. I don’t care a blasted button for Service, and I don’t in­tend to be anybody’s servant; certainly not yours. Every business man here wants to make money for himself, including me; and though he may use other men, he doesn’t care if they’re dead and damned when he’s used them. That’s the reality, and I like doing business with realities. As for ideals, I’ve nothing to say of them except that they make me sick as a dog.” He sat down more slowly and with a greater air of calm and relief.

It would be hard to say how the luncheon party broke up; but the first to come was the last to go. For, as Crake went out of the room, he found the lean bilious man looking more unpleasant than ever, be­cause his face was deformed with a smile.

“Good for you,” he said, showing his yellow teeth. “I daren’t do it; I have to wear this fool thing. But that’s the way to get on top. Treat ‘em like dirt.” After a pause, he added: “Say, can I see you about that consignment?”

“Come round to my office at four,” said Crake abstractedly, and went out.

At four he was going through a pile of letters, not without a grim smile. Personal letters had already begun to arrive, sent round by hand as a sequel to his disgraceful outburst. Ladies especially, whom he had never seen in his life, remonstrated with him at enormous length over his unfamiliarity with Ideals. Some recommended par­ticular books, especially their own books; some particular ministers, at whose feet a taste for ideals might be imbibed. As he turned them over, the bilious man was shown in, a certain J. Jackson Drill, a broker, and, incidentally, a bootlegger. Crake pushed the papers across to him with a gesture of contempt; a contempt, it is to be feared, which included Mr. Drill as well as the papers. For Crake was inconsistent, like many such men; and did not really like the dirty pessimism of Jackson Drill any more than the greasy optimism of Little Frankie. Perhaps the cynic does not respect somebody else’s cynicism.

Drill picked up the letters with his unpleasing grin, and began reading fragments aloud: “. . . If your ideals do not satisfy you, I am sure you have not heard the real message of the Broad Daylight Church, which promises spiritual progress and business success for all. The Church is now in serious need of funds. . . .” Drill dropped the letter and took up another: “. . . May a sister in the sight of God express her grief at the dreadful avowal revealing your spiritual state touching dollars. Wealth is worthless in itself (seem to be a lot of Bible references here; handwriting very illiterate); it is a means to an end, and some of our wealthiest citizens set a noble example. . . .” Drill picked up a third letter, remarking, “Not so illiterate; nice hand­writing,” but continued in the same derisive sing-song, “I have been thinking about what you said today, and I cannot decide whether it was the Only Way. Of course, I see your point. If these people go on being idealists, there won’t be a decent ideal, or a decent idea left in the world. Somebody must do something to stop their befouling everything. Courage has come to mean readiness to risk other people’s money. Service has come to mean servility to any rich man who wad­dles along.”

Crake had lifted his head and was listening, suddenly alert with curiosity, but the other went droning on:

“Somebody must do something; and you did do something. You broke the back of it with sheer brutality; but I can’t help wondering whether there isn’t another way. I expect you’ve wondered yourself; because you are not a brute. You’re supposed to be sulky because you are always longing for a little time to yourself, to think these things out. So am I.”

“Here,” said Crake sharply, “give me that letter.”

“Rather a scream, isn’t it?” said Drill; “it goes on, ‘If we can’t shut off this deafening nonsense, we shall have no inner life at all. . . .’ “ Crake snatched the letter out of his companion’s hand with a vio­lence that tore it across at the corner. Then he spread it out before him and looked at Drill; and Drill knew that he was not wanted in that room any more.

The letter was an extraordinary letter. The extracts he had heard gave no real idea of it. There were moments when he thought he was reading his own diary. In some cases it was rather as if he were look­ing into his own subconsciousness. It was signed with an evasive fe­male pen-name, and had an address that was no clue to identity. Yet he was not primarily impressed with how much, or rather how little, he knew about the writer. He was impressed with how much the writer knew about him. She knew one thing at least, which he hardly knew himself till he had done reading. That he hated ideals and idealism because he was himself very much too bitter and fastidious an idealist. That he hated his wealth and his work and his fellow-workmen because of an unnamed comparison and because his kingdom was not of this world. He sat down and wrote a long and even laborious letter in reply; the beginning of a prolonged private correspondence that spread over years. And through all those years he never made an effort (so strong was something in him making for refinement and renunciation) to find out the name or dwelling of the woman who was his best friend.

For some little time Bison City did regard Mr. Crake as something between a leper, a lunatic, a wicked wizard commanding the elements and the blasphemer whose duty it is to be struck by lightning in the religious tracts of that region. Americans do not worship riches in the sense of forgiving anything to the rich; and they do not easily forgive a blasphemy against the gods whom they do worship. Mr. Crake had defied the gods of the tribe that were of stone and brass-especially brass. He had violated the highest morality of Bison City, which is well named, because its morality consists of going at anything with your head down. Yet, strangely enough, Mr. Crake grew happier as time went on, and even more good humoured with his fellows; so that his unpopularity began to fade away. In fact, his loneliness was ended. He no longer boiled with an incommunicable disgust. He poured out his feelings every night in long letters to his unknown friend; and received letters which had a slow but steady effect of restoring him to sanity and even to sociability. In this respect his invisible companion both puzzled and pleased him. She had read much more than he, though he was not an uncultivated man; but she seemed to have reached a balance from the study of opposite extremes. Left alone, with one book at a time, he might have been tempted to go mad like Nietzsche or turn peasant like Tolstoy. But she seemed to have accepted all the abnormalities and then returned to the normal. She was sufficiently cultured to know even the case against culture; and he could not shock her by cursing books as he shocked Bison City by cursing busi­ness. The result was that, unknown to himself and by minute gradations, he was turning from a monomaniac into a man. And then, one fine day, something happened to him, that suddenly revealed to him his manhood; which came on him with a rush like a return of boyhood.

And the strangest thing about it was this: That when he sat down, on the evening of that fine day, to write the letter that had become like a diary, to be read only by a second self, he found for the first time that he could not write. At least it seemed in a new unnatural way impossible . . . almost indecent. Nothing might seem more re­mote than that relation; yet his friend had always remained a woman; the mere fact, the slope of the feminine handwriting, a hundred deli­cate details, had left hanging over the affair that distant and disem­bodied sentiment that can never be conjured away; something like the smell of old gardens or that dust of dead roses that was preserved in old bowls and cabinets. He knew now that he had been living through a long convalescence in the large rooms of some such ancient and quiet house; under the large tact of an invisible hostess. And what had just happened to him, in the street outside, was so vivid and vio­lent, so concrete, so incongruous. After poising his pen for a moment of doubt, he dismissed the matter, and only answered her remarks about the poetry of Claudel. And then a strange thing happened; giv­ing him a rather terrifying sense of being watched in that house of healing by an all-seeing eye. For she wrote, in her next letter, quite casually and even humorously: “Something has happened to you. I was very much interested in what you did not tell me.”

Then he told her; but it was an effort, and he felt for the first time that he was living in two worlds. As he walked where the town opened into a country road, he had suddenly realised that he was happy. His cure was complete. The disease of disdain for common things no longer devoured his brain, and yet his appreciation of the common was no nearer to the vulgar. Indeed, the common things around him, the stones in the road, the weeds in the ditch, stood out with a distinctness that was the reverse of flat. It was as if he had felt the third dimension for the first time. It reminded him of something his friend had said about religion, as compared with the mere herding both of Capitalism and Communism. “There is a delicacy about the Day of Judgment.” It was at least supposed to deal with individuals. “Yes, that is it,” he said to himself. “They used to say in the sight of God we are all equal. But if you only say that, it sounds flat; like all those flat-faced Bisons. No, in the sight of God we are all distinguished. We may be damned; but, damn it all, we’re distinguished.”

He was wandering away into the nondescript landscape outside the wooden town, dotted with frame-houses and the thin trees of those plains, now lit up with the delicate clarity of the Indian summer. A born critic, born in a world where criticism is rare, he had often felt something frail and collapsible about the frame-houses of his country; as if they would fold up flat like a portable stage; something of the nomadism of a travelling show. But in his new normal mood it pleased him-not so much that they should shut as that they could open-as a child is pleased when a hinged toy opens like a telescope. Then some­thing happened which showed sharply how very new was the mood, and even how very abnormal was the normality. He caught sight of a string stretched across a backyard, with some coloured clothes hanging on it; some of them seemed to be blouses or pinafores such as artists wear; some pyjamas of a garish cut and pattern. Before he had begun to browse in that great library of his literary correspondence, he would have felt the sight as the most unsightly sort of commonplace. A woman hanging out the washing would have been something on a level with the Comic Strip in the loathsome local paper. But at this queer moment of his life he actually liked it. The headless figures of the shirts, the danc­ing legs of the pantaloons looked like giant marionettes acting a panto­mime in the sunlight of Italy; the stripes and patches of crude colour had the note of carnival. He thought inconsequently of the double fate of the word “Pantaloon.” A very strenuous young woman was strug­gling with the line; and her copper hair in the sun gave a touch that brought to life the colours of a blue and green frock fluttering behind her. The garments on the line were puffed out by the wind into prepos­terous shapes of hollow solidity; and just at that moment a very big one, looking like a complete suit of yellow, broke from its peg and went careering across the bushes towards him, like some fat yellow buf­foon dancing across the countryside. He made one wild leap and caught the runaway, which collapsed like a balloon and then hung like a rag; and, bounding across the grass plots and pathways, solemnly handed it to the young woman, who was already laughing.

“Oh, thank you very much,” she said, “that’s Uncle Bill. He’s sup­posed to be an artist and likes yellow. Used to have to do with some­thing called the Yellow Book.”

“The Yellow Peril, I should think,” said Crake, “but artists are proverbially liable to abscond.”

“So all my business uncles tell me,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand either sort. They would never condescend to run after the washing.”

“I wish they ran after anything so clean,” replied Crake. “In the business and politics I’ve seen-Well, there isn’t any washing, only whitewashing.”

She was looking at him in an unembarrassed manner, slightly amused; she had a square, open face which would have been even conventionally handsome if her wide, blue eyes had not been a shade too far apart; everything else about her expressed only the strength and strenuous bodily vigour of her first attitude; and she had one trick that is only found in people who are physically almost perfect. When she was not darting and dashing about she stood absolutely still.

His eyes strayed towards the little wooden house to which the yard was attached; and she answered his unspoken question without losing her steady smile.

“No, I’m not the Hired Help; I rather doubt if I’m a Help at all. But the rest of the family’s out.”

“Ah, of course,” he said, “the yellow gentleman is your uncle.” “The Scarlet Woman is my aunt,” she said, indicating another garment. “She has gone to hear a Hindoo who lectures on Health­Spirals and the Super-Gland.”

“I know him,” said Crake gloomily, “he deepens your inner life and gives you tips about Wall Street.”

“The peacock blue and green contraption is my sister,” she went on. “She’s gone to the Purple Possum, the celebrated playground of the New Youth. All very brilliant, I believe, and prides itself espe­cially on being frank. What did you say?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Crake, who had involuntarily murmured, “Oh, boy, I’m Little Frankie.”

“Uncle goes to a speakeasy; but it’s supposed to be one for artists. It’s all too intellectual for me. Will you come inside?”

“Intellectuals haven’t intellect enough to boil an egg,” he said as he went inside. “I’m all for the eggs.”

And as he went in through the sheds and sculleries and kitchen, bowing his head a little, something was whispering in his ear: “You will not return; you will not come back free; you are going into a new world; a little, real world. You are going to live in a dolls’ house; and you will come out a doll.”

And the change that was already in his heart made him answer with a challenge: “What a fool Ibsen was,” he muttered. “What could be jollier than living in a dolls’ house?”

And when he went through the dark interior and saw at last the light from the front windows, it was not the dead daylight he had left behind; for those windows looked on to the strange streets of some other star; he was in love.

A few days afterwards, with his head full of these new things, that capered in many colours like the headless puppets in the sun, he came back suddenly into the cool shadow of that older friendship in which he had lived so long. He opened the letter, which went straight to the point, silently and from within, as was her strange habit.

“You understood my first letter at once; when most men would have thought I was mad. You will understand that this is my last letter quite as easily. You will not think any of the vulgar things: jealousy or the fear that somebody else will be jealous. You could not be vulgar; at first you had almost nothing except not being vul­gar. You began with nothing but a hatred; but I knew your hatred was noble, and I know your love would be noble. No; it is not that sort of obvious difficulty at all. We must end here because we have gone round the whole world and thought as far as thinking will go. That is not conceit; it is not a question of knowing everything now, but of being ready to understand anybody at any time. You would not melt into a Regular Guy; you did not dry up into a Superman; and after that you will become a man and understand all men. We must end now, because of all those who have thus understood all things, from the cedar to the hyssop, hardly any (not even Solomon himself) have resisted the temptation to say a last word, to sum it all up, and to say, Vanity of Vanities. Let us, let me at least, resist the temptation, and say, not Vanitas, but only Vale … Farewell.”

John Crake sat down and wrote a long and earnest and delicate letter of thanks, surveying all the thousand things that he had gained in that voyage round the world with that invisible companion. Then he sprang up like a spring released and rushed down the road like a boy freed from school; all the noises of nature seemed to be shouting and cheering him on, for he felt for the first time that he had a body, and it was racing to outstrip his soul.

Before that autumn had turned to winter he was married to Mary Wendover, the lady of the clothes-line; and it is typical of the tail fore­most or back-door fashion of his introduction that he never knew her name was Wendover until about a month after he knew it was Mary. She was apparently a guest in the house of her relative; but the guest seemed to do all the work while the hosts pursued self-development. “Very self-development,” said Crake, “but I think, as usual, the Cin­derella was the favourite of the fairies.” And indeed she seemed to show a more artistic ardour for pots and pans than they did for arts; as if the teapot were indeed a familiar goblin or the broom a benevolent witch’s broomstick. After their marriage her creative concentration increased; and Crake, remembering his own chance words of encouragement, felt it natural to be infected with the same fury of efficiency. He wanted to deal with things directly, with his own hands, as she did; and he an­nounced one day that he had sold out his business and was going to work a farm he had about ten miles from the city. She only laughed, and said: “I thought you were already doing business with realities.”

“Why,” he cried, “that is out of my celebrated disgraceful speech. I didn’t know……

“You must have known ladies are allowed to overhear Bisons eating,” she said.

“Well, it shows how little I knew in those days. Business men do business with unrealities. Only with unrealities. With rubber forests nobody has seen or ivory from elephants who might be fabulous like unicorns. I want to cut down a real tree and ride a real horse and be real.”

Indeed, there was a reality in their very romance; and their com­mon passion went back to its romantic origin. Slight as had been the gesture of their introduction, it had been active and abrupt. What he had seen had been a woman wrestling with a rope; and what she had seen had been a man bounding over a bush; and all their love and life went with that gallop of bodily vigour and the high gestures of the mastery of man.

It was about three years later, and, save for the noise of two children in the old farmhouse, a man would have said that their whole life was unchanged. He still rode his horses round the farm, and his body was still young enough to find automatic exultation in the exercise; she still practised a hundred arts and crafts under the name of housekeeping, and would have let loose a violent scorn against anyone who called it drudgery. They both enjoyed to the full the pleasure of doing things well, and there are few pleasures more enduring; and yet a more subtle critic might have said that things were changed. But John Crake could only think of one critic who would have been subtle enough to say it.

Perhaps it was a proof that things were changed that he had thought of that subtle critic at all. But he did now recall that cooler background of friendship, and told himself that she would have un­derstood. Above all, she would not have misunderstood. She would not have been cheap, and supposed that he was merely tired of his wife. In reality, he was not tired in the least. He felt that he wanted her and he had missed her, in spite of having married her. Moreover, there grew upon him a dull pain in the feeling that his wife herself had become sad and estranged. He had seen her staring out of the window on bright summer days; and her face was sadder for the sunlight. Her plunging practicality was often interrupted by her sudden stillness. She liked more and more to be alone. John Crake was no fool, and would have thought nothing of these moods if they had occurred in a moody person. If she had been of the sentimental sort it would not have distressed him much even if he had thought (as he was sometimes inclined to think) that they were somehow connected with personal memories, and even with personal memories of another person. He was shrewd enough to know that romances do very little harm to the romantic. The sort of person for whom lost loves or faded fancies can be stirred by music or turned into minor poetry is generally the sort of person who can indulge them without much danger to the solid loyalties of life. But Mary Crake was not particularly romantic; and certainly the very reverse of sentimental. She had a passion for the practical, for translating thoughts into things. She would no more desire to have a romance without turning it into a reality than to have a recipe without turning it into a dish. She could no more have lived on dreams than she could have dined on a cookery book. Ever since he had seen her wrestling with a clothes-line like an Ama­zon lassooing a wild horse, he had been affected by her powerful im­patience and directness of design. People of that sort do not brood for pleasure. If she was brooding, she was suffering.

He, in his turn, brooded long upon that brooding; pacing up and down the long verandah into which was extended the wide porch of the American farmhouse. All round him was that dreary plain that is the incongruous background of that cheery people, and one straight American road ran up to the very steps of his own porch, a road lined with lean, spidery trees. The road ended with the farm, and it seemed to his sullen eye like the road of destiny, that leads so straight to achievement and disappointment. With an abrupt movement, he turned his back upon it, went into his study, and sat down at his desk. Before he had risen from it he had broken the silence of four years, and written to that long-lost friend and counsellor who had never had a name.

He came out again upon the porch, with his sealed and stamped let­ter in his hand, and saw that the long road between the thin trees had a black object upon it, the dark angular figure of a man, with a hat tilted over his eyes, so as to show nothing but a sour grin. It was Jackson Drill, the bootlegger; and Crake had an instant overwhelm­ing sense of repugnance. There had been a time when they were the two cynics of Bison City, and there seemed to be a sort of sympathy in their lack of sympathy. It measured the distance that Crake had really travelled along that road of destiny, that the distant sight of Drill was like the sight of a black scorpion. He had long felt that sort of pessimism was mere poison. The hand that held the letter made an involuntary movement, as if not wishing even the externals of such an understanding to be exposed to such a misunderstanding. The movement, of course, produced the very effect it was meant to avoid.

“Very confidential correspondence, I suppose,” said Drill. “Three years after marriage is about the time they start. In fact, old man, I fear it isn’t the only confidential correspondence in the house.”

Crake said in a very low and restrained voice: “What the devil in hell do you mean?”

Drill laughed with disagreeable agreeableness; for Americans are not afraid to be familiar with their wealthier employers, so far as lan­guage is concerned. “Well,” he said, “if you have your private cor­respondence, why shouldn’t she? By all accounts, she used to have letters, even in the old days, that you didn’t see. That you weren’t meant to see.”

“Oh, indeed?” said Crake, thoughtfully, and hit the man a crack on his crooked mouth that sent him from the top of the steps to the bot­tom, and left him spread-eagled on the flat road below. Then Crake turned and entered his own house in so towering a passion that it might have shaken the topmost chimneys and brought them down.

His wife was sitting with her back to him at a writing-desk, read­ing an old faded letter, and, though he could not see her face, he knew when he first heard her voice that she had been in tears; a terri­ble and portentous thing in her case.

“Who is that letter from?” he asked, with his voice on a dead level.

She rose and faced him, and her low voice rang out:

“Who are you to talk about letters?” she said. “Who is that letter for?”

Then, after a deadly silence, she added, almost grimly: “Give me that letter.”

By G.K. Chesterton

“Why should I?” he answered, frowning at her.

“Oh,” she replied, almost lightly, “only because it is addressed to me.” And with that he looked across at the old letter she was reading, and saw that it was one of those that he had sent to the same address.

There are thirty-seven morals to this story; but one of them is that it is he who has really gone round the whole world who is anxious to come home; that the end of wisdom is the beginning of life; and that God Himself bowed down to enter a narrow door, in the hour when the Word was made flesh.