“Right you are.”
And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just helping us. It was only five o’clock, but winter and the fog had made it like midnight.
“This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,” I repeated.
“I don’t know,” said Basil humbly. “It leads to Berkeley Square.”
As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and tried to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right. We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London—more dreary, one must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.
“This is very extraordinary!” said Basil Grant, as we turned into Berkeley Square.
“What is extraordinary?” I asked. “I thought you said it was quite natural.”
“I do not wonder,” answered Basil, “at his walking through nasty streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do wonder at his going to the house of a very good man.”
“What very good man?” I asked with exasperation.
“The operation of time is a singular one,” he said with his imperturbable irrelevancy. “It is not a true statement of the case to say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man. I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps of old Beaumont’s house.”
“Who is old Beaumont?” I asked irritably.
“A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood—don’t you know his name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don’t know what; anyhow, he’s a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If you went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a cheap alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it seems a matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the stars or the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands for fear of tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons are generally fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself, good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter there.”
“My good fellow,” I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, “the truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language, you have the ‘slight disadvantage’ of being off your head. You see a total stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an honest man’s door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil, and come home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet with the distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner.”
Basil’s eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.
“I thought,” he said, “that I had outlived vanity.”
“What do you want now?” I cried.
“I want,” he cried out, “what a girl wants when she wears her new frock; I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a monitor—I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know.”
“Do you really mean—?” I began.
“I will apologize,” he said calmly, “for our not being dressed for a call,” and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark stone steps and rang at the bell.
A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving my friend’s name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to respect. We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly but that our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out quickly to meet us.
“My dear fellow,” he cried, shaking Basil’s hand again and again, “I have not seen you for years. Have you been—er—” he said, rather wildly, “have you been in the country?”
“Not for all that time,” answered Basil, smiling. “I have long given up my official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment.”
“An inopportune moment,” cried the ardent gentleman. “You come at the most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?”
“I do not,” answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of laughter came from the inner room.
“Basil,” said Lord Beaumont solemnly, “I have Wimpole here.”
“And who is Wimpole?”
“Basil,” cried the other, “you must have been in the country. You must have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?”
“As to who Shakespeare was,” answered my friend placidly, “my views go no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is—” and his speech
