“Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?”
I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening, that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at Mr. Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, “No.”
Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more and more from his head.
“You are quite sure, Mr. Shorter,” he repeated, “that you don’t know Captain Fraser?”
“Quite,” answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his tone when he first entered my presence.
Basil sprang smartly to his feet.
“Then our course is clear,” he said. “You have not even begun your investigation, my dear Mr. Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go together to see Captain Fraser.”
“When?” asked the clergyman, stammering.
“Now,” said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.
The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.
“I really do not think that it is necessary,” he said.
Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again, and put his hands in his pockets.
“Oh,” he said, with emphasis. “Oh—you don’t think it necessary; then,” and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation, “then, Mr. Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you without your whiskers.”
And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact with an intellect like Basil’s, I had always the feeling that that splendour and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very moment of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a fellow creature, Basil Grant had gone mad.
“Your whiskers,” he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. “Give me your whiskers. And your bald head.”
The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.
“Sit down, Basil,” I implored, “you’re a little excited. Finish your wine.”
“Whiskers,” he answered sternly, “whiskers.”
And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime and a pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.
And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old vicar looked like a sort of farcical fairytale. Moreover, he did not seem to be so much astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of something like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil. In fact, the unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.
At length Shorter was cornered.
“Come, come, Mr. Grant,” he panted, “you can’t do anything to me. It’s quite legal. And it doesn’t do anyone the least harm. It’s only a social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr. Grant.”
“I don’t blame you, my man,” said Basil coolly. “But I want your whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?”
“No, no,” said Mr. Shorter, laughing, “we provide them ourselves. They don’t belong to Captain Fraser.”
“What the deuce does all this mean?” I almost screamed. “Are you all in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr. Shorter’s bald head belong to Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him, Basil.”
“No,” said Grant, “I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you go to Mrs. Thornton’s dinner-party?” I asked, staring. “Why not?”
“Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”
“In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.
Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in. Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner, and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white whiskers and a plaid shawl.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. “Sit down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have liked that, eh?”
The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.
“Basil,” I
