“Get down to that place?” I repeated blankly. “Get down to what place?”
“I have forgotten its name,” said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in his pockets as he rose. “Something Common near Purley. Has anyone got a timetable?”
“You don’t seriously mean,” cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort of confusion of emotions. “You don’t mean that you want to go to Buxton Common, do you? You can’t mean that!”
“Why shouldn’t I go to Buxton Common?” asked Basil, smiling.
“Why should you?” said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.
“To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,” said Basil Grant. “I thought you wanted to find him?”
Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on the floor. “And in order to find him,” he said, “you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know he can’t be.”
The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on with a reiterated gesture:
“He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of St. Paul’s; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only one where he has just been systematically looked for and where we know that he is not to be found—and that, if I understand you rightly, is where you want us to go.”
“Exactly,” said Basil calmly, getting into his greatcoat; “I thought you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly here till I come back.”
It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if they really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished decisively with his greatcoat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.
“My dear chap,” he cried, “do you really mean that you see any good in going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that came into a rowdy lieutenant’s head when he wanted to give a lying reference in a scrape?”
“Yes,” said Basil, taking out his watch, “and, what’s worse, we’ve lost the train.”
He paused a moment and then added: “As a matter of fact, I think we may just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn’t be in. But if we get down by the 5:15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we shall just catch him.”
“Catch him!” cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. “I wish we could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?”
“I keep forgetting the name of the common,” said Basil, as he buttoned up his coat. “The Elms—what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That’s where we shall find him.”
“But there is no such place,” groaned Rupert; but he followed his brother downstairs.
We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hatstand and our sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from our breakfast table and said: “I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails,” we should have followed him to the end of the world.
I don’t know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God—such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.
There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.
Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell of the windy
