Kitabı oku: «The Innocence of Father Brown / Неведение отца Брауна», sayfa 3

“A man cannot behead with a bodkin,” said Brown calmly, “and for this murder beheading was absolutely necessary.”

“Why?” asked O'Brien, with interest.

“And the next question?” asked Father Brown.

“Well, why didn't the man cry out or anything?” asked the doctor; “sabres in gardens are certainly unusual.”

“ Twigs,” said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window which looked on the scene of death. “No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from any tree? They were not snapped off; they were chopped off. The murderer occupied his enemy with some tricks with the sabre, showing how he could cut a branch in mid-air, or what-not⁵². Then, while his enemy bent down to see the result, a silent slash, and the head fell.”

“Well,” said the doctor slowly, “that seems possible enough. But my next two questions will confuse anyone.”

The priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.

“You know how all the garden was sealed up like an airtight chamber,” went on the doctor. “Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?”

Without turning round, the little priest answered: “There never was any strange man in the garden.”

There was a silence, and then a sudden laughter diminished the strain. The absurdity of Brown's remark made Ivan tease him.

“Oh!” he cried; “then we didn't lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last night? He hadn't got into the garden, I suppose?”

“Got into the garden?” repeated Brown reflectively. “No, not entirely.”

“Just tell us all,” cried Simon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn't.”

“Not necessarily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. “What is the nest question, doctor?”

“I fancy you're ill,” exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; “but I'll ask the next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“He didn't get out of the garden,” said the priest, still looking out of the window.

“Didn't get out of the garden?” exploded Simon.

“Not completely,” said Father Brown.

“A man gets out of a garden, or he doesn't,” cried Simon.

“Not always,” said Father Brown.

Dr. Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. “I have no time to spare on such senseless talk,” he cried angrily.

“Doctor,” said the cleric very gently, “we have always got on very pleasantly together. For the sake of old friendship⁵³, stop and tell me your fifth question.”

The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: “The head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done after death.”

“Yes,” said the motionless priest, “it was done to make you believe that the head belonged to the body.”

Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the window, with his face in shadow; but even in that shadow they could see it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless, he spoke quite sensibly.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you did not find the strange body of Becker in the garden. You did not find any strange body in the garden. I still affirm that Becker was only partly present. Look here!” (pointing to the black bulk of the mysterious corpse) “you never saw that man in your lives. Did you ever see this man?”

He rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown, and put in its place the white-haired head beside it. And there, complete, unmistakable, lay Julius K. Brayne.

“The murderer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his enemy's head and flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to clap on another head to the corpse, and you all imagined a totally new man.”

“Clap on another head!” said O'Brien staring. “What other head? Heads don't grow on garden bushes, do they?”

“No,” said Father Brown, looking at his boots; “there is only one place where they grow. They grow in the basket of the guillotine, beside which the chief of police, Aristide Valentin, was standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my friends, hear me a minute more before you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an honest man, if being mad for an arguable cause is honesty⁵⁴. But did you never see in that cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, to break what he calls the superstition of the Cross⁵⁵. He has fought for it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Valentin heard a whisper that the millionaire Brayne was drifting to us; and that was quite a different thing. Brayne would give money to the impoverished Church of France; he would support six Nationalist newspapers like The Guillotine. He resolved to destroy the millionaire, and he did it as the greatest of detectives would commit his own crime. He abstracted the severed head⁵⁶ of Becker on some criminological excuse, and took it home in his official box. He had that last argument with Brayne, then led him out into the garden, talked about swordsmanship, used twigs and a sabre for illustration, and – ”

Ivan of the Scar sprang up. “You lunatic,” he yelled; “you'll go to my master now, if I take you by – 1”

“Why, I was going there,” said Brown heavily; “I must ask him to confess, and all that.”

Pushing the unhappy Brown before them like a hostage or sacrifice, they rushed together into the sudden stillness of Valentin's study.

The great detective sat at his desk apparently too occupied to hear their noisy entrance. They paused a moment, and then something in the look of that upright and elegant back made the doctor run forward suddenly. A touch and a glance showed him that there was a small box of pills at Valentin's elbow, and that Valentin was dead in his chair; and on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato⁵⁷⁵⁸.

The Queer Feet

If you meet a member of that select club, “ The Twelve True Fishermen,” entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter.

If you were to meet a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask him what he thought was the greatest luck of his life, he would probably reply that his best luck was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had prevented a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. But since it is very unlikely that you will ever rise high enough in the social world to find “ The Twelve True Fishermen,” or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all unless you hear it from me.

The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution which can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners⁵⁹. It was that topsy-turvy product. That is, it was a thing which paid⁶⁰ not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by accident, in the corner of a square in Belgravia⁶¹. It was a small hotel; and a very inconvenient one. But its inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a particular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was of vital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four people could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the celebrated terrace table, which stood on a sort of veranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London, so even the twenty-four seats could only be enjoyed in warm weather. The existing owner of the hotel was a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out of it, by making it difficult to get into. But this limitation of his enterprise in size matched the perfect performance. The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe, and the manners of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the English upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them. It was much easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in that hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness, as if he were a gentleman's servant. And, indeed, there was generally at least one waiter to every gentleman who dined.

The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have agreed to dine anywhere but in such a place; and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other club was even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annual dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of demonstrating all their treasures, especially the celebrated set of fish knives and forks which were, as it were⁶², the symbol of the society, being made of silver in the form of a fish, and each decorated with one large pearl. These were always laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the most magnificent in that magnificent meal. The society had a lot of ceremonies, but it had no history and no object; it was just so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anything in order to be one of the Twelve Fishers. It had been in existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president was the Duke of Chester.

Therefore, the reader may wonder how I came to know anything about it, and how so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came to find himself in that institution. As far as that is concerned, my story is simple, or even vulgar. As it happened, one of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish employer had agreed to send for the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father Brown we are not concerned⁶³, for the reason that that cleric kept it to himself; but he was obliged to write out some note or statement. So Father Brown, with a meek impudence which he would have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be given a room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man who disliked any difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned. There was never any anteroom in the Vernon Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance. There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family. Moreover, the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere glimpse of him might speed up a crisis in the club. Mr. Lever at last hit on a smart plan⁶⁴. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass down a short passage, and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right into passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately on your left hand is the corner of a glass office, in which sat the representative of the proprietor, and just beyond the office, on the way to the servants' quarters, was the gentlemen's cloak room. But between the office and the cloak room was a small private room without other exit, sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters, such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or refusing to lend him sixpence. On that occasion, Mr. Lever permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour used by the priest. The story which Father Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this one, only it will never be known.

The time of darkness and dinner was drawing on; his little room was without a light. As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document, he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a regular noise outside. When he became conscious of the thing he found what it was: just the ordinary patter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very unlikely matter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened to the sound. After he had listened for a few seconds, he got to his feet and listened intently, with his head a little on one side. Then he sat down again and buried his brow in his hands, now not merely listening, but listening and thinking also.

There was something very strange about the footsteps. There were no other steps. It was a very silent house, for the guests went at once to their own apartments, and the well-trained waiters were told to be invisible until they were wanted. Nothing irregular could happen there. But these footsteps were so odd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular.

First, there came rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp. The moment the last stamp had died away, the run of light, hurrying feet would come again, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It was certainly the same pair of boots, because they had a small but unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? The man was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in order to walk very slow down the other half; or he was walking very slow at one end to have the pleasure of walking fast at the other. Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think steadily, his thoughts grew more vivid; he began to have a vision of the fantastic feet hopping along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle⁶⁵, or they sit still. It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. That heavy, springy step belonged to a gentleman of Western Europe, and probably one who had never worked for his living.

Just as he came to this conclusion, the step changed to the quicker one, and ran past the door. This step was much swifter and it was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe. Surely he had heard that strange, swift walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct exit to the passage. He tried the door into the office, and found it locked. Then he looked at the window, now purple of the sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil⁶⁶ as a dog smells rats.

He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come later to set him free. He reminded himselfthat there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work. He had written for about twenty minutes, then suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man had walked, this time he ran. Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man. Yet, when the sound had reached the office, it suddenly changed again to the slow gait.

Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. The attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because the only guests were at dinner. After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the cloak room ended up with a half-door, like a counter, across which we have all handed umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light above the arch of this opening in which he saw the man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

He was an elegant, tall man in very plain evening dress. His face was dark and vivacious, the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners confident; a critic could only say that his black coat even bulged and bagged in an odd way. The moment he caught sight of Brown's black silhouette against the sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called out with amiable authority: “I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have to go away at once.”

Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look for the coat. He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeling in his waistcoat pocket, said laughing: “I haven't got any silver; you can keep this.” And he threw down half a sovereign, and took his coat.

Father Brown's figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.

“I think, sir,” he said civilly, “that you have some silver in your pocket.”

The tall gentleman stared. “Hang it⁶⁷,” he cried, “if I choose to give you gold, why should you complain?”

“Because silver is sometimes more valuable than gold,” said the priest mildly; “that is, in large quantities.”

The stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still more curiously up the passage towards the main entrance. Then he looked back at Brown again, and then he looked very carefully at the window beyond Brown's head, still coloured with the sunset. Then he seemed to make up his mind⁶⁸. He put one hand on the counter, jumped over as easily as an acrobat and stood above the priest, putting one tremendous hand upon his collar.

“Stand still,” he said, in a whisper. “I don't want to threaten you, but —”

“I do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, “I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched⁶⁹.”

“You're a strange sort of cloak-room clerk,” said the other.

“I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau,” said Brown, “and I am ready to hear your confession.”

The other stood staring for a few moments, and then staggered back into a chair.

The first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen had gone with success. There was a tradition in the club that the hors d'oeuvres should be various to the point of madness. There was also a tradition that the soup course should be light to prepare the guests for the coming feast of fish. The talk was about politics and politicians. Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who was a kind of symbol of the society. He had never done anything – not even anything wrong. He was simply in the thing; no party could ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would have been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth, with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough. In private, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly, like a schoolboy.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table, and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace in the most luxurious style, along the inner side of the table, with no one opposite, enjoying a view of the garden, the colours of which were still vivid. The chairman sat in the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end of it. When the twelve guests first walked into their seats it was the custom for all the fifteen waiters to stand lining the wall, while the fat proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he had never heard of them before. But only the one or two stayed to collect and distribute the plates rushing about in deathly silence. Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared long before. But when the fish course was being brought on, there was a sort of his shadow in the air, which told that he was nearby. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost as much as the silver fork it was eaten with. This course was dealt with in silence; and it was only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual remark: “They can't do this anywhere but here.”

“Nowhere,” said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker and nodding his head a number of times. “Nowhere, except here. They told me that at the Cafe Anglais —”

Here he was interrupted for a moment by the removal of his plate, but then he continued. “ They told me that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais. Nothing like it, sir,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing like it.”

“Overrated place,” said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look of him) for the first time for some months.

“Oh, I don't know,” said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, “it's jolly good for some things. You can't beat – ”

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was so unexpected that the gentlemen felt as you and I would feel if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood staring a few seconds, then he turned round and ran madly out of the room.

When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in company with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated with southern fierceness. Then the first waiter went away, leaving the second waiter, and reapp eared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth waiter had joined them, Mr. Audley felt it necessary to break the silence. He used a very loud cough, instead of a presidential hammer, and said: “Splendid work is being done in Burmah⁷⁰. Now, no other nation in the world could have —”

A fifth waiter had run towards him like an arrow, and was whispering in his ear: “So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?”

The chairman saw Mr. Lever coming towards them. The gait of the good proprietor was indeed his usual gait, but his face was by no means usual. Generally it was copper-brown; now it was sickly yellow.

“You will pardon me, Mr. Audley,” he said. “I have a great fear. Your fish-plates, they are cleared away with the knife and fork on them!”

“Well, I hope so,” said the chairman.

“You see him?” asked the excited hotel keeper; “you see the waiter who took them away? You know him?”

“Know the waiter?” answered Mr. Audley indignantly. “Certainly not!”

“I never send him,” he said. “I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away the plates, and he find them already away.”

Mr. Audley still looked rather too confused to be really the man the empire wants; none of the company could say anything except Colonel Pound. He rose from his chair and spoke in a raucous voice. “Do you mean,” he said, “that somebody has stolen our silver fish service?”

The proprietor opened his hands with gesture of great helplessness and in a moment all the men at the table were on their feet.

“Are all your waiters here?” demanded the colonel.

“Yes; they're all here. I noticed it myself,” cried the young duke. “Always count 'em as I come in; they look so queer standing up against the wall.”

“But surely one cannot exactly remember,” began Mr. Audley, with hesitation.

“I remember exactly, I tell you,” cried the duke excitedly. “ There never have been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were no more than fifteen tonight, I'll swear; no more and no less.”

The proprietor turned upon him. “You say – you say,” he stammered, “that you see all my fifteen waiters?”

“As usual,” added the duke. “What is the matter with that!”

“Nothing,” said Lever, “only you did not. For one of zem is dead upstairs.”

There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. One of them, the duke, said with the idiotic kindness: “Is there anything we can do?”

“He has had a priest,” said the Jew.

The colonel flung over his chair and strode to the door. “If there was a fifteenth man here, friends,” he said, “that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front and back doors and secure everything; then we'll talk. The twenty-four pearls of the club are worth searching.”

Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly to be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down the stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more quiet motion.

At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared that he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of the silver.

The crowd of diners and attendants divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed the proprietor to the front room leading to the exit. Colonel Pound, with the chairman, the vice-president, and one or two others darted down the corridor leading to the servants' quarters, as the more likely line of escape. As they did so they passed the cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated figure, probably an attendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it.

“Hallo, there!” called out the duke. “Have you seen anyone pass?”

The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said: “Perhaps I have got what you are looking for, gentlemen.”

They paused, wondering, while he quietly went to the back of the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shining silver, which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took the form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.

“You – you —” began the colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last. Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, that the short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman; and, second, that the window of the room behind him was burst, as if someone had passed violently through. “Valuable things to deposit in a cloak room, aren't they?” remarked the clergyman.

“Did – did you steal those things?” stammered Mr. Audley, with staring eyes.

“If I did,” said the cleric pleasantly, “at least I am bringing them back again.”

“But you didn't,” said Colonel Pound, still staring at the broken window.

“No, I didn't,” said the other, with some humour. And he seated himself quite gravely on a stool.

“But you know who did,” said the colonel.

“I don't know his real name,” said the priest, “but I formed the physical estimate when he was trying to throttle me, and the moral estimate when he repented.”

“Oh, I say – repented!” cried young Chester, laughing.

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. “Odd, isn't it,” he said, “that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon my field. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there are all your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men.”

“Did you catch this man?” asked the colonel, frowning.

Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. “Yes,” he said, “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line.”

There was a long silence. All the other men present went away but the grim-faced colonel still sat on the counter, swinging his long legs and biting his dark moustache.

At last he said quietly to the priest: “He must have been a clever fellow, but I think I know a cleverer.”

“He was a clever fellow,” answered the other, “but I am not quite sure of what other you mean.”

“I mean you,” said the colonel, with a short laugh. “I don't want to get the fellow jailed. But I'd give a good many silver forks to know exactly how you fell into this affair, and how you got the stuff out of him. I reckon you're the most up-to-date devil of the present company.”

Father Brown hopped over the barrier with unexpected activity, and sat beside Colonel Pound, kicking his short legs like a little boy on a gate.

“You see, colonel,” he said, “I was shut up in that small room there doing some writing, when I heard a pair of feet in this passage. First came quick, funny little steps, like a man walking on tiptoe⁷¹; then came slow, creaking steps, as of a big man walking about with a cigar. But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came in turn; first the run and then the walk, and then the run again. I wondered at first why a man should act these two parts at once. One walk I knew; it was just like yours, colonel. It was the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something. Then I heard a clink of plates somewhere; and the answer was ready. It was the walk of a waiter – that walk with the body bent forward, the eyes looking down. Then I thought for a minute and a half more. And I believe I saw the crime, as clearly as if I were going to commit it.”

Colonel Pound looked at him.

“A crime,” he said slowly, “is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised; every work of art has one necessary mark – I mean, that the centre of it is always simple. There is the dead waiter. There is the invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and melted into air⁷². But every clever crime is founded on some one quite simple fact. This crime was built on the plain fact that a gentleman's evening dress is the same as a waiter's. All the rest was acting, and good acting, too.”

“Still,” said the colonel, getting up and frowning, “I am not sure that I understand.”

“Colonel,” said Father Brown, “I tell you that this person walked up and down this passage twenty times in the light of all the lamps. He did not go and hide, he kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, and everywhere that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don't ask me what he was like; you have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight. Whenever he came among you gentlemen, he came in the style of a waiter, with bent head. By the time he had come under the eye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man, in every gesture. He strolled among the servants with the absent-minded arrogance which they have all seen in their patrons. Why should the gentlemen look at a chance waiter? Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walking gentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the proprietor's private quarters he called out for a syphon of soda water, saying he was thirsty. He said that he would carry it himself, and he did. Of course, it could not have been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end of the fish course.