They're not the kind.Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? Iwant to get a paper before the omnibus comes.""Oh, curse the paper!" cried Rupert, in a fury."Do you mean to tell me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch darkness in a private dungeon, because you've had ten minutes' talk with the keepers of it and thought them rather good men?""Good men do commit crimes sometimes," said Basil, taking the ticket out of his mouth."But this kind of good man doesn't commit that kind of crime.Well, shall we get on this omnibus?"The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the dim wide street towards us.Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it and been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.
"Basil," I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, "I simply won't leave this street and this house.""Nor will I," said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers.
"There's some black work going on there.If I left it I should never sleep again."Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.
"Of course if you feel like that," he said, "we'll investigate further.You'll find it's all right, though.They're only two young Oxford fellows.Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this pseudo-Darwinian business.Ethics of evolution and all that.""I think," said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, "that we shall enlighten you further about their ethics.""And may I ask," said Basil gloomily, "what it is that you propose to do?""I propose, first of all," said Rupert, "to get into this house;secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house."Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes.Then he was shaken for an instant with one of his sudden laughs.
"Poor little boys," he said."But it almost serves them right for holding such silly views, after all," and he quaked again with amusement "there's something confoundedly Darwinian about it.""I suppose you mean to help us?" said Rupert.
"Oh, yes, I'll be in it," answered Basil, "if it's only to prevent your doing the poor chaps any harm."He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.
"So sorry to haunt you like this," he said."I met two friends outside who very much want to know you.May I bring them in?""Delighted, of course," said a young voice, the unmistakable voice of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person.He was a short, but shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a square, snub-nosed face.He wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some incredible college purple.
"This way," he said; "mind the steps by the staircase.This house is more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish exterior.There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really.""That," said Rupert, with a savage smile, "I can quite believe."We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines and books ranging from Dante to detective stories.The other youth, who stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly, with dead brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket.He was that particular type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and clumsy, and yet who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.
"Any more arguments?" he said, when introductions had been effected."I must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science such as we.I've half a mind to chuck my D.Sc.and turn minor poet.""Bosh," answered Grant."I never said a word against eminent men of science.What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.When people talked about the fall of man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand.Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.""That is all very well," said the big young man, whose name appeared to be Burrows."Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or the violin, can only be perfectly understood by specialists.Still, the rudiments may be of public use.Greenwood here," indicating the little man in the blazer, "doesn't know one note of music from another.Still, he knows something.He knows enough to take off his hat when they play `God save the King'.He doesn't take it off by mistake when they play `Oh, dem Golden Slippers'.Just in the same way science--"Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly.He was interrupted by an argument uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his throat, and bent the giant backwards.
"Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne," he called out, and before I knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple blazer.He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but I was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise.
I twitched one of his feet from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and then we fell with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.
My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil's voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the beginning.
