r
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 common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly
Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the
dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable
success.

"Well," he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
slapping them together, "here we are at last."

The wind swirled sadly over the homeles