Chapter 4 - Page 2

they are believed or no. If Keith's tales were false he was a liar;
if they were true he had had, at any rate, every opportunity of
being a scamp.

He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his
brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was
invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant
was a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and
cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat
extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it
was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this
boyish incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am
bound to say that I thought him so obviously right that I was
astounded at Basil's opposing him, however banteringly.

I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but
I could not swallow Lieutenant Keith's autobiography.

"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think that
that fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to
be the Mad Mullah and--"

"He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as you
may happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald
a style; he is too veracious."

"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert
contemptuously, "be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance,
that he has lived all his life in one ancestral manor."

"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied Basil
dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That doesn't
prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people
don't understand is that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as
it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of things
Keith recounts are not the sort of things that a man would make up
to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they are
the sort of things that a man would do if he were sufficiently
filled with the soul of skylarking."

"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something rather
like a sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do
you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?"

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil
placidly. "For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and
therefore is congenial to it."

"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy.
"Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the
camera?"

"I believe Keith's words," answered the other.