He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately the whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side of the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness, and coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine attitude as before.
"Get inside! get inside!" cried Moon hilariously, with the air of one shooing a company of cats. "Come, come, be quick about it!
Didn't I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?"
How they were all really driven into the house again it would have been difficult afterwards to say. They had reached the point of being exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce are ill with laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among the trees seemed like a final gesture of things in general.
Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain amicable exasperation, "I say, do you really want to speak to me?"
"I do," said Michael, "very much."
Nigh had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed to promise. While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees, proved by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray indeed.
A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds across the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and yet laborious wind.
"Arthur," said Michael, "I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed Court of Beacon, and to clear him too--clear him of both crime and lunacy.
Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit." They walked up and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of those queer old hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot countries.
How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red, or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it up at all."
Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels.
How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could not conceive. Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.
"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon abruptly, "even if they've forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to remember because they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard to guess. Their colours were plain. Their shapes were plain.
Everything was plain except the meaning."
Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and smoking faster and faster. "Dances, too," he said; "dances were not frivolous.
Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and texts.
The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent.
Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?"
"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour, "have I noticed anything else?"
