Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

“ To the husband, the wife, to the wife, the husband, seems a paragon of beauty, a treasure-house of wit, energy, and charm: old age comes, perhaps, and the bright eyes are dimmed and the raven hair silvers, and yet, between this loving pair, the ravages wrought by time are unmarked: he is still beautiful and charming to her, she to him. “For old sake’s sake she is still, dears, the prettiest doll in the world.” What, then, is the truth of the matter? ”

“ By the time he had reached the ledge a new flash came and showed him, at the very end of the gorge, Brinkman running as if for his life. There was no more sense in concealment; he must mend his own pace too; and that was impossible, on this narrow shelf of rock, unless he lit his torch. Lighting it, he took one look at the ledge toward which Brinkman had been jumping, and, by reason of his superior height, saw without difficulty an envelope which looked as if it must be the explanation of Brinkman’s gesture. ”

“ How could he tell that Brotherhood would get into the part of the train which hadn’t got a corridor, and that he would get into an empty carriage? What would he have been able to do, if Brotherhood had happened to come back as he always did—did, in fact, come back on Tuesday—in a crowded train like the 3.47? How could he be certain that nobody had seen Brotherhood get into the three o’clock? That nobody had noticed him at Weighford? Alternately, don’t you see, you make your man take the most superhumanly cunning precautions, and then trust to blind chance. ”

“ I have sometimes thought that it would be a pleasant occupation for the fancy to throw oneself forward into the future, and to write the imaginary reminiscences of an old lady, one’s granddaughter, who was putting print to paper in 2050! What a strange picture she would give of ourselves! How often she would hit the mark, how often miss it by a hair’s-breadth! She would let us see ourselves, I suppose, as a race of almost legendary heroes, to be spoken of with bated breath: ours would be the rugged virtues and the quaint, old-world ways! ”

“ The man who hoards up anecdotes, and lets them loose at intervals, is a social indecency; he might as well strip and parade some kind of acrobatic feat. See how your anecdotist lies in wait for his opportunity, prays for the moment that will lend excuse to his ‘That reminds me.’ There is a further pitch of shamelessness at which such a man will assault you openly with ‘Have you heard this one?’ But as long as men have some rags of behaviour left to them your sex, Mrs. Bredon, saves us from this conversational horror. When the ladies leave us, anecdotes flow out as from a burst dam. ”

“ Just as Carmichael will have it that Davenant is a mode of Brotherhood. Like the materialist or the idealist he is stultifying experience for the sake of a formula. Couldn’t one write this up, somehow? Brotherhood, representing Matter, leaves off where Davenant, representing Spirit, begins. Carmichael, representing the modern mind, finds this an excellent reason for supposing that they are really, somehow, the same thing. The materialist sees Brotherhood everywhere, the Idealist sees Davenant everywhere, and consequently neither of them can solve the detective mystery of existence. ”

“ A single long table accommodated them all, an arrangement which called for a constant exercise of forced geniality. Bredon and Leyland were both in a mood of contemplation, puzzling out the secret of the room upstairs; Brinkman was plainly nervous, and eager to avoid discussing the tragedy; Angela knew, from experience in such situations, the value of silence. Only the old gentleman seemed quite at his ease, dragging in the subject of Mottram with complete sang-froid and in a tone of irony which seemed inseparable from his personality. ”

“ Far below him he could see the golfers at their orisons, fulfilling, between hope and fear, the daily cycle of their existence. Gordon and Carmichael were at the third tee now; he could have waved to them. Carmichael always made too much business about addressing the ball. Over there was the neglected house, itself radiating the silence of a forgotten past. All else was drowsing; he alone, Mordaunt Reeves, strode on relentlessly in pursuit of crime. ”

“ In the old days, when reviewers held themselves bound to read through a book before they recorded their impressions of it, I should no doubt have had my weak points discovered by the eye of unfriendly criticism; to-day, one can still hope that one’s deficiencies will pass unobserved! I am afraid, now I come to look back over the record, that after all it is a chronicle of small doings; if I had known that I was to write reminiscences in my old age, perhaps I would have travelled further in search of impressions, and striven higher so as to satisfy my readers with the story of greater things. ”

“ He tiptoed back again, his face grave. “Look here, Reeves, I can’t understand it. I tell you, I can’t understand it.”
“It doesn’t much matter whether we understand it or not; the point is, what to do about it? We can have explanations later on. But I daren’t go to a man and say, ‘Look here, are you a murderer?’ Besides, I know he is one. I can’t simply tell the police what I know, and leave them to get on with it; it seems so mean. Besides, I don’t think I want anything to happen to Marryatt. Only I’ve promised Miss Rendall-Smith that I’ll do my best to get Davenant off. What am I to do?” ”

“ In two years from now Mottram would have turned sixty-five and the half-million would have vanished into the air. Moreover, there was much to be said for haste: who could tell when Mottram might not take it into his head to draw up a new will? As it seemed to Simmonds, he had only to get rid of this lonely, crusty old bachelor by a painless death, and he, as the next of kin, would walk straight into five hundred thousand. ”

“ May we not boldly say that the truth relative to their two minds—and all truth, remember, is relative to a mind—is that the man and the woman ARE REALLY the most beautiful pair of creatures in the world? That the honeyed whispers of love, which 121to the profane ear would seem to contain baseless flatteries, are nevertheless in a very real sense the Truth? Dear Miss Winterhead, if you brought home to us from America, per impossible, the most ungainly of hunchbacks, I for one would still hold it Truth that he was the handsomest of men, because to your Truth-perceiving mind he is so. ”

“ In Pullford, a large Midland town which you probably will never visit, men nudged one another and pointed to him as one of the wealthiest residents. In the anteroom of the Indescribable offices he looked, and perhaps felt, like a schoolboy waiting his turn for pocket-money. Yet even here he was a figure recognizable to the attendant who stood there smoothing out back numbers of the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette. For this man, called Mottram by accident of birth and Jephthah through the bad taste of his parents, was the holder of a Euthanasia policy. ”

“ Why should you expect us, then, who write reminiscences, to tell you stories of the old dons that were already skin and bone when we matriculated? We, like you, were young, and lived in a self-contained world of youth. Let nobody expect from me a description of Oxford which shall represent it as a fossil-museum of the still remoter past. There were elderly dons in my time, but I do not remember coming across them at all, except one whom I met at a tea-party, and mistook for a fresher, because at seventy or so he still looked so incorrigibly youthful! ”

“ And why were there so few names like that in the London Telephone Directory? Carmichael would probably have a theory about this. . . .
Such were the thoughts that kept dawdling through his mind, when he felt that he ought to be forming important decisions. What was he going to say when he was called in evidence? Was he going to give any hint as to his suspicions of foul play, or would it be better to leave the police to their own unaided intelligence? And if he did breathe his suspicions, was he bound to mention the golf-ball which he had found at the top of the embankment? ”

“ If we have seen, at the same time, that the ideals which once satisfied and the conditions which once contented us were ideals which ambition should have despised, and conditions which dignity should have resented, we will remember in the days to come that we must never again let ourselves be duped by the ignoble lure of a false peace. We have fought for honour, for civilization, for high aims and pure enthusiasms: we have met the powers of evil, and forced upon them the conditions of a not dishonourable peace. ”

“ Don’t you see that Brinkman argued to himself like this: ‘If I leave an obviously faked clue lying about like this, Leyland will immediately think that it is a faked clue, used by one criminal to shove off the blame on another. Who the criminals are, or which is which, doesn’t matter. It will convince him that there has, after all, been a murder. And it will disguise from him the fact that it was suicide.’ Of course all that’s making Brinkman out to be a pretty smart lad. ”

“ And the old country-seats of feudal England, that bask among their figured terraces, frowning at the ignoble tourist down secular avenues and thrusting back the high-road he travels by into respectful detours—these too, although the family have long since decided that it is too expensive to live there, and the agents smile at the idea of letting them like one humouring a child, have their place in the hero-tenanted England of to-day. ”

“ Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models of what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men will be: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same ultimate mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the future; you go into it, and from you it comes.”
That is our apology—ours who are young—for this business of writing forecasts. ”

“ How often am I to tell you, my dear Reeves, that you are dealing with a genius? If Davenant had ordered a sleeper just at that moment, attention might have been directed to him. But ordering a sleeper for Brotherhood would merely strengthen the impression that Brotherhood had disappeared. If that was all—personally I believe the scheme was even more audacious. I believe Davenant did mean to go away, for a time at any rate, and by that very train. He would join it at Crewe, travelling in an ordinary first-class carriage. ”

“ No, I think it’s the bar parlour for me.”
Angela was far more enthusiastic than her husband over the proposed ambush. “You see, Brinky can’t really be a very nice man, or he wouldn’t have been listening at our keyhole. Just think, I might have been ticking you off about your table manners or something. No, if he will go and hide in the arras he must take what he gets, like Polonius. And, after all, if he does come to you afterward, and wants to sob on your bosom, you can always refuse to promise secrecy. The world would be such a much happier place if people wouldn’t make promises.” ”

“ It nearly broke O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill went through. I remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t defend the old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel because he can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the best counsel the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich people who can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a wonderful smart chap, O’Leary. ”

“ There was a rather crumpled copy of Friday’s Daily Mail, probably derived from the same source as the cushions. There was a tin of boot-polish and a brush, as if the stranger had been careful about his appearance even in these singular surroundings. These relics Reeves quickly reviewed with absorbed interest, and then turned to Gordon in despair.
“All these traces,” he said, “and not one that you could call a clue. If the man has escaped us, he has escaped us without leaving a solitary hint of his identity.” ”

“ There is a sentimental streak in all our natures which warns us that a young man and a young woman sharing a railway carriage must be left to share it; and equally that a pair of lovers in a lane must be passed by as hastily as possible, with no inquisitive looks thrown in their direction. It is our instinct thus to propitiate the Paphian Queen. It was characteristic of Bredon that, as he passed one of these couples from behind, seeing their heads close together in earnest colloquy, he quickened his pace and never looked backward. ”

“ To sneer at what is old-fashioned is an easy triumph, for the dead cannot plead in answer; cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it felt like to wear those clothes, use that forgotten slang, cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the past, have done their cause disservice: youth will have its hit back at the greybeards for all the Polonius-tedium that boyhood endured, in forced silence. ”

“ Brotherhood knew better. He had been working up his alter ego for years.”
“Right under our noses!” protested Reeves.
“That was the cleverness of it,” said Carmichael. “If there was a Mr. Brotherhood at Paston Oatvile, and a Mr. Davenant every week-end at Brighton, nobody would be deceived; it’s a stale old dodge to keep up a double establishment in two different places. The genius of Brotherhood’s invention was that he kept up two establishments within a stone’s throw of each other. Nobody here could actually say that he’d seen Brotherhood and Davenant together, that goes without saying. ”

“ But of all the company’s enterprises none can rival in importance or in popularity the so-called Euthanasia policy. One of the giant brains that organized the undertaking observed with compassion the doubtful lot of human kind, the lot which makes the business man sweat and labour and agonize, uncertain whether he himself will reap the fruits of his industry or whether they will pass to an heir in whom, on the whole, he is less interested. ”

“ I believe marriage will be good for you, because from having no brothers or sisters you’ve had a very easy life up to now, and it must be difficult for you to sympathize with all the unhappiness there is in the world. Now you’ve taken your coat off and come into the ring with the rest of us: more strength to your arm! You’ll find men are more intolerable the more you get to know them; hopelessly selfish, and quite without manners. The only thing to do with them, my dear, is to disregard them. ”