Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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? ”

“ How could a man like Marryatt know that Brotherhood was due to go bankrupt? He knows no more about the City than you do. And the fog—look how the fog played up all through! How was Marryatt to know there was going to be a fog on the very day on which his attempt would be made? ”

“ 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. ”

“ You must consider that the things we really find it hard to change are not the important things of life, our moral or religious or political standpoint, but our common, daily habits of living. Brotherhood might be an atheist, and Davenant a Catholic; Brotherhood a violent Radical, Davenant a Diehard Tory. But every man has his own preference in razors and in shaving-soap and in tooth-powder; and if you looked into the thing, you would find that if Davenant used A’s shaving-soap, so did Brotherhood; if Brotherhood used B’s tooth-powder, so did Davenant. There lay the real danger of detection. ”

“ 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 what’s the good of any number of possible explanations when no single explanation is probable? I never can understand the kind of madness that imagines it has solved a difficulty when it has found a whole number of possible explanations that aren’t probable. What difference does the number of them make? As a matter of fact, in this case there’s only one—that Brotherhood really was an atheist, but posed as a Catholic when he was Davenant merely to put people off the scent. ”

“ When a man takes a house here, one assumes that he’s only come here for the golf. But it looks as if Brotherhood, or else his phantom self, Davenant, knew the Binver world already—at least well enough to possess photographs of its belles. ”

“ It meant, further, that Davenant would be suspected of the murder. No plan could have been more difficult or more clumsy.”
“Then you mean,” said Marryatt, “that we have to look for a murderer, somebody quite unknown to us?”
“I didn’t say that,” replied Carmichael, with a curious look. “I mean that we have to look for a murderer, some one whom we have not hitherto suspected. If Davenant murdered Brotherhood, that was certainly suicide; for Davenant was Brotherhood. ”

“ I was a schoolmaster once, and while one knew the little beasts were capable of almost anything, one did clear some people of suspicion on mere character.”
“But there again,” argued Gordon, “you knew them very well.”
“Not really,” said Marryatt. “A perpetual war of mutual deception is kept up between schoolmasters and schoolboys. One trusted, I think, one’s unconscious impressions most.”
“If I were a detective,” persisted Reeves, “I would suspect my own father or mother as soon as anybody else. ”

“ The theorizers I mean are people who create problems where none exist—as you did, Reeves, when you insisted on regarding it as an open question who murdered Brotherhood. They are people who trust circumstantial evidence in the face of all common human probability, as you did, Reeves, when you wanted to convict a chump like Marryatt of murder on the strength of a chain of silly coincidences. ”

“ That was another reason against your theory. Psychologically, Marryatt hasn’t got the apparatus to do what you thought he did. Morally, he hasn’t got the motive to act as you thought he did.”
“Well, I seem to have made a pretty good ass of myself all round. I wonder if anybody in the world has ever been so led astray by a theory?”
“Anybody ever? Why, my dear Reeves, you’re in exactly the same position there as about three-quarters of the modern world: they are all led astray by theories. Only you were at least led astray by your own theory, not by one you’d borrowed at second-hand.” ”

“ At last, weary of cudgelling his brains over the unlighted grate, he seized his cap and strode out into the air. Half of set purpose, half under the fascination of his thoughts, he found himself climbing once more the steep path that led up the railway embankment and on to the forbidden precincts of the line.
St. Luke’s summer still held; the comparative silence of man’s Sabbath conspired with the autumn stillness of nature—the sunshine quiet that is disturbed no longer by clicking grasshoppers, nor yet by cawing rooks—to hush the countryside. ”

“ Another curious thing—there was every evidence that Davenant was a smoker, and yet not a cigarette, not a pipe, not an ounce of tobacco left in the study. Of course, it was possible that Sullivan was very tidy and put them away somewhere, or that he was dishonest, and treated them as perquisites. But once more Gordon had the impression that Davenant had packed like a man who is leaving his base, not like a man who has just week-ended at a Saturday-to-Monday cottage. Like a man going abroad, even, or why did he take the soap with him? ”

“ There is somebody in the train you badly want to murder. You want to murder him to-day, because his bankruptcy has just been declared, and if he is found dead people will think it is suicide. You have warned him to look out for himself—I wonder why you did that? But of course you must have done it on Monday so as to give him a chance to save himself. . . . No, that won’t do, because you didn’t know anything about his bankruptcy before Tuesday. . . . But the message reached him on Tuesday morning. ”

“ Nobody else lived in the cottage—why not try to force an entrance while Sullivan was out, and satisfy himself on circumstantial evidence whether Davenant had really been in the cottage or not?
Breaking into a house is, as a rule, a difficult proceeding, even if it is your own and you know the ropes. To break into a stranger’s house, when you are not even certain whether a dog is kept; is a still more heroic affair. ”

“ When Marryatt had gone, and Carmichael had sauntered off to the billiard-room, Reeves sat on there fidgeting and discussing the possible significance of the latest find.
“It’s odd,” he said, “how one can live for years in the artificial life of a club like this and not know one’s neighbours in the least. We’re a world to ourselves, and an outside face like that conveys nothing to us; probably the name won’t either. What beats me at present about the photograph is this—how long ago would you say that photograph was taken?” ”

“ When the fire, reluctant after long desuetude, had been induced to crackle, and threw flickering reflections where the shade of the electric light gave subdued half tones, there was an air of comfort which seemed to dispel all thought of detective problems, of murderers stalking the world unpunished, of the open grave that waited in Paston Oatvile churchyard.
Gordon put down the photograph on a jutting cornice that went round the panelling. “There, Reeves,” he said, “you shall sit opposite the lady, and derive inspiration from her. ”

“ A perfect day for golf, such was the immediate impression of the Paston Oatvile mind; but to Reeves a second thought occurred—it was a bad day for following up the clues of a murder.
“It’s all very well,” he said to Gordon, “the visibility’s good, and we shan’t be interrupted by rain; but we can’t get the atmosphere; the spiritual atmosphere, I mean, of yesterday’s fog and drizzle. We shall see where a man fell down the embankment, but we shan’t feel the impulse of that weeping depression which made him throw himself over, or made somebody else save him the trouble. ”

“ Why do we always assume it’s a madman’s act to take one’s own life, when it’s surely a far more desperate thing to take anybody else’s? Did you think, from what you saw of Davenant, that he was in mental health?”
“My dear Marryatt,” said Reeves, “you’re jumping to conclusions again. The police have arrested Davenant, because his movements since the time of the murder have been suspicious, and he has got to account for them. ”

“ What I generally notice about a man is his eyes, and I never got much impression of Davenant’s, because he nearly always wore those heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. And then of course he was a rattling good player. If he murdered Brotherhood, as Marryatt seems positive he did, I can tell you one motive that I can’t accept for his doing it. He wasn’t jealous of Brotherhood’s golf. Poor old Brotherhood was about as rotten as Davenant is good. ”

“ Bramston. The coroner was not ready for her, and she got right in under his guard, pouring out a flood of promiscuous information which he neither demanded nor desired. Then strangers came—people from Brotherhood’s office in London, people from the Insurance Company, people representing the creditors: people, too, who represented the railway company, and dilated for hours on the impossibility of falling out of their trains by accident. In fact, nobody seemed to care a straw about the mangled temple of humanity that lay in the next room, or whether it cried to heaven for vengeance. ”

“ Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Brotherhood has saved a nest-egg for himself, and is skipping to avoid his creditors—what better way of throwing people off the scent than by a pretended suicide? ”

“ But there are so many right-handed people.”
“In most cases,” said Carmichael, “it’s only nerves that make people think they’re left-handed. A more extraordinary thing is the matter of parting the hair. Everybody is predestined from birth to part his hair on one particular side; but most of the people who ought to part their hair on the right do it on the left instead, because that’s easier when you’re right-handed.”
“I think you’re wrong in principle, Gordon,” said Reeves. “Everybody in the world has his little peculiarities, which would give him away to the eye of a trained detective. ”

“ The house itself may be condemned to the scrap-heap, but you can always make a golf-course out of the Park. Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and over-populated greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns. ”