In the course of his meteoric career as Secretary of State for the Home
Department, the Right Honorable Topham Vinson instituted many reforms
and earned the reformer's whack of praise and blame. His methods were
not those of the permanent staff; and while his notorious courage
endeared him to the young, it was not in so strong a nature to leave
friend or foe lukewarm. An assiduous contempt for tradition fanned the
flame of either faction, besides leading to several of those personal
adventures which were as breath to the Minister's unregenerate nostrils,
but which never came out without exposing him to almost universal
censure. It is matter for thanksgiving that the majority of his
indiscretions were unguessed while he and his held office; for he was
never so unconventional as in pursuance of those enlightened tactics on
which his reputation rests, or in the company of that kindred spirit who
had so much to do with their inception.
It was early in an autumn session that this remarkable pair became
acquainted. Mr. Vinson had been tempted by the mildness of the night to
walk back from Westminster to Portman Square. He had just reached home
when he heard his name cried from some little distance behind him. The
voice tempered hoarse excitement with the restraint due to midnight in a
quiet square; and as Mr. Vinson turned on his door-step, a young man
rushed across the road with a gold chain swinging from his outstretched
hand.
"Your watch, sir, your watch!" he gasped, and displayed a bulbous hunter
with a monogram on one side and the crest of all the Vinsons on the
other.
"Heavens!" cried the Home Secretary, feeling in an empty waistcoat
pocket before he could believe his eyes. "Where on earth did you find
that? I had it on me when I left the House."
"It wasn't a case of findings," said the young man, as he fanned himself
with his opera hat. "I've just taken it from the fellow who took it from
you."
"Who? Where?" demanded the Secretary of State, with unstatesmanlike
excitement.
"Some poor brute in North Audley Street, I think it was."
"That's it! That was where he stopped me, just at the corner of
Grosvenor Square!" exclaimed Vinson. "And I went and gave the old
scoundrel half-a-crown!"
"He probably had your watch while you were looking in your purse."
And the young man dabbed a very good forehead, that glistened in the
light from the open door, with a white silk handkerchief just extracted
from his sleeve.
"But where were you?" asked Topham Vinson, taking in every inch of him.
"I'd just come into the square myself. You had just gone out of it. The
pickpocket was looking to see what he'd got, even while he hurled his
blessings after you."
"And where is he now? Did he slip through your fingers?"
"I'm ashamed to say he did; but your watch didn't!" its owner was
reminded with more spirit. "I could guess whose it was by the crest and
monogram, and I decided to make sure instead of giving chase."
"You did admirably," declared the Home Secretary, in belated
appreciation. "I'm in the papers quite enough without appearing as a mug
out of office hours. Come in, please, and let me thank you with all the
honors possible at this time of night."
And, taking him by the arm, he ushered the savior of his property into a
charming inner hall, where elaborate refreshments stood in readiness on
a side-table, and a bright fire looked as acceptable as the saddlebag
chairs drawn up beside it. A bottle and a pint of reputable champagne
had been left out with the oysters and the caviar; and Mr. Vinson,
explaining that he never allowed anybody to sit up for him, opened the
bottle with the precision of a practised hand, and led the attack on
food and drink with schoolboy gusto and high spirits.
In the meantime there had been some mutual note-taking. The Home
Secretary, whose emphatic personality lent itself to the discreet pencil
of the modern caricaturist, was in appearance exactly as represented in
contemporary cartoons; there was nothing unexpected about him, since his
boyish vivacity was a quality already over-exploited by the Press. His
frankness was something qualified by a gaze of habitual penetration, but
still it was there, and his manner could evidently be grand or
colloquial at will. The surprise was in his surroundings rather than in
the man himself. The perfect union of luxury and taste is none too
common in the professed Sybarite who is that and nothing more; in men of
action and pugnacious politicians it is yet another sign of sheer
capacity. The bits of rich old furniture, the old glass twinkling at
every facet, the brasses blazing in the firelight, the few but fine
prints on the Morris wallpaper, might have won the approval of an art
student, and the creature comforts that of the youngest epicure.
The young man from the street was easily pleased in all such respects;
but indoors he no longer looked quite the young man. He had taken off an
overcoat while his host was opening the champagne, and evening clothes
accentuated a mature gauntness of body and limb. His hair, which was
dark and wiry, was beginning to bleach at the temples; and up above one
ear there was a little disk of downright silver, like a new florin. The
shaven face was pale, eager, and austere. Dark eyes burnt like beacons
under a noble brow, and did not lose in character or intensity by a
distinct though slight strabism. So at least it seemed to Topham Vinson,
who was a really wonderful judge of faces, yet had seldom seen one
harder to sum up.
"I'm sorry you don't smoke," said he, snipping a cigar which he had
extolled in vain. "And that champagne, you know! You haven't touched it,
and you really should."
The other was on his legs that instant. "I never smoke and seldom
drink," he exclaimed; "but I simply can not endure your hospitality,
kind as it is, Mr. Vinson, without being a bit more honest with you than
I've been so far. I didn't lose that pickpocket by accident or because
he was too quick for me. I--I purposely packed him off."
In the depths of his softest chair Mr. Vinson lolled smiling--but not
with his upturned eyes. They were the steel eyes of all his tribe, but
trebly keen, as became its intellectual head and chief.
"The fellow pitched a pathetic yarn?" he conjectured. He had never seen
a more miserable specimen, he was bound to say.
"It wasn't that, Mr. Vinson. I should have let him go in any case--once
I'd recovered what he'd taken--as a matter of principle."
"Principle!" cried the Secretary of State. But he did not modify his
front-bench attitude; it was only the well-known eyebrows that rose.
"The whole thing is," his guest continued, yet more frankly, "that I
happen to hold my own views on crime and its punishment If I might be
permitted to explain them, however briefly, they would at least afford
the only excuse I have to offer for my conduct. If you consider it no
excuse, and if I have put myself within reach of the law, there, sir, is
my card; and here am I, prepared to take the consequences of my act."
The Home Secretary leaned forward and took the card from a sensitive
hand, vibrant as the voice to which he had just been listening, but no
more tremulous. Again he looked up, into a pale face grown paler still,
and dark eyes smoldering with suppressed enthusiasm. It was by no means
his baptism of that sort of fire; but it seemed to Mr. Vinson that here
was a new type of eccentric zealot; and it was only by an effort that he
resumed his House of Commons attitude and his smile.
"I see, Doctor Dollar, that you are a near neighbor of mine--only just
round the corner in Welbeck Street. May I take it that your experience
as a consultant is the basis of the views you mention?"
"My experience as an alienist," said Doctor Dollar, "so far as I can lay
claims to that euphemism."
"And how far is that, doctor?"
"In the sense that all crime is a form of madness."
"Then you would call yourself----"
The broken sentence ended on a note as tactfully remote from the direct
interrogative as practised speech could make it.
"In default of a recognized term," said Doctor Dollar, "which time will
confer as part of a wider recognition, I can only call myself a crime
doctor."
"A branch not yet acknowledged by your profession?"
"Neither by my profession nor by the law, Mr. Vinson; but both have got
to come to it, just as surely as we all accept the other scientific
developments of the day."
"But have you reduced your practise to a science, doctor?"
"I am doing so," said Doctor Dollar, with the restrained confidence
which could not but impress one who knew the value of that quality in
himself and in others. "I have made a start; if it were not so late I
would tell you all about it. You are the Home Secretary of England, the
man of all others whom I could wish to convert to my views. But already
I have kept you up too long. If you would grant me an appointment----"
"Not at all," interrupted Mr. Vinson, as he settled himself even more
comfortably in his chair. "The night is still young--so is my cigar.
Pray say all you care to say, and say it as confidentially as you
please. You interest me, Doctor Dollar; nor can I forget that I am much
indebted to you."
"I don't want to trade on that," returned the doctor, hastily. "But it
is an old dream of mine to tell you, sir, about my work, and how and why
I came to take it up. I was not intended for medicine, you see; my
people are army people, were Border outlaws once upon a time, and
fighting folk ever since. My father was an ensign in the Crimea--Scots
Fusiliers. I joined the Argyll and Sutherlands the year before South
Africa--where, by the way, I remember seeing you with your Yeomen."
"I had eighteen months of it without a headache or a scratch."
"I wish I could say the same, Mr. Vinson. I was shot through the head at
the Modder, ten days after I landed."
"Through the head, did you say?" asked the Home Secretary, lifting his
own some inches.
The doctor touched the silver patch in his dark strong hair. "That's
where the bullet came slinking out; any but a Mauser would have carried
all before it! As it was, it left me with a bit of a squint, as you can
see; otherwise, in a very few weeks, I was as fit as ever--physically."
"Wonderful!"
"Physically and even mentally--from a medical point of view--but not
morally, Mr. Vinson! Something subtle had happened, some pressure
somewhere, some form of local paralysis. And it left me a pretty
low-down type, I can tell you! It was a case of absolute automatism--but
I won't go into particulars now, if you don't mind."
"On no account, my dear doctor!" exclaimed the Secretary of State, with
inadvertent cordiality. "This is all of extraordinary interest. I
believe I can see what's coming. But I want to hear every word you care
to tell me--and not one that you don't."
"It had destroyed my moral sense on just one curious point; but, thank
God, I came to see the cause as well as to suffer unspeakably from the
effect. After that it was a case of killing or curing oneself by hook or
by crook. I decided to try the curing first. And--to cut a long yarn
short--I _was_ cured."
"Easily?"
"No. The slander may come home to roost, but I shall never think much of
the London specialist! I've dropped my two sovereigns and a florin into
too many of their itching palms, beginning with the baronets and knights
and ending up with the unknown adventures. But not a man-Jack of them
was ashamed to pocket his two guineas (in one case three) for politely
telling me I was as mad as a hatter to think of such a thing as really
was the matter with me!"
"And in the end?"
"In the end I struck a fellow with an open mind--but not in England--and
if I said that he literally opened mine it might be an exaggeration, but
that's all. He did go prospecting in my skull--risked his reputation as
against my life--but we both came out on top."
"And you've been your own man ever since?"
Topham Vinson asked the question gravely; it would have taken as keen a
superficial observer as himself to detect much difference in his manner,
in his eyes, in anything about him. Doctor Dollar was not that kind of
observer. To see far one must look high, and to look high is to miss
things under one's nose. It is all a matter of mental trajectory. In the
sheer height of his enthusiasm, the soaring visionary was losing touch
with the hard-headed groundling in the chair.
"I was cured," he answered with tense simplicity. "It was a miraculous
cure, and yet no miracle. Anybody could perform its like, given the
nerve and skill. Yet it seemed to me a new thing; its possibilities were
almost appalling in their fascination. I must not speak of them, for in
a large measure they are only possibilities still. But I resolved to
qualify, so that at least I might be in a position to do as I had been
done by. I had already left the service; but my fighting days were not
over. I was going to fight Crime as it had never been fought before!"
There was a challenge in the pause made here. But the listener did not
take it up, and the harangue ended on a humbler note:
"I studied at St. Mary's under men whose names you know as well as they
know yours. I was at Berlin under Winterschladen, and with Jens Jennsen
in Stockholm. Before I was thirty I had put up my plate in Welbeck
Street, and there I am still."
"And yet," said the Home Secretary, with a faint and wary smile--"and
yet the possibilities are still only possibilities!"
"On the surgical side, yes; there I was misled by my own abnormal case.
When another sudden injury makes a monkey of an honest man, I know where
to take him; but the average injury is too gradual, too subtle for the
knife. Congenital cases are, of course, quite hopeless in that respect.
Yet there are ways of curing even what I regard as the very worst type
of congenital criminal at the present day."
"I wish I knew of some!" said Mr. Vinson cheerily. "But what, may I ask,
do you regard as the very worst type of congenital criminal at the
present day?"
"The society type," replied the crime doctor without an instant's
hesitation.
His host permitted himself to open his eyes once more.
"Your ideas are rather sensational, aren't they, Doctor Dollar?"
"It's rather a sensational age, isn't it, Mr. Vinson? Your
twentieth-century criminal, with his telephone and his motor-car--for
professional purposes--his high explosives and his scientific tools, has
got to be an educated person, to begin with; and I am afraid there's an
increasing number of educated people who have got to be criminals or
else paupers all their lives. A vicious circle, I think you must agree?"
"If you can square it with the truth."
"Isn't it almost a truism, Mr. Vinson? When society women making a
living out of bridge, traffic in tickets for Royal enclosures, charge a
fat fee for a presentation at Court, and a small fortune for launching
an unlikely family in their own set, there must be some reason for it
apart from their own depravity. They are no more naturally depraved than
I am, but their purse is perhaps even smaller, and their wants are
certainly ten times as great. Cupidity is not the motive power; it's
simple shortage of the needful--from their point of view. Society
increases and multiplies in everything but money, and transmits its
expensive tastes without the means to indulge them. So we get our good
ladies with their tariff of introductions, and our members of the best
clubs always ready for a deal over a horse or a car or anything else
that's going to bring them in a fiver. It's a short step from that sort
of thing to a shady trick, and from a shady trick to downright crime.
But it's a step often taken by the type I mean--though not necessarily
with their eyes open. And that's just where the crime doctor should come
in."
"In opening their eyes?"
"In saving 'em from themselves while they're still worth saving; in that
prevention which is not only better than cure, but the vital principle
of modern therapeutics in every other direction. In keeping good
material out of prison at all costs, Mr. Vinson, and even though you
turn your prisons into country houses with feather beds and moral
entertainments every night in life!"
The Secretary of State smiled again, but this time with some sympathy
and much less restraint. He was beginning to see some method in what had
seemed at first unmitigated mania, and to take some interest in a point
of view at least novel and entertaining. But the prison system was not
to be attacked, even in terms of fantastic levity, without protest from
its official champion.
"Prisons, my dear Doctor Dollar, exist for the benefit of those who keep
out of them rather than those who will insist on getting in. Of course,
the ideal thing would be to benefit both sides; and that's what we're
aiming at all the time. It isn't our fault if a man who gets into quod
is a marked man ever after; he shouldn't get into quod."
"You've put your finger on your own vulnerable point!" cried the eager
doctor. "Why should he be a marked man? Why force a professional status
on the mere dabbler in crime, who might never have dabbled again? It
isn't as if it undid anything he's done; even hanging your murderer
doesn't bring your victim back to life, and the chances are that he
would never want to murder anybody else. On the other hand, how many
serious crimes might be hushed up without anybody being a bit worse off
than they were the very moment after their commission!"
Mr. Vinson had been framing an ironical rebuke in the name of morality
and the Mosaic law; but he was not sorry to drop the irony and pin his
opponent down.
"I hope, Doctor Dollar, it is not to be a function of the new faculty to
collaborate in the concealment of crime and criminals?"
"It is impossible," replied the enthusiast, duly drawn, "to define the
scope of an embryonic science. When the crime doctor has come to
stay--as he will--I can see him playing a Protean part with the full
sanction of his profession and of the law. He will be preventive
officer, private detective, and father confessor in one, if not even
privileged accessory after some awful fact. The humbler pioneer can hope
for no such powers; his only chance is to work in the dark on his own
lines, to use his own judgment and to take his own risks as I've done
to-night. If he really can save a man by screening him, let him do it
and blow the odds! If he can stop a thing without giving it away, all
the better for everybody, and if he fails to stop it all the worse for
him! Let him be a law unto his patient and himself, but let him stand
the racket if his law won't work."
"In other words, you would tackle character as ordinary doctors and
persons devote themselves to the body and the soul?"
"It would come to that, Mr. Vinson. It's a large order, I know, and I
don't expect to see the goods delivered in my time. It will take better
men than I am, and many of 'em, even to start delivery on the scale I
dream about. But that's the idea all right. Punishment has never
signified prevention; what we want is to get under the criminal's skin
_before_ we make it smart, if not before there's an actual criminal in
the case at all!"
"A very plausible confession of faith, Doctor Dollar."
The Minister's tone was dry after the other, but that was all. His fixed
eyes seemed to be looking through the doctor's into the scheme itself,
probing it on its merits in the very spirit in which it had been
propounded. It is only the small men who laugh in the face of genuine
enthusiasm, however wild and flighty it may seem. Topham Vinson was not
a small man; but he, too, had been guilty of some wild flights in his
day, and office had not altogether clipped his wings. The sportsman and
the charlatan within him were only too ready to see themselves in
another, to hear their own voices on other lips. But the appeal to
temperament does not necessarily compromise the mind. And that citadel
still flew a neutral flag.
"What about the practise?" asked Topham Vinson, forcing himself back to
facts.
"Rome took less building than a London practise, by an unknown man
striking out a new line for himself."
"I really don't wonder. Who would come to consult you about a homicidal
tendency, or a trick of tampering with special offertories?"
"In the first instance, most likely, the patient's people; then they
might send him to see me on some other pretext."
"And what form would the treatment take?"
"It would depend, of course, upon the case. They don't all know that
they're being treated for incipient criminality. The majority think they
are in an ordinary nursing home."
"A home!" cried the Secretary of State. The word had brought him to his
feet at last, in a frame of mind no longer to be concealed by nods and
smiles. "You don't mean to tell me, Doctor Dollar, that you actually
run a nursing home for unconvicted criminals?"
"Potential criminals, Mr. Vinson. I have at present no patient who is
actually wanted by the police."
"And where is this extraordinary establishment?"
"Under my own roof here in Welbeck Street."
"A few hundred yards from where we stand, yet this is the first I hear
of it!"
"I can see that. It's not my fault, sir. I have done my best to bring it
before your notice."
"How?"
"By writing many times to tell you all about myself and the home, Mr.
Vinson."
"Then I never saw the letters. A Home Secretary stands to be shot at by
every crank who can hold a pen. I employ more than one young gentleman
expressly to divert that sort of fire. You should have got an
introduction to me, Doctor Dollar."
The doctor had smiled at an expression that he could not but take to
himself. His smile sweetened under the kindlier tone which succeeded
that one unmeasured word.
"I am not sorry I waited for the introduction which time has given me,
Mr. Vinson."
"You wanted me to assist the good work, I take it?"
"By your countenance and influence--if you could."
"I must see something of it first. I must inspect this home of yours,
Doctor Dollar."
The steel eyes of the Vinsons could seldom have cut deeper at a glance,
or been met by a pair more candid and unafraid. And yet there was just
that cruel suspicion of a cast, to prejudice both the candor and the
courage of the finer face.
"It is open to your inspection day or night," said Doctor Dollar.
"Even at this hour? Even to-night?"
The Home Secretary sounded as keen as he looked; but on the other side
there was now just enough hesitation to correspond with that one slight
flaw in the finer eyes.
"This minute, by all means," said the doctor, with resolute cordiality.
"There's always somebody up, and the patients can be seen without being
disturbed."
"Then," said the Home Secretary, "it's a chance at a time when every
moment of the day is full. Let us strike, doctor, while the iron is as
hot as I can assure you that you have made it."