The Doctor’s Theory
It is not easy to make any picture of the horror that lay dark on the
hearts of the people of Meirion. It was no longer possible to believe
or to pretend to believe that these men and women and children had met
their deaths through strange accidents. The little girl and the young
laborer might have slipped and fallen over the cliffs, but the woman
who lay dead with the dead sheep at the bottom of the quarry, the two
men who had been lured into the ooze of the marsh, the family who were
found murdered on the Highway before their own cottage door; in these
cases there could be no room for the supposition of accident. It seemed
as if it were impossible to frame any conjecture or outline of a
conjecture that would account for these hideous and, as it seemed,
utterly purposeless crimes. For a time people said that there must be a
madman at large, a sort of country variant of Jack the Ripper, some
horrible pervert who was possessed by the passion of death, who prowled
darkling about that lonely land, hiding in woods and in wild places,
always watching and seeking for the victims of his desire.
Indeed, Dr. Lewis, who found poor Williams, his wife and children
miserably slaughtered on the Highway, was convinced at first that the
presence of a concealed madman in the countryside offered the only
possible solution to the difficulty.
“I felt sure,” he said to me afterwards, “that the Williams’s had been
killed by a homicidal maniac. It was the nature of the poor creatures’
injuries that convinced me that this was the case. Some years
ago—thirty-seven or thirty-eight years ago as a matter of fact—I had
something to do with a case which on the face of it had a strong
likeness to the Highway murder. At that time I had a practice at Usk,
in Monmouthshire. A whole family living in a cottage by the roadside
were murdered one evening; it was called, I think, the Llangibby
murder; the cottage was near the village of that name. The murderer was
caught in Newport; he was a Spanish sailor, named Garcia, and it
appeared that he had killed father, mother, and the three children for
the sake of the brass works of an old Dutch clock, which were found on
him when he was arrested.
“Garcia had been serving a month’s imprisonment in Usk Jail for some
small theft, and on his release he set out to walk to Newport, nine or
ten miles away; no doubt to get another ship. He passed the cottage and
saw the man working in his garden. Garcia stabbed him with his sailor’s
knife. The wife rushed out; he stabbed her. Then he went into the
cottage and stabbed the three children, tried to set the place on fire,
and made off with the clockworks. That looked like the deed of a
madman, but Garcia wasn’t mad—they hanged him, I may say—he was merely
a man of a very low type, a degenerate who hadn’t the slightest value
for human life. I am not sure, but I think he came from one of the
Spanish islands, where the people are said to be degenerates, very
likely from too much inter-breeding.
“But my point is that Garcia stabbed to kill and did kill, with one
blow in each case. There was no senseless hacking and slashing. Now
those poor people on the Highway had their heads smashed to pieces by
what must have been a storm of blows. Any one of them would have been
fatal, but the murderer must have gone on raining blows with his iron
hammer on people who were already stone dead. And _that_ sort of thing
is the work of a madman, and nothing but a madman. That’s how I argued
the matter out to myself just after the event.
“I was utterly wrong, monstrously wrong. But who could have suspected
the truth?”
Thus Dr. Lewis, and I quote him, or the substance of him, as
representative of most of the educated opinion of the district at the
beginnings of the terror. People seized on this theory largely because
it offered at least the comfort of an explanation, and any explanation,
even the poorest, is better than an intolerable and terrible mystery.
Besides, Dr. Lewis’s theory was plausible; it explained the lack of
purpose that seemed to characterize the murders. And yet—there were
difficulties even from the first. It was hardly possible that a strange
madman should be able to keep hidden in a countryside where any
stranger is instantly noted and noticed; sooner or later he would be
seen as he prowled along the lanes or across the wild places. Indeed, a
drunken, cheerful, and altogether harmless tramp was arrested by a
farmer and his man in the fact and act of sleeping off beer under a
hedge; but the vagrant was able to prove complete and undoubted alibis,
and was soon allowed to go on his wandering way.
Then another theory, or rather a variant of Dr. Lewis’s theory, was
started. This was to the effect that the person responsible for the
outrages was, indeed, a madman; but a madman only at intervals. It was
one of the members of the Porth Club, a certain Mr. Remnant, who was
supposed to have originated this more subtle explanation. Mr. Remnant
was a middle-aged man, who, having nothing particular to do, read a
great many books by way of conquering the hours. He talked to the
club—doctors, retired colonels, parsons, lawyers—about “personality,”
quoted various psychological textbooks in support of his contention
that personality was sometimes fluid and unstable, went back to “Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” as good evidence of this proposition, and laid
stress on Dr. Jekyll’s speculation that the human soul, so far from
being one and indivisible, might possibly turn out to be a mere polity,
a state in which dwelt many strange and incongruous citizens, whose
characters were not merely unknown but altogether unsurmised by that
form of consciousness which so rashly assumed that it was not only the
president of the republic but also its sole citizen.
“The long and the short of it is,” Mr. Remnant concluded, “that any one
of us may be the murderer, though he hasn’t the faintest notion of the
fact. Take Llewelyn there.”
Mr. Payne Llewelyn was an elderly lawyer, a rural Tulkinghorn. He was
the hereditary solicitor to the Morgans of Pentwyn. This does not sound
anything tremendous to the Saxons of London; but the style is far more
than noble to the Celts of West Wales; it is immemorial; Teilo Sant was
of the collaterals of the first known chief of the race. And Mr. Payne
Llewelyn did his best to look like the legal adviser of this ancient
house. He was weighty, he was cautious, he was sound, he was secure. I
have compared him to Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; but Mr.
Llewelyn would most certainly never have dreamed of employing his
leisure in peering into the cupboards where the family skeletons were
hidden. Supposing such cupboards to have existed, Mr. Payne Llewelyn
would have risked large out-of-pocket expenses to furnish them with
double, triple, impregnable locks. He was a new man, an _advena_,
certainly; for he was partly of the Conquest, being descended on one
side from Sir Payne Turberville; but he meant to stand by the old
stock.
“Take Llewelyn now,” said Mr. Remnant. “Look here, Llewelyn, can you
produce evidence to show where you were on the night those people were
murdered on the Highway? I thought not.”
Mr. Llewelyn, an elderly man, as I have said, hesitated before
speaking.
“I thought not,” Remnant went on. “Now I say that it is perfectly
possible that Llewelyn may be dealing death throughout Meirion,
although in his present personality he may not have the faintest
suspicion that there is another Llewelyn within him, a Llewelyn who
follows murder as a fine art.”
Mr. Payne Llewelyn did not at all relish Mr. Remnant’s suggestion that
he might well be a secret murderer, ravening for blood, remorseless as
a wild beast. He thought the phrase about his following murder as a
fine art was both nonsensical and in the worst taste, and his opinion
was not changed when Remnant pointed out that it was used by De Quincey
in the title of one of his most famous essays.
“If you had allowed me to speak,” he said with some coldness of manner,
“I would have told you that on Tuesday last, the night on which those
unfortunate people were murdered on the Highway I was staying at the
Angel Hotel, Cardiff. I had business in Cardiff, and I was detained
till Wednesday afternoon.”
Having given this satisfactory alibi, Mr. Payne Llewelyn left the club,
and did not go near it for the rest of the week.
Remnant explained to those who stayed in the smoking room that, of
course, he had merely used Mr. Llewelyn as a concrete example of his
theory, which, he persisted, had the support of a considerable body of
evidence.
“There are several cases of double personality on record,” he declared.
“And I say again that it is quite possible that these murders may have
been committed by one of us in his secondary personality. Why, I may be
the murderer in my Remnant B. state, though Remnant A. knows nothing
whatever about it, and is perfectly convinced that he could not kill a
fowl, much less a whole family. Isn’t it so, Lewis?”
Dr. Lewis said it was so, in theory, but he thought not in fact.
“Most of the cases of double or multiple personality that have been
investigated,” he said, “have been in connection with the very dubious
experiments of hypnotism, or the still more dubious experiments of
spiritualism. All that sort of thing, in my opinion, is like tinkering
with the works of a clock—amateur tinkering, I mean. You fumble about
with the wheels and cogs and bits of mechanism that you don’t really
know anything about; and then you find your clock going backwards or
striking 240 at tea-time. And I believe it’s just the same thing with
these psychical research experiments; the secondary personality is very
likely the result of the tinkering and fumbling with a very delicate
apparatus that we know nothing about. Mind, I can’t say that it’s
impossible for one of us to be the Highway murderer in his B. state, as
Remnant puts it. But I think it’s extremely improbable. Probability is
the guide of life, you know, Remnant,” said Dr. Lewis, smiling at that
gentleman, as if to say that he also had done a little reading in his
day. “And it follows, therefore, that improbability is also the guide
of life. When you get a very high degree of probability, that is, you
are justified in taking it as a certainty; and on the other hand, if a
supposition is highly improbable, you are justified in treating it as
an impossible one. That is, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out
of a thousand.”
“How about the thousandth case?” said Remnant. “Supposing these
extraordinary crimes constitute the thousandth case?”
The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoulders, being tired of the
subject. But for some little time highly respectable members of Porth
society would look suspiciously at one another wondering whether, after
all, there mightn’t be “something in it.” However, both Mr. Remnant’s
somewhat crazy theory and Dr. Lewis’s plausible theory became untenable
when two more victims of an awful and mysterious death were offered up
in sacrifice, for a man was found dead in the Llanfihangel quarry,
where the woman had been discovered. And on the same day a girl of
fifteen was found broken on the jagged rocks under the cliffs near
Porth. Now, it appeared that these two deaths must have occurred at
about the same time, within an hour of one another, certainly; and the
distance between the quarry and the cliffs by Black Rock is certainly
twenty miles.
“A motor could do it,” one man said.
But it was pointed out that there was no high road between the two
places; indeed, it might be said that there was no road at all between
them. There was a network of deep, narrow, and tortuous lanes that
wandered into one another at all manner of queer angles for, say,
seventeen miles; this in the middle, as it were, between Black Rock and
the quarry at Llanfihangel. But to get to the high land of the cliffs
one had to take a path that went through two miles of fields; and the
quarry lay a mile away from the nearest by-road in the midst of gorse
and bracken and broken land. And, finally, there was no track of
motor-car or motor-bicycle in the lanes which must have been followed
to pass from one place to the other.
“What about an airplane, then?” said the man of the motor-car theory.
Well, there was certainly an aerodrome not far from one of the two
places of death; but somehow, nobody believed that the Flying Corps
harbored a homicidal maniac. It seemed clear, therefore, that there
must be more than one person concerned in the terror of Meirion. And
Dr. Lewis himself abandoned his own theory.
“As I said to Remnant at the Club,” he remarked, “improbability is the
guide of life. I can’t believe that there are a pack of madmen or even
two madmen at large in the country. I give it up.”
And now a fresh circumstance or set of circumstances became manifest to
confound judgment and to awaken new and wild surmises. For at about
this time people realized that none of the dreadful events that were
happening all about them was so much as mentioned in the Press. I have
already spoken of the fate of the _Meiros Observer._ This paper was
suppressed by the authorities because it had inserted a brief paragraph
about some person who had been “found dead under mysterious
circumstances”; I think that paragraph referred to the first death of
Llanfihangel quarry. Thenceforth, horror followed on horror, but no
word was printed in any of the local journals. The curious went to the
newspaper offices—there were two left in the county—but found nothing
save a firm refusal to discuss the matter. And the Cardiff papers were
drawn and found blank; and the London Press was apparently ignorant of
the fact that crimes that had no parallel were terrorizing a whole
countryside. Everybody wondered what could have happened, what was
happening; and then it was whispered that the coroner would allow no
inquiry to be made as to these deaths of darkness.
“In consequence of instructions received from the Home Office,” one
coroner was understood to have said, “I have to tell the jury that
their business will be to hear the medical evidence and to bring in a
verdict immediately in accordance with that evidence. I shall disallow
all questions.”
One jury protested. The foreman refused to bring in any verdict at all.
“Very good,” said the coroner. “Then I beg to inform you, Mr. Foreman
and gentlemen of the jury, that under the Defense of the Realm Act, I
have power to supersede your functions, and to enter a verdict
according to the evidence which has been laid before the Court as if it
had been the verdict of you all.”
The foreman and jury collapsed and accepted what they could not avoid.
But the rumors that got abroad of all this, added to the known fact
that the terror was ignored in the Press, no doubt by official command,
increased the panic that was now arising, and gave it a new direction.
Clearly, people reasoned, these Government restrictions and
prohibitions could only refer to the war, to some great danger in
connection with the war. And that being so, it followed that the
outrages which must be kept so secret were the work of the enemy, that
is of concealed German agents.