XII

Grodman was ushered into the conscientious Minister's study. The doughty

chief of the agitation was, perhaps, the one man who could not be denied.

As he entered, the Home Secretary's face seemed lit up with relief. At a

sign from his master, the amanuensis who had brought in the last telegram

took it back with him into the outer room where he worked. Needless to

say not a tithe of the Minister's correspondence ever came under his own

eyes.

"You have a valid reason for troubling me, I suppose, Mr. Grodman?" said

the Home Secretary, almost cheerfully. "Of course it is about Mortlake?"

"It is; and I have the best of all reasons."

"Take a seat. Proceed."

"Pray do not consider me impertinent, but have you ever given any

attention to the science of evidence?"

"How do you mean?" asked the Home Secretary, rather puzzled, adding, with

a melancholy smile, "I have had to lately. Of course, I've never been a

criminal lawyer, like some of my predecessors. But I should hardly speak

of it as a science; I look upon it as a question of common-sense."

"Pardon me, sir. It is the most subtle and difficult of all the sciences.

It is, indeed, rather the science of the sciences. What is the whole of

Inductive Logic, as laid down, say, by Bacon and Mill, but an attempt

to appraise the value of evidence, the said evidence being the trails

left by the Creator, so to speak? The Creator has--I say it in all

reverence--drawn a myriad red herrings across the track, but the true

scientist refuses to be baffled by superficial appearances in detecting

the secrets of Nature. The vulgar herd catches at the gross apparent

fact, but the man of insight knows that what lies on the surface does

lie."

"Very interesting, Mr. Grodman, but really--"

"Bear with me, sir. The science of evidence being thus so extremely

subtle, and demanding the most acute and trained observation of facts,

the most comprehensive understanding of human psychology, is naturally

given over to professors who have not the remotest idea that 'things are

not what they seem,' and that everything is other than it appears; to

professors, most of whom by their year-long devotion to the shop-counter

or the desk, have acquired an intimate acquaintance with all the infinite

shades and complexities of things and human nature. When twelve of these

professors are put in a box, it is called a jury. When one of these

professors is put in a box by himself, he is called a witness. The

retailing of evidence--the observation of the facts--is given over to

people who go through their lives without eyes; the appreciation of

evidence--the judging of these facts--is surrendered to people who may

possibly be adepts in weighing out pounds of sugar. Apart from their

sheer inability to fulfil either function--to observe, or to judge--their

observation and their judgment alike are vitiated by all sorts of

irrelevant prejudices."

"You are attacking trial by jury."

"Not necessarily. I am prepared to accept that scientifically, on the

ground that, as there are, as a rule, only two alternatives, the balance

of probability is slightly in favour of the true decision being come to.

Then, in cases where experts like myself have got up the evidence, the

jury can be made to see through trained eyes."

The Home Secretary tapped impatiently with his foot.

"I can't listen to abstract theorising," he said. "Have you any fresh

concrete evidence?"

"Sir, everything depends on our getting down to the root of the matter.

What percentage of average evidence should you think is thorough, plain,

simple, unvarnished fact, 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but

the truth'?"

"Fifty?" said the Minister, humouring him a little.

"Not five. I say nothing of lapses of memory, of inborn defects of

observational power--though the suspiciously precise recollection of

dates and events possessed by ordinary witnesses in important trials

taking place years after the occurrences involved, is one of the most

amazing things in the curiosities of modern jurisprudence. I defy you,

sir, to tell me what you had for dinner last Monday, or what exactly you

were saying and doing at five o'clock last Tuesday afternoon. Nobody

whose life does not run in mechanical grooves can do anything of the

sort; unless, of course, the facts have been very impressive. But this by

the way. The great obstacle to veracious observation is the element of

prepossession in all vision. Has it ever struck you, sir, that we never

_see_ any one more than once, if that? The first time we meet a man we

may possibly see him as he is; the second time our vision is coloured and

modified by the memory of the first. Do our friends appear to us as they

appear to strangers? Do our rooms, our furniture, our pipes strike our

eye as they would strike the eye of an outsider, looking on them for the

first time? Can a mother see her babe's ugliness, or a lover his

mistress's shortcomings, though they stare everybody else in the face?

Can we see ourselves as others see us? No; habit, prepossession changes

all. The mind is a large factor of every so-called external fact. The eye

sees, sometimes, what it wishes to see, more often what it expects to

see. You follow me, sir?"

The Home Secretary nodded his head less impatiently. He was beginning to

be interested. The hubbub from without broke faintly upon their ears.

"To give you a definite example. Mr. Wimp says that when I burst open the

door of Mr. Constant's room on the morning of December 4th, and saw that

the staple of the bolt had been wrested by the pin from the lintel, I

jumped at once to the conclusion that I had broken the bolt. Now I admit

that this was so, only in things like this you do not seem to _conclude_,

you jump so fast that you _see_, or seem to. On the other hand, when you

_see_ a _standing_ ring of fire produced by whirling a burning stick, you

do _not_ believe in its continuous existence. It is the same when

witnessing a legerdemain performance. Seeing is not always believing,

despite the proverb; but believing is often seeing. It is not to the

point that in that little matter of the door Wimp was as hopelessly and

incurably wrong as he has been in everything all along. The door _was_

securely bolted. Still I confess that I should have seen that I had

broken the bolt in forcing the door, even if it had been broken

beforehand. Never once since December 4th did this possibility occur

to me, till Wimp with perverted ingenuity suggested it. If this is the

case with a trained observer, one moreover fully conscious of this

ineradicable tendency of the human mind, how must it be with an untrained

observer?"

"Come to the point, come to the point," said the Home Secretary, putting

out his hand as if it itched to touch the bell on the writing-table.

"Such as," went on Grodman, imperturbably, "such as--Mrs. Drabdump. That

worthy person is unable, by repeated violent knocking, to arouse her

lodger who yet desires to be aroused; she becomes alarmed, she rushes

across to get my assistance; I burst open the door--what do you think the

good lady expected to see?"

"Mr. Constant murdered, I suppose," murmured the Home Secretary,

wonderingly.

"Exactly. And so she saw it. And what should you think was the condition

of Arthur Constant when the door yielded to my violent exertions and flew

open?"

"Why, was he not dead?" gasped the Home Secretary, his heart fluttering

violently.

"Dead? A young, healthy fellow like that! When the door flew open, Arthur

Constant was sleeping the sleep of the just. It was a deep, a very deep

sleep, of course, else the blows at his door would long since have

awakened him. But all the while Mrs. Drabdump's fancy was picturing her

lodger cold and stark, the poor young fellow was lying in bed in a nice

warm sleep."

"You mean to say you found Arthur Constant alive?"

"As you were last night."

The Minister was silent, striving confusedly to take in the situation.

Outside the crowd was cheering again. It was probably to pass the time.

"Then, when was he murdered?"

"Immediately afterwards."

"By whom?"

"Well, that is, if you will pardon me, not a very intelligent question.

Science and common-sense are in accord for once. Try the method of

exhaustion. It must have been either by Mrs. Drabdump or myself."

"You mean to say that Mrs. Drabdump--!"

"Poor dear Mrs. Drabdump, you don't deserve this of your Home Secretary!

The idea of that good lady!"

"It was _you_!"

"Calm yourself, my dear Home Secretary. There is nothing to be alarmed

at. It was a solitary experiment, and I intend it to remain so." The

noise without grew louder. "Three cheers for Grodman! Hip, hip, hip,

hooray," fell faintly on their ears.

But the Minister, pallid and deeply moved, touched the bell. The Home

Secretary's home secretary appeared. He looked at the great man's

agitated face with suppressed surprise.

"Thank you for calling in your amanuensis," said Grodman. "I intended to

ask you to lend me his services. I suppose he can write shorthand."

The Minister nodded, speechless.

"That is well. I intend this statement to form the basis of an appendix

to the twenty-fifth edition--sort of silver wedding--of my book,

_Criminals I have Caught_. Mr. Denzil Cantercot, who, by the will I have

made to-day, is appointed my literary executor, will have the task of

working it up with literary and dramatic touches after the model of the

other chapters of my book. I have every confidence he will be able to do

me as much justice, from a literary point of view, as you, sir, no doubt

will from a legal. I feel certain he will succeed in catching the style

of the other chapters to perfection."

"Templeton," whispered the Home Secretary, "this man may be a lunatic.

The effort to solve the Big Bow Mystery may have addled his brain.

Still," he added aloud, "it will be as well for you to take down his

statement in shorthand."

"Thank you, sir," said Grodman, heartily. "Ready, Mr. Templeton? Here

goes. My career till I left the Scotland Yard Detective Department is

known to all the world. Is that too fast for you, Mr. Templeton? A

little? Well, I'll go slower; but pull me up if I forget to keep the

brake on. When I retired, I discovered that I was a bachelor. But it was

too late to marry. Time hung heavy on my hands. The preparation of my

book, _Criminals I have Caught_, kept me occupied for some months. When

it was published, I had nothing more to do but think. I had plenty of

money, and it was safely invested; there was no call for speculation. The

future was meaningless to me; I regretted I had not elected to die in

harness. As idle old men must, I lived in the past. I went over and over

again my ancient exploits; I re-read my book. And as I thought and

thought, away from the excitement of the actual hunt, and seeing the

facts in a truer perspective, so it grew daily clearer to me that

criminals were more fools than rogues. Every crime I had traced,

however cleverly perpetrated, was from the point of view of penetrability

a weak failure. Traces and trails were left on all sides--ragged edges,

rough-hewn corners; in short, the job was botched, artistic completeness

unattained. To the vulgar, my feats might seem marvellous--the average

man is mystified to grasp how you detect the letter 'e' in a simple

cryptogram--to myself they were as commonplace as the crimes they

unveiled. To me now, with my lifelong study of the science of evidence,

it seemed possible to commit not merely one but a thousand crimes that

should be absolutely undiscoverable. And yet criminals would go on

sinning, and giving themselves away, in the same old grooves--no

originality, no dash, no individual insight, no fresh conception! One

would imagine there were an Academy of crime with forty thousand

armchairs. And gradually, as I pondered and brooded over the thought,

there came upon me the desire to commit a crime that should baffle

detection. I could invent hundreds of such crimes, and please myself by

imagining them done; but would they really work out in practice?

Evidently the sole performer of my experiment must be myself; the

subject--whom or what? Accident should determine. I itched to commence

with murder--to tackle the stiffest problems first, and I burned to

startle and baffle the world--especially the world of which I had ceased

to be. Outwardly I was calm, and spoke to the people about me as usual.

Inwardly I was on fire with a consuming scientific passion. I sported

with my pet theories, and fitted them mentally on every one I met. Every

friend or acquaintance I sat and gossiped with, I was plotting how to

murder without leaving a clue. There is not one of my friends or

acquaintances I have not done away with in thought. There is no public

man--have no fear, my dear Home Secretary--I have not planned to

assassinate secretly, mysteriously, unintelligibly, undiscoverably.

Ah, how I could give the stock criminals points--with their second-hand

motives, their conventional conceptions, their commonplace details, their

lack of artistic feeling and restraint."

The crowd had again started cheering. Impatient as the watchers were,

they felt that no news was good news. The longer the interview accorded

by the Home Secretary to the chairman of the Defence Committee, the

greater the hope his obduracy was melting. The idol of the people would

be saved, and "Grodman" and "Tom Mortlake" were mingled in the exultant

plaudits.

"The late Arthur Constant," continued the great criminologist, "came to

live nearly opposite me. I cultivated his acquaintance--he was a lovable

young fellow, an excellent subject for experiment. I do not know when I

have ever taken to a man more. From the moment I first set eyes on him,

there was a peculiar sympathy between us. We were drawn to each other. I

felt instinctively he would be the man. I loved to hear him speak

enthusiastically of the Brotherhood of Man--I, who knew the brotherhood

of man was to the ape, the serpent, and the tiger--and he seemed to find

a pleasure in stealing a moment's chat with me from his engrossing

self-appointed duties. It is a pity humanity should have been robbed of

so valuable a life. But it had to be. At a quarter to ten on the night of

December 3rd he came to me. Naturally I said nothing about this visit

at the inquest or the trial. His object was to consult me mysteriously

about some girl. He said he had privately lent her money--which she was

to repay at her convenience. What the money was for he did not know,

except that it was somehow connected with an act of abnegation in which

he had vaguely encouraged her. The girl had since disappeared, and he

was in distress about her. He would not tell me who it was--of course

now, sir, you know as well as I it was Jessie Dymond--but asked for

advice as to how to set about finding her. He mentioned that Mortlake

was leaving for Devonport by the first train on the next day. Of old I

should have connected these two facts and sought the thread; now, as he

spoke, all my thoughts were dyed red. He was suffering perceptibly from

toothache, and in answer to my sympathetic inquiries told me it had been

allowing him very little sleep. Everything combined to invite the trial

of one of my favourite theories. I spoke to him in a fatherly way, and

when I had tendered some vague advice about the girl, I made him promise

to secure a night's rest (before he faced the arduous tram-men's meeting

in the morning) by taking a sleeping draught. I gave him a quantity of

sulfonal in a phial. It is a new drug, which produces protracted sleep

without disturbing digestion, and which I use myself. He promised

faithfully to take the draught; and I also exhorted him earnestly to bolt

and bar and lock himself in so as to stop up every chink or aperture by

which the cold air of the winter's night might creep into the room. I

remonstrated with him on the careless manner he treated his body, and he

laughed in his good-humoured, gentle way, and promised to obey me in all

things. And he did. That Mrs. Drabdump, failing to rouse him, would cry

'Murder!' I took for certain. She is built that way. As even Sir Charles

Brown-Harland remarked, she habitually takes her prepossessions for

facts, her inferences for observations. She forecasts the future in grey.

Most women of Mrs. Drabdump's class would have behaved as she did. She

happened to be a peculiarly favourable specimen for working on by

'suggestion,' but I would have undertaken to produce the same effect on

almost any woman. The key to the Big Bow Mystery is feminine psychology.

The only uncertain link in the chain was, Would Mrs. Drabdump rush across

to get _me_ to break open the door? Women always rush for a man. I was

well-nigh the nearest, and certainly the most authoritative man in the

street, and I took it for granted she would."

"But suppose she hadn't?" the Home Secretary could not help asking.

"Then the murder wouldn't have happened, that's all. In due course Arthur

Constant would have awoke, or somebody else breaking open the door would

have found him sleeping; no harm done, nobody any the wiser. I could

hardly sleep myself that night. The thought of the extraordinary crime

I was about to commit--a burning curiosity to know whether Wimp would

detect _the modus operandi_--the prospect of sharing the feelings of

murderers with whom I had been in contact all my life without being in

touch with the terrible joys of their inner life--the fear lest I should

be too fast asleep to hear Mrs. Drabdump's knock--these things agitated

me and disturbed my rest. I lay tossing on my bed, planning every detail

of poor Constant's end. The hours dragged slowly and wretchedly on

towards the misty dawn. I was racked with suspense. Was I to be

disappointed after all? At last the welcome sound came--the rat-tat-tat

of murder. The echoes of that knock are yet in my ear. 'Come over and

kill him!' I put my night-capped head out of the window and told her to

wait for me. I dressed hurriedly, took my razor, and went across to 11

Glover Street. As I broke open the door of the bedroom in which Arthur

Constant lay sleeping, his head resting on his hands, I cried, 'My God!'

as if I saw some awful vision. A mist as of blood swam before Mrs.

Drabdump's eyes. She cowered back, for an instant (I divined rather than

saw the action) she shut off the dreaded sight with her hands. In that

instant I had made my cut--precisely, scientifically--made so deep a cut

and drawn out the weapon so sharply that there was scarce a drop of blood

on it; then there came from the throat a jet of blood which Mrs.

Drabdump, conscious only of the horrid gash, saw but vaguely. I covered

up the face quickly with a handkerchief to hide any convulsive

distortion. But as the medical evidence (in this detail accurate)

testified, death was instantaneous. I pocketed the razor and the empty

sulfonal phial. With a woman like Mrs. Drabdump to watch me, I could do

anything I pleased. I got her to draw my attention to the fact that both

the windows were fastened. Some fool, by the by, thought there was a

discrepancy in the evidence because the police found only one window

fastened, forgetting that, in my innocence I took care not to refasten

the window I had opened to call for aid. Naturally I did not call for aid

before a considerable time had elapsed. There was Mrs. Drabdump to quiet,

and the excuse of making notes--as an old hand. My object was to gain

time. I wanted the body to be fairly cold and stiff before being

discovered, though there was not much danger here; for, as you saw by the

medical evidence, there is no telling the time of death to an hour or

two. The frank way in which I said the death was very recent disarmed all

suspicion, and even Dr. Robinson was unconsciously worked upon, in

adjudging the time of death, by the knowledge (query here, Mr. Templeton)

that it had preceded my advent on the scene.

"Before leaving Mrs. Drabdump, there is just one point I should like to

say a word about. You have listened so patiently, sir, to my lectures on

the science of sciences that you will not refuse to hear the last. A good

deal of importance has been attached to Mrs. Drabdump's oversleeping

herself by half an hour. It happens that this (like the innocent fog

which has also been made responsible for much) is a purely accidental

and irrelevant circumstance. In all works on inductive logic it is

thoroughly recognised that only some of the circumstances of a phenomenon

are of its essence and casually interconnected; there is always a certain

proportion of heterogeneous accompaniments which have no intimate

relation whatever with the phenomenon. Yet, so crude is as yet the

comprehension of the science of evidence, that _every_ feature of the

phenomenon under investigation is made equally important, and sought to

be linked with the chain of evidence. To attempt to explain everything is

always the mark of the tyro. The fog and Mrs. Drabdump's oversleeping

herself were mere accidents. There are always these irrelevant

accompaniments, and the true scientist allows for this element of (so to

speak) chemically unrelated detail. Even I never counted on the

unfortunate series of accidental phenomena which have led to Mortlake's

implication in a network of suspicion. On the other hand, the fact that

my servant, Jane, who usually goes about ten, left a few minutes earlier

on the night of December 3rd, so that she didn't know of Constant's

visit, was a relevant accident. In fact, just as the art of the artist or

the editor consists largely in knowing what to leave out, so does the art

of the scientific detector of crime consist in knowing what details to

ignore. In short, to explain everything is to explain too much. And too

much is worse than too little.

"To return to my experiment. My success exceeded my wildest dreams. None

had an inkling of the truth. The insolubility of the Big Bow Mystery

teased the acutest minds in Europe and the civilised world. That a man

could have been murdered in a thoroughly inaccessible room savoured of

the ages of magic. The redoubtable Wimp, who had been blazoned as my

successor, fell back on the theory of suicide. The mystery would have

slept till my death, but--I fear--for my own ingenuity. I tried to stand

outside myself, and to look at the crime with the eyes of another, or of

my old self. I found the work of art so perfect as to leave only one

sublimely simple solution. The very terms of the problem were so

inconceivable that, had I not been the murderer, I should have suspected

myself, in conjunction, of course, with Mrs. Drabdump. The first persons

to enter the room would have seemed to me guilty. I wrote at once (in a

disguised hand and over the signature of 'One who looks through his own

spectacles') to the _Pell Mell Press_ to suggest this. By associating

myself thus with Mrs. Drabdump I made it difficult for people to

dissociate the two who entered the room together. To dash a half-truth in

the world's eyes is the surest way of blinding it altogether. This

pseudonymous letter of mine I contradicted (in my own name) the next day,

and in the course of the long letter which I was tempted to write, I

adduced fresh evidence against the theory of suicide. I was disgusted

with the open verdict, and wanted men to be up and doing and trying to

find me out. I enjoyed the hunt more.

"Unfortunately, Wimp, set on the chase again by my own letter, by dint of

persistent blundering, blundered into a track which--by a devilish tissue

of coincidences I had neither foreseen nor dreamt of--seemed to the world

the true. Mortlake was arrested and condemned. Wimp had apparently

crowned his reputation. This was too much. I had taken all this trouble

merely to put a feather in Wimp's cap, whereas I had expected to shake

his reputation by it. It was bad enough that an innocent man should

suffer; but that Wimp should achieve a reputation he did not deserve, and

over-shadow all his predecessors by dint of a colossal mistake, this

seemed to me intolerable. I have moved heaven and earth to get the

verdict set aside, and to save the prisoner; I have exposed the weakness

of the evidence; I have had the world searched for the missing girl; I

have petitioned and agitated. In vain. I have failed. Now I play my last

card. As the overweening Wimp could not be allowed to go down to

posterity as the solver of this terrible mystery, I decided that the

condemned man might just as well profit by his exposure. That is the

reason I make the exposure to-night, before it is too late to save

Mortlake."

"So that is the reason?" said the Home Secretary, with a suspicion of

mockery in his tones.

"The sole reason."

Even as he spoke, a deeper roar than ever penetrated the study.

"A Reprieve! Hooray! Hooray!" The whole street seemed to rock with

earthquake and the names of Grodman and Mortlake to be thrown up in a

fiery jet. "A Reprieve! A Reprieve!" And then the very windows rattled

with cheers for the Minister. And even above that roar rose the shrill

voices of the newsboys, "Reprieve of Mortlake! Mortlake Reprieved!"

Grodman looked wonderingly towards the street. "How do they know?" he

murmured.

"Those evening papers are amazing," said the Minister, drily. "But I

suppose they had everything ready in type for the contingency." He turned

to his secretary.

"Templeton, have you got down every word of Mr. Grodman's confession?"

"Every word, sir."

"Then bring in the cable you received just as Mr. Grodman entered the

house."

Templeton went back into the outer room and brought back the cablegram

that had been lying on the Minister's writing-table when Grodman came in.

The Home Secretary silently handed it to his visitor. It was from the

Chief of Police of Melbourne, announcing that Jessie Dymond had just

arrived in that city in a sailing vessel, ignorant of all that had

occurred, and had been immediately despatched back to England, having

made a statement entirely corroborating the theory of the defence.

"Pending further inquiries into this," said the Home Secretary, not

without appreciation of the grim humour of the situation as he glanced at

Grodman's ashen cheeks, "I have reprieved the prisoner. Mr. Templeton was

about to despatch the messenger to the governor of Newgate as you entered

this room. Mr. Wimp's card-castle would have tumbled to pieces without

your assistance. Your still undiscoverable crime would have shaken his

reputation as you intended."

A sudden explosion shook the room and blent with the cheers of the

populace. Grodman had shot himself--very scientifically--in the heart. He

fell at the Home Secretary's feet, stone dead.

Some of the working men who had been standing waiting by the shafts of

the hansom helped to bear the stretcher.

* * * * *