Gordon offers the Consolation of Philosophy¹
¹ To the Reader—This chapter may be omitted if the book be thought
too long.
Gordon fell into Reeves’ other arm-chair and shouted with laughter.
Nothing could be more disagreeable to nerves already jangled. Reeves
almost shook him into position, demanding explanations.
“It’s all right,” he said at last. “You get all the luck, Reeves.
Marryatt wasn’t listening at the other end of the metaphone. And all
the time you were talking through it, it was just a soliloquy.”
“Thank God for that! But how did you explain it all? What did you tell
him?”
“Oh, I just told him the truth—part of the truth. And you must really
get out of that habit of wheezing, because it was your wheezing behind
the secret panel that made Marryatt think it was Brotherhood’s ghost
sitting in your room last night!”
“You mean that’s what frightened Marryatt? Why did he run away this
morning, then?”
“He thought it was Brotherhood telephoning to him. Lord, what a day!”
“And you’ve explained everything to him?”
“Yes, I’ve explained it all; I’d have explained it yesterday, if you’d
let me.”
“Come now, don’t try and persuade me you didn’t think yourself that
Marryatt was guilty?”
“Guilty of murder? Not for a single, solitary moment. I did think
there was something wrong with him—so there was, he was hag-ridden
with nightmare about Brotherhood. But I never agreed with you about
Marryatt being a murderer, and, to do me justice, I never said so.”
“That’s all very well, but you never showed me where I was wrong in my
interpretation of the whole thing.”
“I know; it was no good showing you where you were wrong, because you
were so confoundedly ingenious at devising fresh explanations.
Honestly, I did put one or two difficulties to you, but in a second
you’d persuaded yourself to believe that they were no difficulties at
all. And of course there were heaps more.”
“Such as?”
“Well, you persisted in regarding the whole thing as a deliberate,
carefully planned murder. But if you come to think of it, the
circumstances that favoured the murder were just the sort of
circumstances that couldn’t have been foreseen. 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? Yet, without a
fog, the attempt would have been perfectly desperate.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“And it wasn’t merely the general setting, it was the details. How
could Marryatt know that the train would be held up by signals just
there? 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. But those are all objections of detail. I
didn’t mention them because, as I say, you’d have found some sort of
answer for each. My real objection was much deeper.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me about _that_?”
“Because you wouldn’t have begun to understand it. It’s concerned, you
see, with people, not with things. It’s simply that Davenant is the
kind of person who would kill a man, and Marryatt isn’t.”
“You mean because Marryatt’s a parson? But, dash it all, Davenant goes
to church.”
“Davenant goes to church, but he isn’t the sort of person who goes to
church. With Protestants, I mean, it’s ordinarily safe to assume that
if people do go to church they are of a church-going type; they belong
to the ‘unco’ guid.’ That isn’t a safe assumption to make about
Catholics; they seem to go to church whether they’re ‘unco’ guid’ or
not. I don’t mean that Davenant’s a stage villain, but he’s just an
ordinary sort of person, and he’s got red blood in him, whereas
Marryatt hasn’t—I hope it’s not unkind to say so. He wouldn’t kill a
man; you may almost say he couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t morally, you mean, or couldn’t physically?”
“I don’t mean either. ‘Couldn’t psychically’ would be nearer the mark.
For one thing, Davenant’s fought in the war, and killed people, I
expect—he was a bombing officer, wasn’t he? Well, you know, I think to
most people that makes an enormous difference. I suppose that’s why
there’s generally a ‘crime-wave’ after wars—part of the reason,
anyhow. People have got accustomed to killing, and it isn’t easy to
murder people till you’ve done that.”
“And Marryatt, you mean, really couldn’t kill a man?”
“Physically he could—he’s rather strong. Morally he could—morally any
of us could do anything. Or so they taught us when we were small. But
there’s a third difficulty you’ve got to get over, if you want to
murder people; a sort of nervous repugnance to the job. I don’t say
that if Marryatt went to the bad, he mightn’t screw himself up to the
point of shoving poison into somebody’s tea. But he couldn’t kill a
man with his hands.”
“I know; it doesn’t sound probable. And yet, I suppose a person with a
fixed idea isn’t much different from a madman, is he? And my argument
was that Marryatt had a sort of fixed idea about religion.”
“Yes; but, don’t you see, he hasn’t. Marryatt’s a very good chap, and
he thinks all the doctrines he preaches are more probable than not,
but his religion doesn’t sweep him off his feet: the man who denies it
doesn’t seem to him something less than human. 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.”
“What, you mean scientific theories in medicine and so on? Taking the
doctors’ word for it that it’s a good thing to be vaccinated, and that
kind of thing?”
“No, hang it all, it would be unfair to complain of that. It’s better
for the doctors to have a false theory than no theory at all. They
make mistakes, but sooner or later they find out they were wrong. It’s
bad luck on all the people who happen to have died from getting the
wrong treatment, but still, we did our best. No, I don’t mean the
guess-work by which we live from day to day, and which is necessary to
living: I mean the theories learned people propound to us about the
past, about the meaning of human history.”
“Darwin, and all that?”
“No, not exactly. I grant you that does illustrate my point. Evolution
is only a theory, and the relationship of the monkey to the man not
even a plausible theory; and yet they have gone on so long without
being positively disproved that everybody talks as if they were
proved. The scientist still treats evolution as a theory, the
educationalist treats it as a fact. There’s a curious sort of statute
of limitations in the learned world which makes it impossible to call
a man a liar if he has gone on lying successfully for fifty years.
But, after all, there’s something to be said for the Evolutionists.
They did set out to explain a real problem, why there should be more
than one kind of thing in the world; and they don’t even profess to
have explained it. 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.”
“All this comes out of your diary, I suppose?”
“No, I haven’t written it up yet. I’m going to write it up, about half
an hour from now, that’s why you’re getting all this thrown at you.
You see, when I think of you talking through that metaphone, it
strikes me as a splendid allegory of the whole historical method in
criticism—or rather, that abuse of the historical method which
commonly usurps the title. The man who has theories about history is
usually just that—a man talking down the metaphone, making a series of
false statements to a person who isn’t there, and defying him to
disprove them.”
“Gordon, I believe you’re going to solve the problem of my vocation.
I’ve always hankered after being an amateur detective, but it seems to
me the job is less attractive than I supposed—facts will keep coming
in. But, by your way of it, it sounds as if I might be a success in
one of the learned professions.”
“Certainly. Be an anthropologist, Reeves. Fish up a lot of facts,
alleged on very doubtful authority, about primitive man—his marriage
ceremonies, his burial customs, his system of land tenure. Look at the
whole mass of facts squint-eyed until you can see a theory in it.
Embrace the theory; trot out all the facts which support your theory;
write a long appendix on all the facts which contradict your theory,
showing them to be insignificant or irrelevant (you’d do that all
right) and there you are. You’ll do quite as good anthropological
research as——”
“Is there money in it?”
“I thought you were all right for money. No, if you’re out for that, I
should take to psycho-analysis. The system’s the same, generally
speaking, only instead of dealing with primitive man, whom you can
disregard because he isn’t there, you are dealing with a living man,
who will probably tell you that you are a liar. Then you tell him that
he is losing his temper, which is the sign of a strong inhibition
somewhere, and that’s just what you were saying all along. The beauty
of psycho-analysis is that it’s all ‘Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.’ In
medicine, your diagnosis of fever is a trifle disconcerted if the
patient’s temperature is sub-normal. In psychoanalysis you say, ‘Ah,
that just proves what I was saying.’”
“It seems to me that I have been neglecting all these openings for our
young men.”
“Well, I don’t know, the psycho-business is getting a bit over-crowded
nowadays. But there are still plenty of openings in the historical
line. You can read what theories you like into history, as long as you
are careful to neglect human probabilities, and take your evidence
entirely from a selection of external facts. There is danger in it, of
course; any day some fool may dig up a great chunk of Livy, and all
your theories go wrong. Still, the obvious remedy for that is to say
that Livy was lying on purpose, leaving false clues about
deliberately, like Marryatt, you know, on the railway line. All
documents, you see, which don’t happen to support your point of view,
thereby give themselves away as being late and untrustworthy.”
“But I don’t think I know any history much.”
“That doesn’t matter; it’s quite easy to read your stuff up if you
confine yourself to a particular period or a particular kind of
history. For the beginner, Church history may be confidently
recommended. Public interest in the subject is so small that it is
very unlikely any one will take the trouble to contradict you. If the
worst comes to the worst, you can always fall back upon literary
criticism, and there you are on perfectly safe ground. A man with a
documentary hypothesis can defy the rudest assaults of common sense.”
“How does one do that, exactly?”
“You have to start out by saying, ‘This document consists of three
parts. One part is genuine, one part is spurious, the third part is
faked evidence put in to make the spurious stuff look as if it was
genuine!’ Then, you see, you are on velvet. You reject altogether the
parts of the document which you don’t like. Then you take the
remaining part, and find that it still contains a certain sort of
dross—evidence which still conflicts with your theory. That dross you
purge away by calling it a deliberate fake. The watch says 4.54—that
is proof positive that, in the first place, the murder took place at
3.54, and, in the second place, the murderer tried to pretend it
didn’t. You see the idea? Now, the more of that business you do, the
more ingenious your theory becomes, and the more ingenious your theory
becomes, the more easily will people accept it as true. Half the
statements which we regard as facts in history and criticism are
statements made by critics, which are so ingenious that nobody has the
heart to doubt them. And so the silly old world goes on. What if our
forefathers are misjudged? We keep our mouths, not our ears, to the
metaphone, and the honourable gentlemen get no opportunity to reply:
and it doesn’t matter much to them, because, like sensible people,
they’ve dropped their end of the tube, and left us to talk into empty
air.”
“Do you know, Gordon, I believe you talk an awful lot of rot.”
“I know. But it isn’t all rot. Well, what are you proposing to do?”
“I am proposing to devote myself in future to the Game—the Game, the
whole Game, and nothing but the Game.”