Chapter II.From Cocktails to CriminologyIt has been said, no doubt with truth, that to make her mark in these overcrowded days a girl must adopt a line and stick to it like grim death. She may be languid, she may be sporting, she may be offensively rude, she may be appealing and doll-like, and she will find success, but she must never be purely and simply herself; that is the fundamental mistake. Such criticism could not be applied to the Misses Howard.Our semi-civilised conventions have their disadvantages. In a more enlightened age the Misses Howard might have been compelled to go through life wearing horns and a barbed tail and a passable imitation of cloven hooves, as a timely warning to unsuspecting strangers not to take these two innocent-looking maidens at their face-value, charming as that was. Dissimulation, as practised by the Misses Howard, was more than a fine art; it was a hobby. The unsuspecting stranger (of the male sex, of course; female strangers are never unsuspecting, and the more strange they are the more they suspect), catching sight of one of the Miss Howards would swell his manly chest and pat his manly back, and say to himself in his manly tones: “Here is a poor, frightened little thing who looks at me as if I were a god. Who knows? Perhaps I am a god. I am very much inclined, when this helpless and pretty little thing looks at me like that, to think that I am. Out with the lance and armour! Are there any dragons about? Or, failing dragons, mice? At any rate, it is palpably up to me to protect this delectably timid small person from something, and that pretty quickly.”And twenty minutes later, if he had interested the timid little thing enough, he would be wondering ruefully if certain words of hers really meant what they had implied, or whether they were intended to convey something quite different and impossibly puncturing to the gallant balloon of manly self-esteem. If he did not interest her enough, he would be wondering still more ruefully how he could ever have imagined such a frigid block of sarcastic ice to be incapable in any conceivable way of looking after, not merely herself, but the entire universe as well. The Misses Howard may perhaps most politely be described as “stimulating.”Nevertheless, the family of Howard had done one good thing—it had brought Guy and Cynthia together. George Howard, the brother of the two demons, a large, solid person, as unlike his sisters as the elephant is unlike the mosquito, had been Guy’s worshipping disciple at school and at Oxford; Dora and Cynthia had been “best friends.” George had now taken for the summer the cottage at Duffley whose garden adjoined Guy’s. He had moved in only three days before this story opens, and the fate of Duffley still hung in the balance.Laura, younger than her sister by a couple of years, had shouldered the responsibilities of her lot and the family’s orphanhood by accompanying her brother George about wherever he went and insisting upon keeping his house for him, much to that simple soul’s sorrow; on the whole, George would rather have had his house kept for him by a combination of Catherine of Medici and Lucretia Borgia than by either of his sisters. George was the sort of person who likes to know where he is at any given moment, and has a rooted distaste for dwelling upon a volcano. Laura, therefore, was now wasting her gifts upon the rustic life of Duffley. Dora, investing her talents to better purpose, had gone on the stage, where she had confidently expected to multiply them sevenfold.The British stage is a mass of curious contradictions. It lives upon humbug, it exploits humbug, and it is itself more taken in by humbug than any other institution. If a penniless actress lays out her last ten shillings in a pair of new gloves and a taxi-fare to the stage-door, the stage will say to itself as often as not: “Ha! Trixie Two-shoes is going about everywhere in taxis now, is she? She must be getting on, that girl. There is evidently more in her than I thought. I must have her for my next show, at double the salary she’s getting now. Good!” The stage then buys four cigars at five times the price it usually pays, in order to impress the financial magnate after lunch with the strength of its own position.But when humbug was offered to it of such rare and golden quality that its exploitation should have been repaid a hundred times over, the stage would have none of it. Dora had been unable to penetrate further into the legitimate drama which she felt herself called upon to enrich, than the stage-door-keeper’s box. Refusing to be beaten (she had no need of the money, but she was determined by hook or by crook to get on that elusive stage), Dora had abandoned the idea of legitimate drama for the time being and expressed her willingness to adorn the chorus of a revue, comforting herself with the reflection that not a few great stars have risen from the musical ranks to legitimate heights. She had at once obtained the position to which her face and figure entitled her and, after a year in the provinces, had for the last six months been adorning the front row of the Mammoth Chorus at the Palladeum. She was now rehearsing a production which was to open the following week, and so was at liberty to present herself, with her fiancé, at a Saturday to Monday housewarming for George.Only once had either of the Miss Howards met their match, and that was when a certain Mr. Doyle irritably besought Dora five months ago, within twenty minutes of the opening of their acquaintance, “for Heaven’s sake not to try and pull that moon-eyed, baby-voiced stuff on him. He wasn’t born yesterday, and he didn’t like it. In short, her artless behaviour left Mr. Doyle not only cold but weary.” Dora was so taken aback that for the first time in her life she became perfectly natural with a complete stranger.The sequel was inevitable. When four days later the volatile Mr. Doyle, touched apparently by this complimentary change of front, besought her hand in marriage, she kept her whirling head long enough to accept him on the spot; she felt she had at last met her master, and the sensation though novel was by no means disagreeable. Since then they had remained engaged, in spite of all expectations to the contrary, their own included; indeed, Mr. Doyle had gone so far as to inform his fiancée with engaging candour that this was the longest period he had ever been engaged to any one girl. They were now even beginning to think quite seriously of the possibility of really getting married some day if Mr. Doyle could scrape together the capital on which to do so.In spite of Cynthia’s assurances, Guy Nesbitt was not on hand when the quartet arrived. With a face like a high priest’s he was performing solemn rites in the dining-room over a bottle of port and a decanter, and Cynthia had to welcome her guests in the drawing-room alone.She cast a somewhat anxious eye at the sisters as they marched decorously into the room on the heels of the maid’s announcement, their faces both ornamented with the same shy smile. Although she had known them most of her life and Dora was her closest friend, Cynthia never felt she knew quite where she was with them. In their rear walked Mr. Doyle, and behind him George Howard. Where Cynthia cast one anxious eye, George cast two. In spite of his elder years George knew even less where he was with his sisters than Cynthia did.“Hallo, Lawks!” smiled their hostess. “Hallo, Dawks!” To be admitted to the circle of those permitted to address them by these pseudonyms, which George had invented with simple pride at the age of eight, was the highest privilege the two had to bestow. The number so allowed was, for each sister, twelve, and no one fresh could be received within the magic circle until a suitable vacancy occurred. Cynthia did not know Laura nearly so well as her sister (the two had, very wisely, been despatched to different schools), but was permitted the honour in view of her position as Dora’s Best Friend.Laura smiled her greeting, and Dora motioned Mr. Doyle forward. “This is my appendage, Cynthia,” she remarked frankly.“He isn’t much to look at perhaps,” Laura amplified, “but his heart’s in the right place; at least Dora says it is, we haven’t had him vetted yet. His name’s Henry Aloysius Frederick Doyle, but never mind about that; he answers much better to the name of Pat. He’s Irish.”Mr. Doyle, a slightly-built, clean-shaven young man with black hair, turned in the act of bowing to Cynthia. “I’m not!” he said indignantly.“Yes, you are,” his future sister-in-law contradicted him. “How could you help being, with a name like Pat Doyle?”“But my name isn’t Pat Doyle. It’s Henry Doyle. Pat’s a nickname, goodness knows why. I’ve told you a hundred——”“Stop arguing and shake hands with the lady,” the younger Miss Howard interrupted. “Goodness knows your manners are bad enough at the best of times without making them worse. And we did want you to shine a little to-night. That’s why I told you not to speak with your mouth full, like you usually do, and not to wave your fork in the air when you argue. Of course you’re Irish!”With a somewhat heightened colour, which told Cynthia that these candid remarks were not without their substratum of truth, Mr. Doyle completed his greeting of his hostess. George, trying hard to look as if he had heard nothing, took Cynthia’s slim hand in his huge paw and told her, with remarkable earnestness, that it had been a topping day; he also expressed his hopes that it would be as topping a day to-morrow. One gathered that George was being what he considered tactful.Cynthia embarked upon her share of the unnatural conversation that takes place between intimate friends before a rather formal dinner.Glancing surreptitiously at Dora from time to time, Cynthia decided that the engagement had done her friend good. Dora seemed quieter. Not subdued, or anything like that, but tasting her enjoyment of life with a rather more detached, almost a lazy air. In contrast with the more bounding spirits of Laura, Dora seemed far older than the two years between them would have suggested. Cynthia was conscious of a certain relief.Five minutes later Guy came hurrying in and paused for a moment in the doorway, blinking benignly round through his glasses. “Sorry I’m so late,” he apologised. “Hallo, Dawks. Good-evening, Laura. The bottles were disgustingly dirty, and I had to go and wash again.”“Never mind washing, in a good cause,” murmured Mr. Doyle, and came forward to be introduced.The cocktails which Guy then proceeded to dispense played their usual helpful part (what would civilisation be without its cocktails?) and the little gathering moved into the dining-room. Dora seemed, for such a self-possessed young woman, acutely conscious of the presence of her fiancé, on trial, as it were, before the Best Friend, and was in consequence refreshingly innocuous; Laura, who was only meeting Guy for the third time and was not yet quite sure what to make of him, was equally tentative. Cynthia was able to take her seat at the bottom of the table with the happy confidence that her party was going to be a success. Cynthia was more right than she imagined.The dinner proceeded much in the way of all dinners, and the ice, to which the cocktails had already dealt a sound blow, was gradually smashed into diminishing smithereens.As the port was placed before him and the maid withdrew, Guy glanced with satisfaction round his dinner-table, on whose polished mahogany the candles in their heavy silver stands gleamed softly. The meal had gone off well, the guests had been exceedingly cheerful, and Cynthia, in a black velvet gown which admirably enhanced the white beauty of her arms and shoulders, was looking her very best. The host in Guy was full of content, the husband no less so. He poured himself out a glass of port as the decanter reached him from Dora, and beamed round once more.The young man Doyle had pleased Guy particularly. He had shown signs of a tendency towards argument which was most gratifying; rather voluble, perhaps, and occasionally a little excitable, but good, sound argument; and if there was one form of mental exercise which Guy’s soul loved beyond all others it was argument. In the dreamy contentment that follows a perfectly good dinner he listened to Cynthia rolling the conversational ball at her end of the table and meditated on a new subject to attract Doyle’s attention from his fiancée.“By the way,” Cynthia was remarking to George, “Monica and Alan are coming to stay with us the week after next for a few days, George. We must get up a river picnic for them.”“Thank goodness,” Laura took it on herself to reply. “We’ve only been in Duffley three days, but I’m bored stiff with the place already. I feel wasted here. There are possibilities in a river picnic.”“Oh, rather,” George murmured dutifully, concealing his blenches in his port-glass.As Cynthia’s brother and sister, and consequently Guy’s brother and sister-in-law, Alan and Monica undoubtedly had every claim upon him; but he was not unduly elated at Cynthia’s news. Duffley was a nice, peaceful place, where one could get a tolerably good game of golf and smoke a quiet pipe or two in the country round. It seemed a pity to have it turned upside down, even for a few days.George had met Alan and Monica before; the meeting had taken place two years ago, but George would never forget it. “Oh, rather,” he repeated sadly, wondering whether there were many frogs in the neighbourhood of Duffley. The last time they had met, Alan had done his best to endear himself by putting a frog in George’s bed. Neither George nor the frog had altogether appreciated the jest. George had had something of a fellow-feeling for frogs ever since.Cynthia turned to her other neighbour. “Will you still be here, Pat?” “Mr. Doyle,” had been dropped, on command of the sisters, before the champagne had been round twice.“I doubt it,” observed Laura darkly, from the other side of the table. It appeared that Laura had taken it upon herself to entertain the gravest doubts as to the engagement lasting for more than a few hours in the immediate future, and to give voice to those doubts upon every possible occasion. When she was not doing this, she was trying to correct, with an air of patient despondency, certain faults which she professed to see in her future brother-in-law’s manners. “For,” as she told her indignant sister, “you may be going to marry him, but I’ve got to be a sister to him; and I never could be a sister to a man who eats and drinks at the same time.”“No, Cynthia,” said Mr. Doyle with emphasis. “I shall certainly not be here then. Why?”“What a pity! I couldn’t help thinking you’d be so useful,” Cynthia smiled. “I mean, anybody who can manage to engage himself to Dawks—well, Monica ought to be child’s-play to him.”“Are you meaning,” inquired Mr. Doyle carefully, “that you want me to get engaged to your sister as well as Dawks? I’m a very obliging man, and I do my best to be kind to my friends, but the trouble is that I’ve never been properly trained as a bigamist. Besides, don’t you think Dawks might have something to say about it?”“She will,” interposed that young lady’s sister promptly. “She’ll say, ‘Get to it, my lad, and step briskly!’ That’ll be all right, Cynthia. He’ll be free for Monica days before she comes.”Cynthia laughed tactfully and proceeded with her exposition. “No, I wasn’t meaning that you need go so far as to get engaged to her; what I did think, though, was that you might be able to—well, what is known ashandleher, perhaps.”“Man-handle her, more like,” put in the faithful Greek chorus.George stifled another groan in his wine-glass. The last time he had encountered her, Monica had handled him, with a hose-pipe, causing him to dance at her commands as madly as any dervish on the front lawn of her house half an hour before the ceremony, on pain of having his wedding garments drenched, what time the wedding-guests stood about in the background feebly beating their breasts; and all because he had bestowed a brotherly tug at the thick plait which hung down her back—a thing to George’s ideas that was almost inevitable etiquette in the presence of a flapper. George had singularly few pleasant recollections of Monica.Mr. Doyle seemed to have caught something of the spirit of George’s apprehensions. He groaned faintly and ran a hand through his long black hair. “You don’t mean—you don’t mean that your sister is anything like——?” He paused. “Oh, no!” he said with decision. “You must put her off. Remember, Dawks might come down for another week-end, and then there’d be three in the place at a time. Duffley couldn’t stand it. The whole village would vanish in a cloud of blue smoke, and we with it. You must put her off, Cynthia.”“Are we,” Laura inquired carefully of her sister, “are we, do you think, being insulted, Dawks? Are we being insulted by this wretched Sein Feiner you’re trying to smuggle into the family?”An apprehensive look appeared on Cynthia’s face. She loved the sisters, and she loved to see them ragging; but she did not love the idea of their ragging across her dining-room table.Help came from an unexpected quarter. Dora, who had been unwontedly silent during the last half-hour, smiled lazily at her sister. “When are you going to grow up, Lawks?” she asked gently.Nobody but herself could have posed such a question and retired unscathed. As it was, Laura was half out of her chair before she sank back feebly, turning incredulous eyes up to the ceiling.“The woman’s nerve’s all gone,” she murmured in a faint voice. “She’s got soft. It’s young love, I suppose. She’ll be asking people to call her Miss Howard soon. Well, Heaven preserve me from ever getting engaged, that’s all!”“On behalf of the sex,” remarked Mr. Doyle piously, “which I so unworthily represent, Amen!”Laura’s pose altered abruptly, and her eyes sparkled with battle, but before she could translate her feelings into action, Guy, catching a frantic signal from his wife’s eyes, interposed with a change of subject. “Cheer up, George,” he said hastily. “What’s the matter? You look as if you’d committed a murder, and couldn’t decide what to do with the body.”“I think he’s just seen a ghost, and is being tactful about it,” said Laura, her attention successfully diverted.George, roused abruptly from his meditations concerning frogs and hose-pipes, smiled wanly. “Me? I’m all right,” he muttered.“I think you’ve guessed it, Nesbitt,” remarked Doyle, regarding his future brother-in-law closely. “He has committed a murder. How awkward for him! Now I come to look at him, he has got a criminal face, hasn’t he? I wonder what type he belongs to. The Palmer, would you say? He has that look of chubby innocence. But no, he’s too big and massive. Now, who…? Smith, perhaps? Smith was always the gent, wasn’t he?” He prattled on happily. Thus great events from causes small do spring.In Guy’s eyes an eager light had appeared, the light that must have gleamed in Stanley’s eyes when he pretended to greet Livingstone so nonchalantly. “I say, Doyle,” he said in hushed tones, “you’re not—you’re not interested in criminology, are you?”The light leaped into Doyle’s eyes. He looked at his host with reverence and awe. “Are you?” he asked, in the same cathedral-like voice.“Yes. I’ve never met any one else who was before.”“Neither have I!”They gazed at each other in ecstasy.“What’s your real opinion of the Thompson case?” Guy managed to whisper.“I heard an awfully interesting theory about the Mahon case,” whispered Doyle at the same moment.Cynthia coughed gently, “Have I caught your eye, Dawks? This, I think, is where we three gracefully retire.”They did so.“Doyouthink Seddon ought to have been convicted?” murmured Doyle, closing the door as absently as he had opened it.“Have you read the MacLachlan trial?” murmured Guy absently, producing cigars. “The character of old Fleming is most absorbing. Of course he did it.”They opened the flood-gates of their hobby and the long pent tide poured forth.For a time George listened with interest, for murders, dash it, are interesting, say what you like. Then he listened with less interest, for murders, hang it, are a bit what-you-might-call boring, taken in the mass; a good juicy mystery with his morning-paper George enjoyed as much as any one, but one, in George’s opinion, was enough at a time. Besides, after a fellow had done some one in and been well and truly hanged for it, what on earth was there to go on yapping about? George listened with growing boredom.“What about a foursome to-morrow morning, Guy?” said George. “We can get Dawks to make up the four. She doesn’t play at all too badly.”“When are your sister and brother-in-law coming, Guy?” said George.“I say, hadn’t we better be getting into the drawing-room?” said George. “They’ll be wondering what’s happened to us.”He might have saved himself the trouble; for when two or three criminologists are gathered together, then is for them neither time nor space, sweetheart nor wife, necessity nor law.They talked on.“I say,” said George, nerving himself for a supreme effort, “I’m getting a bit fed up with all this chat about murder.”Never once before in all his life had George so much as hinted that anything his elder and superior did, came to him the least little bit amiss; never before had the disciple ventured to criticise the master. At school where there were three years between them (and three years at school is an eternity) the small but beefy George, a stolid boy in those days, had worshipped, humbly adoring, at the shrine of Guy, the Head of his House. When Guy, who had only just scraped his second fifteen cap, came down as an old boy to find George captain of the school fifteen and runner-up for the captaincy of the cricket eleven, George had all but wept for joy to hear himself addressed almost on equal terms.At Oxford, where Guy was a fourth-year man, the time of George’s fresherhood had been brightened and sanctified by the presence in the same town of his divinity. Had not George been permitted to be the humble instrument for bringing about Guy’s marriage with the only woman in this world remotely approaching worthiness, and had he not been rewarded beyond rubies by being allowed to be the great one’s best man—an honour he valued far more than the note from his captain announcing that he had been awarded a blue for rugger? Yet, after all that, here he was, red in the face and not unconscious of his epoch-making action, saying gruffly that he was getting fed up with all that chat about murder! Murder has turned people into revolutionaries before George.The two ghouls paused in their banquet and turned glazed eyes upon George. Had they heard aright?“Fed up?” demanded Doyle incredulously.“Yes,” replied the mutinous George. “Too much of a good thing.”“Too much?” repeated Mr. Doyle. He exchanged pitying glances with Guy.“My dear chap,” that gentleman took up the tale, rather in the tones of one addressing a small and particularly foolish infant (thus do all criminologists address on this particular subject those who are not of their own persuasion, which accounts largely for their unpopularity.) “My dear chap, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It isn’t the mereactof murder which interests us, it’s the state of mind of the murderer. The particular psychology, in fact, which finds its culmination in murder. The motives, the amount of premeditation, the lack of premeditation even more, the psychology of the victim, the network of circumstance, and a hundred other things—thoseare what makes murder the most absorbing of all psychological studies.”“Oh!” said George. But he was impressed. George had never realised that murder had a psychology at all. George was learning things.Guy saw that the faithful hound was beginning to think of coming once more to heel, and carried on with the good work.He leaned back in his chair, joined his finger-tips and regarded his now uneasy disciple over his glasses with some severity.“Let me put it in this way,” he said, striving conscientiously to speak in words of not more than one syllable. “Supposeyoucommitted a murder, George. Suppose you were playing with the vicar, and he foozled his tee-shot to the last green and the whole match, and half-a-crown, depended on it; and suppose, unable to live in the same world with such bungling incompetence, you smote him on the head with one of your clubs, so that he died. Are you supposing all that?”“Ye-es,” said George, supposing manfully.“Well, what would interest us is not whether you smote him with your mashie or your niblick, or how much he bled, or whether his death-agonies removed any divots from the fairway. Nothing like that at all, George. Simply the state of your mind which showed you in one moment of blinding revelation that nothing short of murder was demanded by the situation.”“But I’m not a murderer,” said George, putting his finger on the weak spot.“No, George, at present you’re not; at least, so we hope. But if you ever happened to murder anybody, then you, yes, even you, George Howard, would be a murderer; and we should be studying the intricate psychology which caused you to snatch at your niblick and lay the vicar low just as eagerly as we now discuss the singular mentality of Mr. George Joseph Smith, who drowned a woman in her bath one minute and strummed on the organ in his sitting-room the next.”“What he means,” Mr. Doyle chimed in, “is that the really interesting thing is the reactions of the ordinary person to the idea of murder. What he feels like,” he amplified kindly, “after he’s done it, in fact.”“And before,” Guy amended.“And before,” Mr. Doyle agreed. “Look, in short, upon this picture and on that. Mr. Howard before murder, same gent after murder. The cross marks the spot where the body was found.”“So now do you understand, George?” Guy inquired.“I think so,” George responded, trying to look as if he did. “You mean, you like probing into the mind of a chap who’s committed a murder?”“In a nutshell!” approved Mr. Doyle.“But unfortunately we have to do our probing at second-hand,” Guy lamented. “Or rather, we have to let others do the probing for us and then try to draw our own deductions. What wouldn’t you give, Doyle, for the chance to probe yourself? To psycho-analyse a murderer before the law got hold of him and messed his mind up?”“Oh, don’t!”“To have him under observation right from the time of the crime,” Guy gloated wistfully. “To know exactly what he thought and felt and did.”“Don’t tempt me, Nesbitt! I’ll be getting George to murder you in a minute, if you go on like this. I promise I wouldn’t give you away, George, if you’d only let me psycho-analyse you afterwards.”“That’s right,” Guy said. “George is just the person, of course. The ordinary man is far more interesting than your sordid murderer for gain or your mentally kinked. The reactions of the ordinary man to murder! That’s the crux of the whole thing. And so few murderers are ordinary men, unfortunately. What do you imagine he’d do, Doyle? I believe the ordinary decent man would go straight to the nearest police-station and give himself up.”The light of argument kindled in Doyle’s eye. George’s heart sank.“That depends on the circumstances. You must postulate those first. Do you mean, if the murder was a more or less unpremeditated one, and without witnesses?”“Yes, certainly. Any circumstances you like. Your ordinary decent man’s impulse would be to give himself up at once.”“Not he!” retorted Mr. Doyle with much scorn. “If there are no witnesses and no evidence against him, he’s going to make one arrow-flight for home and safety.”“I don’t agree with you,” Guy hunched his head between his shoulders till he looked more like an ill-omened bird of prey than ever. His glasses and the top of his head shone with enjoyment. “I don’t agree with you. He wouldn’t stop to consider whether there was evidence or not. He’d assume that there must be; he’d take it for granted that he’d be found out. He’d give himself up, without hesitation. In a way, you see, it’s a shelving of responsibility, and the ordinary decent man avoids responsibility like the plague. Besides, he’d have too great a respect for the law.”“Your ordinary decent man sounds to me uncommonly like a spineless worm,” retorted Mr. Doyle. “Now this is what he probablywoulddo….”The argument raged delectably.It continued to rage.It developed heat.George’s heart sank till it could sink no further. He poured himself out another glass of port and recklessly consumed it side by side with his cigar, an action that would have caused Guy in his saner moments the utmost pain and distress; as it was he never even noticed it. George squirmed, he wriggled, he writhed. Seven times he said, “I say!” and seven times said no more.“I say!” said George loudly for the eighth time. “I say, if you’re so jolly keen on knowing what the wretched chap would do, why on earth don’t you stage a murder and find out?”George had a large voice. In spite of their preoccupation his words penetrated into the minds of the other two. They actually stopped arguing to look at him.“Do what?” said Mr. Doyle.“What do you mean?” asked Guy.So far as he knew, George had not meant anything, except a desperate endeavour somehow to break the thick cord of this interminable argument, but desperation sharpens the wits and George saw in a flash what he must have been meaning. “Why,” he explained modestly, “carry out an experiment, of course. A psychological experiment,” he added with pride. “Not a real murder, of course. Just fix things so that a chap thinks he’s committed a murder, you see. Oughtn’t to be so difficult. You could hammer out half a dozen different ways of working it, Guy, with your gumption.”They stared at him in respectful silence. George, who was by way of sharing their respect, stared back.“By jove!” exclaimed Mr. Doyle softly. One gathered that the idea appealed to him. He looked at George with new eyes.That gentleman obliged with another brain-wave. “Do you remember that time when you wondered what a Dean would do if he found a girl in his rooms after the coll. gates were locked, under the impression that she’d been invited to stay till morning, so to speak, Guy? Well, something like that.”Guy, remembering his innocent curiosity on that point and the means he had taken to gratify it, began to laugh silently, stealing jam with every appearance of joyful guilt. Across his delighted vision strayed the germs of three separate and distinct plans for making an innocent citizen imagine that he had murdered a fellow. “The ordinary man’s reactions to murder, eh?” he chuckled. “Itcouldbe done. Upon my soul, it could! What do you say, Doyle?”What Mr. Doyle should have said is: “Nesbitt, your cocktails were good, your champagne better, your port superlative. Of all have we drunk, and in consequence we are not a little elated. Let us realise the fact, and not toy with fascinating impossibilities.” He said nothing of the sort. What he did say, tersely, was: “Every time! Let’s!”Guy jumped to his feet, grinning madly. “I think—yes, I think I see it! I shall want a female accomplice. Let’s go and hear what the others have got to say about it.”They joined the ladies.There, five minutes later, Guy was being accorded the highest honours, as an enlivener of the tedium of Duffley’s daily round, amid hearty shrieks which effectively drowned the one half-hearted dissentient voice in the room.“Guy, I hand it to you,” Laura was shrieking. “And to mark the occasion I’m going to create a precedent. I’ve got no vacancy in my inner circle, but I must do something. I’m going to create an entirely extra place for you and make a baker’s dozen of it. Henceforth I am Lawks to you, and Lawks only!”“Lawks it is!” beamed the gratified Guy, and winked broadly at his wife. “Thank you.”That lady, watching his narrow back as he drew up chairs for the conference, had no difficulty in correctly interpreting the wink. It said quite plainly: “What price my ideas about feminine psychology now?”With much ceremony and clinking of glasses (a bottle of Benedictine was specially opened for the occasion and ruthlessly carried into the drawing-room in defiance of all decent convention) Guy was sealed of the tribe of Howard.“Oh!”An exclamation from Mr. Doyle caused all heads to turn in his direction. He was smiting the back of a chair with clenched fist.“Iknow the man for us!” cried Mr. Doyle. “The very fellow! As ordinary and decent as you like, and the sort of man whose reactions it’s almost impossible to predict. And it’d do him all the good in the world, too. He wants shaking up badly. It might be the saving of him to imagine for twenty-four hours that he’d killed a man. A fellow called Priestley….”
It has been said, no doubt with truth, that to make her mark in these overcrowded days a girl must adopt a line and stick to it like grim death. She may be languid, she may be sporting, she may be offensively rude, she may be appealing and doll-like, and she will find success, but she must never be purely and simply herself; that is the fundamental mistake. Such criticism could not be applied to the Misses Howard.
Our semi-civilised conventions have their disadvantages. In a more enlightened age the Misses Howard might have been compelled to go through life wearing horns and a barbed tail and a passable imitation of cloven hooves, as a timely warning to unsuspecting strangers not to take these two innocent-looking maidens at their face-value, charming as that was. Dissimulation, as practised by the Misses Howard, was more than a fine art; it was a hobby. The unsuspecting stranger (of the male sex, of course; female strangers are never unsuspecting, and the more strange they are the more they suspect), catching sight of one of the Miss Howards would swell his manly chest and pat his manly back, and say to himself in his manly tones: “Here is a poor, frightened little thing who looks at me as if I were a god. Who knows? Perhaps I am a god. I am very much inclined, when this helpless and pretty little thing looks at me like that, to think that I am. Out with the lance and armour! Are there any dragons about? Or, failing dragons, mice? At any rate, it is palpably up to me to protect this delectably timid small person from something, and that pretty quickly.”
And twenty minutes later, if he had interested the timid little thing enough, he would be wondering ruefully if certain words of hers really meant what they had implied, or whether they were intended to convey something quite different and impossibly puncturing to the gallant balloon of manly self-esteem. If he did not interest her enough, he would be wondering still more ruefully how he could ever have imagined such a frigid block of sarcastic ice to be incapable in any conceivable way of looking after, not merely herself, but the entire universe as well. The Misses Howard may perhaps most politely be described as “stimulating.”
Nevertheless, the family of Howard had done one good thing—it had brought Guy and Cynthia together. George Howard, the brother of the two demons, a large, solid person, as unlike his sisters as the elephant is unlike the mosquito, had been Guy’s worshipping disciple at school and at Oxford; Dora and Cynthia had been “best friends.” George had now taken for the summer the cottage at Duffley whose garden adjoined Guy’s. He had moved in only three days before this story opens, and the fate of Duffley still hung in the balance.
Laura, younger than her sister by a couple of years, had shouldered the responsibilities of her lot and the family’s orphanhood by accompanying her brother George about wherever he went and insisting upon keeping his house for him, much to that simple soul’s sorrow; on the whole, George would rather have had his house kept for him by a combination of Catherine of Medici and Lucretia Borgia than by either of his sisters. George was the sort of person who likes to know where he is at any given moment, and has a rooted distaste for dwelling upon a volcano. Laura, therefore, was now wasting her gifts upon the rustic life of Duffley. Dora, investing her talents to better purpose, had gone on the stage, where she had confidently expected to multiply them sevenfold.
The British stage is a mass of curious contradictions. It lives upon humbug, it exploits humbug, and it is itself more taken in by humbug than any other institution. If a penniless actress lays out her last ten shillings in a pair of new gloves and a taxi-fare to the stage-door, the stage will say to itself as often as not: “Ha! Trixie Two-shoes is going about everywhere in taxis now, is she? She must be getting on, that girl. There is evidently more in her than I thought. I must have her for my next show, at double the salary she’s getting now. Good!” The stage then buys four cigars at five times the price it usually pays, in order to impress the financial magnate after lunch with the strength of its own position.
But when humbug was offered to it of such rare and golden quality that its exploitation should have been repaid a hundred times over, the stage would have none of it. Dora had been unable to penetrate further into the legitimate drama which she felt herself called upon to enrich, than the stage-door-keeper’s box. Refusing to be beaten (she had no need of the money, but she was determined by hook or by crook to get on that elusive stage), Dora had abandoned the idea of legitimate drama for the time being and expressed her willingness to adorn the chorus of a revue, comforting herself with the reflection that not a few great stars have risen from the musical ranks to legitimate heights. She had at once obtained the position to which her face and figure entitled her and, after a year in the provinces, had for the last six months been adorning the front row of the Mammoth Chorus at the Palladeum. She was now rehearsing a production which was to open the following week, and so was at liberty to present herself, with her fiancé, at a Saturday to Monday housewarming for George.
Only once had either of the Miss Howards met their match, and that was when a certain Mr. Doyle irritably besought Dora five months ago, within twenty minutes of the opening of their acquaintance, “for Heaven’s sake not to try and pull that moon-eyed, baby-voiced stuff on him. He wasn’t born yesterday, and he didn’t like it. In short, her artless behaviour left Mr. Doyle not only cold but weary.” Dora was so taken aback that for the first time in her life she became perfectly natural with a complete stranger.
The sequel was inevitable. When four days later the volatile Mr. Doyle, touched apparently by this complimentary change of front, besought her hand in marriage, she kept her whirling head long enough to accept him on the spot; she felt she had at last met her master, and the sensation though novel was by no means disagreeable. Since then they had remained engaged, in spite of all expectations to the contrary, their own included; indeed, Mr. Doyle had gone so far as to inform his fiancée with engaging candour that this was the longest period he had ever been engaged to any one girl. They were now even beginning to think quite seriously of the possibility of really getting married some day if Mr. Doyle could scrape together the capital on which to do so.
In spite of Cynthia’s assurances, Guy Nesbitt was not on hand when the quartet arrived. With a face like a high priest’s he was performing solemn rites in the dining-room over a bottle of port and a decanter, and Cynthia had to welcome her guests in the drawing-room alone.
She cast a somewhat anxious eye at the sisters as they marched decorously into the room on the heels of the maid’s announcement, their faces both ornamented with the same shy smile. Although she had known them most of her life and Dora was her closest friend, Cynthia never felt she knew quite where she was with them. In their rear walked Mr. Doyle, and behind him George Howard. Where Cynthia cast one anxious eye, George cast two. In spite of his elder years George knew even less where he was with his sisters than Cynthia did.
“Hallo, Lawks!” smiled their hostess. “Hallo, Dawks!” To be admitted to the circle of those permitted to address them by these pseudonyms, which George had invented with simple pride at the age of eight, was the highest privilege the two had to bestow. The number so allowed was, for each sister, twelve, and no one fresh could be received within the magic circle until a suitable vacancy occurred. Cynthia did not know Laura nearly so well as her sister (the two had, very wisely, been despatched to different schools), but was permitted the honour in view of her position as Dora’s Best Friend.
Laura smiled her greeting, and Dora motioned Mr. Doyle forward. “This is my appendage, Cynthia,” she remarked frankly.
“He isn’t much to look at perhaps,” Laura amplified, “but his heart’s in the right place; at least Dora says it is, we haven’t had him vetted yet. His name’s Henry Aloysius Frederick Doyle, but never mind about that; he answers much better to the name of Pat. He’s Irish.”
Mr. Doyle, a slightly-built, clean-shaven young man with black hair, turned in the act of bowing to Cynthia. “I’m not!” he said indignantly.
“Yes, you are,” his future sister-in-law contradicted him. “How could you help being, with a name like Pat Doyle?”
“But my name isn’t Pat Doyle. It’s Henry Doyle. Pat’s a nickname, goodness knows why. I’ve told you a hundred——”
“Stop arguing and shake hands with the lady,” the younger Miss Howard interrupted. “Goodness knows your manners are bad enough at the best of times without making them worse. And we did want you to shine a little to-night. That’s why I told you not to speak with your mouth full, like you usually do, and not to wave your fork in the air when you argue. Of course you’re Irish!”
With a somewhat heightened colour, which told Cynthia that these candid remarks were not without their substratum of truth, Mr. Doyle completed his greeting of his hostess. George, trying hard to look as if he had heard nothing, took Cynthia’s slim hand in his huge paw and told her, with remarkable earnestness, that it had been a topping day; he also expressed his hopes that it would be as topping a day to-morrow. One gathered that George was being what he considered tactful.
Cynthia embarked upon her share of the unnatural conversation that takes place between intimate friends before a rather formal dinner.
Glancing surreptitiously at Dora from time to time, Cynthia decided that the engagement had done her friend good. Dora seemed quieter. Not subdued, or anything like that, but tasting her enjoyment of life with a rather more detached, almost a lazy air. In contrast with the more bounding spirits of Laura, Dora seemed far older than the two years between them would have suggested. Cynthia was conscious of a certain relief.
Five minutes later Guy came hurrying in and paused for a moment in the doorway, blinking benignly round through his glasses. “Sorry I’m so late,” he apologised. “Hallo, Dawks. Good-evening, Laura. The bottles were disgustingly dirty, and I had to go and wash again.”
“Never mind washing, in a good cause,” murmured Mr. Doyle, and came forward to be introduced.
The cocktails which Guy then proceeded to dispense played their usual helpful part (what would civilisation be without its cocktails?) and the little gathering moved into the dining-room. Dora seemed, for such a self-possessed young woman, acutely conscious of the presence of her fiancé, on trial, as it were, before the Best Friend, and was in consequence refreshingly innocuous; Laura, who was only meeting Guy for the third time and was not yet quite sure what to make of him, was equally tentative. Cynthia was able to take her seat at the bottom of the table with the happy confidence that her party was going to be a success. Cynthia was more right than she imagined.
The dinner proceeded much in the way of all dinners, and the ice, to which the cocktails had already dealt a sound blow, was gradually smashed into diminishing smithereens.
As the port was placed before him and the maid withdrew, Guy glanced with satisfaction round his dinner-table, on whose polished mahogany the candles in their heavy silver stands gleamed softly. The meal had gone off well, the guests had been exceedingly cheerful, and Cynthia, in a black velvet gown which admirably enhanced the white beauty of her arms and shoulders, was looking her very best. The host in Guy was full of content, the husband no less so. He poured himself out a glass of port as the decanter reached him from Dora, and beamed round once more.
The young man Doyle had pleased Guy particularly. He had shown signs of a tendency towards argument which was most gratifying; rather voluble, perhaps, and occasionally a little excitable, but good, sound argument; and if there was one form of mental exercise which Guy’s soul loved beyond all others it was argument. In the dreamy contentment that follows a perfectly good dinner he listened to Cynthia rolling the conversational ball at her end of the table and meditated on a new subject to attract Doyle’s attention from his fiancée.
“By the way,” Cynthia was remarking to George, “Monica and Alan are coming to stay with us the week after next for a few days, George. We must get up a river picnic for them.”
“Thank goodness,” Laura took it on herself to reply. “We’ve only been in Duffley three days, but I’m bored stiff with the place already. I feel wasted here. There are possibilities in a river picnic.”
“Oh, rather,” George murmured dutifully, concealing his blenches in his port-glass.
As Cynthia’s brother and sister, and consequently Guy’s brother and sister-in-law, Alan and Monica undoubtedly had every claim upon him; but he was not unduly elated at Cynthia’s news. Duffley was a nice, peaceful place, where one could get a tolerably good game of golf and smoke a quiet pipe or two in the country round. It seemed a pity to have it turned upside down, even for a few days.
George had met Alan and Monica before; the meeting had taken place two years ago, but George would never forget it. “Oh, rather,” he repeated sadly, wondering whether there were many frogs in the neighbourhood of Duffley. The last time they had met, Alan had done his best to endear himself by putting a frog in George’s bed. Neither George nor the frog had altogether appreciated the jest. George had had something of a fellow-feeling for frogs ever since.
Cynthia turned to her other neighbour. “Will you still be here, Pat?” “Mr. Doyle,” had been dropped, on command of the sisters, before the champagne had been round twice.
“I doubt it,” observed Laura darkly, from the other side of the table. It appeared that Laura had taken it upon herself to entertain the gravest doubts as to the engagement lasting for more than a few hours in the immediate future, and to give voice to those doubts upon every possible occasion. When she was not doing this, she was trying to correct, with an air of patient despondency, certain faults which she professed to see in her future brother-in-law’s manners. “For,” as she told her indignant sister, “you may be going to marry him, but I’ve got to be a sister to him; and I never could be a sister to a man who eats and drinks at the same time.”
“No, Cynthia,” said Mr. Doyle with emphasis. “I shall certainly not be here then. Why?”
“What a pity! I couldn’t help thinking you’d be so useful,” Cynthia smiled. “I mean, anybody who can manage to engage himself to Dawks—well, Monica ought to be child’s-play to him.”
“Are you meaning,” inquired Mr. Doyle carefully, “that you want me to get engaged to your sister as well as Dawks? I’m a very obliging man, and I do my best to be kind to my friends, but the trouble is that I’ve never been properly trained as a bigamist. Besides, don’t you think Dawks might have something to say about it?”
“She will,” interposed that young lady’s sister promptly. “She’ll say, ‘Get to it, my lad, and step briskly!’ That’ll be all right, Cynthia. He’ll be free for Monica days before she comes.”
Cynthia laughed tactfully and proceeded with her exposition. “No, I wasn’t meaning that you need go so far as to get engaged to her; what I did think, though, was that you might be able to—well, what is known ashandleher, perhaps.”
“Man-handle her, more like,” put in the faithful Greek chorus.
George stifled another groan in his wine-glass. The last time he had encountered her, Monica had handled him, with a hose-pipe, causing him to dance at her commands as madly as any dervish on the front lawn of her house half an hour before the ceremony, on pain of having his wedding garments drenched, what time the wedding-guests stood about in the background feebly beating their breasts; and all because he had bestowed a brotherly tug at the thick plait which hung down her back—a thing to George’s ideas that was almost inevitable etiquette in the presence of a flapper. George had singularly few pleasant recollections of Monica.
Mr. Doyle seemed to have caught something of the spirit of George’s apprehensions. He groaned faintly and ran a hand through his long black hair. “You don’t mean—you don’t mean that your sister is anything like——?” He paused. “Oh, no!” he said with decision. “You must put her off. Remember, Dawks might come down for another week-end, and then there’d be three in the place at a time. Duffley couldn’t stand it. The whole village would vanish in a cloud of blue smoke, and we with it. You must put her off, Cynthia.”
“Are we,” Laura inquired carefully of her sister, “are we, do you think, being insulted, Dawks? Are we being insulted by this wretched Sein Feiner you’re trying to smuggle into the family?”
An apprehensive look appeared on Cynthia’s face. She loved the sisters, and she loved to see them ragging; but she did not love the idea of their ragging across her dining-room table.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. Dora, who had been unwontedly silent during the last half-hour, smiled lazily at her sister. “When are you going to grow up, Lawks?” she asked gently.
Nobody but herself could have posed such a question and retired unscathed. As it was, Laura was half out of her chair before she sank back feebly, turning incredulous eyes up to the ceiling.
“The woman’s nerve’s all gone,” she murmured in a faint voice. “She’s got soft. It’s young love, I suppose. She’ll be asking people to call her Miss Howard soon. Well, Heaven preserve me from ever getting engaged, that’s all!”
“On behalf of the sex,” remarked Mr. Doyle piously, “which I so unworthily represent, Amen!”
Laura’s pose altered abruptly, and her eyes sparkled with battle, but before she could translate her feelings into action, Guy, catching a frantic signal from his wife’s eyes, interposed with a change of subject. “Cheer up, George,” he said hastily. “What’s the matter? You look as if you’d committed a murder, and couldn’t decide what to do with the body.”
“I think he’s just seen a ghost, and is being tactful about it,” said Laura, her attention successfully diverted.
George, roused abruptly from his meditations concerning frogs and hose-pipes, smiled wanly. “Me? I’m all right,” he muttered.
“I think you’ve guessed it, Nesbitt,” remarked Doyle, regarding his future brother-in-law closely. “He has committed a murder. How awkward for him! Now I come to look at him, he has got a criminal face, hasn’t he? I wonder what type he belongs to. The Palmer, would you say? He has that look of chubby innocence. But no, he’s too big and massive. Now, who…? Smith, perhaps? Smith was always the gent, wasn’t he?” He prattled on happily. Thus great events from causes small do spring.
In Guy’s eyes an eager light had appeared, the light that must have gleamed in Stanley’s eyes when he pretended to greet Livingstone so nonchalantly. “I say, Doyle,” he said in hushed tones, “you’re not—you’re not interested in criminology, are you?”
The light leaped into Doyle’s eyes. He looked at his host with reverence and awe. “Are you?” he asked, in the same cathedral-like voice.
“Yes. I’ve never met any one else who was before.”
“Neither have I!”
They gazed at each other in ecstasy.
“What’s your real opinion of the Thompson case?” Guy managed to whisper.
“I heard an awfully interesting theory about the Mahon case,” whispered Doyle at the same moment.
Cynthia coughed gently, “Have I caught your eye, Dawks? This, I think, is where we three gracefully retire.”
They did so.
“Doyouthink Seddon ought to have been convicted?” murmured Doyle, closing the door as absently as he had opened it.
“Have you read the MacLachlan trial?” murmured Guy absently, producing cigars. “The character of old Fleming is most absorbing. Of course he did it.”
They opened the flood-gates of their hobby and the long pent tide poured forth.
For a time George listened with interest, for murders, dash it, are interesting, say what you like. Then he listened with less interest, for murders, hang it, are a bit what-you-might-call boring, taken in the mass; a good juicy mystery with his morning-paper George enjoyed as much as any one, but one, in George’s opinion, was enough at a time. Besides, after a fellow had done some one in and been well and truly hanged for it, what on earth was there to go on yapping about? George listened with growing boredom.
“What about a foursome to-morrow morning, Guy?” said George. “We can get Dawks to make up the four. She doesn’t play at all too badly.”
“When are your sister and brother-in-law coming, Guy?” said George.
“I say, hadn’t we better be getting into the drawing-room?” said George. “They’ll be wondering what’s happened to us.”
He might have saved himself the trouble; for when two or three criminologists are gathered together, then is for them neither time nor space, sweetheart nor wife, necessity nor law.
They talked on.
“I say,” said George, nerving himself for a supreme effort, “I’m getting a bit fed up with all this chat about murder.”
Never once before in all his life had George so much as hinted that anything his elder and superior did, came to him the least little bit amiss; never before had the disciple ventured to criticise the master. At school where there were three years between them (and three years at school is an eternity) the small but beefy George, a stolid boy in those days, had worshipped, humbly adoring, at the shrine of Guy, the Head of his House. When Guy, who had only just scraped his second fifteen cap, came down as an old boy to find George captain of the school fifteen and runner-up for the captaincy of the cricket eleven, George had all but wept for joy to hear himself addressed almost on equal terms.
At Oxford, where Guy was a fourth-year man, the time of George’s fresherhood had been brightened and sanctified by the presence in the same town of his divinity. Had not George been permitted to be the humble instrument for bringing about Guy’s marriage with the only woman in this world remotely approaching worthiness, and had he not been rewarded beyond rubies by being allowed to be the great one’s best man—an honour he valued far more than the note from his captain announcing that he had been awarded a blue for rugger? Yet, after all that, here he was, red in the face and not unconscious of his epoch-making action, saying gruffly that he was getting fed up with all that chat about murder! Murder has turned people into revolutionaries before George.
The two ghouls paused in their banquet and turned glazed eyes upon George. Had they heard aright?
“Fed up?” demanded Doyle incredulously.
“Yes,” replied the mutinous George. “Too much of a good thing.”
“Too much?” repeated Mr. Doyle. He exchanged pitying glances with Guy.
“My dear chap,” that gentleman took up the tale, rather in the tones of one addressing a small and particularly foolish infant (thus do all criminologists address on this particular subject those who are not of their own persuasion, which accounts largely for their unpopularity.) “My dear chap, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It isn’t the mereactof murder which interests us, it’s the state of mind of the murderer. The particular psychology, in fact, which finds its culmination in murder. The motives, the amount of premeditation, the lack of premeditation even more, the psychology of the victim, the network of circumstance, and a hundred other things—thoseare what makes murder the most absorbing of all psychological studies.”
“Oh!” said George. But he was impressed. George had never realised that murder had a psychology at all. George was learning things.
Guy saw that the faithful hound was beginning to think of coming once more to heel, and carried on with the good work.
He leaned back in his chair, joined his finger-tips and regarded his now uneasy disciple over his glasses with some severity.
“Let me put it in this way,” he said, striving conscientiously to speak in words of not more than one syllable. “Supposeyoucommitted a murder, George. Suppose you were playing with the vicar, and he foozled his tee-shot to the last green and the whole match, and half-a-crown, depended on it; and suppose, unable to live in the same world with such bungling incompetence, you smote him on the head with one of your clubs, so that he died. Are you supposing all that?”
“Ye-es,” said George, supposing manfully.
“Well, what would interest us is not whether you smote him with your mashie or your niblick, or how much he bled, or whether his death-agonies removed any divots from the fairway. Nothing like that at all, George. Simply the state of your mind which showed you in one moment of blinding revelation that nothing short of murder was demanded by the situation.”
“But I’m not a murderer,” said George, putting his finger on the weak spot.
“No, George, at present you’re not; at least, so we hope. But if you ever happened to murder anybody, then you, yes, even you, George Howard, would be a murderer; and we should be studying the intricate psychology which caused you to snatch at your niblick and lay the vicar low just as eagerly as we now discuss the singular mentality of Mr. George Joseph Smith, who drowned a woman in her bath one minute and strummed on the organ in his sitting-room the next.”
“What he means,” Mr. Doyle chimed in, “is that the really interesting thing is the reactions of the ordinary person to the idea of murder. What he feels like,” he amplified kindly, “after he’s done it, in fact.”
“And before,” Guy amended.
“And before,” Mr. Doyle agreed. “Look, in short, upon this picture and on that. Mr. Howard before murder, same gent after murder. The cross marks the spot where the body was found.”
“So now do you understand, George?” Guy inquired.
“I think so,” George responded, trying to look as if he did. “You mean, you like probing into the mind of a chap who’s committed a murder?”
“In a nutshell!” approved Mr. Doyle.
“But unfortunately we have to do our probing at second-hand,” Guy lamented. “Or rather, we have to let others do the probing for us and then try to draw our own deductions. What wouldn’t you give, Doyle, for the chance to probe yourself? To psycho-analyse a murderer before the law got hold of him and messed his mind up?”
“Oh, don’t!”
“To have him under observation right from the time of the crime,” Guy gloated wistfully. “To know exactly what he thought and felt and did.”
“Don’t tempt me, Nesbitt! I’ll be getting George to murder you in a minute, if you go on like this. I promise I wouldn’t give you away, George, if you’d only let me psycho-analyse you afterwards.”
“That’s right,” Guy said. “George is just the person, of course. The ordinary man is far more interesting than your sordid murderer for gain or your mentally kinked. The reactions of the ordinary man to murder! That’s the crux of the whole thing. And so few murderers are ordinary men, unfortunately. What do you imagine he’d do, Doyle? I believe the ordinary decent man would go straight to the nearest police-station and give himself up.”
The light of argument kindled in Doyle’s eye. George’s heart sank.
“That depends on the circumstances. You must postulate those first. Do you mean, if the murder was a more or less unpremeditated one, and without witnesses?”
“Yes, certainly. Any circumstances you like. Your ordinary decent man’s impulse would be to give himself up at once.”
“Not he!” retorted Mr. Doyle with much scorn. “If there are no witnesses and no evidence against him, he’s going to make one arrow-flight for home and safety.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Guy hunched his head between his shoulders till he looked more like an ill-omened bird of prey than ever. His glasses and the top of his head shone with enjoyment. “I don’t agree with you. He wouldn’t stop to consider whether there was evidence or not. He’d assume that there must be; he’d take it for granted that he’d be found out. He’d give himself up, without hesitation. In a way, you see, it’s a shelving of responsibility, and the ordinary decent man avoids responsibility like the plague. Besides, he’d have too great a respect for the law.”
“Your ordinary decent man sounds to me uncommonly like a spineless worm,” retorted Mr. Doyle. “Now this is what he probablywoulddo….”
The argument raged delectably.
It continued to rage.
It developed heat.
George’s heart sank till it could sink no further. He poured himself out another glass of port and recklessly consumed it side by side with his cigar, an action that would have caused Guy in his saner moments the utmost pain and distress; as it was he never even noticed it. George squirmed, he wriggled, he writhed. Seven times he said, “I say!” and seven times said no more.
“I say!” said George loudly for the eighth time. “I say, if you’re so jolly keen on knowing what the wretched chap would do, why on earth don’t you stage a murder and find out?”
George had a large voice. In spite of their preoccupation his words penetrated into the minds of the other two. They actually stopped arguing to look at him.
“Do what?” said Mr. Doyle.
“What do you mean?” asked Guy.
So far as he knew, George had not meant anything, except a desperate endeavour somehow to break the thick cord of this interminable argument, but desperation sharpens the wits and George saw in a flash what he must have been meaning. “Why,” he explained modestly, “carry out an experiment, of course. A psychological experiment,” he added with pride. “Not a real murder, of course. Just fix things so that a chap thinks he’s committed a murder, you see. Oughtn’t to be so difficult. You could hammer out half a dozen different ways of working it, Guy, with your gumption.”
They stared at him in respectful silence. George, who was by way of sharing their respect, stared back.
“By jove!” exclaimed Mr. Doyle softly. One gathered that the idea appealed to him. He looked at George with new eyes.
That gentleman obliged with another brain-wave. “Do you remember that time when you wondered what a Dean would do if he found a girl in his rooms after the coll. gates were locked, under the impression that she’d been invited to stay till morning, so to speak, Guy? Well, something like that.”
Guy, remembering his innocent curiosity on that point and the means he had taken to gratify it, began to laugh silently, stealing jam with every appearance of joyful guilt. Across his delighted vision strayed the germs of three separate and distinct plans for making an innocent citizen imagine that he had murdered a fellow. “The ordinary man’s reactions to murder, eh?” he chuckled. “Itcouldbe done. Upon my soul, it could! What do you say, Doyle?”
What Mr. Doyle should have said is: “Nesbitt, your cocktails were good, your champagne better, your port superlative. Of all have we drunk, and in consequence we are not a little elated. Let us realise the fact, and not toy with fascinating impossibilities.” He said nothing of the sort. What he did say, tersely, was: “Every time! Let’s!”
Guy jumped to his feet, grinning madly. “I think—yes, I think I see it! I shall want a female accomplice. Let’s go and hear what the others have got to say about it.”
They joined the ladies.
There, five minutes later, Guy was being accorded the highest honours, as an enlivener of the tedium of Duffley’s daily round, amid hearty shrieks which effectively drowned the one half-hearted dissentient voice in the room.
“Guy, I hand it to you,” Laura was shrieking. “And to mark the occasion I’m going to create a precedent. I’ve got no vacancy in my inner circle, but I must do something. I’m going to create an entirely extra place for you and make a baker’s dozen of it. Henceforth I am Lawks to you, and Lawks only!”
“Lawks it is!” beamed the gratified Guy, and winked broadly at his wife. “Thank you.”
That lady, watching his narrow back as he drew up chairs for the conference, had no difficulty in correctly interpreting the wink. It said quite plainly: “What price my ideas about feminine psychology now?”
With much ceremony and clinking of glasses (a bottle of Benedictine was specially opened for the occasion and ruthlessly carried into the drawing-room in defiance of all decent convention) Guy was sealed of the tribe of Howard.
“Oh!”
An exclamation from Mr. Doyle caused all heads to turn in his direction. He was smiting the back of a chair with clenched fist.
“Iknow the man for us!” cried Mr. Doyle. “The very fellow! As ordinary and decent as you like, and the sort of man whose reactions it’s almost impossible to predict. And it’d do him all the good in the world, too. He wants shaking up badly. It might be the saving of him to imagine for twenty-four hours that he’d killed a man. A fellow called Priestley….”