When the last cheer and howl of a whole hell of such noises had died away, Father Bernard succeeded in making his voice heard.
‘It is enough to say in answer to this maniac charge that the atheists who bring it against us cannot induce their own atheistic Government to support them. But as the charge is against Father Hyacinth rather than against me, I will ask him to reply to it.’
There was another tornado of conflicting noises when the eremitical preacher opened his mouth; but his very tones had a certain power of piercing, and quelling it. There was something strange in such a voice coming out of such a skull-and-cross-bones of a countenance; for it was unmistakably the musical and moving voice that had stirred so many congregations and pilgrimages. Only in this crisis it had an awful accent of reality, which was beyond any arts of oratory. But before the tumult had yet died away Armitage, moved by some odd nervous instinct, had turned abruptly to Garth and said, ‘What’s become of Gale? He said he was going to be here. Didn’t he talk some nonsense about bringing the body himself?’
Dr Garth shrugged his shoulders. ‘I imagine he’s talking some other nonsense at the top of the hill somewhere else. You mustn’t ask poets to remember all the nonsense they talk.’
‘My friends,’ Father Hyacinth was saying, in quiet but penetrating tones. ‘I have no answer to give to this charge. I have no proofs with which to refute it. If a man can be sent to the guillotine on such evidence, to the guillotine I will go. Do you fancy I do not know that innocent men have been guillotined? M. Bertrand spoke of the burning of Bruno, as if it is only the enemies of the Church that have been burned. Does any Frenchman forget that Joan of Arc was burned; and was she guilty? The first Christians were tortured for being cannibals, a charge as probable as the charge against me. Do you imagine because you kill men now by modern machinery and modern law, that we do not know that you are as likely to kill unjustly as Herod or Heliogabalus? Do you think we do not know that the powers of the world are what they always were, that your lawyers who oppress the poor for hire will shed innocent blood for gold? If I were here to bandy such lawyer’s talk, I could use it against you more reasonably than you against me. For what reason am I supposed to have imperilled my soul by such a monstrous crime? For a theory about a theory; for a hypothesis about a hypothesis, for some thin fantastic notion that a discovery about fossils threatened the everlasting truth. I could point to others who had better reasons for murder than that. I could point to a man who by the death of Boyg has inherited the whole power and position of Boyg. I could point to one who is truly the heir and the man whom the crime benefits; who is known to claim much of the discovery as his own; who has been not so much the assistant as the rival of the dead. He alone has given evidence that Boyg was seen on the hill at all on that fatal day. He alone inherits by the death anything solid, from the largest ambitions in the scientific world, to the smallest magnifying glass in his collection. The man lives, and I could stretch out my hand and touch him.’
Hundreds of faces were turned upon Bertrand with a frightful expression of inhuman eagerness; the turn of the debate had been too dramatic to raise a cry. Bertrand’s very lips were pale, but they smiled as they formed the words:
‘And what did I do with the body?’
‘God grant you did nothing with it, dead or alive,’ answered the other. ‘I do not charge you; but if ever you are charged as I am unjustly, you may need a God on that day. Though I were ten times guillotined, God could testify to my innocence; if it were by bidding me walk these streets, like St. Denis, with my head in my hand. I have no other proof. I can call no other witness. He can deliver me if He will.’
There was a sudden silence, which was somehow stronger than a pause; and in it Armitage could be heard saying sharply, and almost querulously:
‘Why, here’s Gale again, after all. Have you dropped from the sky?’
Gale was indeed sauntering in a clear space round the corner of the statue with all the appearance of having just arrived at a crowded At Home; and Bertrand was quick to seize the chance of an anti-climax to the hermit’s oratory.
‘This,’ he cried, ‘is a gentleman who thinks he can find the body himself. Have you brought it with you, monsieur?’
The joke about the poet as detective had already been passed round among many people, and the suggestion received a new kind of applause. Somebody called out in a high, piping voice, ‘He’s got it in his pocket’; and another, in deep sepulchral tones, ‘His waistcoat pocket.’
Mr Gale certainly had his hands in his pockets, whether or no he had anything else in them; and it was with great nonchalance that he replied:
‘Well, in that sense, I suppose I haven’t got it. But you have.’
The next moment he had astonished his friends, who were not used to seeing him so alert, by leaping on the chair, and himself addressing the crowd in clear tones, and in excellent French:
‘Well, my friends,’ he said, ‘the first thing I have to do is to associate myself with everything said by my honourable friend, if he will allow me to call him so, about the merits and high moral qualities of the late Professor Boyg. Boyg, at any rate, is in every way worthy of all the honour you can pay to him. Whatever else is doubtful, whatever else we differ about, we can all salute in him that search for truth which is the most disinterested of all our duties to God. I agree with my friend Dr Garth that he deserves to have a statue, not only in his own town, but in every town in the world.’
The anti-clericals began to cheer warmly, while their opponents watched in silence, wondering where this last eccentric development might lead. The poet seemed to realize their mystification, and smiled as he continued:
‘Perhaps you wonder why I should say that so emphatically. Well, I suppose you all have your own reasons for recognizing this genuine love of truth in the late Professor. But I say it because I happen to know something that perhaps you don’t know, which makes me specially certain about his honesty.’
‘And what is that?’ asked Father Bernard, in the pause that followed.
‘Because,’ said Gale, ‘he was going to see Father Hyacinth to own himself wrong.’
Bertrand made a swift movement forward that seemed almost to threaten an assault: but Garth arrested it, and Gale went on, without noticing it.
‘Professor Boyg had discovered that his theory was wrong after all. That was the sensational discovery he had made in those last days and with those last experiments. I suspected it when I compared the current tale with his reputation as a simple and kindly man. I did not believe he would have gone merely to triumph over his worst enemy; it was far more probable that he thought it a point of honour to acknowledge his mistake. For, without professing to know much about these things, I am sure it was a mistake. Things do not, after all, need all those thousand years to petrify in that particular fashion. Under certain conditions, which chemists could explain better than I, they do not need more than one year, or even one day. Something in the properties of the local water, applied or intensified by special methods, can really in a few hours turn an animal organism into a fossil. The scientific experiment has been made; and the proof is before you.’
He made a gesture with his hand, and went on, with something more like excitement:
‘M. Bertrand is right in saying that truth is not in a well, but on a tower. It is on a pedestal. You have looked at it every day. There is the body of Boyg!’
And he pointed to the statue in the middle of the market-place, wreathed with laurel and defaced with stones, as it had stood so long in that quiet square, and looked down at so many casual passers-by.
‘Somebody suggested just now,’ he went on, glancing over a sea of gaping faces, ‘that I carried the statue in my waistcoat pocket. Well, I don’t carry all of it, of course, but this is a part of it,’ and he took out a small object like a stick of grey chalk; ‘this is a finger of it knocked off by a stone. I picked it up
by the pedestal. If anybody who understands these things likes to look at it, he will agree that the consistency is precisely the same as the admitted fossils in the geological museum.’
He held it out to them, but the whole mob stood still as if it also was a mob of men turned to stone.
‘Perhaps you think I’m mad,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Well, I’m not exactly mad, but I have an odd sort of sympathy with madmen. I can manage them better than most people can, because I can fancy somehow the wild way their minds will work. I understand the man who did this. I know he did, because I talked to him for half the morning; and it’s exactly the sort of thing he would do. And when first I heard talk of fossil shells and petrified insects and so on, I did the same thing that such men always do. I exaggerated it into a sort of extravagant vision, a vision of fossil forests, and fossil cattle, and fossil elephants and camels; and so, naturally, to another thought: a coincidence that somehow turned me cold. A Fossil Man.
‘It was then that I looked up at the statue; and knew it was not a statue. It was a corpse petrified by the curious chemistry of your strange mountain-stream. I call it a fossil as a loose popular term; of course I know enough geology to know it is not the correct term. But I was not exactly concerned with a problem of geology. I was concerned with what some prefer to call criminology and I prefer to call crime. If that extraordinary erection was the corpse, who and where was the criminal? Who was the assassin who had set up the dead man to be at once obvious and invisible; and had, so to speak, hidden him in the broad daylight? Well, you have all heard the arguments about the stream and the scrap of paper, and up to a point I have entirely followed them. Everyone agreed that the secret was somewhere hidden on that bare hill where there was nothing but the glass-roofed studio and the lonely hermitage; and suspicion centred entirely upon the hermitage. For the man in the studio was a fervent friend of the man who was murdered, and one of those rejoicing most heartily at what he had discovered. But perhaps you have rather forgotten what he really had discovered. His real discovery was of the sort that infuriates friends and not foes. The man who has the courage to say he is wrong has to face the worst hatred; the hatred of those who think he is right. Boyg’s final discovery, like our final discovery, rather reverses the relations of those two little houses on the hill. Even if Father Hyacinth had been a fiend instead of a saint, he had no possible motive to prevent his enemy from offering him a public apology. It was a believer in Boygism who struck down Boyg. It was his follower who became his pursuer and persecutor; who at least turned in unreasonable fury upon him. It was Paradou the sculptor who snatched up a chisel and struck his philosophical teacher, at the end of some furious argument about the theory which the artist had valued only as a wild inspiration, being quite indifferent to the tame question of its truth. I don’t think he meant to kill Boyg; I doubt whether anybody could possibly prove he did; and even if he did, I rather doubt whether he can be held responsible for that or for anything else. But though Paradou may be a lunatic, he is also a logician; and there is one more interesting logical step in this story.
‘I met Paradou myself this morning; owing to my good luck in putting my leg through his skylight. He also has his theories and controversies; and this morning he was very controversial. As I say, I had a long argument with him, all about realism in sculpture. I know many people will tell you that nothing has ever come out of arguments; and I tell you that everything has always come out of arguments; and anyhow, if you want to know what has come out of this, you’ve got to understand this argument. Everybody was always jeering at poor old Paradou as a sculptor and saying he turned men into monsters; that his figures had flat heads like snakes, or sagging knees like elephants, or humps like human camels. And he was always shouting back at them, “Yes, and eyes like blindworms when it comes to seeing your own hideous selves! This is what you do look like, you ugly brutes! These are the crooked, clownish, lumpish attitudes in which you really do stand; only a lot of lying fashionable portrait-painters have persuaded you that you look like Graces and Greek gods.” He was at it hammer and tongs with me this morning; and I dare say I was lucky he didn’t finish that argument with a chisel. But anyhow the argument wasn’t started then. It all came upon him with a rush, when he had committed his real though probably unintentional killing. As he stood staring at the corpse, there arose out of the very abyss of his disappointment the vision of a strange vengeance or reparation. He began to see the vast outlines of a joke as gigantic as the Great Pyramid. He would set up that grim granite jest in the market-place, to grin for ever at his critics and detractors. The dead man himself had just been explaining to him the process by which the water of that place would rapidly petrify organic substances. The notes and documents of his proof lay scattered about the studio where he had fallen. His own proof should be applied to his own body, for a purpose of which he had never dreamed. If the sculptor simply lifted the body in the ungainly attitude in which it had actually fallen, if he froze or fixed it in the stream, or set it upon the public pedestal, it would be the very thing about which he had so bitterly debated; a real man, in a real posture, held up to the scorn of men.
‘That insane genius promised himself a lonely laughter, and a secret superiority to all his enemies, in hearing the critics discuss it as the crazy creation of a crank sculptor. He looked forward to the groups that would stand before the statue, and prove the anatomy to be wrong, and clearly demonstrate the posture to be impossible. And he would listen, and laugh inwardly like a true lunatic, knowing that they were proving the utter unreality of a real man. That being his dream, he had no difficulty in carrying it out. He had no need to hide the body; he had it brought down from his studio, not secretly but publicly and even pompously, the finished work of a great sculptor escorted by the devotees of a great discoverer. But indeed, Boyg was something more than a man who made a discovery; and there is, in comparison, a sort of cant even in the talk of a man having the courage to discover it. What other man would have had the courage to undiscover it? That monument that hides a strange sin, hides a much stranger and much rarer virtue. Yes, you do well to hail it as a true scientific trophy. That is the statue of Boyg the Undiscoverer. That cold chimera of the rock is not only the abortion born of some horrible chemical change; it is the outcome of a nobler experiment, which attests for ever the honour and probity of science. You may well praise him as a man of science; for he, at least, in an affair of science, acted like a man. You may well set up statues to him as a hero of science; for he was more of a hero in being wrong than he could ever have been in being right. And though the stars have seen rise, from the soils and substance of our native star, no such monstrosity as that man of stone, heaven may look down with more wonder at the man than at the monster. And we of all schools and of all philosophies can pass it like a funeral procession taking leave of an illustrious grave and, like soldiers, salute it as we pass.’
The Vanishing of Mrs Fraser
Basil Thomson
Sir Basil Thomson (1861–1939) had a colourful career. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he entered the Colonial Service, and became a magistrate in Fiji before returning to England and starting to write. He decided to train as a barrister, but soon turned to prison governorship instead, working in Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubs. As if that were not enough, he joined Scotland Yard and became head of the CID, as well as becoming involved in counter-espionage and interrogating Mata Hari. But after the First World War, he was pushed out of office, and then humiliated by a sex scandal which may or may not have been orchestrated by his enemies.
In 1925, he published Mr Pepper, Investigator, from which this story is taken. The plot is a variation on a familiar theme, turning up in a different guise, for instance, in a popular film of 1950. PC Richardson’s First Case appeared in 1933, and Richardson’s meteoric rise through the ranks of the police is recorded in a series of books. His work, although almost completely forgotten today, earned praise from Dorothy L. Sayers, and merit
s rediscovery.
***
If I had ever had any doubts about the almost uncanny cleverness of Mr Pepper they were dispelled by the way in which he managed the case of Mrs Fraser. True, his first theory had to be abandoned; but it was he who brought the mystery under his searchlight and probed it to the bottom.
On arriving at the office one day, I found him frowning over a typewritten sheet which purported to be a translation from a paragraph from one of the Paris newspapers. The covering letter, I remember, ran as follows:
Dear Pep,—This is something you need to take care of. I would mail you the original but I think you don’t read the lingo.
Yours cordially,
Winston E. Slack.
It was the first intimation I had had that Mr Pepper was called ‘Pep’ by his intimates.
The cutting related to the alleged disappearance of a Scottish lady, Mrs Fraser, in Paris, under circumstances which were highly suspicious, if they were true. Supplemented by information that came to me at a later stage, the story was as follows:
Mrs Fraser and her daughter Mary had been passing the winter in Naples. They left in April and travelled through to Paris without stopping. At the Midi Station a porter trundled a vast trunk to the cab rank and called up a cabman with a pallid, broad face framed in a bushy red beard, who refused to accept the trunk. If it did not sow the seeds of disease in him, he said, it would certainly kill his horse. Mary Fraser, who was the linguist of the two, reasoned with him, and in the end persuaded him to accept the two, trunk and all, for ten francs. They drove to that little family hotel in the Rue Cambon, the Hotel des Etrangers, much frequented by English people with slender means. There followed a fresh dispute with Redbeard, who said that the trunk had strained the springs of his cab, and that sixteen francs was the least that he would take. Mary Fraser, being firm, came to a compromise for twelve; the cabman went off hurling his frank opinion of the English at the concierge, and Mary entered the hotel to find her mother collapsing on a seat in the hall. It fell to Mary to enter their names in the hotel register. She chanced to notice that the name just above theirs was ‘Dupont,’ executed with an elaborate flourish to indicate, I suppose, that the writer was a person of consideration.
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