“I don’t think he would have escaped,” said Carmichael. “Truth will out—there’s a lot in the old saying. By the way, I wonder if either of you know the origin of the phrase magna est veritas et praevalebit, or rather praevalet, to give the exact form?”
“We’ll buy it,” said Gordon.
“Actually it comes from the third book of Esdras. That’s a thing ninety-nine people out of a hundred don’t know. But what was I saying? Oh, yes, it’s extraordinary how criminals don’t escape. If you come to think of it, we were close on the track of our man the whole time.”
“There,” said Gordon, “I can’t agree with you. Up to a certain point we were on the right track. Then you came and confused all the tracks with your ‘Davenant-is-Brotherhood’ slogan. After that we were at a loss—or rather, it was worse than that, we were definitely off the true scent, although the man himself was within a few yards of us. It was only because he came out of his hiding-place and disturbed Reeves’ papers—a sheer accident, from our point of view—that we were able to start again. Now, your ideal detective is never dependent upon an accident.”
“Well, don’t rub it in,” suggested Reeves. “After all, we are both of us as much to blame, because we swallowed Carmichael’s theory like lambs.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I never did agree with Carmichael.”
“Never did agree with him? Well, you kept jolly dark about it. What weren’t you satisfied with about his explanation?”
“Oh, it seemed to me to disregard human probabilities. And, as I told you the other day, I trust human probabilities more than I trust circumstantial evidence. I didn’t believe, for example, that the same man could be a Catholic from Saturday to Monday and an atheist for the rest of the week.”
“But Carmichael explained that. Surely it’s reasonable that a Roman Catholic should want to sweep away what he regards as inadequate theologies?”
“No, it’s just what he wouldn’t do. I used to know a good many Catholics at one time, and I know a certain amount about their point of view. And they couldn’t act in the way Carmichael described, because it would be doing evil in order that good might come of it. And Catholic theology, you see, doesn’t allow that.”
“I only gave that as a possible explanation,” objected Carmichael. “There are plenty of other possible explanations.”
“I know. But what’s the good of any number of possible explanations when no single explanation is probable? I never can understand the kind of madness that imagines it has solved a difficulty when it has found a whole number of possible explanations that aren’t probable. What difference does the number of them make? As a matter of fact, in this case there’s only one—that Brotherhood really was an atheist, but posed as a Catholic when he was Davenant merely to put people off the scent. But can’t you see how monstrous that is? Instead of taking the trouble to go over to Paston bridge every Sunday, he might have gained a far bigger local reputation for piety by sitting under Marryatt once in three weeks.”
“Well, what other human probabilities are there?”
“Next to changing one’s religion every Saturday to Monday, the most impossible thing in the world would be to change one’s game of golf every Saturday to Monday. Theoretically it sounds all right; in practice I don’t believe in it. I can’t think how you did either, Carmichael, because golf is a thing of which you have some experience.”
“Well, why didn’t you communicate these doubts to us before?”
“You were talking too hard. But I can produce my diary to show you what I did think about your suggestion.” And Gordon disappeared, to return after a few minutes with a formidable volume over which he spent an unvarying twenty minutes every evening. “Here you are. ‘Thursday—Carmichael has had an inspiration—he thinks Davenant and Brotherhood were the same person, a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde pair. He overlooks, it seems to me, the obvious phenomena of religion and golf. But of course it is very typical’ ”—he broke off. “I don’t expect that part would interest you.”
“Go on,” said Reeves. “I shouldn’t have thought Carmichael was typical of anything. What’s it all about?”
“Well, the truth is that in this diary I don’t merely record what’s happened; I’ve got into the way of philosophizing over it a bit. As you know, Reeves, I’ve got a bad habit of writing for the papers, and I find writing down my impressions every day often helps me to find subjects.”
“It would be a privilege to hear what you made of all this,” said Carmichael dryly.
“ ‘But of course it is very typical,’ ” Gordon read on, “ ‘of all these modern philosophies. They are always for explaining something in terms of something else, just as Carmichael wants to explain Davenant in terms of Brotherhood. In plain English it means mixing up two things that are entirely different. The moderns, for example, will have it that punishment is only another name for correction. And once you have said that, the whole idea of punishment drops out of sight altogether. Or they will tell you that a concept is the same as a mental picture, or that Truth is the same as beauty, or as intellectual convenience, or that matter is a form of motion. The root of error is always one of those false identifications, saying that A is B when it isn’t.
“ ‘The cause of them is a rage for the simplification of experience, the result is a paralysis of thought. There is a sense of neatness and efficiency about identifying Davenant with Brotherhood; it explains such a
