“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 churchgoing 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 secondhand.”
“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 guesswork 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
