Tracks in the Snow

officials who were observing him, and, through them, for that very Department in which he wished to fill a high place. Nevertheless, he had pursued ingenious enquiries in regard to the (as I still thought him) unfortunate Thalberg, for which purpose he paid several flying visits to London and elsewhere. The result of these enquiries he related to me, mingling it up with the tale of his other adventures in such a manner that it was hard for me to grasp what its importance might be. I was able to see that Callaghan had employed quite extraordinary ingenuity and pains in picking up the facts about Thalberg which he told me, but that very ingenuity struck me as ludicrously disproportionate to the importance of the facts which he had found, or was ever likely to find along this road. Thalberg was a solicitor in the City who had been in a small way of business, till the firm of which he was now the sole surviving partner began, a good many years before, to be employed by Vane-Cartwright. Vane-Cartwright got this firm appointed solicitors to a company which was formed to take over his original venture in the East, and he still continued to employ Thalberg from time to time upon private business of his own. Thalberg’s family were interested in Eastern commerce, and he had correspondence with many persons in various parts of the far East. Years before he had transacted for Vane-Cartwright a good deal of correspondence of a nature so secret as to be unknown to his clerks, and in the course of this very year he had again returned to an employment of the like kind for someone or other. It appeared that it might have been upon an errand connected with this secret correspondence that he had come down to Long Wilton. Callaghan was much excited about a discovery which he had made that Thalberg had in January of this year been in correspondence with a personage in Madrid, telegraphing to him in a cipher employed by the Spanish Consulate in London, of which he was able to make use through an official in that Consulate, who had since been discharged for misconduct and was now in Paris. There was more of this nature as to the mysterious proceedings of Thalberg, but I cannot well remember how much Callaghan told me on that occasion, and I must observe that I have set down what he then told me as I understand it now. I was not able to understand it completely at the time owing to the fact that throughout his talk that afternoon Callaghan did not once allude to Vane-Cartwright by his name.

I wondered then, and I wonder now, how far up to this time Callaghan suspected Vane-Cartwright. I believe that he did not like to avow to himself the full suspicion that he felt, and that this was why he hesitated to name him to me. I am sure that in his heart he disliked him very much; he had always seemed to do so. But I think that, to my Irish friend, Vane-Cartwright appeared the embodiment of those characteristics of the Englishman which an Irishman knows he dislikes, but thinks that he ought to respect. So I should guess that, as long as he could, he had dutifully forced himself to believe in Vane-Cartwright as a very estimable person full of English rectitude. In any case, for all the pains he took to follow up his suspicion that Thalberg was somehow connected with the crime, I know that he had not fully seen the conclusion to which this was leading him.

When I went up to dress for dinner, I reminded my wife of certain passages in Peters’ manuscripts on psychology which we had read together with very great interest. Among these was a curious paper on “Imagination, Truth-telling and Lying,” in which, beginning with the paradox that the correct perception of fact depended far more on moral qualities, and truthfulness in ordinary speech far more on intellectual qualities than was generally supposed, he proceeded to describe with great wealth of illustration some of the types under which races and individual men fall, in respect of their power of getting hold of truth and of giving it out. Scattered through these pages were a number of remarks which came to my mind in this talk with Callaghan. With most of them I will not trouble the reader, but in one passage in particular Peters had pointed out the mistake of thinking that a man who commits glaring inaccuracies is necessarily on that account not worth listening to. Ludicrous inaccuracies, even glaring falsehoods as they may seem, spring often, he insisted, from the peculiar abundance and vivacity of the impressions which a man receives from what passes before his eyes. A person with this gift may frequently in his memory put something that he has truly noticed into a wrong connection, or combine two scattered fragments of observation, true in themselves, into a single totally erroneous recollection of fact. But a man who gets things wrong in this way, is, said Peters, often more full of information than a more sober observer, because he has noticed far more, and after all, a very large part of what he has noticed is sure to be accurately retained. In another passage, which I am afraid I may mar by summarising it, Peters described how, with all men in some degree, but with some men in a wonderful degree, intellectual faculties are the servants of emotional interests, so that not only the power of inference, but even memory itself will do work at the bidding of pain or pleasure, liking or dislike, which it will not do upon a merely rational demand. Reminding my wife of this, I said I wished I knew by what test I could tell the true from the false in Callaghan’s reminiscences, and by what spell I could turn the flow of