“I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous arrangement, and ask the prosecution two or three questions.”
Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.
“In the first place,” continued Moon, “have you the date of Canon Hawkins’s last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and roofs?”
“Ho, yus!” called out Gould smartly. “November thirteen, eighteen ninety-one.”
“Have you,” continued Moon, “identified the houses in Hoxton up which they climbed?”
“Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,” answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.
“Well,” said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, “was there any burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that out.”
“There may well have been,” said the doctor primly, after a pause, “an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities.”
“Another question,” proceeded Michael. “Canon Hawkins, in his blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment. Why don’t you produce the evidence of the other clergyman, who actually followed the burglar and presumably was present at the crime?”
Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table, as he did when he was specially confident of the clearness of his reply.
“We have entirely failed,” he said, “to track the other clergyman, who seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had seen him as‑cending the gutters and the leads. I am fully aware that this may strike many as sing’lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will appear pretty natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy is admittedly, by the canon’s evidence, a minister of eccentric ways. His con‑nection with England’s proudest and fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith is, by general agreement, a man of irr’sistible fascination. I entertain no doubt that Smith led the Revered Percy into the crime and forced him to hide his head in the real crim’nal class. That would fully account for his nonappearance, and the failure of all attempts to trace him.”
“It is impossible, then, to trace him?” asked Moon.
“Impossible,” repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
“You are sure it’s impossible?”
“Oh dry up, Michael,” cried Gould, irritably. “We’d ’ave found ’im if we could, for you bet ’e saw the burglary. Don’t you start looking for ’im. Look for your own ’ead in the dustbin. You’ll find that—after a bit,” and his voice died away in grumbling.
“Arthur,” directed Michael Moon, sitting down, “kindly read Mr. Raymond Percy’s letter to the court.”
“Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much as possible,” began Inglewood, “I will not read the first part of the letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution to admit the account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as facts are concerned, that given by the first clergyman. We concede, then, the canon’s story so far as it goes. This must necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy’s letter, then, at the point when all three men were standing on the garden wall:—
“As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind not to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud of copper fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was violent and simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so complicated and contradictory that I could not retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have given ten pounds for the pleasure of kicking him down the road. That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that—rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
“At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern; discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time; I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was made for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because they could not get meat—and fish-bones when they could not get fish. As too many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that. Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had not been a pageant, but a riot—and a suppressed riot. There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist—and a pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.
“On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned in the marketplace, I should still have had that patience that all good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there is no priestcraft about Hawkins—nor any other kind of craft. He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman; that is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his class. He never said a word of religion in the whole of his damnable address. He simply said all the things his brother, the major, would have said. A voice from heaven assures me that
