Moreover, to obtain a conviction, there must be no doubt possible. The murder theory must be overwhelmingly more likely than the accident theory. Judges are careful to point this out.
I was as certain that Lathom had poisoned my father with synthetic muscarine as that I was alive. But I began to be equally certain that Lathom had hit upon a method of murder that was utterly and completely proof against proof.
52. Statement of John Munting
[Additional and concluding portion.]
This damned business of Lathom’s.
People write books about murders, and the nice young men and women in them enjoy the job of detecting. It is a good game and I like reading the books. But the emotions of the nice young people are so well-regulated, or so perfunctory, or something. They don’t feel like worms and get put off their dinners when they have succeeded in squeezing a damaging admission out of a friend. They don’t seem to suffer from fits of retching terror for fear they should find out something definite. Nor, while struggling with these complicated miseries, do they ever have to fulfil contracts with publishers. Sometimes they are filled with a stern sorrow – a nice, Brutus-like sentiment. I envy their nerves.
My nerves went back on me about the time of our visit to St Anthony’s. I took a kind of hysterical pleasure in pointing out that we had no proof of the murder. I didn’t want proof. I didn’t want to know. It was like writing one of those horrible letters which call for a decisive answer one way or another. You post it and wait, and you know that one morning you will see your correspondent’s handwriting on an envelope, and feel as hollow as a piece of bamboo. And you wait. Nothing comes. And after a time you say, ‘It’s been lost in the post. Now I need not know. Not now, at any rate, I can still pretend that it’s all right. Nothing will happen today. I can eat my dinner and listen to the wireless – and perhaps it will go on like that for ever.’
The answer to the Lathom problem seemed to have been lost in the post. We did not talk about it at home. My wife knew that I winced from it. It made other subjects impossible, too. Women, for instance, and the way they influence their lovers – we would start as far off as Gordon Craig’s theatre-masks or Gryll Grange and Lord Curryfin’s echeia, and before we had gone far, the figure of Clytemnestra would come bobbing over the horizon, and I would be talking hurriedly, dismissing it, rushing into technicalities about epode and stasimen, or about the chorus or the machines – anything. Or if Elizabeth merely asked what we should have for dinner, it seemed difficult to think of anything that was not flavoured with mushrooms or founded on beef-stock. We lived for a whole week on fish once, so sensitive did our minds become.
I got over it, more or less, after a time and, mercifully, Lathom let me alone. It was not till March that a faint reminding echo of the thing sounded faintly over the breakfast-table. I got a note from Mr Perry, the parson to whom I had once lent a volume of Eddington. At the sight of his name I got a kind of painful twitching in the sore place.
The note was to invite me to dinner. An old college friend of his, the extremely celebrated Professor Hoskyns, was coming over to spend the evening with him. Hoskyns is, of course, a very brilliant physicist, and Perry thought it would interest me to meet him. One or two other people were coming as well. If I could put up with a very simple meal, he thought we should enjoy a really enjoyable talk.
My fist instinct was to refuse. I hated the idea of going into the district and of seeing anybody even remotely connected with the Harrisons. But the idea of meeting Hoskyns was fascinating. I have that kind of vaguely inquiring mind that likes to be told what is going on, even though I could not be troubled to make a single experiment myself, and should not have the vaguest idea what experiment to make. A pap-fed, negative, twentieth-century mind open on all sides and wind-swept by every passing gust. Elizabeth thought that a chat with a bunch of scientific men would do me good. We need not, she said, mention the Harrisons. In the end, I accepted, and I rather think Elizabeth must have conveyed some sort of warning to Perry, for the Harrisons were not mentioned.
Perry’s shabby little sitting-room seemed crowded with men and smoke when I arrived. Professor Hoskyns, long, thin, bald, and much more human-looking than his press photographs, was installed in a broken-springed leather armchair and called Perry ‘Jim’. There was also a swarthy little man in spectacles whom they both called ‘Stingo’, and who turned out to be Professor Matthews, the biologist, the man who has done so much work on heredity. A large, stout, red-faced person with a boisterous manner was introduced as Waters. He was younger than the rest, but they all treated him with deference, and it presently appeared that he was the coming man in chemistry. Desultory conversation made it clear that Matthews, Hoskyns and Perry had been contemporaries at Oxford, and that Waters had been brought by Matthews, with whom he was on terms of the heartiest friendship and disagreement. A thin youth, with an eager manner and an irrepressible forelock, completed the party. He sported a clerical collar and informed me that he was the new curate, and that it was ‘a wonderful opportunity’ to start his ministry under a man like Mr Perry.
The dinner was satisfying. A vast beef-steak pudding, an apple-pie of corresponding size, and tankards of beers, quaffed from Perry’s old rowing-cups, put us all into a mellow humour. Perry’s asceticism did not, I am thankful to say, take the form of tough hash and lemonade, in spite of the presence on his walls of a series of melancholy Arundel prints, portraying brown and skinny anchorites, apparently nourished on cabbage-water. It rather tended to the idea of: ‘Beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity and beer,’ and I judged that in their younger days, my fellow-guests had kept the progs busy. However, the somewhat wearisome flood of undergraduate reminiscence was stemmed after a time with suitable apologies, and Matthews said, a little provocatively:
‘So here we all are. I never thought you’d stick to it, Perry. Which has made your job hardest – the War or people like us?’
‘The War,’ said Perry, immediately. ‘It has taken the heart out of people.’
‘Yes. It showed things up a bit,’ said Matthews. ‘Made it hard to believe in anything.’
‘No,’ replied the priest. ‘Made it easy to believe and difficult not to believe – in anything. Just anything. They believe in everything in a languid sort of way – in you, in me, in Waters, in Hoskyns, in mascots, in spiritualism, in education, in the daily papers – why not? It’s easier, and the various things cancel out and so make it unnecessary to take any definite steps in any direction.’
‘Damn the daily papers,’ said Hoskyns. ‘And damn education. All these get-clever-quick articles and sixpenny textbooks. Before one has time to verify an experiment, they’re all at you, shrieking to have it formulated into a theory. And if you do formulate it, they misunderstand it, or misapply it. If anybody says there are vitamins in tomatoes, they rush out with a tomato-theory. If somebody says that gamma-rays are found to have an action on cancer-cells in mice, they proclaim gamma-rays as a cure-all for everything from old age to a cold in the head. And if anybody goes quietly away into a corner to experiment with high-voltage electric currents, they start a lot of ill-informed rubbish about splitting the atom.’
‘Yes,’ said Matthews, ‘I thought I saw some odd remarks attributed to you the other day about that.’
‘Wasting my time,’ said Hoskyns. ‘I told them exactly what they put into my mouth. You’re right, Jim, they’d believe anything. The elixir of life – that’s what they really want to get hold of. It would look well in a headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.’
‘Ah!’ said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, ‘but if the Church gives them a set of formulae for the same purpose, they say they don’t want formulae or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.’
‘You’re not up-to-date enough,’ said Waters. ‘They like their formulae to be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.’
‘Why, so they are
,’ said Perry. ‘Look at Stingo here. He tells them that if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If you tell them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.’
‘And possibly act on them, you think?’ said Matthews. ‘But we have to do all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.’
‘That’s not altogether true,’ said Perry.
‘Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgement for sin, and all you can do is to sit down under it.’
‘But surely,’ struck in the curate, ‘we are expressly warned in Scripture against calling things judgements for sin. How about those eight on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?’
‘If it was anybody’s sin,’ said Perry, ‘it was probably the carelessness of the people who built the tower.’
‘And that’s usually a sin that finds somebody out,’ added Waters. ‘Unfortunately, the sinner isn’t always the victim.’
‘Why should it be?’ said Matthews. ‘Nature does not work by a scheme or poetical justice.’
‘Nor does God,’ said Perry. ‘We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable cell, Stingo?’
‘No,’ said Matthews. ‘It is you that have tried to keep up that story about Man in the image of God and lord of nature and so on. But trace the chain back and you will find every linkhold – you yourself, compounded from your father and mother by the mechanical chemistry of the chromosomes. Back to your ancestors, back to prehistoric Neanderthal Man and his cousin, Aurignacian. Neanderthal was a mistake, he wouldn’t work properly and died out, but the line goes on back, dropping the misfits, leaving the stabilised forms on the way – back to Arboreal Man, to the common ancestor Tarsius, to the first Mammal, to the ancestral bird-form, back to the Reptiles, the Trilobites, back to the queer, shapeless jellies of life that divide and subdivide eternally in the waters. The things that found some kind of balance with their environment persisted, the things that didn’t, died out; and here and there some freak found its freakishness of advantage and started a new kind of life with a new equilibrium. At what point, Perry, will you place your image of God?’
‘Well,’ said Perry, ‘I should not attempt to deny that Adam was formed of the dust of the earth. And your ape-and-tiger ancestry at least provides me with a scientific authority for original sin. What a mercy the Church stuck to that dogma, in spite of Rousseau and the noble savage. If she hadn’t, you scientists would have forced it back on her, and how silly we should all have looked then.’
‘But it was all guess-work,’ retorted Matthews, ‘unless you call it inspiration, and very inaccurate at that. If the author of Genesis had said that man was made of sea-water, he would have been nearer the truth.’
‘Well,’ said Waters, ‘he put the beginnings of life on the face of the waters, which wasn’t so very far off.’
‘But how did life begin?’ I asked. ‘After all, there is a difference between the Organic and the Inorganic. Or there appears to be.’
‘That’s for Waters to say,’ said Matthews.
‘I can’t be very didactic about that,’ said the chemist. ‘But it appears possible that there was an evolution from Inorganic or Organic through the Colloids. We can’t say much more, and we haven’t – so far – succeeded in producing it in the laboratory. Matthews probably still believes that Mind is a function of Matter, but if he asks me to demonstrate it for him, I must beg to be excused. I can’t even show that Life is a function of Matter.’
‘The Behaviourists seem to think that what looks like Intelligence and Freewill are merely mechanical responses to material stimuli,’ I suggested.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Hoskyns, emerging with a grin from a cloud of tobacco-smoke, ‘but all you people talk so cheerfully about Matter, as if you know what it was. I don’t, and it’s more or less my job to know. Go back again, go past your colloids and your sea-water. Go back to the dust of the earth and the mass of rotating cinders which was before the ocean even began. Go back to the sun, which threw the planets off so unexpectedly, owing to a rare accident which might not happen in a million light-years. Go back to the nebula. Go back to the atom. Do some of the famous splitting we hear so much about. Where is your Matter? It isn’t. It is a series of pushes or pulls or vortices in nothingness. And as for your train of mechanical causation, Matthews, when you come down to it, it resolves itself into a series of purely fortuitous movements of something we can’t define in a medium that doesn’t exist. Even your heredity-business is fortuitous. Why one set of chromosomes more than any other? Your chain of causation would only be a real one if all possible combinations and permutations were worked out in practice. Something is going on, that is as certain as anything can be – that is, I mean, it is the fundamental assumption we are bound to make in order to reason at all – but how it started or why it started is just as mysterious as it was when the first thoughtful savage invented a god to explain it.’
‘Why should it ever have started at all?’ said Matthews. ‘As Matter passes from one form to another, so forces change from one to another. Why should we suppose a beginning – or an end if it comes to that? Why not a perpetually shifting kaleidoscope, going through all its transformations and starting again?’
‘Why, my lad,’ replied Hoskyns, ‘because in that case you will come slap up against the second law of thermodynamics, and that will be the end of you.’
‘Oh!’ said Mr Perry, ‘the formula that starts so charmingly about “Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage” – that appears to be all the Law and the Prophets nowadays.’
‘Yes,’ said Hoskyns. ‘It’s general meaning is that Time only works in one direction, and that when all the permutations and combinations have been run through. Time will stop, because there will be nothing further by which we can distinguish its direction. All the possibilities will have been worked out, all the electrons will have been annihilated, and there will be nothing more for them to do and no radiant energy left for them to do it with. That is why there must be an end. And if an end, presumably a beginning.’
‘And the end is implicit in the beginning?’ said I.
‘Yes; but the intermediate stages are not inevitable in detail, only overwhelmingly probable in the gross. There, Perry, if you like, you can reconcile Foreknowledge with Freewill.’
‘Life, then, I suppose, is but one more element of randomness,’ said I, ‘in the randomness of things.’
‘Presumably,’ said Hoskyns.
There was a pause.
‘What is Life?’ I asked, suddenly.
‘Well, Pontius,’ said Waters, ‘if we could answer that question we should probably not need to ask the others. At present – chemically speaking – the nearest definition I can produce is that it is a kind of bias – a lop-sidedness, so to speak. Possibly that accounts for its oddness.’
‘I’ve said that kind of thing myself,’ I said, rather astonished, just as a sort of feeble witticism. Have I hit on something true by accident?’
‘More or less. That is to say, it is true that, up to the present, it is only living substance that has found the trick of transforming a symmetric, optically active compound into a single asymmetric, optically active compound. At the moment that Life appeared on this planet something happened to the molecular structure of things. They got a twist which nobody has ever succeeded in reproducing mechanically – at least, not without an exercise of deliberate selective intelligence, which is also, as I suppose you’ll allow, a manifestation of Life.’
/> ‘Thank you,’ said Perry. ‘Do you mind saying the first part over again, in words that a child could understand?’
‘Well, it’s like this,’ said Waters. ‘When the planet cooled, the molecules of that original inorganic planetary matter were symmetric – if crystallised, the crystals were symmetric also. That is, they were alike on both sides, like a geometrical cube, and their reversed or mirror-images would be identical with themselves. Substances of this kind are said to be optically inactive; that is to say, if viewed through the polariscope, they have no power to rotate the beam of polarised light.’
‘We will take your word for it,’ said Perry.
‘Oh, well, that’s quite simple. Ordinarily speaking, the vibrations in the aether – need I explain aether?’
‘I wish you could,’ said Hoskyns.
‘We will pass aether,’ said Perry.
‘Thank you. Well, ordinarily the aetheric vibrations which propagate the light takes place in all directions at right angles to the path of the ray. If you pass the ray through a crystal of Iceland spar, these vibrations are all brought into one plane, like a flat ribbon. That is what is called a beam of polarised light. Very well, then. If you pass this polarised light through a substance whose molecular structure is symmetric, nothing happens to it; the substance is optically inactive. But if you pass it through, say, a solution of cane sugar, the beam of polarised light will be twisted, and you will get a spiral effect, like twisting a strip of paper either to the right or to the left. The cane sugar is optically active. And why? Because its molecular structure is asymmetric. The crystals of sugar are not fully developed. There is an irregularity on one side, and the crystal and its mirror image are reversed, like my right hand and my left.’ He laid the palm of the right hand on the back of the left to show his meaning. We all frowned and practised on our own hands.