Gordon fell into Reeves’ other armchair and shouted with laughter. Nothing could be more disagreeable to nerves already jangled. Reeves almost shook him into position, demanding explanations.

“It’s all right,” he said at last. “You get all the luck, Reeves. Marryatt wasn’t listening at the other end of the metaphone. And all the time you were talking through it, it was just a soliloquy.”

“Thank God for that! But how did you explain it all? What did you tell him?”

“Oh, I just told him the truth⁠—part of the truth. And you must really get out of that habit of wheezing, because it was your wheezing behind the secret panel that made Marryatt think it was Brotherhood’s ghost sitting in your room last night!”

“You mean that’s what frightened Marryatt? Why did he run away this morning, then?”

“He thought it was Brotherhood telephoning to him. Lord, what a day!”

“And you’ve explained everything to him?”

“Yes, I’ve explained it all; I’d have explained it yesterday, if you’d let me.”

“Come now, don’t try and persuade me you didn’t think yourself that Marryatt was guilty?”

“Guilty of murder? Not for a single, solitary moment. I did think there was something wrong with him⁠—so there was, he was hag-ridden with nightmare about Brotherhood. But I never agreed with you about Marryatt being a murderer, and, to do me justice, I never said so.”

“That’s all very well, but you never showed me where I was wrong in my interpretation of the whole thing.”

“I know; it was no good showing you where you were wrong, because you were so confoundedly ingenious at devising fresh explanations. Honestly, I did put one or two difficulties to you, but in a second you’d persuaded yourself to believe that they were no difficulties at all. And of course there were heaps more.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you persisted in regarding the whole thing as a deliberate, carefully planned murder. But if you come to think of it, the circumstances that favoured the murder were just the sort of circumstances that couldn’t have been foreseen. How could a man like Marryatt know that Brotherhood was due to go bankrupt? He knows no more about the City than you do. And the fog⁠—look how the fog played up all through! How was Marryatt to know there was going to be a fog on the very day on which his attempt would be made? Yet, without a fog, the attempt would have been perfectly desperate.”

“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 to have explained it. The theorizers I mean are people who create problems where none exist⁠—as you did, Reeves, when you insisted on regarding it as an open question who murdered Brotherhood. They are people who trust circumstantial evidence in the face of all common human probability, as you did, Reeves, when you wanted to convict a chump like Marryatt of murder on the strength of a chain of silly coincidences.”

“All this comes out of your diary, I suppose?”

“No, I haven’t written it up yet. I’m going to write it up, about half an hour from now, that’s why you’re getting all this thrown at you. You see, when I think of you talking through that metaphone, it strikes me as a splendid allegory of the whole historical method in criticism⁠—or rather, that abuse of the historical method which commonly usurps the title. The man who has theories about history is usually just that⁠—a man talking down the metaphone, making a series of false statements to a person who isn’t there, and defying him to disprove them.”

“Gordon, I believe you’re going to solve the problem of my vocation. I’ve always hankered after being an amateur detective, but it seems to me the job is less attractive than I supposed⁠—facts will keep coming in. But, by your way of it, it sounds as if I might be a success in one of the learned professions.”

“Certainly. Be an anthropologist, Reeves. Fish up a lot of facts, alleged on very doubtful authority, about primitive man⁠—his marriage ceremonies, his burial customs, his system of land tenure. Look at the whole mass of facts squint-eyed until you can see a theory in it. Embrace the theory; trot out all the facts which support your theory; write a long appendix on all the facts which contradict your theory, showing them to be insignificant or irrelevant (you’d do that all right) and there you are. You’ll do quite as good anthropological research as⁠—”

“Is there money in it?”

“I thought you were all right for money. No, if you’re out for that, I should take to psychoanalysis. The system’s the same, generally speaking, only instead of dealing with primitive man, whom you can disregard because he isn’t there, you are dealing with a living man, who will probably tell you that you are a liar. Then you tell him that he is losing his temper, which is the sign of a strong inhibition somewhere, and that’s just what you were saying all along. The beauty of psychoanalysis is that it’s all ‘Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.’ In medicine, your diagnosis of fever is a trifle disconcerted if the patient’s temperature is subnormal. In psychoanalysis you say, ‘Ah, that just proves what I was saying.’ ”

“It seems to me that I have been neglecting all these openings for our young men.”

“Well, I don’t know, the psycho-business is getting a bit overcrowded nowadays. But there are still plenty of openings in the historical line. You can read what theories you like into history, as long as you are careful to neglect human probabilities, and take your evidence entirely from a selection of external facts. There is danger in it, of course; any day some fool may dig up a great chunk of Livy, and all your theories go wrong. Still, the obvious remedy for that is to say that Livy was lying on purpose, leaving false clues about deliberately, like Marryatt, you know, on the railway line. All documents, you see, which don’t happen to support your point of view, thereby give themselves away as being late and untrustworthy.”

“But I don’t think I know any history much.”

“That doesn’t matter; it’s quite easy to read your stuff up if you confine yourself to a particular period or a particular kind of history. For the beginner, Church history may be confidently recommended. Public interest in the subject is so small that it is very unlikely anyone will take the trouble to contradict you. If the worst comes to the worst, you can always fall back upon literary criticism, and there you are on perfectly safe ground. A man with a documentary hypothesis can defy the rudest assaults of common sense.”

“How does one do that, exactly?”

“You have to start out by saying, ‘This document consists of three parts. One part is genuine, one part is spurious, the third part is faked evidence put in to make the spurious stuff look as if it was genuine!’ Then, you see, you are on velvet. You reject altogether the parts of the document which you don’t like. Then you take the remaining part, and find that it still contains a certain sort of dross⁠—evidence which still conflicts with your theory. That dross you purge away by calling it a deliberate fake. The watch says 4:54⁠—that is proof positive that, in the first place, the murder took place at 3:54, and, in the second place, the murderer tried to pretend it didn’t. You see the idea? Now, the more of that business you do, the more ingenious your theory becomes, and the more ingenious your theory becomes, the more easily will people accept it as true. Half the statements which we regard as facts in history and criticism are statements made by critics, which are so ingenious that nobody has the heart to doubt them. And so the silly old world goes on. What if our forefathers are misjudged? We keep our mouths, not our ears, to the metaphone, and the honourable gentlemen get no opportunity to reply: and it doesn’t matter much to them, because, like sensible people, they’ve dropped their end of the tube, and left us to talk into empty air.”

“Do you know, Gordon, I believe you talk an awful lot of rot.”

“I know. But it isn’t all rot. Well, what are you proposing to do?”

“I am proposing to devote myself in future to the Game⁠—the Game, the whole Game, and nothing but the Game.”