It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym, after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear, rose to open the case. His statement was clear and even restrained, and such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention by a certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of American speech.
He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. “The time has gone by,” he said, “when murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act, important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered. Science has profoundly...” here he paused, poising his compressed finger and thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said “modified,” and let it go–“has profoundly Modified our view of death. In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life, catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded by solemnity. Brighter days, however, have dawned, and we now see death as universal and inevitable, as part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding average which we call for convenience the order of nature. In the same way we have come to consider murder socially. Rising above the mere private feelings of a man while being forcibly deprived of life, we are privileged to behold murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich rotation of the cosmos, bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the golden-bearded harvesters, the return for ever of the slayers and the slain.”
He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed slightly, putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent manners of Boston, and continued: “There is but one result of this happier and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us. It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work, ‘The Destructive Type.’ We do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a murderous man. The type is such that its very life– I might say its very health–is in killing. Some hold that it is not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature. My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets–” (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud “hurrah!” but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that Mrs. Duke looked everywhere else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly–“who, in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the creature’s ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an end in itself. However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so with the prisoner. In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of the maniac; but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity. But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements–a cruel, an evil sanity. As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin West as stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay. No environment, however scientific, could have softened him. Place that man in the silver-silent purity of the palest cloister, and there will be some deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb. Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or brain with the brick. Circumstances may be favourable, training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb.”
Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked hat, and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.
“It only remains for us,” he said, “to bring forward actual evidence of his previous attempts. By an agreement already made with the Court and the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence authentic letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is free to examine. Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided to select one– the clearest and most scandalous. I will therefore, without further delay, call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two letters–one from the Sub-Warden and the other from the porter of Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University.”
Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face. He began in a loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt as a cock-crow:–
“Sir,–Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge–”
“Lord have mercy on us,” muttered Moon, making a backward movement as men do when a gun goes off.
“Sir,–Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,” proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, “and I can endorse the description you gave of the un’appy Smith. It was not alone my unfortunate duty to rebuke many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period, but I was actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated that period. Hi happened to passing under the house of my friend the Warden of Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College and connected with it by two or three very ancient arches or props, like bridges, across a small strip of water connected with the river. To my grave astonishment I be’eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air and clinging to one of these pieces of masonry, his appearance and attitude indicatin’ that he suffered from the grivest apprehensions. After a short time I heard two very loud shots, and distinctly perceived the unfortunate undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the Warden’s window and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver. Upon seeing me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared to desist. I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he succeeded in detaching the Warden from his painful position. Smith was sent down. The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle Club prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.–Hi am, your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.”
“The other letter,” continued Gould in a glow of triumph, “is from the porter, and won’t take long to read.
“Dear Sir,–It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare College, and that I ’elped the Warden down when the young man was shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter. The young man who was shooting at him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the photograph Mr. Boulter sends.– Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker.”
Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them. But for the vocal divergences in the matter of h’s and a’s, the Sub-Warden’s letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it; and both that and the porter’s letter were plainly genuine. Moon handed them to Inglewood, who handed them back in silence to Moses Gould.
“So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is concerned,” said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, “that is my case.”
Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner. He did not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into doctor into the abstract questions. “I do not know enough to be an agnostic,” he said, rather wearily, “and I can only master the known and admitted elements in such controversies. As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That’s the only difference between science and religion there’s ever been, or will be. Yet these new discoveries touch me, somehow,” he said, looking down sorrowfully at his boots. “They remind me of a dear old great-aunt of mine who used to enjoy them in her youth. It brings tears to my eyes. I can see the old bucket by the garden fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind–”
“Hi! here, stop the ’bus a bit,” cried Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a sort of perspiration. “We want to give the defence a fair run–like gents, you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering poplars.”
“Well, hang it all,” said Moon, in an injured manner, “if Dr. Pym may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn’t I have an old aunt with poplars?”
“I am sure,” said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost like a shaky authority, “Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes.”
“Why, as to liking her,” began Moon, “I–but perhaps, as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question. I repeat that I do not mean to follow the abstract speculation. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true”–here he lowered his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness–“is it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to get murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding the field that Dr. Warner is such a man? I do not speak without the book, any more than my learned friend. The whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein’s monumental work, ‘The Destructible Doctor,’ with diagrams, showing the various ways in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be resolved into his elements. In the light of these facts–”
“Hi, stop the ’bus! stop the ’bus!” cried Moses, jumping up and down and gesticulating in great excitement. “My principal’s got something to say! My principal wants to do a bit of talkin’.”