“Isaac Morse flourished about twenty years ago as a financial agent and adviser; I imagine you know what that means. In fact he flourished as a money-lender, and flourished like the green bay-tree, otherwise the wicked man. He flourished so very much, and so very much at other people’s expense, that he was probably pretty unpopular with a good many people whose circumstances were not so flourishing. Among these were two students; the one, who was a less interesting person, was a medical student named Duveen. The other was an art student named Windrush.

  “The financial adviser was imprudent enough to leave his car and chauffeur, and walk across a corner of a heath to the hotel where the conference was to be held. In doing so, they passed a very desolate dip in the moorland marked only by this queer, hollow tree. . . . What would the ordinary, stupid, professional killer have done? He would have killed, doubtless when his other companion’s back was turned, and if he got away with it, would have skulked back and tried to scratch a shallow grave in the sandy heath. Or tried to cart away the corpse in a box under the eyes of all the servants at the inn. That is the difference between him and a man with imagination — an artist. The artist attempted something perfectly wild and new, and apparently absurd; but something that has succeeded for twenty years. He professed to have a romantic affection for that particular spot, he boasted of his intention of buying it and living on it. He did buy it, and he did live on it, and he did by this method bury from all eyes but his own the secret of what he had left there. For in those few moments, when the other student had gone on ahead and was hidden beyond the sprawling tree, he struck Morse a mortal blow with his left hand and threw his body into the yawning cavern in the tree. It was a solitary spot and naturally nobody actually saw him do the deed. But long after the medical student had gone on to the hotel and caught a train to London, another traveller on the moor saw Windrush sitting staring at the tree and the pools, in a dark reverie doubtless full of his daring scheme. And it is an odd thing that even the passer-by thought his solitary figure looked as tragic as Cain, and the pools under the red sunset looked like blood.

  “The rest of his audacious scheme, or artistic pose, worked easily enough. By bragging of being cranky, he escaped all chance of the suspicion of being criminal. He could cage up the tree like a wild animal, without anybody thinking it any sillier than it seemed. You will notice that his caging grew more strict; when people began to touch or examine the tree, he locked everybody out of the garden. Except Harrington — and, apparently, you.”

  “I suppose,” said Judson, “that Harrington, or Wilmot, or whatever you call him, told you that the artist admitted being ambidexterous — doing things with his left hand as well as his right.”

  “Quite so,” replied the Inspector. “Well, Dr. Judson, I have obliged you and told you practically all I know at present. If there is anything more that you know, and we don’t know, I am bound to warn you in any case that you are bound to return the favour. This is a deadly serious business. It is a hanging matter.”

  “No,” said Dr. Judson thoughtfully; “not a hanging matter.”

  As the other only stared he added, still in a meditative style:

  “You will never hang Walter Windrush.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded the officer, in a new sharp voice.

  “Because,” said the doctor, beaming at him, “Walter Windrush has been in a lunatic asylum for some little time. He was certified in the regular old official manner” — he talked of it as of something that happened a hundred years before— “and the medical authorities that certified him noted the symptom of ambidexterous action and a somewhat excessive development of power in the left hand.”

  Inspector Brandon was staring like one stunned at the brisk and smiling doctor, who rose to his feet as if the interview were over. But even as he stepped towards the door, he found his exit blocked by the presence of a newcomer, and found himself looking once more at the long hair and long, smiling visage of the gentleman he had so heartily disliked under the name of Mr. Wilmot.

  “Back again,” said Wilmot, or Harrington, his smile widening to a grin, “and apparently just in time.”

  The Inspector had recovered from his stupefaction and his senses and perceptions were quick enough. He got to his feet quickly and said:

  “Is anything the matter?”

  “No,” said the great detective; “nothing is the matter. Except that we are after the wrong man.”

  And he settled himself comfortably in a chair and smiled at the Inspector.

  “The wrong man!” repeated Brandon. “You can’t mean that Windrush is the wrong man! I’ve just been taking the liberty of telling Dr. Judson the real story—”

  “Under the impression,” said Harrington, “that you knew the real story. For my part, I never knew it till about twenty minutes ago.”

  His face and manner were eminently cheerful; but as he turned to speak to the doctor, they took on a sort of business-like gravity and he seemed to choose and weigh his words.

  “Doctor,” he said, “you are a man of science and you understand what hardly anybody in this world does understand. You understand what is really meant of a hypothesis that holds the field. As a man of science, you must have had the experience of building up a very elaborate, a very complete and even a very convincing theory.”

  “Why, yes,” said John Judson, with a grim smile; “I have certainly had the experience of building up a very elaborate, very complete and even convincing theory.”

  “But,” went on the detective thoughtfully, “as a man of science, you were nevertheless ready to entertain the possibility, even if it were the remote possibility, that your theory was after all untrue.”

  “You are right again,” said Judson, and the smile grew grimmer. “I was ready to entertain the remote possibility that my theory was quite untrue.”

  “Well, I take full responsibility for the unexpected collapse of my theory,” said the great detective, with his agreeable smile. “You must not blame the Inspector; the whole of that story of the artist criminal and his original scheme of concealment was my idea, and an infernally intelligent and interesting idea too, though I say it who shouldn’t. There’s really nothing to be said against it, except that it can’t be true. Everything has a little weakness somewhere.”

  “But why can’t it be true?” asked the astonished Brandon.

  “Only,” answered his commanding officer, “because I have just discovered the real murderer.”

  Amid the startled silence that followed he added, as in a pleasant abstraction: “That grand and bold artistic crime we dreamed of was, like many great things, too great for this world. Perhaps in Utopia, perhaps in Paradise, we may have murders of that perfect and poetical sort. But the real murderer behaves in a much more ordinary fashion. . . . Brandon, I have found the other student. Naturally, you know rather less about the other student.”

  “Pardon me,” said the Inspector stiffly; “of course, we traced the movements of the other student, and of everybody who could be involved. He took the train to London that evening and, a month after, went to New York on business and thence to the Argentine, where he set up a successful and highly respectable practice as a doctor.”

  “Exactly,” said Harrington. “He did the dull, ordinary thing that the real criminal does. He bolted.”

  Dr. Judson seemed to find his voice for the first time since the last turn of events, and it was like the voice of a new man.

  “Are you quite certain,” he said at last, “that Windrush is innocent after all?”

  “I am quite certain,” said Harrington seriously. “This is not a hypothesis but a proof. There are a hundred converging proofs; I will only give you a few. The injury to the skull was done with a very unusual surgical instrument, and I have found the instrument in possession of the man who used it. The spot selected would only have been so chosen by a man of special knowledge. The man called Duveen, whom we know to have been present, and to have had a stronger motive than Windrush (for he was ruined and in fear of exposure), was and is a man with exactly that special knowledge. He is a surgeon and a skilful man. He is also a left-handed man.”

  “If you are certain, sir, the thing is settled,” said the Inspector rather regretfully. “As Dr. Judson has explained, the left-handed business was also a part of the disease or aberration of Windrush—”

  “You will agree that I never said I was certain about Windrush,” said Harrington calmly; “I do say I am certain now.”

  “Doctor Judson says—” began the Inspector.

  “Dr. Judson says,” said that physician himself, springing up like a spring released; “Dr. Judson says that everything that Dr. Judson has said for the last forty-eight hours is a pack of lies! Dr. Judson says that Walter Windrush is no more mad than we are. Dr. Judson begs to announce that his celebrated theory of Arboreal Ambidexterity is a blasted mass of balderdash that ought never to have taken in a baby! Duodiapsychosis! Huh!” And he snorted with a violent and indescribable noise.

  “This is very extraordinary,” said Inspector Brandon.

  “I bet it is,” said the doctor. “We all seem to have made pretty damned fools of ourselves by being too clever, but I was the damndest. Look here, this has got to be put straight at once! It’s bad enough for Miss Windrush that her father should be locked up for a day. I must make out some sort of document admitting a mistake, or announcing a recovery, or some nonsense, and get him out again.”

  “But,” said Harrington gravely, “I understood that no less a person than Dr. Doone also signed the emergency order, and his authority—”

  “Doone!” cried Judson with a quite indescribable frenzy of contempt, “Doone! Doone would sign anything! Doone would say anything. Doone is a doddering old fraud! He wrote one book that was boomed when I was a baby, and he’s never opened a book since. I saw all the new books on his table with none of the leaves cut. And the way he talked about prehistoric man was more prehistoric than fossils. As if any serious scientific man now believed all his stuff about Arboreal Man! Golly, I didn’t have any difficulty with Doone! I only had to flatter him at first by making it all very Arboreal, and then talking about what he didn’t understand and dared not question. I had great fun with something newer than Psycho-analysis.”

  “All the same,” said Harrington, “as Dr. Doone has signed the order, he’ll have to sign the countermanding of it.”

  “Oh, very well,” cried the impetuous Judson, who had already scribbled something on a page and was already rushing from the room, “I’ll cut round and get him to sign it, too.”

  “I think I should rather like to go with you,” said Harrington.

  In the track of the headlong Judson, they trailed round with tolerable rapidity to that stately and pillared house in the West End, the house with the sombre blinds, which the doctor had once visited alone. The scene between him and the stately Dr. Doone was rather curious. Now that they had some inner light on the matter, they could appreciate the evasiveness of the great man and the pertinacity of the smaller one. However, Dr. Doone evidently felt it was wiser to join in his colleague’s recantation, and, carelessly picking up a quill pen, he signed the paper with his left hand.

  VI

  THE EPILOGUE OF THE GARDEN

  A fortnight afterwards, Mr. Walter Windrush was walking round his favourite garden, smiling and smoking as if nothing had happened. He was smoking a small cigarette in a very long cigarette-holder, and he really was doing it as if nothing had happened. For that was the real mystery of Walter Windrush, which neither medical non legal experts were ever in the least likely to fathom. That was the real Secret, which no detective would ever detect.

  He had been turned into a monstrosity in the eyes of his nearest and dearest; he had been described to his own child as a chimpanzee and as a chattering maniac; he had been described again as a pitiless and patient assassin, planning his whole life upon the concealment of a crime; he had been dragged through or threatened by every degrading and hideous experience; he had found that his favourite private paradise had been the scene of a murder and that his friend found it possible to believe him to be a murderer; he had been in the madhouse; he had been near to the gallows. And all these things were of less importance to him than the shape of the great coloured cloud of morning that came sailing up out of the east, or the fact that the birds had begun to sing in the branches of the tragic tree. Some would have said his mood was too shallow for such tragedies. Some, who saw deeper, might have said it was too deep for them. But upon such deep springs of levity he lived, and so he walked, as if in another world. It is possible that Inspector Brandon did not completely comprehend the monster called a Man of Genius.

  Indeed, he was much less affected by the morbid memories than the man of common sense. When he had strolled about alone for a few moments, he was joined by his young friend the doctor, but the doctor looked comparatively gloomy and embarrassed; so much so that the artist rallied him about it.

  “Well,” said Dr. Judson, with something of his old sort of sullen candour, “I ought to be ashamed of it, I suppose, as well as of everything else. But I confess I can’t think how you can bear to hang about in the place.”

  “My dear fellow, and you are the cold and rational man of science,” said Windrush lightly. “In what superstitions you wallow! In what medieval darkness you brood all your days! I am only a poor, impracticable, poetic dreamer, but I assure you I am in broad daylight. In fact, I have never been out of it, not even when you put me in that pleasant little sanatorium for a day or two. I was quite happy there; and as for the lunatics, well I came to the conclusion that they were rather saner than my friends outside.”

  “There’s no need to rub it in,” said Judson with a groan. “I won’t apologize for thinking you a madman, because I never did think so. But I suppose that, given a fine sense of delicacy, I ought to apologize for thinking you a murderer. But there are murderers and murderers; all I knew was that I had found a murdered man you had hidden in your garden. I didn’t know how far you might have been provoked or justified. Indeed, from all I hear of the late lamented Mr. Morse, he was of the sort that won’t be missed. But I knew that Wilmot was a detective and was poking round the tree, and I knew that meant your arrest in precious quick time. I had to act pretty quickly myself; I generally do act a good deal too quickly, for that matter. A plea of insanity after arrest is always weak — especially when it’s not true. But if you were already certified you couldn’t even be arrested. I had to invent an imaginary disease, entirely out of my own head in about five minutes. I put it together somehow out of bits of that talk we had about ambidexterity and bits of Doone’s rotten old rubbish about anthropoids. I put that in, partly because I foresaw that I should have to nobble Doone somehow, and partly because it fitted so well into the tale of the tree. But even now I hate to think of the horrors I made up, even though they were horrors that never happened. But what must one feel about the horrors that really have happened?”

  “Well,” replied the artist cheerfully, “and what do you feel about them?”

  “I can’t help feeling,” said Judson, “that men might avoid the place like a plague-spot.”

  “The birds perch on the tree,” said Windrush, “as if it were the shoulder of St. Francis.”

  There was a silence and then the brooding Judson said:

  “After all, sir, it is damned extraordinary that you lived alone with this tree for twenty years and never found what was inside it. I know it rotted to bones pretty quickly, because the stream carried away the decomposition; but you might have been pulling the tree about any day.”

  Walter Windrush looked at him steadily with his clear, glassy eyes.

  “I have never even touched the tree,” he said. “I have never been within two yards of it.”

  Something in his manner suggested to the young man that they had come near the nerve of the eccentricity; he was silent and the artist went on:

  “You tell us a great deal about Evolution and the Ascent of Man. You scientific men are very superior, of course, and there is nothing legendary about you. You do not believe in the Garden of Eden. You do not believe in Adam and Eve. Above all, you do not believe in the Forbidden Tree.”

  The doctor shook his head in half-humorous deprecation, but the other went on with the same grave fixity of gaze.

  “But I say to you, always have in your garden a Forbidden Tree. Always have in your life something that you may not touch. That is the secret of being young and happy for ever. There was never a story so true as that story you call a fable. But you will evolve and explore and eat of the tree of knowledge, and what comes of it?”

  “Well,” said the doctor defensively, “a good many things have come of it that are not so bad.”

  “My friend,” said the poet. “You once asked me what was the Use of this tree. I told you I did not wish it to be any Use. And was I wrong? I have got nothing but good out of it, because to me it was useless. What have they got out of it, those to whom it was useful? What did they get who asked, after the manner of that ancient folly, for the Fruit of the tree? It was useful to Duveen, or Doone, or whatever you call him; and what fruit did he gather but the fruit of sin and death? He got murder and suicide out of it; they told me this morning that he had taken poison, leaving a confession of the murder of Morse. It was useful to Wilmot in a way, of course; but what did even Wilmot and Brandon get out of it, but the dreadful duty of dragging a fellow-creature to the gallows? It was useful to you, when you wanted a nonsensical nightmare of some sort, with which to lock me up for life and terrify my family. But it was a nightmare; and you yourself still seem to be a little haunted by the nightmare. But I repeat that it was useless to me; and I am still in the broad daylight.”

  As he spoke, Judson looked up across the lawn and saw Enid Windrush come out of the shadow of the house into the sun. Something in the golden balance of her figure, with the flushed face and flame-like radiation of her hair, made her look as if she had actually stepped from an allegorical picture of the dawn; and swiftly as she moved, her movements always had the grand, gradual curves of great unconscious forces, of the falling waters and the wind. Something of this congruity with the almost cosmic drift of the conversation doubtless rose into the poet’s mind, as he said casually enough: