He had already thought of about two-thirds of what the solicitor was going to tell him.

  “The truth is, Mr. Pond,” said the solicitor, in a confidential but still careful voice, when he was at length deposited on the other side of Mr. Pond’s table next day. “The truth is that the possibilities of this affair, painful in any case, may be specially painful for you. Most of us find it impossible to imagine that a personal friend might come under suspicion in such matters.”

  The mild eyes of Mr. Pond opened very wide, and even his mouth made the momentary movement which some thought so very fishy. The lawyer probably assumed that he was shocked at the first suggestion of his friend being affected; in fact, he was mildly amazed to suppose that anybody had not entertained the idea long ago. He knew that words to that effect were common in the more conventional detective stories, which he heartily enjoyed, as a change from Burke and Gibbon. He could see the printed words on a hundred pages: “None of us could believe that this handsome young cricketer had committed a crime,” or: “It seemed absurd to connect murder with a man like Captain Pickleboy, the most popular figure in Society.” He had always wondered what the words meant. To his simple and sceptical eighteenth-century mind, they seemed to mean nothing at all. Why should not pleasant and fashionable men commit murders, like anybody else? He was very much upset himself, inside, about this particular case; but he still did not understand that way of talking.

  “I am sorry to say,” continued the lawyer in a low voice, “that private investigation which we have already made, on our own account, places your friend, Captain Gahagan, in a position requiring explanation.”

  “Yes,” thought Pond, “and, my God, Gahagan really does require explanation! That’s exactly the difficulty about him — but, Lord, how slow this fellow is!” In short, the real trouble was that Pond was very fond of Captain Gahagan; but in so far as one could ask whether men were capable of murder, he was rather inclined to think that Gahagan was capable of murder — more capable of murder than of meanness to a cabman.

  Suddenly, with extraordinary vividness, the image of Gahagan himself sprang up in Pond’s memory: Gahagan as he had last seen him lounging with his large shoulders and long stride, and strange dark-red hair under the rather rakishly tilted grey top-hat, and behind him a space of sunset where the evening clouds passed in a sort of crumbling purple pomp, rather like the pomp of poor Gahagan himself. No; the Irishman was a man seventy-and-seven times to be forgiven; but not a man to be lightly acquitted.

  “Mr. Luke,” said Pond suddenly, “will it save time if I tell you, to start with, what I know there is against Gahagan? He was hanging round Mrs. Feversham, the great actress; I don’t know why he was; my own belief is that he is really in love with another woman. Yet he did unquestionably give the actress a huge amount of his time: hours and hours and late hours too. But if Feversham caught him doing anything unconventional, Feversham was not the man to let him off without a lawsuit and a scandal and God knows what. I don’t want to criticize your client; but, speaking crudely, he almost lived on lawsuits and scandals all his life. And if Feversham was the man to threaten or blackmail, I give it you frankly that Gahagan was the man to hit him back in a bodily fashion; and perhaps kill him, especially if a lady’s name were involved. That is the case against Captain Gahagan; and I tell you at the start that I don’t believe in it.”

  “Unfortunately it is not the whole case against Captain Gahagan,” replied Luke smoothly, “and I fear the full Statement may make even you believe it. Perhaps the most serious result of our investigations is this. It is now quite clearly established that Captain Gahagan gave three quite contrary and inconsistent accounts of his movements, or proposed movements, on the evening of the murder. Allowing him the highest possible marks for truthfulness in the matter, he must at least have told two lies to one truth.”

  “I have always found Gahagan truthful enough,” replied Pond, “except when he was telling lies for amusement; which is really rather the mark of a man who doesn’t prostitute the sublime art of lying to the base uses of necessity. About all ordinary practical things, I have found him not only frank but also rather precise.”

  “Even accepting what you say,” answered Mr. Luke dubiously, “we should still have to answer: If he was commonly candid and truthful, it must have been a mortal and desperate occasion that made him lie.”

  “To whom did he tell these lies?” asked Pond.

  “That is where the whole matter is so painful and delicate,” said the lawyer, shaking his head. “That afternoon, it seems, Gahagan had been talking to several ladies.”

  “He generally has,” said Pond. “Or was it they who were talking to him? If one of them happened, for instance, to be that very charming lady, Miss Asa-Smith of Pentapolis, I would venture to guess that it was she who was talking to him.”

  “This is rather extraordinary,” said Luke in some surprise. “I do not know if it was a guess; but one of them certainly was a Miss Asa-Smith of Pentapolis. The other two were the Hon. Violet Varney and, last but not least, the Hon. Joan Varney. As a matter of fact, it was the last that he spoke to first; which, I suppose, was only natural. It is notable, on your own suggestion, that he is really attached to this last lady, that his statement to her was apparently much the nearest to the truth.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Pond, and pulled his beard thoughtfully.

  “Joan Varney,” observed the lawyer gravely, “stated most definitely, before she knew that there was any trouble or tragedy in this case, that Captain Gahagan had left the house saying: ‘I am going round to the Fevershams’.’”

  “And you say that is contradicted by his statement to the others,” said Mr. Pond.

  “Most emphatically,” replied Luke. “The other sister, well known on the stage as Violet Varney, stopped him as he was going out and they exchanged a little light conversation. But, as he left, he distinctly said to her: ‘I’m not going to the Fevershams’; they’re still at Brighton,’ or something like that.”

  “And now we come,” said Mr. Pond, smiling, “to my young friend from Pentapolis. What was she doing there, by the way?”

  “He found her on the doorstep when he opened the front door,” replied Mr. Luke, also smiling. “She had arrived in a rush of enthusiasm to interview Violet Varney as ‘Comedienne and Social Leader.’ Neither she nor Gahagan are the sort of people not to be noticed; or to fail to notice each other. So Gahagan had a little talk with her, too; at the end of which he departed, with a flourish of his grey top-hat, telling her that he was going immediately to the club.”

  “Are you certain of that?” asked Pond, frowning.

  “She was certain of it; because she was in a red-hot rage about it,” replied Luke. “It seems that she has some feminist fad on the subject. She thinks all male persons who go to clubs go there to tell slanderous anecdotes about women and then drink themselves under the table. She may have had a little professional feeling about it too; perhaps she would have liked to have a longer interview, either for herself or The Live Wire. But I’ll swear she’s quite honest.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Pond emphatically but rather gloomily, “she’s absolutely honest.”

  “Well, there it is,” said Luke, speaking also not without a decent gloom. “It seems to me that the psychology’s only too obvious under the circumstances. He blurted out where he was really going to the girl he was accustomed to confide in; perhaps he didn’t really plan the crime till later; or perhaps it wasn’t entirely planned or premeditated. But by the time he talked to less friendly people he saw how unwise it would be to say he was going to the Fevershams’. His first impulse is to say, hastily and too crudely, that he was not going to the Fevershams’. Then, by the third interview, he thinks of a really good lie, normal and sufficiently vague, and says he is going to the club.”

  “It might be like that,” replied Pond, “or it might—” And Mr. Pond fell for the first time into the lax habit of Miss Asa-Smith, and failed to finish his sentence. Instead he sat staring at the distance with his rather goggle-eyed and fish-like gaze; then he put his head on his hands, said apologetically: “Please pardon me if I think for a minute,” and buried his bald brows once more.

  The bearded fish came to the surface again with a somewhat new expression, and said with a brisk and almost sharp tone:

  “You seem very much bent on bringing the crime home to poor Gahagan.”

  For the first time Luke’s features stiffened to hardness, or even harshness. “We naturally wish to bring the murderer of our client to justice.”

  Pond bent forward and his eyes were penetrating as he repeated: “But you will have it that the murderer was Gahagan.”

  “I’ve given you the evidence,” said Luke, lowering; “you know the witnesses.”

  “And yet, oddly enough,” said Pond very slowly, “you haven’t mentioned the really damning thing against him in the report of those witnesses.”

  “It’s damning enough — what do you mean?” snapped the lawyer.

  “I mean the fact that they are unwilling witnesses,” replied Pond. “It couldn’t be a conspiracy. My little Yank is as honest as the day and would never join a conspiracy. He’s the sort of man women like. Even Violet Varney likes him. Joan Varney loves him. And yet they all give evidence to contradict him or, at least, show he contradicted himself. And yet they’re all wrong.”

  “What the devil do you mean,” cried Luke with sudden impatience, “by saying they’re all wrong?”

  “They’re all wrong about what he said,” answered Pond. “Did you ask them if he said anything else?”

  “What else is needed?” cried the lawyer, now really angry. “They could all swear he said what I say. Going to the Fevershams’; not going to the Fevershams’; going to some unnamed club — and then bolting down the street so as to leave a lady in a rage.”

  “Precisely,” said Pond. “You say he said three different things. I say he said the same thing to all three. He turned it the other way round and made it the same.”

  “He turned it the other way round all right,” retorted Luke almost viciously. “But if he goes into the witness-box, he’ll find out whether the law of perjury says that turning a thing round makes it the same.”

  There was a pause and then Mr. Pond said serenely:

  “So now we know all about the Crime of Captain Gahagan.”

  “Who says we know all about anything? I don’t. Do you?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Pond. “The Crime of Captain Gahagan was that he didn’t understand women; especially modern women. These men with a vague air of being lady-killers seldom do. Don’t you know that dear old Gahagan is really your great-great-grandfather?”

  Mr. Luke made a movement as of sudden and sincere alarm; he was not the first man to fancy for a moment that Mr. Pond was mad.

  “Can’t you see,” went on Pond, “that he belongs to the school of the old bucks and beaux who called her ‘Woman, Lovely Woman,’ and knew nothing whatever about her — to the considerable increase of her power? But how they could pay compliments! ‘Stand close about, you Stygian set. . . .’ But perhaps, as you seem to suggest, it is not quite relevant. But you see what I mean by Gahagan being the old sort of lady-killer?”

  “I know he’s a very old sort of gentleman-killer,” cried Luke quite violently, “and that he killed the worthy and greatly wronged gentleman who was my client and friend!”

  “You seem a little annoyed,” said Mr. Pond. “Have you tried reading Dr. Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes? Very soothing. Believe me, those eighteenth-century writers I wanted to quote are very soothing. Have you read Addison’s play about Cato?”

  “You appear to be mad,” said the lawyer, now positively pale.

  “Or again,” continued Mr. Pond in a chatty way, “have you read Miss Asa-Smith’s play about the duchess in the bathing-suit? All the sentences curiously cut short — like the bathing-suit.”

  “Do you mean anything whatever?” asked the lawyer in a low voice.

  “Oh, yes, I mean a great deal,” replied Pond. “But it takes quite a long time to explain — like the Vanity of Human Wishes. What I mean is this. My friend Gahagan is very fond of those old wits and orators, just as I am; speeches where you have to wait for the peroration; epigrams with the sting in the tail. That’s how we first became friends, by both being fond of the eighteenth-century style; balance and antithesis and all that. Now if you have this habit and read, say, the hackneyed lines in Cato: ‘’Tis not in mortals to command success; but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it’ — well, it may be good or bad; but you’ve got to wait for the end of the sentence; because it begins with a platitude and ends with a point. But the modern sort of sentence never ends; and nobody waits for it to end.

  “Now women were always a little like that. It isn’t that they don’t think, they think quicker than we do. They often talk better. But they don’t listen so well. They leap so quickly upon the first point; they see so much more in it; and go off in a gallop of inference about it — so that they sometimes don’t notice the rest of the speech at all. But Gahagan, being of the other sort, the old oratorical sort, would always end his sentence properly, and be as careful to say what he meant at the end as the beginning.

  “I suggest to you, as the barristers say, that what Captain Gahagan really said to Joan in the first case was this: ‘I’m going round to the Fevershams’; I don’t believe they are back from Brighton yet, but I’ll just look in and see. If they’re not. I’ll go on to the club.’ That is what Peter Gahagan said; but that is not what Joan Varney heard. She heard about going to the Fevershams’ and felt at once that she knew all about it — far too much about it — to the not unnatural tune of ‘He’s going to see that woman’; even though his next words were that the woman almost certainly wasn’t there. Stuff about Brighton and the club didn’t interest her, and she didn’t even remember it. Very well, let us go on to the next case. What Gahagan said to Violet Varney was this: ‘It’s no good going to the Fevershams’ really; they’re not back from Brighton; but perhaps I’ll look in and see; if they’re not back, I shall go on to the club.’ Violet is much less truthful and careful than Joan; and she was jealous of Olivia herself, but in a much shallower way, Violet supposing herself to be an actress. She also heard the word Feversham and remembered vaguely that he said it was no good going there; that is, that he was not going there. She was pleased at this and condescended to chat with him; but did not condescend to pay any attention whatever to anything else he said.

  “Now for the third case. What Gahagan said to Miss Artemis Asa-Smith on the doorstep was this: ‘I’m going to the club; I promised to look in on some friends of mine on the way, the Fevershams; but I don’t believe they’re back from Brighton.’ That’s what he said. What Artemis heard, saw and blasted with her blazing eye, was a typical insolent, selfish, self-indulgent male brazenly bragging in the open street of his intention to go to his infamous club, where women are slandered and men drugged with alcohol. After the shock of this shameless avowal, of course she could not stoop to pick up the pieces of any other silly things he had said. He was simply the man who went to the club.

  “Now all those three real statements of Gahagan are exactly the same. They all mean the same thing; map out the same course of action; give the same reasons for the same acts. But they sound totally different according to which sentence comes first; especially to these rather jumpy modern girls, accustomed only to jump at the sentence that comes first — very often because there isn’t any thing at all to come after it. The Asa-Smith school of drama, in which every sentence stops as soon as it starts, if it doesn’t strike you as having much to do with the Tragedy of Cato, has had a very great deal to do with the Tragedy of Captain Gahagan. They might have hanged my friend between them, with the best intentions in the world, simply and solely because they will think only in half-sentences. Broken necks, broken hearts, broken lives, and all because they won’t learn any language but broken English. Don’t you think there’s something to be said for that musty old taste of his and mine, for the sort of literature that makes you read all that a man writes and listen to all that he says? Wouldn’t you rather have an important statement made to you in the language of Addison or Johnson than in the splutterings of Mr. Toxin and the Diving Duchess?”

  During this monologue, certainly rather long, the lawyer had grown more and more restless and full of nervous irritation.

  “This is all fancywork,” he said almost feverishly. “You haven’t proved any of this.”

  “No,” said Pond gravely, “as you say, I fancied it. At least I guessed it. But I did ring up Gahagan and hear something of the truth of his words and movements that afternoon.”

  “Truth!” cried Luke, with very extraordinary bitterness.

  Pond looked at him curiously. That woodenness of visage which was the first impression produced by Mr. Luke was found on examination to consist mostly of a rather forced look of fixity, combined with the rigid smoothness of his head and hair, the latter looking as if it had been painted on with some rather sticky yellow paint: a gummy gamboge. His eyelids indeed were cold and often partially closed; but inside them the grey-green eyes seemed strangely small, as if they were distant; and they were dancing and darting about like microscopic green flies. The more Mr. Pond looked at those veiled but restless eyes, the less he liked them. The old fancy came back to him about an actual conspiracy against Gahagan; though certainly not one worked by Artemis or Joan. At last he broke the silence very abruptly.