A Train of Powder (31 page)

It might have been, of course, that Mr. Setty did not grasp the knife (and his unscarred fingers showed that he had made no attempt to do so) and had left no fingerprints on the wall and the furniture because he was unconscious when he was killed. He might first have been hit on the head with a cosh; but that is most unlikely, for murderers rarely change instruments in the middle of a murder. Or he might have been drunk; there was a good deal of alcohol found in his stomach. But in that case his assailant would hardly have stabbed him five times when once would have done; and as his stab wounds were all in the front of his body, if he had been unconscious and therefore presumably lying flat or leaning back, the blood would have run back into his chest cavity, and no doctor spoke of this having happened. Nor would a murderer, having an unconscious man at his mercy, have stabbed him where his blood was likely to fall on a carpet or have carried him into another room without wrapping him in a blanket or some absorbent material. It was impossible to believe that Hume had murdered Mr. Setty in this apartment singlehanded, and it was even more impossible to believe that he had murdered him with the aid of accomplices, for in that case it was even less likely that the dying man would have been allowed to stagger from one room to another, or that his corpse should have been borne unwrapped to drop a trail of blood. It was also impossible to believe that Hume had, alone or with help, dismembered the body in the apartment. The bones had been severed with a saw, and one of the pathologists assured the court that that must have been a very noisy proceeding, adding, “It is quite impossible to go on dictating to one’s secretary if human bones are being sawed through in the vicinity.” There was no table in the whole apartment long enough to lay Mr. Setty’s body on during the dissection, and if such dissecting had been done on the floor it would surely have left bloodstains of a more diffuse, sprayed sort than any which were actually found.

It is certain that in essence Hume’s own story was true, and that Mr. Setty’s corpse had been left at his apartment already dismembered and packaged; and that he was not the murderer but only an accessory after the fact. This would do away with all the difficulties inherent in the theory of the prosecution; it did not ask us to believe that Mr. Setty, who had been noted for a timidity so extreme that he never would travel in any automobile but his own, would visit the apartment of a man in whom he had no reason to feel confidence. It suggested an explanation of the patches of bloodstain all over the apartment. Supposing that Hume had opened the door to some visitors and invited them to come into the living room, they may have brought all or any of the packages and dumped them on the floor. Hume may not have known at first or indeed for some time what the packages contained, but may simply have noticed that they were exuding a sticky fluid and suggested that they might be moved to the kitchen and put in the sink or the coal cupboard, if it had been proposed that he was to keep them and dispose of them. But unfortunately for Hume the details of his story annulled all benefit the outline of it might bring him. For he said that the three men who had come and left the first two packages had come between two and three on the afternoon of October 5; but he had sent the bloodstained carpet to the dyer that morning before lunch, the floral rug in the bloodstained hall had disappeared by the time Mrs. Stride had arrived a few minutes before two, and he had spoken of his intention to have the floorboards revarnished soon after her arrival. These circumstances, and Mrs. Stride’s firm assertion that there were no callers at the apartment during the whole afternoon, knocked Hume’s defence to pieces. For that reason this murder seems likely to rank as one of the great unsolved mysteries. The possibility that Hume murdered Mr. Setty can definitely be excluded. But who murdered Mr. Setty, and how, and where, is known to nobody except the murderer. Not for lack of evidence. That is piled sky-high. There is so much that whatever theory the mind may base on that evidence, there exists some fact which disproves it.

The case was the stranger because the prosecution was so curiously conducted by Mr. Christmas Humphreys, who had just become the senior prosecuting counsel for the government. He is the son of a very famous old judge, who presides over trials with a merciless, humorous, savage, solemn kind of common sense, often shocking to everybody in court except the prisoner, who, out on a limb where at last he knows what’s what, can see what the old man is driving at. His son, who is getting on for sixty, looks as if he would be the conventionalist of all time, and would enjoy few activities outside the law except going back to his old college and having dinner with the dons at the High Table in Hall. He is in fact a passionate joiner of the wilder type. He starts near the centre by being chairman of the Ballet Guild and of a group that reads poetry aloud, then gets off to the left with osteopathy and psychoanalysis, then the Bates system of curing eye defects without spectacles lures him, and he runs along into herbalism and the movement against the use of artificial fertilizers. His top note is Buddhism. He is probably the only English-born Buddhist at the Bar. Conversions of any kind are uncommon among lawyers, who rarely want to become
anything
except judges.

This was the first case he had conducted as senior prosecuting counsel for the government, and it was therefore watched with interest. This turned to dismay. On rising to cross-examine this man who had been accused of the appalling crime of stabbing and cutting up Mr. Setty, Mr. Christmas Humphreys asked him, in accents cold, with a loathing which suggested that he had detected him doing something far, far worse, whether he had not taken a blond girl called Teresa out to a night club and paid the bill with a rubber check. It was of course pleasant to think of him doing anything so relatively innocuous, but Mr. Humphreys suggested that this was the kind of thing that stabbing and cutting up people led to if done too often. He also alluded with horror to the fact that Hume had an overdraft at his bank, though British banks indulge, to an extent which Americans find astonishing, in the amiable habit of letting their clients run into debt with them, if they either deposit security, or get a solvent friend to give a personal guarantee, or exhibit symptoms of future solvency. Such is the economic disorder of England today that probably at least half the people in this court were living on overdrafts. There were many faces which failed to light up as Mr. Humphreys suggested that Hume had been so distressed at having an overdraft that Mr. Setty’s notes had offered him an irresistible temptation. Other suggestions of his brought forward as a reason for the butchery included even more common signs of indigence. He made much of the fact that Hume had pawned a suit. Yet it is part of the curious economics of pawnbroking that there are many objects for which pawnbrokers give much more than their second-hand value; and a large section of the population pawns things all its life, and a still larger section pawns things quite a lot when it is young, and yet neither habitually engages in murder. He cut an even wider swathe when he mentioned portentously that Hume had often been some days late in paying the rent. By this time the court was looking on Mr. Humphreys with awe as a financial virgin, who felt as strongly about his state as the Lady in Comus felt about hers and would have claimed at any moment that So dear to Heav’n is Saintly solvency That when a soul is found sincerely so, a thousand liveried Angels lackey her.

Rage rang in his voice, and it was very odd to remember his last book. He is quite an accomplished writer. His book on
The Great Pearl Robbery of 1913
is one of the classics of criminal literature; it conveys the peculiarly cosy character of British crime as it was before the First World War far better than any detective novel. He has also published several works on Buddhism, the chief of which is
Concentration and Meditation.
The last,
Via Tokyo,
is the record of his trip to Japan as a junior counsel for the British government in the International War Trial. It contains little about his legal mission, for he is preoccupied by his awed delight in the stillness and formality of the East, as they were exhibited in the Buddhist shrines and schools of dancing which he visited in Japan and the countries through which he travelled.

The emotional climax of his journey was his surrender to the Zen sect of Buddhism. This is a rarefied form of the faith, in which stupidity is regarded as the first enemy, to be overcome by the intellect, which, when it has been trained to its highest capacity, becomes the second enemy, to be overcome by the development of a higher faculty of wisdom. The means by which the intellect is transcended includes the asking of
koan,
refined conundrums for which there is no logical answer, and the practice of
mondo,
dialogues between master and pupil which sound like nonsense because they are carried on above the plane where sense holds good. As the pupil progresses he is rewarded with flashes of
satori,
immediate understanding, and his ultimate aim is to stop thinking and have no need for thought, because as soon as he becomes aware of a problem he himself becomes its solution. He enters into it by intuition, as he can enter into all things in the universe, without effort, by tranquil acceptance.
Via Tokyo
shows that its author is in love with tranquillity. In one of the poems which are scattered through the volume he writes of his regret that he must leave “the golden cool serene” of his room in a Japanese house; and his pages are covered with his desire to discard all hot emotions and intellectual superfluities and make himself an empty chalice to receive the wine of mysticism.

Yet the Old Bailey has not for many years witnessed anything like Mr. Christmas Humphreys’ cross-examination of Hume. It was Hume’s intention to be gaily impudent, and he soon found a way of mentioning that an escaped criminal lunatic called the Mad Parson, for whom all the police forces of England were searching, had lived for months unmolested in lodgings directly opposite the London police station where he himself had been detained and examined. But nobody can be funny for long when he is being tried for such a crime; there is something in everybody which forbids it. Soon Hume began to bicker and yelp and snarl, and nothing was said to him which might have exorcised him. Mr. Humphreys had several times described Hume as an inveterate romancer, so it happened that when he said to Hume, “I suggest that you stabbed Setty in the sitting room and that he died in the dining room,” Hume snapped back, “Now you’re romancing,” and when Mr. Humphreys went on, “And that you cut him up that night,” Hume pouted out his lips in insolence and sneered, “Absolute baloney.” The horrid subject matter was being discussed in too appropriate a style. From Mr. Humphreys’ book it had appeared that one of the most intense pleasures he had experienced on his journey to the East, indeed, perhaps in all his life, was his stay in a Zen monastery, the Temple of Full Enlightenment, founded seven hundred years ago, a place of mellowed wood and grey-green tiles, set among flowering trees below a sandstone cliff. There was a Great Bell there, older than the Temple, at the top of a rising venue of worn grey steps. In this home of pure mysticism, purged of formality, nobody minded the bell being sounded at any time by anybody who was moved to sound it. So he used to go up the long steep stairs to the bell whenever he had time to take refuge in this Temple, and strike it to announce his coming, fusing himself with its ancient, harmonious voice.

There was a war of philosophical principles here. Mr. Humphreys is a fastidious person who is displeased with what man has made of the earth, and has therefore always distrusted the common practises of mankind and has put his faith in any alternative which has been less generally adopted. Ballet is not ordinary motion, therefore he adored it; prose is more habitually used than poetry, therefore he wrote poetry and read it aloud; he would not be satisfied by any rationalist view of the mind, he enjoyed the psychoanalytic reinstatement of the primitive; he rejected the findings of orthodox medicine for osteopathy and herbalism; he waved away modern agriculture; he would have nothing to do with the Christianity which lay at his hand shaped for the use of his Western personality, he insisted on going out of Europe into Asia to find a religion hardly modified by the spirit of recent centuries, which treated as insignificant that pampered darling of the West, the self.

But Hume had nothing against the self. He showed this when the cross-examination became such a bitter wrangle that the judge had to check it, and reminded him that he must not answer counsel violently, telling him that the purpose of the trial was to make a necessary investigation and that there was nothing personal behind the questions put to him by his cross-examiner and therefore no occasion for heat. To this Hume replied, “But my life is a personal matter to me.” This was not only a very sensible remark, which the judge did not reject, it was a proclamation made with immense Byronic pride. Yet he made no claim that the life he wished to preserve showed any merit. No man ever went into a witness box to defend himself against a capital charge and took such trouble to convince the jury that he was of bad character. When he was asked whether he would call himself an honest man, he answered that perhaps it would be better to call him a semi-honest man; and his grin gave a deep nastiness to the phrase. He was announcing that he would not be good but he would not be bad either; he was presenting them with a problem of confusion and defied them to solve it. He had a deep love of chaos, and he was for the self because it can carry such a load of the stuff. It was his intention to revolt all who have tried to establish order, and to torment them by declaring that let the ballet be what it may, there would still be cripples who cannot dance and louts that will not, there will be blindness which cannot be cured by exercises, sickness which will not yield to herbal iodine and sickness which resists psychoanalysis, fields which will be barren for all the dung that is spread on them, and souls which refuse the gift of peace from Christianity or any other faith. Hume spoke with the voice of the spirit that denies.