“Fed up?” demanded Doyle incredulously.
“Yes,” replied the mutinous George. “Too much of a good thing.”
“Too much?” repeated Mr. Doyle. He exchanged pitying glances with Guy.
“My dear chap,” that gentleman took up the tale, rather in the tones of one addressing a small and particularly foolish infant (thus do all criminologists address on this particular subject those who are not of their own persuasion, which accounts largely for their unpopularity.) “My dear chap, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It isn’t the mere act of murder which interests us, it’s the state of mind of the murderer. The particular psychology, in fact, which finds its culmination in murder. The motives, the amount of premeditation, the lack of premeditation even more, the psychology of the victim, the network of circumstance, and a hundred other things—those are what makes murder the most absorbing of all psychological studies.”
“Oh!” said George. But he was impressed. George had never realised that murder had a psychology at all. George was learning things.
Guy saw that the faithful hound was beginning to think of coming once more to heel, and carried on with the good work.
He leaned back in his chair, joined his finger-tips and regarded his now uneasy disciple over his glasses with some severity.
“Let me put it in this way,” he said, striving conscientiously to speak in words of not more than one syllable. “Suppose you committed a murder, George. Suppose you were playing with the vicar, and he foozled his tee-shot to the last green and the whole match, and half-a-crown, depended on it; and suppose, unable to live in the same world with such bungling incompetence, you smote him on the head with one of your clubs, so that he died. Are you supposing all that?”
“Ye-es,” said George, supposing manfully.
“Well, what would interest us is not whether you smote him with your mashie or your niblick, or how much he bled, or whether his death-agonies removed any divots from the fairway. Nothing like that at all, George. Simply the state of your mind which showed you in one moment of blinding revelation that nothing short of murder was demanded by the situation.”