“The strong silence of the detective,” explained the old gentleman, “is a novelists’ fiction. The novelist must gag his detective, or how is he to preserve his secret till the last chapter? No, it is Mr. Brinkman who should be professionally silent; for what is a secretary if he does not keep secrets?”
“I am not silent, I am silenced,” said Brinkman. “The second best peacock dare not strut for fear of an encounter.”
“I find in silence,” said Bredon, “a mere relief from the burden of conversation. I am grateful to the man who talks, as I should be grateful to the man who jumped in before me to rescue a drowning baby. He obviates the necessity for effort on my part. I sometimes think that is why I married.”
“Miles,” said Angela, “if you are going to be odious, you will have to leave the room. I suppose you think you can be rude because the detectives in fiction are rude? Mr. Leyland may be silent, but at least he’s polite.”
“Mr. Bredon is married,” suggested Pulteney. “The caged bird does not strut. His are golden chains, I hasten to add, but they take the spring out of him none the less. For all that, I have some contempt for the man who does not take his share in shouldering the burden of conversation. He puts nothing into the common pot. Mr. Brinkman, I resign the strutting-ground. Tell us whether you think detectives should be strong, silent men or not.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t read much in that direction, Mr. Pulteney. I should imagine it was an advantage to the detective to be silent, so that he can be in a good position to say ‘I told you so’ when the truth comes out.”
“Oh, but a detective ought to be talking all the time,” protested Angela. “The ones in the books always are. Only what they say is always entirely incomprehensible, both to the other people in the book and to the reader. ‘Let me call your attention once more,’ they say; ‘to the sinister significance of the bend in the toast-rack,’ and there you are, none the wiser. Wouldn’t you like to be a detective, Mr. Pulteney?”
“Why, in a sense I am.” There was a slight pause, with several mental gasps in it, till the old gentleman continued, “That is to say, I am a schoolmaster; and the two functions are nearly akin. Who threw the butter at the ceiling, which boy cribbed from which, where the missing postage-stamp has got to—these are the problems which agitate my inglorious old age. I do not know why headmasters allow boys to collect postage-stamps; they are invariably stolen.”
“Or why anybody wants to collect them?” suggested Angela. “Some of them are quite pretty, of course. But I’ve no patience with all this pedantry about the exact date of issue and the exact shape of the water-mark. But I suppose the water-mark helps you in your investigations, Mr. Pulteney?”
“I am hardly professional enough for that. I leave that to the philatelist. A philatelist, by the way, means one who loves the absence of taxes. It hardly seems to mark out the stamp-lover from his fellows.”