The Luminous Face — Reading Companion

n, several more went away, and finally Fred Lane rose to go.

“Frightfully interesting, you fellows,” he said, “but it’s after five, and I’ve a date. Anybody I can drop anywhere?”

“Me, please,” accepted Dean Monroe. “That is, if you’re going my way. I want to go downtown.”

“Was going up,” returned Lane, “but delighted to change my route. Come along, Monroe.”

But Monroe had heard a chance word from Doctor Davenport that arrested his attention, and he sat still.

“Guess I won’t go quite yet—thanks all the same,” he nodded at Lane, and lighted a fresh cigarette.

Dean Monroe was a younger man than the others, an artist, but not yet in the class with Barry. His square, firm-set jaw, and his Wedgwood blue eyes gave his face a look of power and determination quite in contrast with Philip Barry’s pale, sensitive countenance. Yet the two were friends—chums, almost, and though differing in their views on art, each respected the other’s opinions.

“Have it your own way,” Lane returned, indifferently, and went off.

“Crime detection is not the simple process many suppose,” Davenport was saying, and Monroe gave his whole attention. “So much depends on chance.”

“Now, Doctor,” Monroe objected, “I hold it’s one of the most exact sciences, and——”

Davenport looked at him, as an old dog might look at an impertinent kitten.

“Being an exact science doesn’t interfere with dependence on chance,” he growled; “also, young man, are you sure you know what an exact science is?”

“Yeppy,” Monroe defended himself, as the others smiled a little. “It’s—why, it’s a science that’s exact—isn’t it?”

His gay smile disarmed his opponent, and Davenport, mounted on his hobby, went on: “You may have skill, intuition, deductive powers and all that, but to discover a criminal, the prime element is chance. Now, in the Mellen case, the chances were all against the detectives from the first. They didn’t get there till the evidences were, or might have been destroyed. They couldn’t find Mrs Gresham, the most important witness until after she had had time to prepare her string of falsehoods. Oh, well, you know how the case was messed up, and now, there’s not a chance in a hundred of the truth ever being known.”

“Does chance play any part in your profession, Doctor?” asked Monroe, with the expectation of flooring him.

“You bet it does!” was the reply. “Why, be I never so careful in my diagnosis or treatment, a chance deviation from my orders on the part of patient or attendant, a chance draught of wind, or upset nerves—oh, Lord, yes! as the Good Book says, ‘Time and Chance happeneth to us all.’ And no line of work is more precarious than establishing a theory or running down a clew in a murder case. For the criminal, ever on the alert, has all the odds on his side, and can block or divert the detective’s course at will.”

Doctor Ely Davenport was, without being pompous, a man who was at all times conscious of his own personality and sure of his own importance. He was important, too, being one of the most highly thought of doctors in New York City, and his self-esteem, if a trifle annoying, was founded on his real worth.

He often said that his profession brought him in contact with the souls of men and women quite as much as with their bodies, and he was fond of theorizing what human nature might do or not do in crucial moments.

The detection of crime he held to be a matter requiring the highest intelligence and rarest skill.

“Detection!” he exclaimed, in the course of the present conversation, “why detection is as hard to work out as the Fourth Dimension! As difficult to understand as the Einstein theory.”

“Oh, come now, Doctor,” Pollard said, smiling, “that’s going a bit too far. I admit, though, it requires a superior brain. But any real work does. However, I say, first catch your motive.”

“That’s it,” broke in Monroe, eagerly. “It all depends on the motive!”

“The crime does,” Davenport assented, drily, “but not the detection. You youngsters don’t know what you’re talking about—you’d better shut up.”

“We know a lot,” returned Monroe, unabashed. “Youth is no barrier to knowledge these days. And I hold that the clever detective seeks first the motive. You can’t have a murder without a motive, any more than an omelette without eggs.”

“True, oh, Solomon,” granted the doctor. “But the motive may be known only to the murderer, and not to be discovered by any effort of the investigator.”