The tender light Of peaceful evening, and the saintly night. Sweet still the scent of roses; only this, They hau a perfume then which now I miss.
> J. H. Navniu. 'J. 0. Umbert.
NUMBERS XXXII. 23 439
Yea, too, I can recall the night wherein
Did first begin The joy of that intoxicating sin. Late was the day in April, gray and still. Too faint to gladden, and too mild to chill; Hot lay upon my lips the last night's kiss,
The first of his; I wandered blindly between shame and bliss; And, yearning, hung all day about the lane, Where, in the evening, he should come again."*
^ Some of you may, like myself, have seen Vesuvius. Some- times it looks the quietest mountain you can imagine. There are green slopes. There are people dwelling at its foot. The vine festoons its flanks, and all is loveliness. Yes, but wait a little. It opens its red mouth, and its crater vomits forth smoke and fire and ashes, and now down its flanks there comes the burning, glowing tide of molten lava. Hell seems let loose from its deep caverns. So it is with a man's conscience. It may for years be quiet and still, with perhaps an occasional murmur, faint and fleeting; but there comes a day when the sinner's sins confront him. Then does conscience do her work.^
3. What are the methods which sin the detective uses ?
(1) Sin finds out the sinner, first, with shameful memories. The sinner may flee from the past, but he cannot alter it, and the waters of Lethe are fabulous. "Teach me," bitterly exclaimed Themistocles to the man who offered to improve his memory, "teach me to forget." Here there is no forgetting. The past always stands as you have made it. There are men who from the first have resisted temptation and refused to stoop to folly, who have lived a wise, honourable, aspiring life ; but you are not one of these and never can be. If you have spent your youth in a shameful, low, animal, selfish, misguided fashion, no power on earth or in heaven can alter that. You can never live your youth over again. You know what it might have been, you know also what it is. However much you repent, however thoroughly you reform, you cannot undo that piece of your life and replace it with conduct you could now look back upon with pleasure. The shuttle you once so recklessly and eagerly shot across your life has woven into it a pattern which shaU now for ever char- acterize your early life.
^ Philip Bourke Marston. ■ A. G. Brown.
440 SIN THE DETECTIVE
^ Psychologists tell us that memory never really loses any- thing. Things pass from our consciousness and seem to be utterly forgotten ; but they are only lying below the surface of the mind, ready to rise again into vivid life in their own time. Now and then we get slight hints of these mysterious potenti- alities of our being. Events long buried in the abyss of our forgotten years suddenly come back to us like half-remembered dreams. Some unwonted circumstance serves as the key to a secret spring, and straightway the locked chambers of the soul fly open.
^ What worse torment could be imagined than to be com- pelled to remember all one's past sins, to be compelled to see them in their naked hideousness, to be compelled to acknowledge them in their far-stretching consequences as one's very own ? Mediaeval theologians pictured the abode of the lost as a vast furnace filled with leaping tongues of flame. Dante pictured it, no lees awfully, as a realm of thick-ribbed everlasting ice, the breath of which was sufficient to freeze both body and spirit. But think of the state of a man whose sins have found him out, who has to say, " Which way I fly is hell ; myself am hell." ^
^ A fine scholar once told me that he had done plenty of things to regret at school; but one only was a real burden to him. " Once," he said, " myself and some others had been doing something wrong, and the thing had awakened suspicion, and was likely to be discovered. I went boldly to the headmaster and asked him to put it in my hands, as I thought I could find it out if anybody could. He said, ' I willingly put it into your hands.' I need not say that it never was found out ; but it is the only thing for which I was really punished. I am ashamed of myself whenever I think of it — and I think of it incessantly, and would give anything if I could tell the whole business to the world and be flogged for it." His sin was not found out, but it found him out, and stuck to him through life.^
What shall blot The memories of bitter years, Of joys which have been, but are not, And floods of unforgotten tears?
The painful records graven clear On carven rock or deathless page;
The long unceasing reign of fear. The weary tale of lust and rage;
»J. C. Umbert. • A. W. Pott^
NUMBERS XXXII. 23 441
The ills whose dark sum baffles thought,
Done day by day beneath the sun ? "That which is done," the old sage taught,