The future
was meaningless to me; I regretted I had not elected to die in harness.
As idle old men must, I lived in the past. I went over and over again my
ancient exploits; I re-read my book. And as I thought and thought, away
from the excitement of the actual hunt, and seeing the facts in a truer
perspective, so it grew daily clearer to me that criminals were more
fools than rogues. Every crime I had traced, however cleverly
perpetrated, was from the point of view of penetrability a weak failure.
Traces and trails were left on all sides--ragged edges, rough-hewn
corners; in short, the job was botched, artistic completeness
unattained. To the vulgar, my feats might seem marvelous--the average
man is mystified to grasp how you detect the letter 'e' in a simple
cryptogram--to myself they were as commonplace as the crimes they
unveiled. To me now, with my lifelong study of the science of evidence,
it seemed possible to commit not merely one, but a thousand crimes that
should be absolutely undiscoverable. And yet criminals would go on
sinning, and giving themselves away, in the same old grooves--no
originality, no dash, no individual insight, no fresh conception! One
would imagine there were an Academy of crime with forty thousand
armchairs. And gradually, as I pondered and brooded over the thought,
there came upon me the desire to commit a crime that should baffle
detection. I could invent hundreds of such crimes, and please myself by
imagining them done; but would they really work out in practice?
Evidently the sole performer of my experiment must be myself; the
subject--whom or what? Accident should determine. I itched to commence
with murder--to tackle the stiffest problems first, and I burned to
startle and baffle the world--especially the world of which I had ceased
to be. Outwardly I was calm, and spoke to the people about me as usual.
Inwardly I was on fire with a consuming scientific passion. I sported
with my pet theories, and fitted them mentally on everyone I met. Every
friend or acquaintance I sat and gossiped with, I was plotting how to
murder without leaving a clue. There is not one of my friends or
acquaintances I have not done away with in thought. There is no public
man--have no fear, my dear Home Secretary--I have not planned to
assassinate secretly, mysteriously, unintelligibly, undiscoverably. Ah,
how I could give the stock criminals points--with their second-hand
motives, their conventional conception