“There you are wrong,” protested Reeves. “People can never tell you a story without putting their own colour upon it—that is the difficulty of getting evidence in real life. There, I grant you, the detective stories are unreal: they always represent witnesses as giving the facts with complete accuracy, and in language of the author’s own choosing. Somebody bursts into the room, and says, ‘The body of a well-dressed man in middle-life has been found four yards away from the north end of the shrubbery. There are marks of violence about the person of the deceased’—just like a reporter’s account of an inquest. But in real life he would say, ‘Good God! A man’s shot himself on the lawn’—leaping at once, you see, from observation to inference.” “Journalism,” explained Carmichael, “makes havoc of all our detective stories. What is journalism? It is the effort to make all the facts of life correspond, whether they will or no, to about two hundred ready-made phrases. Head-lines are especially destructive—you will have noticed for yourselves how the modern head-line aspires to be a series of nouns, with no other parts of speech in attendance. I mean, the phrase, ‘She went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple pie’ becomes ‘Apple-pie fraud cabbage-leaf hunt,’ and ‘What; no soap! So he died’ becomes ‘Soap-shortage fatality sequel.’ Under this treatment, all the nuances of atmosphere and of motive disappear; we figure the truth by trying to make it fit into a formula.” “I agree with you about inference,” said Marryatt, disregarding Carmichael’s last remark—one always did disregard Carmichael’s last remark. “But think how much of one’s knowledge of other people is really inference. What do we really know about one another down here? Fellow-passengers on the stream of life, that’s all we are. Take old Brotherhood, whom you were mentioning just now. We know that he has some sort of business in London, but we’ve no idea what. We know that he comes down here every night in the week from Monday onwards, and then from Saturday to Monday he disappears—how do you know what he does with himself during the week-ends? Or take young Davenant down at the Hatcheries; he turns up there every Saturday evening, and does his two rounds on the Sunday, and then on Monday he’s off again into the _Ewigkeit_. What do we really know about him?” “I should have thought you knew all you wanted to about Brotherhood,” chuckled Reeves. “Hasn’t he taken to disproving the existence of God on Wednesday evenings on the village green?” Marryatt flushed slightly. “After all,” he said, “what does that amount to? You might as well say I know Davenant’s a Roman Catholic. But all I know is that once in a way he goes over on a Sunday to Paston Bridge—the priest there knows something about him, I suppose, but he wouldn’t tell you.”