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Updated: May 14, 2025
Becoming abruptly aware that a fat kid in knickerbockers was at his elbow, he started violently. "Hullo!" he said, visibly shaken. "Who are you?" "This," said the bearded bloke, "is R.V. Smethurst." "What's he doing here?" asked Gussie suspiciously. "You are presenting him with the drawing prize, Mr. Fink-Nottle." This apparently struck Gussie as a reasonable explanation. His face cleared.
"But now the climax had come, and Kershaw, after a final moment of hesitation, handed over to his German friend the two last letters purporting to have been written by Smethurst, and which, if you remember, played such an important part in the mysterious story of this extraordinary crime.
I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment.
Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.
Smethurst, the millionaire, hobnobbed in the park with duchesses! Hang such a man! Fie!" He fumbled for his hat. With nervous, trembling fingers he held it deferentially in his hand whilst he rose from the table. Polly watched him as he strode up to the desk, and paid twopence for his glass of milk and his bun.
Francis Smethurst, who had quite shaken off his somnolence, spoke with a curious nasal twang, and with an almost imperceptible soupçon of foreign accent, He calmly denied Kershaw's version of his past; declared that he had never been called Barker, and had certainly never been mixed up in any murder case thirty years ago.
This, cabby declared, had occurred at a quarter before nine. Still Sir Arthur Inglewood made no comment, and Mr. Francis Smethurst, in the crowded, stuffy court, had calmly dropped to sleep. "The next witness, Constable Thomas Taylor, had noticed a shabbily dressed individual, with shaggy hair and beard, loafing about the station and waiting-rooms in the afternoon of December the 10th.
"Er " said Cuthbert, blushing as every eye in the room seemed to fix itself on him, "I think he means Abe Mitchell and Harry Vardon." "Abe Mitchell and Harry Vardon?" repeated Mrs. Smethurst, blankly. "I never heard of " "Yais! Yais! Most! Very!" shouted Vladimir Brusiloff, enthusiastically. "Arbmishel and Arreevadon. You know them, yes, what, no, perhaps?"
In the hurry I could just see Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my companion's outstretched band, and hear him crying his farewells after us as we slipped out of the station at an ever accelerating pace.
And if it had been Smethurst instead of Smith who committed the error of judgment if the overdoses by which he had meant to kill had happened to cure would his error of judgment have thereby been rendered moral, notwithstanding that his motive was murder?
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