To make matters worse,
infinitely worse, an aunt of the really murdered man, an appalling
female of an obviously low order of intelligence, identified me as
her nephew, and gave the authorities a lurid account of my depraved
youth and of her laudable but unavailing efforts to spank me into a
better way. I believe it was even proposed to search me for
fingerprints."
"But," said the Chaplain, "surely your educational attainments--"
"That was just the crucial point," said the condemned; "that was
where my lack of specialisation told so fatally against me. The
dead Salvationist, whose identity I had so lightly and so
disastrously adopted, had possessed a veneer of cheap modern
education. It should have been easy to demonstrate that my learning
was on altogether another plane to his, but in my nervousness I
bungled miserably over test after test that was put to me. The
little French I had ever known deserted me; I could not render a
simple phrase about the gooseberry of the gardener into that
language, because I had forgotten the French for gooseberry."
The Chaplain again wriggled uneasily in his seat. "And then,"
resumed the condemned, "came the final discomfiture. In our village
we had a modest little debating club, and I remembered having
promised, chiefly, I suppose, to please and impress the doctor's
wife, to give a sketchy kind of lecture on the Balkan Crisis. I had
relied on being able to get up my facts from one or two standard
works, and the back-numbers of certain periodicals.
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