"Of course my real job would be one of these Expeditions," he mumbled.
I pursued him relentlessly. "Which Expeditions?"
"Well, between you and I, they've started work on several of them. In Africa and India and places. You see I'm awfully keen on Air-geography. If this dashed ankle of mine ever gives me a chance again, that is. Bobby always said that was my line of country. He was the chap for the technical end. Thought in surds, Bobby did. He put me on to all those Journals and things, and--after--well, I sort-of keep it up. _He_ was your man for that."
"By Bobby do you mean your friend Maxwell?"
"Yes. Bobby," he replied, his eyes far out over the sea.
He spoke the name with the most perfect readiness and simplicity; there was neither tremor in his voice nor the faintest sign of pain in his dark and steady eyes. He was not even self-conscious under my (I admit) prolonged and deliberate gaze. By what mystery of self-absolution he had expunged the sinister fact for which Esdaile vouched I could not tell. He repeated Bobby's name.
"Yes, Bobby was your man for all that. Fearfully hot stuff. When Bobby opened his mouth I used to dry up."
Then, still without removing my eyes from him, "I never knew Bobby," I said. "But I know a man who did."
He turned to me swiftly. "Who was that?" he demanded.
"A man called Hanson. An Australian. He says he knew him in Gallipoli."
His brows were knitted. "Hanson? Hanson? What was his other name?"
"He wasn't sure. He thinks he ran across you. He knew you by sight, anyway, for he described you to me."
"Hanson? No, I give it up. Don't remember him at all. You met such crowds of chaps, you see--sometimes it's just like a dream----"
I appreciated that; but there still remained one thing that was no dream. This was Philip's explicit declaration, "Oh, he remembers all right--it was the other I didn't tell him--that anybody else knew." Philip might now be resolved to let the whole affair sink into oblivion, but Philip after all had not shot anybody. On that morning when I had had my talk with Mackwith I had been rather pleased with my acumen in pointing out that whether our Case had legal consequences or not its moral consequences were inescapable. Yet here, if I could believe my own eyes, was a man who was escaping them in their entirety. He continued to order Journals that Bobby had "put him on to," and could speak of his victim apparently out of some transcendental state of mind where sorrow was an anomaly and regret beside the mark. It all appeared to be admirable, but I found it quite incomprehensible.