“If I am Mr. Neville St. Clair, then it is obvious that no crime has been committed, and that, therefore, I am illegally detained.”

“No crime, but a very great error has been committed,” said Holmes. “You would have done better to have trusted you wife.”

“It was not the wife; it was the children,” groaned the prisoner. “God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father. My God! What an exposure! What can I do?”

Sherlock Holmes sat down beside him on the couch and patted him kindly on the shoulder.

“If you leave it to a court of law to clear the matter up,” said he, “of course you can hardly avoid publicity. On the other hand, if you convince the police authorities that there is no possible case against you, I do not know that there is any reason that the details should find their way into the papers. Inspector Bradstreet would, I am sure, make notes upon anything which you might tell us and submit it to the proper authorities. The case would then never go into court at all.”

“God bless you!” cried the prisoner passionately. “I would have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot to my children.

“You are the first who have ever heard my story. My father was a school-master in Chesterfield, where I received an excel-: lent education. I travelled in my youth, took to the stage, and finally became a reporter on an evening paper in London. One day my editor wished to have a series of articles upon begging in the metropolis, and I volunteered to supply them. There was the point from from which all my adventures started. It was only by trying begging as an amateur that I could get the facts upon which to base my articles. When an actor I had, of course, learned all the secrets of making up, and had been famous in the green-room for my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments. I painted my face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a small slip of flesh-coloured plaster. Then with a red head of hair, and an appropriate dress, I took my station in the business part of the city, ostensibly as a match-seller but really as a beggar. For seven hours I plied my trade, and when I returned home in the evening I found to my surprise that I had received no less than 26s. 4d.

“I wrote my articles and thought little more of the matter until, some time later, I backed a bill for a friend and had a writ served upon me for 25 pounds. I was at my wit’s end where to get the money, but a sudden idea came to me. I begged a fortnight’s grace from the creditor, asked for a holiday from my employers, and spent the time in begging in the City under my disguise. In ten days I had the money and had paid the debt.

“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at 2 pounds a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still. It was a long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers. Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town. This fellow, a lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that my secret was safe in his possession.

“Well, what am I to do then, if I’m not to love?” cried Aaron.

“You want to go on, from passion to passion, from ecstasy to ecstasy, from triumph to triumph, till you can whoosh away into glory, beyond yourself, all bonds loosened and happy ever after. Either that or Nirvana, opposite side of the medal.”

“There’s probably more hate than love in me,” said Aaron.

“That’s the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love–urge, and becomes a horror.”

“All right then. I’m a criminal and a murderer,” said Aaron.

“No, you’re not. But you’ve a love–urge. And perhaps on the recoil just now. But listen to me. It’s no good thinking the love–urge is the one and only. Niente! You can whoosh if you like, and get excited and carried away loving a woman, or humanity, or God. Swoop away in the love direction till you lose yourself. But that’s where you’re had. You can’t lose yourself. You can try. But you might just as well try to swallow yourself. You’ll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous–neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end. A very nasty thing to wake up to is one’s own raw self after an excessive love–whoosh. Look even at President Wilson: he love–whooshed for humanity, and found in the end he’d only got a very sorry self on his hands.

“So leave off. Leave off, my boy. Leave off love–whooshing. You can’t lose yourself, so stop trying. The responsibility is on your own shoulders all the time, and no God which man has ever struck can take it off. You ARE yourself and so BE yourself. Stick to it and abide by it. Passion or no passion, ecstasy or no ecstasy, urge or no urge, there’s no goal outside you, where you can consummate like an eagle flying into the sun, or a moth into a candle. There’s no goal outside you—and there’s no God outside you. No God, whom you can get to and rest in. None. It’s a case of:

‘Trot, trot to market, to buy a penny bun,
And trot, trot back again, as fast as you can run.’

But there’s no God outside you, whom you can rise to or sink to or swoop away to. You can’t even gum yourself to a divine Nirvana moon. Because all the time you’ve got to eat your dinner and digest it. There is no goal outside you. None.

“There is only one thing, your own very self. So you’d better stick to it. You can’t be any bigger than just yourself, so you needn’t drag God in. You’ve got one job, and no more. There inside you lies your own very self, like a germinating egg, your precious Easter egg of your own soul. There it is, developing bit by bit, from one single egg–cell which you were at your conception in your mother’s womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die—if then. You’ve got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it’s the only thing you have got or ever will have, don’t go trying to lose it. You’ve got to develop it, from the egg into the chicken, and from the chicken into the one–and–only phoenix, of which there can only be one at a time in the universe. There can only be one of you at a time in the universe—and one of me. So don’t forget it. Your own single oneness is your destiny. Your destiny comes from within, from your own self–form. And you can’t know it beforehand, neither your destiny nor your self–form. You can only develop it. You can only stick to your own very self, and NEVER betray it. And by so sticking, you develop the one and only phoenix of your own self, and you unfold your own destiny, as a dandelion unfolds itself into a dandelion, and not into a stick of celery.