P.-C. Lee: Complete Series (ALL 24 Detective Stories in One Volume). Edgar Wallace

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      A Man of Note

       Table of Contents

      Once I hinted delicately to P.C. Lee that it was remarkable, considering his popularity not only with his superiors but with the man in the street equally with the man on the bench, that he had never achieved promotion. I did this with some trepidation because I feared that I might have disturbed a hornet’s nest of grievances, and the best fellow in the world is a wearisome bore if he has a grievance. But P.C. Lee was very frank. With no false shame he told me that it was a matter of education with him, and he was content to remain a first class constable.

      “The force gen’rally,’ he said, “is filled with men who find no difficulty in passin’ the stiffest educational examination you can set ‘em. There isn’t a better educated police force in the world, as I’ve heard, than the Metropolitan — unless it’s the City.

      “But I have not the patience to go in for schoolin’. I tried it once. Went to a private evenin’ class, an’ a chap wanted to teach me decimal fractions, but there didn’t seem much sense in it to me, although I dessay I’m wrong. I can write a report, an’ tell the truth, an’ know enough about the law to know when to arrest a man, an’ that’s about as much as I’m anxious to know. The fact that the River Danube empties itself into the Arctic Ocean doesn’t worry me, because the Arctic Ocean ain’t on my beat.

      “I never deny that education is a good thing — in spite of its difficulty. Lots of people think that education has increased the number of criminals, but I say it has reduced ‘em. I once took a young fellow for embezzlement. He was a milkman, an’ his mother cried an’ carried on something dreadful.

      ‘“It’s what a board school education has done for my poor boy,’ she says, ‘fillin’ his head with stuff an’ nonsense.’

      “But my own opinion was that if he’d been better educated he’d have had more sense than try to alter the customer’s account book so as to make it tally with his cash hook. It’s ignorance that makes criminals, having no sense to look ahead, no imagination.

      “There was a feller once,” reflected P.C. Lee, who gave a lecture at the Police Institute, an’ he said a very true thing: he said ‘True happiness you pay for in advance, false happiness you pay for afterwards’; and if criminals knew this there’d be no criminals. It’s because a chap doesn’t bother to think about tomorrow an’ the policeman who’s waitin’ round the corner to pinch him, that he finds the easiest way to make money is to take money. There are exceptions, of course, an’ a case in point, that shows how education sometimes works the wrong end first, was the case of Albert Walker.

      “When I first knew Albert he was a little barefooted boy runnin’ wild in Lambeth. I was in the ‘L’ Division at the time. His parents were a bad lot: his father was in and out of prison most of the time, an’ his mother — well, got a livin’; it wasn’t much in the food line at home, but knowin’ how the poor help the poor, I should say that the neighbours kept him from starvin’. Then the School Board got hold of him, an’ from what I’ve heard he was a rare boy for learnin’, an’ sucked up education like a sponge till he was the best writer in the school an’ the best at arithmetic an’ geography.

      “He was a prime favourite with the schoolmaster, who got him some old cast-off clothes to wear in place of his rags, an’ helped him in many ways. The school was on my beat, an’ I’ve often spoke to the boy, just a word of encouragement now an’ then. I never used to mention his father to him, because I didn’t want the kid to think I had any other reason for takin’ an interest in him. He wasn’t a bit shy, an’ would tell me how he’d taken prizes for reg’lar attendance an’ for geometry.

      “The only time he ever spoke about his people was just after his father had gone down for nine months for stealin’ pewter pots.

      “The boy was then well up in the school; he was a sort of pupil teacher now, an’ had just won a scholarship, an’ I was sayin’ how pleased I was. I specially bought him a little book called ‘A Man of Note’ which was all about a boy who rose to a wonderful position through study.

      “‘Yes,’ he says, after thankin’ me, ‘I’m glad I’ve got on so well at school, too. I don’t want to be like father.’

      “‘Quite right,’ I says.

      “‘Father is a strikin’ example of unintelligent application,’ he says — he was a rare one for usin’ long words an’ could spell ‘Constantinople’ before he was nine—’he is the unskilled labourer, for whom no real need exists. Here’s father doing nine months for stealing pewter. Another man, scarcely any more intelligent, will one day get two years for converting these pewter pots into spurious coin of the realm, yet another man will probably go to prison for passing the counterfeit coin — it is inevitable.’

      “He sighed regretfully.

      ‘With silver at its present price,’ he went on, ‘there is no need at all why the coins СКАЧАТЬ