THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF THE HUMAN BODY.
THE case which has come to be known as the Moat Farm Mystery is in some respects one of the most remarkable of modern times. We have no intention here, of course, of making any comment upon those aspects of the case which have yet to be considered in a Court of Law. Suffice to say that in the spring of 1899 Miss Camille Holland, who was then living at the Moat Farm House, near Clavering, in Essex, disappeared. She went out for a drive, remarking that she would be back in an hour and a half, and she was never seen alive again. Curiously enough, her disappearance seems to have created very little stir, even in the locality where she lived. It was a common subject of village gossip, but up to a certain date no one seems to have thought it his business either to make searching inquiry or to lay information before the police. It happened, however, that cheques continued to be presented in the name of this Miss Holland. Out of this legal proceedings, now pending, arose, and subsequently, owing to action taken by the Chief Constable of the county, a search for Miss Holland's body was ordered, and eventually, after weeks of hard work in draining and dragging moats and ponds, and digging in likely and unlikely places, the body of the poor woman was found, fully dressed, buried in a filled-in ditch over which elder-trees were actually growing.
It is a strange and a terrible spectacle,—the remains of the body in its clothes dug out by farm labourers from the place where it was laid and the earth piled above it four years ago. " This grave is sealed," the Little Minister cries in one of Mr. Barrie's books, " until the Day of Judgment." That grave was sealed until the fulfilment of the day of Ate,— when the consequence which follows every act of man, goodly or hideous, came about at its appointed time. After four years — there lies the horrible lesson. For there is a lesson ; it is one the terror of which men bowing to the sound of the Sixth Commandment cannot but pray that they may never realise,—that the human body is in practice, though not, of course, in abstract theory, indestructible. That is the great, commanding fact. It is the supreme obstacle to undetected murder. If it were not so—if it were possible to annihilate, to hammer in pieces and grind to dust, as a man might hammer and grind a marble statue, the clay which lies under the hand that has struck the blow—then murder would be commoner and many more murderers would go unhanged. But it is not so; it can never happen to the murderer that he will not hear the heart- shaking question, " What hast thou done ? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground." If those straight-flung words rang in a man's ears before the quick blow were struck or the venomous glass emptied, with the resonant horror that they must hold for him the moment all is over, and not God can undo what is done, would the hand ever be lifted or the glass filled ? There is no answer to that, except that we must be certain of the intensity of the terror of the question asked and the problem to be faced. Probably no murderer has ever fully thought out that problem in all its plain nakedness until he has been compelled to know what it meant. He has nourished, it may be for years, a consuming hatred against a fellow-mortal; or he thinks that with the death of a fellow-mortal there will come into his bands something which he deeply desires to have,—a house, money, access to another to whom access is denied him by the living ; or in sudden blind passion he determines to strike, at whatever cost. He does not know the cost. He strikes, and there, before him, is the tough clay. It is his. It is the legacy of his fulfilled desire ; the damnosa hereditaa left him by the dead. It is a dreadful piece of property come into his hands, made his by murder, as the law tells us a wild creature is made a man's property by the mere act of killing,— the supreme appropriation. To do with it, what ? The crowding answers are elemental in their simplicity. Earth, fire, water : by which ? A simple burial P But earth has to be disturbed, and over the earth there are flowers and grasses and weeds springing ; there is a spade to be got, and digging to be done by night, no one seeing ; and even then, with the flowers re- planted and the earth hoed carefully and regularly every- where else, to show no difference and no sign after the hours of labour with shakings and cold sweat, and the weight of the carried body, nothing has been done. It is still there, for
dogs and other spades. And scars show on the earth almost as clearly as on human flesh. Water ? But water is far away. The body must be taken to the water, and there must be weights at head and feet. There is the pond ; but it will be dragged. There is the canal or the river ; but they will be dragged also.
There is the sea ; but the sea is further than the river, and his legacy must accompany him, packed—somehow ; and carried—by some one. And even on the sea-shore, alone with it, be has no boat that he can row out with his own arms far away over the water ; and if he had, there have been broken cables dragged up from a thousand fathoms deep in mid-ocean,—would not the shallower sea give up its dead to the grappling-hook ? But all that is too difficult ; what, then, of fire ? If the sea is not deep enough, the fire is not hot enough. A furnace such as that in which the Three Children walked ; that might solve the shouting problem for him. But there are no such fires. The limekiln's glowing maw, the howl of the draught of the smelting-furnace,—he cannot get near either of these. The bundle of wood, the crumpled newspaper, the scant scuttle of cobbles,—that is the only order which he can give to the red slave who might do so much for him, but will not. Unless, perhaps, he fired the house. But such a fire as that means the sudden and inevitable attention of men, and the attention of men is what he knows, and is told with aching persistency by his motionless inheritance, that he must at all costs avoid. Surely he realises as no other man can—and realises it, too, with an intensified sense of the difference which separates his position from that of the maker of the Psalm—the impotence of mortality to conceal what Providence means to be found and seen. " Whither shall I go then from thy Presence ? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there ; if I go down to bell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there If peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned into day." And after that, the choice, earth, water, or fire, whichever he chooses to harness to his will, with the knowledge that the harnessing is evident and must reveal what he hides ; or the last alternative, flight pure and simple, with the insistent remembrance that the earth is one large prison to the evildoer; that all the resources of electricity, steam, and the wide grip of a general civilisation are in deadly concord against his ultimate escape.
It may be that there is yet another lesson, or yet another possibility. If once it is granted that it is hard for man to take man's life without fear of discovery—and no criminal would refuse to admit that simple claim—does there not follow the corollary that it must have been ordered that the practical im- possibility of taking of human life without consequent and immediate detection is part of the great Plan ? We, with men all around us, meeting men and seeing animals every day, find it difficult—or at least we think it a far-fetched notion—to conceive of men's bodies being made of other constituents than tough, obstinate flesh and blood and bone. But if, looking at that difficulty with " larger, other eyes," we can conceive men's bodies as holding a relation to the great consuming elements, fire and water, different from that which they do actually hold ; if, that is to say, a man's body could be as easily burned, and so made to vanish, as a blade of corn- " the grass of the field "—do we not come to the conclusion that there must be an ordered purpose in the fact that man's body is practically indestructible by man? The Maker could have made the body of what He pleased ; He made it of con- stituents which a single man can hardly destroy undetected. That is the huge thought which, surely, was mercifully in- tended to be ever present to the man desiring to take the life of man.
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