"Well, of course!" he said firmly.
That was what his honour, Judge Carcasson, had said a few hours before,
when the little Clerk of the Court had remarked an obvious thing about
the case of Jean Jacques.
And Jean Jacques said only the obvious thing when he made up his mind to
do the obvious thing--to kill George Masson, the master-carpenter.
This was evidence that he was no genius. Anybody could think of killing a
man who had injured him, as the master-carpenter had done Jean Jacques.
It is the solution of the problem of the Patagonian. It is old as
Rameses.
Yet in his own way Jean Jacques did what he felt he had to do. The thing
he was going to do was hopelessly obvious, but the doing of it was Jean
Jacques' own; and it was not obvious; and that perhaps was genius after
all. There are certain inevitable things to do, and for all men to do;
and they have been doing them from the beginning of time; but the way it
is done--is not that genius? There is no new story in the world; all the
things that happen have happened for untold centuries; but the man who
tells the story in a new way, that is genius, so the great men say. If,
then, Jean Jacques did the thing he had to do with a turn of his own, he
would justify to some degree the opinion he had formed of himself.
As he walked back to his desecrated home he set himself to think.
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