Chapter 43 Section ten

Green closed his eyes, "Gentlemen? Please tell me, is my words useful to solve some problems?" They came out of the cubicle and walked cautiously through groups of veterans, Lowell helping Green into the carriage.Holmes had to wake up the coachman and horse, and the coachman turned his horse and drove away from the ancient church. At the same time, from behind a darkened window of the Soldiers' Aid, the man dubbed Satan by the Dante Club shot two wary glances, and watched the carriage go away until it disappeared from sight. At the corner, Green sat down in a reclining armchair in the author's anteroom.Nicholas Ray came too.Green told them all he could recall of Dante's sermon and of the soldiers who came to hear it every week.Then Lowell narrated these Dante-style murders in detail, and Green was so dumbfounded that he couldn't say a word.

"My dear Green," said Longfellow softly, "you must not speak of Dante to anyone outside this room until these matters are settled." Greenfield nodded vigorously.He looked so useless and powerless, like a clock face with its hands smashed. "So tomorrow's Dante discussion will still go on?" Longfellow shook his head sadly. Fields rang the bell for a chaperone to escort Green back to his daughter's house.Longfellow got up and helped him put on his coat. "I'll never do that again, my dear friend," Green said. "Young people don't want it, old people don't want it." He walked into the hall with the help of his clerk, and stopped again.He began, without looking back at the people in the room, "You could have told me what happened. Any of you could have told me. I may not be the strongest... but I am Know that I can help you."

They heard Green's footsteps disappearing down the corridor. "If only we'd told him," said Longfellow. "I'm so foolish to imagine someone racing our translations!" "No, Longfellow!" said Fields. "Let's recap what we know now: Greene preached on Thursday afternoon, then went straight back to Rhode Island. He'll be the next interpreter meeting you've arranged. Of the two or three translations for discussion, pick the one he wants to review. Damn Satan can hear in advance of the punishment we're going to sit down to discuss—six days before our Dante Club! In that case, Satan has plenty of time to prepare for the murder of the law of retribution, and carry it out a day or two before we translate the article."

"And what about the warnings engraved on Longfellow's windows?" Ray asked. "My translation." Fields raised his hand violently. "We have hastily attributed it to the murderer. It must be those damn minions of Manning who did such dirty things in an attempt to scare us into giving up the translation." Work." Holmes turned to Ray and asked, "Sergeant, does the confession of Willard Burndy help us?" Ray replied: "Burndy said he was paid by a soldier to instruct him to break into Reverend Talbot's safe. Burndy was a drunk, and all he remembered was the soldier in uniform and nothing else. I don’t even remember. If you hadn’t discovered the source of the murderer’s knowledge of the Divine Comedy, I wouldn’t have believed him anyway.”

"Hang Burndy! Gallow them all!" cried Lowell. "Don't you see, gentlemen? That's obvious. We're so close to Satan that we're about to step on his ass." Karius' heel. Consider this: the time interval between the three murders is indeterminate, for reasons that are now clear to us. Satan is not a Dante researcher at all, but a Dante doctrine He only committed murder after hearing Greene’s sermon on a certain punishment. Greene preached the eleventh as a speech about Virgil and Dante sitting on a wall in order to adapt to The stench of hell, like two grim engineers discussing the construction of hell; no specific punishment is mentioned in this article, no murder. After that, Greene fell ill and did not join our club or preach. These two There have been no murders for a week."

"Exactly, before we translated the Inferno, Green was ill once." Longfellow turned to a page in the notebook. Murder happened." Lowell went on: "And when we suspended the club meetings, when we first decided to investigate after Holmes saw Talbot's body, the murders stopped altogether - because Green stopped preaching! Until When we 'suspended the investigation' and decided to translate the solicitors piece - Green was back in the pulpit and Janison was killed!" "It is clear now why the murderer put money under the heads of the clergymen," said Longfellow with great regret. "It comes from Green's favorite translation commentary. I should have noticed to the point where he likes to read Dante's descriptions of the details of the murder."

"Don't be disheartened, Longfellow," advised Holmes "While my surmises are well-intentioned, my fear," replied Longfellow, "is that we may have made a serious mistake. As we have increased the number of translation seminars, our opponents have already It took more than a month to master the verses of the "Divine Comedy" from Green's mouth." "I say, let Green go back to preaching in that little chapel," Lowell said firmly, "but this time we'll have him preach something that has nothing to do with Dante. We're there watching the audience, waiting for someone to become Be anxious, and then we can catch our satan!"

"This game is too dangerous for Green!" Fields said, "he is not good at playing tricks like this. What's more, the aid center is about to close, and now the soldiers may have been scattered all over the city. We don't have time to go Planning this kind of thing. Satan can launch an attack according to his distorted worldview at any time, and attack anyone at will, as long as he thinks that person has violated him!" "But, Fields, there must be a reason for his creeds," Holmes replied. "Now we know that it takes at least two days for the murderer to prepare for the murder after listening to the sermon, and sometimes it may be longer." Officer Lei said, "Now that you know where Mr. Green told the soldiers about the "Divine Comedy" One article, is it possible for us to predict the next murder target?"

"I'm afraid we can't guess," Lowell said. "First of all, we don't have the experience of inferring how Satan, who is used to a single sermon, would react to the latest mass sermon. But I suspect that what we have just heard about The traitor's article may be the most important in the murderer's mind. But how could we possibly guess who the 'traitor' this lunatic identified as?"