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Multirnodal Discourse Analysis

Systemic-Functional Perspectives
Open Linguistics Series
Series Editor
Robin Fawcett, Cardiff University
The series is 'open' in two related ways. First, it is not confined to works associated with
any one school of linguistics. For almost two decades the series has played a significant
role in establishing and maintaining the present climate of 'openness' in linguistics, and
we intend to maintain this tradition. However, we particularly welcome works which
explore the nature and use of language through modelling its potential for use in social
contexts, or through a cognitive model of language - or indeed a combination of the two.
The series is also 'open' in the sense that it welcomes works that open out 'core'
linguistics in various ways: to give a central place to the description of natural texts and the
use of corpora; to encompass discourse 'above the sentence'; to relate language to other
semiotic systems; to apply linguistics in fields such as education, language pathology and
law; and to explore the areas that lie between linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines
such as semiotics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural and literary studies.
Continuum also publishes a series that offers a forum for primarily functional
descriptions of languages or parts of languages — Functional Descriptions of Language.
Relations between linguistics and computing are covered in the Communication in Artificial
Intelligence series, two series, Advances in Applied Linguistics and Communication in Public Life,
publish books in applied linguistics and the series Modern Pragmatics in Theory and Practice
publishes both social and cognitive perspectives on the making of meaning in language
use. We also publish a range of introductory textbooks on topics in linguistics, semiotics
and deaf studies.
Recent titles in this series
Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Functional Perspective, Frances Christie
Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition,
M. A. K. Halliday and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen
Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, Helen Spencer-Oatey (ed.)
Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate, Geoffrey Sampson
Empirical Linguistics, Geoffrey Sampson
Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, Frances Christie and
J. R. Martin (eds)
The Intonation Systems of English, Paul Tench
Language Policy in Britain and France: The Processes of Policy, Dennis Ager
Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence,
Michael Fortescue
Learning through Language in Early Childhood, Clare Painter
Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes, Frances Christie (ed.)
Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.)
Relations and Functions within and around Language, Peter H. Fries, Michael Cummings,
David Lockwood and William Spruiell (eds)
Researching Language in Schools and Communities: Functional Linguistic Perspectives,
Len Unsworth (ed.)
Summary Justice: Judges Address Juries, Paul Robertshaw
Syntactic Analysis and Description: A Constructional Approach, David G. Lockwood
Thematic Developments in English Texts, Mohsen Ghadessy (ed.)
Ways of Saying: Ways of Meaning. Selected Papers of Ruqaiya Hasan. Carmen Cloran, David
Butt and Geoffrey Williams (eds)
Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology, Howard Jackson
and Etienne Zé Amvela
Working with Discourse: Meaning beyond the Clause, J. R. Martin and David Rose
Multimodal Discourse Analysis
Systemic-Functional Perspectives

Edited by Kay L. O'Halloran

continuum
LONDON NEW YORK
Continuum
The Tower Building 15 East 26th Street
11 York Road New York
London SE1 7NX NY 10010

© Kay L. O'Halloran 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0-8264-7256-7

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents

Introduction 1
Kay L. O'Hallomn

Part I
Three-dimensional material objects in space
1 Opera Ludentes: the Sydney Opera House at work and play 11
Michael O'Toole

2 Making history in From Colony to Nation: a multimodal analysis

of a museum exhibition in Singapore 28
Alfred Pang Kah Meng

3 A semiotic study of Singapore's Orchard Road and Marriott

Hotel 55
Safeyaton Alias

Part II
Electronic media and film
4 Phase and transition, type and instance: patterns in media texts
as seen through a multimodal concordancer 83
Anthony P. Baldry

5 Visual semiosis in film 109

Kay L. O'Halloran

6 Multisemiotic mediation in hypertext 131

Arthur Kok Kum Chiew

Part III
Print media
7 The construal of Ideational meaning in print advertisements 163
Cheong Tin Yuen
vi CONTENTS

8 Multimodality in a biology textbook 196

Libo Guo

9 Developing an integrative multi-semiotic model 220

Victor Lim Fei

Index 247
This book is dedicated to my mother, Janet O'Halloran
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

Kay L. O'Halloran

Multi-modal Discourse Analysis is a collection of research papers in the field of

multimodality. These papers are concerned with developing the theory and
practice of the analysis of discourse and sites which make use of multiple
semiotic resources; for example, language, visual images, space and archi-
tecture. New social semiotic frameworks are presented for the analysis of a
range of discourse genres in print media, dynamic and static electronic
media and three-dimensional objects in space. The theoretical approach
informing these research efforts is Michael Halliday's (1994) systemic-
functional theory of language which is extended to other semiotic resources.
These frameworks, many of which are inspired by Michael O'Toole's (1994)
approach in The Language of Displayed Art, are also used to investigate mean-
ing arising from the integrated use of semiotic resources.
The research presented here represents the early stages in a shift of focus
in linguistic enquiry where language use is no longer theorized as an isolated
phenomenon (see, for example, Baldry, 2000; Kress, 2003; Kress and van
Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; ledema, 2003; Ventola et al., forthcoming). The
analysis and interpretation of language use is contextualized in conjunction
with other semiotic resources which are simultaneously used for the con-
struction of meaning. For example, in addition to linguistic choices and their
typographical instantiation on the printed page,1 multimodal analysis takes
into account the functions and meaning of the visual images, together with
the meaning arising from the integrated use of the two semiotic resources.
To date, the majority of research endeavours in linguistics have tended to
concentrate solely on language while ignoring, or at least downplaying, the
contributions of other meaning-making resources. This has resulted in
rather an impoverished view of functions and meaning of discourse.
Language studies are thus undergoing a major shift to account fully for
meaning-making practices as evidenced by recent research in multimodality
(for example, Baldry, 2000; Callaghan and McDonald, 2002; ledema, 2001;
Jewitt, 2002; Martin, forthcoming; Kress, 2000, 2003; Kress et al., 2001:
Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; Lemke, 1998, 2002, 2003; O'Halloran,
1999a, 2000, 2003a, 2003b; Royce, 2002; Thibault, 2000; Unsworth, 2001;
Ventola et al., forthcoming; Zammit and Callow, 1998).
Multimodal Discourse Analysis contains an invited paper by Michael
2 INTRODUCTION

O'Toole, a founding scholar in the extension of systemic-functional theory

to semiotic resources other than language. The collection also features an
invited contribution from Anthony Baldry, a forerunner in the use of inform-
ation technology for the development of multimodal theory and practice.
The remaining seven research papers have been completed by Kay
O'Halloran and her postgraduate students in the Semiotics Research Group
(SRG) in the Department of English Language and Literature at the
National University of Singapore. The SRG has been actively involved in
research in systemic-functional approaches to multimodality over the
period 1999-2003.
The papers are organized into sections according to the medium of the
discourse: Part I which is concerned with three-dimensional material objects
in space, Part II which deals with electronic media and film and Part III
which contains investigations into print media. The theoretical advances
presented in this volume are illustrated through the analysis of a range of
multimodal discourses and sites, some of which are Singaporean. These
contributions represent a critical yet sensitive interpretation of everyday
discourses in Singapore. Thus, like all discourse, they are grounded in local
knowledge, but due to the universality of the semiotic model being used,
they are applicable to similar texts in any culture. A brief synopsis of each
paper in this collection is given below.
In Michael O'Toole's opening paper in Part I, 'Opera Ludentes: the
Sydney Opera House at work and play', a systemic-functional analysis of
architecture (O'Toole, 1990, 1994) is used to consider in turn the Experien-
tial, Interpersonal and Textual functions ofJ0rn Utzon's (1957-73) Sydney
Opera House and its parts, both internally and in relation to its physical and
social context. In this paper, the usual definition of 'functionalism' in archi-
tecture is significantly extended. Like language, the building embodies an
Experiential function: its practical purposes, the 'lexical content' of its com-
ponents (theatre, stage, seats, lights, and so forth) and the relations of who
does what to whom, and when and where. It also embodies a 'stance' vis-a-
vis the viewer and user (its facade, height, transparency, resemblance to
other buildings or objects) which also reflects the power relations between
groups of users. That is, it embodies an Interpersonal function like lan-
guage. The Sydney Opera House also embodies a Textual function: its parts
connect with each other and combine to make a coherent 'text', and it
relates meaningfully to its surrounding context of streets, quays, harbour,
nearby buildings and cityscape, and by 'meaningful' here we include delib-
erate dramatic contrast as well as harmonious blending in. In the analysis,
certain features are discovered to be multifunctional, marking 'hot spots' of
meaning in the total building complex. In terms of all three functions, the
Opera House emerges as a playful building: Opera Ludentes. Utzon's build-
ing started its life as a focus of architectural and political controversy and
most discourses about the building are still preoccupied with the politics of
its conception, competition, controversies and completion by different archi-
tects. A semiotic rereading of the building can relate its structure and design
 INTRODUCTION 3

to the 'social semiotic' of both Sydney in the 1960s and to the international
community of its users today.
The museum is located as the next site for semiotic study in Alfred Pang's
'Making history in From Colony to Nation: a multimodal analysis of a museum
exhibition in Singapore'. Pang discusses how systemic-functional theory is
productive in fashioning an interpretative framework that facilitates a multi-
modal analysis of a museum exhibition. The usefulness of this framework
is exemplified in the critical analyses of particular displays in From Colony to
Nation, an exhibition at the Singapore History Museum (SHM) that displays
Singapore's political constitutional history. From this analysis, Pang explains
how the museum as a discursive site powerfully constitutes and maintains
particular social structures through the primary composite medium of an
exhibition. Of interest is the relationship between the museum, nation and
history and how the multimodal representation of history in From Colony to
Nation ideologically positions the visitor to a particular style of imagining a
'nation' (Anderson, 1991).
Safeyaton Alias investigates the semiotic makeup of the city in 'A semiotic
study of Singapore's Orchard Road and Marriott Hotel'. Like a written text,
the city stores information and 'presents particular transformations and
embeddings of a culture's knowledge of itself and of the world' (Preziosi,
1984: 50-51). In this paper, a rank-scale framework for the functions and
systems in the three-dimensional multi-semiotic city is proposed. The focus in
this paper, however, is the analysis of the built forms of Orchard Road and
the Marriott Hotel. Safeyaton discusses how these built forms transmit mes-
sages which are articulated through choices in a range of metafunctionally
based systems. This paper discusses the intertextuality and the discourses that
construct Singapore as a city that survives on consumerism and capitalism.
In Part II on electronic media and film, Anthony Baldry's opening paper,
'Phase and transition, type and instance: patterns in media texts as seen
through a multimodal concordancer', explores the use of computer tech-
nology for capturing 'the slippery eel-like' (to quote Baldry) dynamics of
semiosis. Baldry demonstrates that the online multimodal concordancer, the
Multimodal Corpus Authoring (MCA) system, provides new possibilities for
the analysis and comparison of film and videotexts. This type of concord-
ancing transcends in vitro approaches by preserving the dynamic text, insofar
as this is ever possible, in its original form. The relational properties of the
multimodal concordancer also allow a researcher to embark on a quest for
patterns and types. Taking the crucial semiotic units of phase and transition
as its starting point, Baldry shows that, when examining the semiotic and
structural units that make up a video, a multimodal concordancer far out-
strips multimodal transcription in the quest for typical patterns.
Kay O'Halloran further explores the use of computer technology for
the semiotic analysis of dynamic images in 'Visual semiosis in film'. A sys-
temic-functional model which incorporates the visual imagery and the
soundtrack for the analysis of film is introduced. Inspired by O'Toole's
(1999) representation of systemic choices in paintings in the interactive
4 INTRODUCTION

CD-ROM Engaging with Art., O'Halloran uses video-editing software Adobe

Premiere 6.0 to discuss the analysis of the temporal unfolding of semiotic
choices in the visual images for two short extracts from Roman Polanski's
(1974) film Chinatown. While film narrative involves staged and directed
behaviour to achieve particular effects, the analysis of film is at least a first
step to understanding semiosis in everyday life. The analysis demonstrates
the difficulty of capturing and interpreting the complexity of dynamic
semiotic activity.
Attention turns to hypertext in Arthur Kok's 'Multisemiotic mediation in
hypertext'. In this paper, Kok explores how hypertext (re)presents reality and
engages the user, and how instantiations of different semiotic resources are
arranged and co-deployed for this purpose. This paper formulates a working
definition and a theoretical model of hypertext which contains different
orders of abstraction. As with many papers in this collection, the semiotic
analysis is employed through extending previously developed systemic-
functional frameworks (Halliday, 1994; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996;
O'Toole, 1994). Via an examination of the semiotic choices made in
Singapore's Ministry of Education (MOE) homepage, this analysis seeks to
understand how the objectives of an institution become translated, trans-
mitted and received through the hypertext medium. In the process, an
account of the highly elusive process of intersemiosis, the interaction of
meanings across different semiotic instantiations, is given.
In Part III on print media, in the first paper, 'The construal of ideational
meaning in print advertisements', Cheong Yin Yuen proposes a generic
structure potential for print advertisements which incorporates visual and
verbal components. Cheong also investigates lexicogrammatical strategies
for the expansion of ideational meaning which occur through the inter-
action of the linguistic text and visual images. Through the analysis of five
advertisements, Cheong develops a new vocabulary to discuss the strategies
which account for semantic expansions of ideational meaning in these texts;
namely, the Bi-directional Investment of Meaning, Contextual Propensity,
Interpretative Space, Semantic Effervescence and Visual Metaphor.
Moving to the field of education, Guo Libo investigates the multi-semiotic
nature of introductory biology textbooks in 'Multimodality in a biology
textbook'. These books invariably contain words and visual images: for
example, diagrams, photographs, and mathematical and statistical graphs.
Drawing upon the work of sociological studies of biology texts and following
O'Toole (1994), Lemke (1998) and O'Halloran (1999b), this paper proposes
social semiotic frameworks for the analysis of schematic drawings and math-
ematical or statistical graphs in biology. The frameworks are used to analyse
how the various semiotic resources interact with each other to make meaning
in selected pages from the biology textbook Essential Cell Biology (Alberts et al.,
1998). The article concludes by reiterating Johns's (1998: 194) claim that in
teaching English for Academic Purposes to science and engineering stu-
dents, due attention must be given to the visual as well as the linguistic
meaning in what is termed Visual/Textual interactivity' (ibid.: 186).
 INTRODUCTION 5

Lastly, in order to further theorize the meaning made in texts containing

language and visual images, Victor Lim proposes a meta-model in 'Develop-
ing an integrative multi-semiotic model'. This model allows for an integra-
tive approach to the interpretation of texts where the simultaneous
co-deployment of choices from various systems contextualize each other at
each instance of the meaning-making process. It takes into account the
independent meanings made by each semiotic resource and, further to this,
theorizes a space of interaction and integration where inter-semiotic pro-
cesses for the expansion of meaning (for example, 'homospatiality' and
'semiotic metaphor') take place. The model also accounts for systems of
Typography and Graphics that operate on the Expression plane. Building on
the pioneering work done in this field (for example, Baldry, 2000; Baldry and
Thibault, forthcoming; Lemke, 1998; O'Halloran, 1999a; Thibault, 2000),
as with each paper in this collection, the model is conceived in the tradition
of the systemic-functional theory.
Michael Halliday has always been ready to extend and enrich his lin-
guistic theory when particular types of text demanded it. The contributors
to this volume may be seen to be attempting to extend productively these
categories for multimodal analysis.

Note
Regrettably it has not been possible to reproduce coloured plates in this
publication. However, as will become evident in what follows, the contribu-
tors in this volume recognize that colour is a significant resource for mean-
ing (see also Kress and van Leeuwen, 2002). While the papers have been
somewhat comprised by the black and white reproductions, every possible
effort has been made to ensure that the analysis refers to the original colour
of the texts.

References
Alberts, B., Bray, D., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K. and Walter,
P. (1998) Essential Cell Biology: An Introduction to the Molecular Biology of the Cell.
New York: Garland.
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism (revised edn). London: Verso.
Baldry, A. P. (ed.) (2000) Multimodality and Multimediality in the Distance Learning Age.
Gampobasso, Italy: Palladino Editore.
Baldry, A. P. and Thibault, P. (forthcoming) Multimodal Transcription and Text.
London: Equinox.
Gallaghan, J. and McDonald, E. (2002) Expression, content and meaning in lan-
guage and music: an integrated semiotic analysis. In P. McKevitt, S. O'Nuallain
and C. Mulvihill (eds), Language, Vision and Music. Selected papers from the 8th Inter-
national Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Galway, Ireland,
1999. Advances in Consciousness Research, Volume 35. Amsterdam: Benjamins,
205-220.
6 INTRODUCTION

Halliday, M. A. K. (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edn). London:

Edward Arnold.
ledema, R. (2001) Analysing film and television: a social semiotic account of hos-
pital: an unhealthy business. In T. van. Leeuwen and C. Jewitt (eds), Handbook of
Visual Analysis. London: Sage, 183—204.
ledema, R. (2003) Multimodality, resemioticization: extending the analysis of dis-
course as a multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication 2(1): 29—57.
Jewitt, C. (2002) The move from page to screen: the multimodal reshaping of school
English. Visual Communication 1(2): 171—195.
Johns, A. (1998) The visual and the verbal: a case study in macroeconomics. English
for Specific Purposes 17(2): 183-197.
Kress, G. (2000) Multimodality. In B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds), Multiliteracies:
Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 182—202.
Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.
Kress, G, Jewitt, G., Ogborn, J. and Tsatsarelis, C. (2001) Multimodal Teaching and
Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom. London: Continuum.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.
London: Routledge.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2002) Colour as a semiotic mode: notes for a
grammar of colour. Visual Communication 1(3): 343-368.
Lemke, J. L. (1998) Multiplying meaning: visual and verbal semiotics in scientific
text. InJ. R. Martin and R. Veel (eds), Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspec-
tives on Discourses of Science. London: Routledge, 87—113.
Lemke, J. L. (2002) Travels in hypermodality. Visual Communication 1(3): 299—325.
Lemke, J. L. (2003) Mathematics in the middle: measure, picture, gesture, sign and
word. In M. Anderson, A. Saenz-Ludlow, S. Zellweger and V Cifarelli (eds),
Educational Perspectives on Mathematics as Semiosis: From Thinking to Interpreting to Know-
ing. Ottawa: Legas Publishing, 215-234.
Martin, J. R. (forthcoming) Sense and sensibility: texturing evaluation. InJ. Foley
(ed.), Mew Perspectives on Education and Discourse. London: Continuum.
O'Halloran, K. L. (1999a) Interdependence, interaction and metaphor in multi-
semiotic texts. Social Semiotics 9(3): 317—354.
O'Halloran, K. L. (1999b) Towards a systemic-functional analysis of multi-semiotic
mathematics texts. Semiotica (124-1/2): 1-29.
O'Halloran, K. L. (2000) Classroom discourse in mathematics: a multi-semiotic
analysis. Linguistics and Education 10(3): 359—388.
O'Halloran, K. L. (2003a) Educational implications of mathematics as a multi-
semiotic discourse. In M. Anderson, A. Saenz-Ludlow, S. Zellweger, and V V
Cifarelli (eds), Educational Perspectives on Mathematics as Semiosis: From Thinking to
Interpreting to Knowing. Ottawa: Legas Publishing, 185-214
O'Halloran, K. L. (2003b) Intersemiosis in mathematics and science: grammatical
metaphor and semiotic metaphor. In A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen, M. Taverni-
ers, and L. Ravelli (eds), Grammatical Metaphor: Views from Systemic Functional Lin-
guistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 337—365.
O'Toole, M. (1990) A systemic-functional semiotics of art. Semiotica (82—3/4):
185-209.
O'Toole, M. (1994) The Language of Displayed Art. London: Leicester University Press.
O'Toole, M. (1999) Engaging with Art [CD-ROM]. Perth: Murdoch University.
 INTRODUCTION 7

Preziosi, D. (1984) Relations between environmental and linguistic structure. In

R. P. Fawcett, M. A. K. Halliday, S. M. Lamb and A. Makkai (eds), The Semiotics of
Culture and Language Volume 2. Language and Other Semiotic Systems of Culture. Dover,
NH: Frances Pinter, 47-67.
Royce, T. (2002) Multimodality in the TESOL classroom: exploring visual—verbal
synergy. TESOL Quarterly 36(2): 191-205.
Thibault, P. J. (2000) The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement:
theory and practice. In A. P. Baldry (ed.), Multimodality and Multimediality in the
Distance Learning Age. Gampobasso, Italy: Palladino Editore, 311—385.
Unsworth, L. (2001) Teaching Multiliteracies across the Curriculum: Changing Contexts of
Text and Image in Classroom Practice. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
Ventola, E., Charles, C. and Kaltenbacher, M. (eds) (forthcoming) Perspectives on
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89-105.

Acknowledgements
The research presented here is only made possible through the foundational
work of Michael Halliday and Michael O'Toole. I am also indebted to Jay
Lemke for originally pointing me in this direction many years ago, and for
his continued support since that time. I also thank Joe Foley, Eija Ventola,
Frances Christie and Anthony Baldry for their friendship, advice and active
support over the years.
My special thanks also to Michael O'Toole for his invaluable reading of
the first draft of the manuscript. His comments, corrections and suggestions
have contributed to the final form of this volume, although of course any
errors of interpretation are mine. I am also most grateful to Guo Libo for his
careful proof-reading and corrections to the manuscript.
My sincere thanks to my talented group of postgraduate research stu-
dents for their enthusiasm, dedication and commitment to push the bound-
aries of multimodal analysis. This volume would not be possible without
their contributions. And special thanks to my past and present colleagues in
the Department of English Language and Literature at the National Uni-
versity of Singapore (NUS), especially Linda Thompson, Chris Stroud, Ed
McDonald and Desmond Allison for their continued friendship and
support.
I would also like to thank Anne Pakir and the Faculty Research Commit-
tee (FRC) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS for providing
the research grant (R-103-000-014-107/112) in 2000 to establish the Labora-
tory for Research in Semiotics (LRS) in the Department of English Language
and Literature. The research grant has directly supported the research
presented in this publication.
This page intentionally left blank
Parti
Three-dimensional material objects in space
This page intentionally left blank
1 Opera Ludentes: the Sydney Opera House at work
and play

Michael O'Toole
Murdoch University, Western Australia

Here the trick was to get people up. When you go up the steps you see no
buildings. You see the sky and you get separated from being between houses. I
like procession very much: sky — foyer — windows — sea. It takes you to another
world. That's what you want for an audience: to separate themselves from their
daily life.
(J0rnUtzon, 1998)1

Clearly, for the architect of Sydney Opera House (Plate 1.1) 'Interpersonal'
meanings are very important: the building's height and orientation to its
visitors; the play of vistas as one approaches the entrance; the stress on
architecture as theatre; constructing an audience; a working building at play.
In a systemic-functional semiotic model of architecture2 (O'Toole, 1994;
Table 1.1) these kinds of meaning are analogous to the Interpersonal
semantic functions in language: Mood constructing the roles to be played in
a verbal interaction; Modality constructing a hinge between the real and the
hypothetical; Attitudinal Modifiers and Intensifiers expressing the speaker's
position and influencing the response of the hearer.

If you look out here [at Utzon's home in Helebek, Denmark], you see a field
with flowers and a small bush and small trees and big trees. They all consist of
small elements. And if you take them up and put them on the table it's a
number of elements. Together they make this. In architecture you have a floor,
your walls, you have windows, doors, and you have a lot of materials. And you
select them. You must have in mind that they make a whole or an expression of
some kind.
(J0rnUtzon, 1998)3

Here Utzon's focus is on 'Textual' meanings: the way distinct architectural

components are combined to make a coherent whole, that is to say, an
important dimension of the meaning ('an expression of some kind') is in the
composition.4
As in language, the Collocational potential of architectural elements - their
Conjunction in rooms and floors and buildings, their Reference to each other
and to their environment - is what makes them into coherent and usable
'texts'.
Table 1.1 Functions and systems in architecture (reproduced from O'Toole 1994: 86)

Units/ Experiential Interpersonal Texture

Functions

Building Practical function: Public/Private; Size Orientation to neighbours Relation to city

Industrial/Commercial/Agricultural/ Verticality Orientation to road Relation to road
Governmental/Educational/Medical/ Chthonicity Orientation to entrant Relation to adjacent buildings
Cultural/Religious/Residential; Domestic/ Fagade Intertextuality Proportions
Utility Gladding reference Rhythms: contrasting shapes,
Colour mimicry angles
Orientation to light Modernity contrast Textures: rough/smooth
Orientation to wind Exoticism Roof/ wall relation
Orientation to earth Reflectivity
Orientation to service (water/sewage/ Opacity
power)
Floor Sub-functions: Access: Height Sites of power Relation to other floors
Working Spaciousness Separation of groups Relation to outer world
Selling Accessibility Relation to connectors; stairs/lift
Administration Openness of vista escalator (external cohesion)
Storing View Relation of landing/corridor/
Waking Hard/ soft texture foyer/room (internal cohesion)
Sleeping Colour Degree of partition
Parking Permanence of partition
Units/ Experiential Interpersonal Texture
Functions

Room Specific functions: Comfort Lighting Scale

Access Study Foyer Modernity Sound Lighting
Entry Toilet Restaurant Opulence Welcome Sound
Living room Laundry Kitchen Style: rustic, pioneer, colonial, suburban Relation to outside
Family room Gamesroom Bar 'Dallas', working class, tenement, Relation to other rooms
Kitchen Retreat Bedroom slum Connectors: doors/windows/
Bathroom Ensuite Foregrounding of function hatches/intercom
Bedroom Servery Focus (e.g. hearth, dais, altar, desk)
Element Light: window, lamp, curtains, blinds Relevance Texture
Air: window, fan, conditioner Functionality: convention/surprise Positioning: to light/heat/other
Heating: central, fire, stove "dining Texture: rough/smooth elements
Sound: carpet, rugs, coffee Newness Finish
partitions acoustic, occasional Decorativeness
treatment 'Stance'
function desk Stylistic coherence
Seating <{ table ' computer Projection (e.g. TV)
I comfort drawing
Plate 1.1 The Sydney Opera House as procession
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 15

It's a curious fact that in all the drama of constructing the building, not much
detailed thought had gone into its specific uses. The competition entrants had
been asked to provide large and small halls, the larger to accommodate orchestral
concerts and opera as its chief forms of entertainment. At this point, seven years
after construction began, the Australian Broadcasting Commission decided that a
multi-purpose venue wouldn't be good enough as the permanent home of the
Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

It was a difficult situation. To argue stubbornly in favour of the original multi-

purpose concept for the major auditorium would mean accepting compromises
on both sides in terms of stage requirements and acoustics: orchestral music
versus opera. There were also practical considerations involved, such as a reduc-
tion in the seating capacity for concerts, and the logistics of sharing the hall.
Should it be devoted to performances of opera and ballet alone?
(Sykes, 1993: 45)

A great deal of the political controversy surrounding the design and con-
struction of the Opera House focused on the 'Experiential' use-functions of
the building and the competing claims of its corporate users. The brief for
any commissioned architect or entrant to an architectural competition
necessarily starts from the uses proposed for the building.
Like a clause in language, a building incorporates Types of Process and
their Participants; its specific functions are Modified in terms of material,
size, colour and texture; and its component elements are organized taxo-
nomically like lexical items in the vocabulary of our language.
We clearly need to take account of the Experiential function of archi-
tecture. Otherwise, our roof will leak, our rooms will be full of draughts, our
cupboards and desk will face the wall, and we will find ourselves cooking or
worshipping or taking baths in the bedroom. But the obsession with Tunc-
tionalism' in architecture by both its modernist proponents and its Post-
modernist critics has taken it for granted either that the Experiential function
is the only function and that the design and evaluation of a building stands
or falls by this criterion alone, or that the form of the building primarily
expresses its practical use, which confuses functions, or modes of meaning,
which should be kept distinct. A systemic-functional approach corrects such
blinkered approaches by proposing that there are three functions creating
meaning in all buildings: an Experiential, an Interpersonal and a Textual
function, and that these are all equally valid and equally necessary for a
building to be meaningful and socially usable.
J0rn Utzon was probably naive in the early phase of designing and con-
structing the Opera House in that his revolutionary designs foregrounded
the public image (Interpersonal) and sculptural coherence (Textual function)
of the building, leaving many features of its use (Experiential) insufficiently
resolved. Given the political partisanship, the conflicting client requirements
and the media hype surrounding his design from the outset, this bias is
understandable, but it meant that his successors had to focus in the first
instance on the Experiential function:
16 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

When Utzon resigned in 1966, the construction of the roof and its tile cladding
was well under way. But plans for Stage III were scarcely defined, and they
involved the elements which would turn the building from a magnificent sculp-
ture to a working centre for the performing arts: the walls that would enclose the
roof area, the performing venues within it, the stage equipment and the furnish-
ing of foyer, backstage and administrative areas throughout.

The newly appointed triumvirate of architects (Peter Hall, Lionel Todd and
David Littlemore) declared their intention to complete the building as closely as
possible to Utzon's intentions. But in the drawings that Utzon left behind, there
were no precise dimensions worked out for what would be more than a thousand
rooms within the structure. [. . .]
The key to finalising the internal designs was to establish what their users
wanted. Incredibly, in the Alice in Wonderland development of the construction,
there had been no formal compilation of user organisations' expectations
in terms of performance characteristics and capacities, dressing room and
rehearsal area backup, box office, administration, air conditioning and catering
requirements.
(Sykes, 1993: 61-62)

As our chart of functions and systems in architecture (Table 1.1) shows, a

large number of Experiential functions are involved in a building complex
like the Sydney Opera House. Practical orientations to light (the sun, reflec-
tions off the harbour), to wind (prevailing winds, strength of the highest
possible wind gusts), to the earth (the building up of Bennelong Point to
form the massive podium, its projection out into the harbour), and the
provision of services such as water, sewage, power, scenery and food deliv-
ery, car-parking, waste disposal, etc. had already been accounted for either
by Utzon and his team of architects or by the consultant engineers, Ove
Arup and Partners. But each functioning part requires separate specifica-
tions: the concert hall with its open plan and relatively fixed fittings as
opposed to the opera theatre with its proscenium arch and constantly chan-
ging scenery, its stage tower, backstage, stage and auditorium; the drama
theatre (originally designed as a smaller experimental theatre) as opposed to
the playhouse (originally designed as a 'music room' for solo recitals and
chamber music) or the Broadwalk Studio (originally conceived purely as a
recording hall); the Bennelong Restaurant, serving high-quality inter-
national cuisine for leisurely eating under its own miniature shell roof, as
opposed to the more informal forecourt restaurant, the Cafe Mozart, the
performers' cafeteria, or the ad hoc catering arrangements in the foyers.
As I discovered in analyzing a church and even a suburban display home
in The Language of Displayed Art (O'Toole, 1994), the rank of Floor on the
chart may not always be valid as such. And yet even in the complex struc-
tures of the Opera House, particular spaces below the rank of Building but
above the rank of Room, as likely to be separated horizontally as vertically,
still need to be accounted for experientially. To the list of sub-functions listed
at floor rank on the chart we could add Rehearsing, Recording, Cooking,
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 17

Eating, Scenery Construction, Maintenance, Security, and so on. And even

the multifunctional (in the old sense) outdoor areas of the forecourt, broad-
walk, arcade and steps involve specific but varying activities (Process-
Participant relations).
The point is that a systemic-functional semiotics takes a rank-scale as one
of its starting-points, differentiating the options available at lower ranks in
relation to those available at higher ranks. In the Experiential function this is
partly a matter of common sense (i.e. the shape of a drinks bar or a box
office at Room rank requires different decisions from either the types of
Element (desk, chairs, equipment) with which they will be furnished or the
shape, illumination, ventilation and accessibility or enclosability of
the larger foyer (Floor) spaces in which they are to be found). It is also a
matter of different design specialists, with whole firms and even industries
being responsible for particular Experiential sub-functions (cooking, drinks-
serving, ticketing, public relations, etc.).
The heuristic value of the rank-scale becomes more obvious when we
relate these Experiential distinctions to Interpersonal and Textual distinc-
tions at the same ranks. To illustrate how architectural meanings are made
through all three functions I want to start with one of the smallest, most
numerous and most visible elements of the whole structure, the 1,056,000
roof tiles.
Experientially, the roof covering had to be weatherproof to all climatic
conditions and had to be self-cleaning, but curved roofs can be sprayed or
sheeted in copper or bronze. As the architect, Harry Seidler relates:

I asked him in his office, 'Why do you want to cover a building like that with tiles?
A curved surface, it could be sprayed.' And he looked surprised and said, 'But
tiles are the best.' And he'd looked all over the world at them, and he'd seen them
in the Middle East and elsewhere, mosques covered in gleaming tiles. And he'd
been to Japan and China, and he was very concerned with the quality that made
them up: what material they used, where they got the clay from and what mixes
they used in the clay, till it eventually satisfied him that it gave a slightly rough
surface. And this was the natural colour, the white, and over that surface was a
very clear glaze, a very shiny glaze.5

The material quality and the rough surface, the texture of the built surface
are primarily Interpersonal considerations. Like the shine and the gleam
they are part of the impact the Opera House shells have on spectators. And
the intertextual references to mosques and Oriental architecture, visual simi-
larities which may jog our cultural memory, are Interpersonal issues. The
impact on the spectator is crucial to Utzon. For him his Opera House is
almost more than a sculpture; it has a human personality:

It tells a story, it's not a calm building, it's awake all the time. You cannot make a
sculpture better than something that's white or off-white. If you look at bronze
sculptures in nature, they're difficult to read. If you had put a copper roof on this
house, you wouldn't have benefitted from the light. You would have seen a green
18 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

marvellous colour. So this was my first and only idea for the roof. And Saarinen
said to me, 'Keep it white. Sydney harbour is dark.' And at that time the buildings
were dark. So it's the right answer.6

The older Finnish architect is as alert as his Danish colleague to the effect on
the spectator of the chiaroscuro of a white building against a dark ground
and the quality of light in a city on the water like Sydney, Helsinki or
Copenhagen.
Of course, the Interpersonal function at the rank of Element is not con-
fined to the roof tiles. The concrete ribs of the shells have a primary
Experiential function of binding and supporting the roof, but as soon as one
steps inside, one becomes aware of the contrast between the raw, matt and
unpatterned grey concrete of the ribs and the warm brown satin grain of
internal balustrades and doors. In terms of its textures, the building (apart
from the tiled surfaces) seems to start as rough, raw, grey and abrasive in its
outer layers and become progressively more smooth, polished, colourful and
comforting as we move to the core of the personal artistic experience in our
seat in any of the auditorial it speaks to us Interpersonally through its shine,
colours, textures, the very warmth or coldness of the materials used. This
play of material qualities has even more impact on the spectator at those
points outside the building where the shells meet the metal struts and sheets
of glass of the windows in an exciting geometry of tiles, raw concrete, metal
and glass (Plate 1.2). As we shall see, this involves an important interplay of
the Interpersonal and Textual functions.
Interpersonal relevance is obviously a key criterion inside a theatrical
building. Audience seats and lighting and sound booths face performers'
spaces; conductor's rostra face orchestras; prompt boxes face actors; bar-
tenders face customers across bars, counters and tables (as Ervin Goflftnan
showed in the 1950s7 - and Fawlty Towers hyperbolized in the 1960s - res-
taurants and hotels are highly dramatistic spaces). The public relations
mechanisms of display boards, information desks, ticket offices, media
interview spaces and Opera House guide routes all have their structure as
mini-theatres. And where 'projection' in the home may be confined to one
or two TV sets, in theatres it covers the gamut of possibilities from staging,
rostra, lighting, sound projection, security video and telephones (fixed and
mobile) and even the projection of performances to overflow audiences on
closed-circuit television. In all these aspects of a theatre or concert hall you
might say that the Interpersonal is Experiential - but we will argue that there
is still real heuristic value in keeping them separate.
Less obviously 'theatrical' choices at Room rank are involved in the Inter-
personal systems of Comfort, Modernity, Opulence and Style. Patrons of
concerts and operas are enveloped in a cocoon of almost perfect acoustics
and seated on luxuriously upholstered seats (Plate 1.3). These seats in
moulded birch ply and contrasting scarlet upholstery carry a message of
Scandinavian 'functionalism' of the 1960s and 1970s: like so much of the
architecture here, they put their working functions on display. The steel
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 19

Plate 1.2 Texture and geometry

cable tensioning of the concrete columns, the moulded curves of internal

beams and columns, the glass curtain walls, even the acoustic baffles and
plexiglass 'doughnuts' which hang in a ring from the roof of the Concert
Hall 'show the works' - though less stridently than Richard Rogers's Pompi-
dou Centre in Paris and its imitators. The stress here comes from a humanist
'craft' tradition of high-quality but 'natural' materials (wool, varnished ply,
grained parquet, shuttered concrete) with a modest unassertive finish.
The Interpersonal meaning of many types of building is carried by the
placing and styling of 'sites of power', that is, a building expresses the
political relations between its various users. A building primarily dedicated
to classical musical performance incorporates the power of the conductor's
rostrum over the orchestra and the power of both over the audience. Hid-
den control booths and 'Private' administration rooms mystify this power
further. The stage and orchestra in the Opera House and other theatrical
spaces carry the same power relations.
We have pinpointed many of the systems realizing the Interpersonal func-
tion at the ranks of Floor, Room and Element, but with the Sydney Opera
House this function begins and ends at the rank of the whole building
complex. Our very opening quotation of Utzon's own words shows the
architect's concern with imposing Size and Verticality and Orientation to the
Plate 1.3 The Concert Hall
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 21

entrant (systems in the top central box of the Chart): the viewer is induced to
look up, beyond the steps, beyond the shells to the sky and to imagine
themselves into another world of the imagination, even before the official
performance starts. Chthonicity is a particularly interesting system in this
case, because the Opera House deliberately plays with conflicting options:
on the one hand, there seem to be no solid walls embedded in the base. The
shells rear up skywards (anti-chthonically, away from the earth), to such a
degree that their corners hardly seem to touch their footings, seeming to
balance on pinpoints. The smooth spherical curves induce a touch of ver-
tigo and it is no wonder that so many of the photographs of the Opera
House, whether by official agencies or casual tourists, accentuate the
upward thrust of the shells. On the other hand, the podium is highly
chthonic: it has turned Bennelong Point into a rock-like headland and, as we
know, incorporates many of the key functions of the working building. The
light, dynamic, mobile and poetic structures above are embedded in the
solid and prosaic podium.
A building's orientation to its neighbours and the road by which it is
approached are important aspects of its Interpersonal function. Utzon and
Saarinen were keen for the white curves of the sails to stand out against the
predominantly dark water of the harbour and the high-rise buildings of
Sydney's rigidly rectangular central business district at that time. (Since
1973 more of the neighbouring buildings have been constructed in lighter
concrete, marble or glass - perhaps in deference to Utzon's building as well
as in harmony with changing architectural fashions.) The multiple curves,
however, offer visual echoes of Sydney Harbour Bridge (Plate 1.4), Circular
Quay and the bays and headlands of the harbour. Of course, good archi-
tectural as well as human relations can be spoiled when bad neighbours
move in. The Opera House's visual relationship with Circular Quay has
been obstructed and, more importantly, the easy natural pedestrian route
from the ferry terminals to the entrance steps has been interrupted by the
rectangular complex of shops and apartments erected in 1997-8,
unpopularly known as 'the East Circular Quay toaster'.
The final heading in the Interpersonal box at the rank of Building on the
chart is 'Intertextuality'. This was a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, the
Russian literary theorist and philosopher, to account for the deliberate refer-
ences, allusions or echoes that a writer makes to other widely known texts.
As with language texts, this would seem to carry primarily an Interpersonal
function in architecture: the writer/architect is saying to the viewer 'Nudge-
nudge . . . look at my clever reference here to Stonehenge, or Palladian
villas, or St Peter's in Rome, or the Pompidou Centre in Paris . . . It is up to
you to enrich the meaning further here by your knowledge of that building,
its uses, its tradition, its local cultural significance, etc'. And to some extent
we as viewers interpret the allusion according to our range of references and
our cultural preoccupations at the time. Virtually everyone seeing the Opera
House sees the visual metaphor of sails; many see sharks' jaws or clam
shells; Barry Humphries saw a drowning nun. Utzon claims that the curves
Plate 1.4 Visual echoes
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 23

of the sails were inspired by the segments of an orange; the relation between
the outer shell and the inner roof of the auditoria - by the snug fit between
shell and kernel in a walnut; the structural relations between the construc-
tion units and the whole building — variously by the leaves on a palm tree or
by Meccano toy construction sets. But in terms of other built texts, we have
Utzon's word for it that he had in mind a relationship between water and
built forms at Kronborg Castle, Helsingor; the soaring vaults of Gothic
cathedrals; and the shining segmentation of tiles on a mosque.
The tiles bring us at last to the Textual function (which does not have to be
the last function examined: the three functions are all equally meaningful
and may be considered in any order). At the lowest rank of Element the
finish of the tiles and the chevron patterning create the surface texture of
the Opera House shells. This is texture as such - Textual meaning - as
opposed to their practical (Experiential) function of keeping out the rain and
their decorative or dramatic (Interpersonal) functions.
At the rank of Room, each auditorium, or foyer, or office, or restaurant
has its own scale and proportions, it is lit or in shadow, and has its own
acoustic properties in contrast to other spaces around it. Its relation to
outside carries Textual meaning, so that our response to the isolated and
insulated worlds of the concert hall, opera theatre, drama theatre or cinema
is quite different from how we feel in the foyers, where our gaze is delib-
erately projected out to the harbour and city views - where we are no longer
fully enclosed in the built text. At this rank we experience a Textual focus as
well as the power relation (Interpersonal) between the rostrum and the
orchestra and the audience. This is facilitated by aisles and stairways within
the auditoria, and all such 'connectors' as corridors, stairs, lifts, escalators,
hatches and interconnecting windows throughout the building are primarily
Textual in function: they work like the cohesive devices of conjunction in
language.
Like cohesive devices in language, these connectors work across several
ranks, since they also work to relate floors and the various auditoria and
other internal spaces to each other. Doors and windows, of course, relate the
internal spaces to exterior parts of the built text: walkways, entrance steps
and terraces, and thence to the Broadwalk and approach road.
The most striking Textual systems of the Opera House at the rank of
Building are listed in the top right-hand box of the Chart. We will consider
them from the bottom up - as if we were moving from near the building to
vantage points further away. Opacity/Reflectivity/Transparency is a system
of options that tends to have meaning when we are near a building. The
shells of the Opera House are opaque, but, being shiny and white or off-
white, reflect the light, whereas the podium is opaque and comparatively
matt, giving a denser, less light-responsive texture. The windows, of demi-
topaz coloured laminated glass, are highly transparent for the viewer from
inside and for those outside when the interior is lit - after dark, when most
of the building's theatrical functions are at play. Unlike most glass facing
water and sky, they do not reflect much of their environment, except from
24 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

an aerial vantage-point; the three distinct surface planes of the northern

foyer windows draw our gaze in rather than reflecting us and the world we
stand in.
These windows also make a major contribution to other kinds of Textual
meaning such as the Roof-Wall relation, Rhythms and Proportions. As Jill
Sykes explains, after Utzon's resignation it took his replacement architects
nearly four years:

to solve the design problems, at first working through trial proposals and then
tackling tricky situations as they arose under construction [. . .]

Linking the curves of the sails to the rectangular lines of the podium required a
concept that combined the aesthetic with the pragmatic. Without a mathematical
relationship between the shape of the shell and that of the podium to use as a
starting point for a geometrical solution to devising the structure of the two
largest glass walls overlooking the Harbour, a new design element had to be
introduced. The result was a combination of three surface planes: vertical at the
top, coming down to a half-circle leaning outwards from the vertical, then pulling
back in a cone shape [Plate 1.5].

This verandah-style approach provided the practical advantage of extending the

area within the building well beyond the feet of the shells, as well as offering non-
reflective views over the Harbour through the inward-slanting glass that ended at
floor level.
(Sykes, 1993: 62-63)

Sykes is here describing the resolution of Experiential ('pragmatic') and

Interpersonal ('aesthetic') problems through the Textual functions ('geom-
etry') of shell-glass wall-podium relations and the contrasting shapes, angles
and proportions created by the windows. Even she has difficulty in articulat-
ing the sheer visual excitement of this brilliant and unique interplay of the
parallel lines of the vertical mullions, gradually diverging in the other two
planes, with the stepped window spacers and the curve of the intersections
of the planes and the curve of the front of the canopy creating an intricate
harmony with the curve of the shells above: only a musical metaphor can do
justice to the Textual meaning of these mathematical relationships.
We have discussed the Opera House's relation to adjacent buildings and
to the road already in terms of their Interpersonal tensions and mimicry, but
a full account must also recognize the Textual relations created by their
shared geometry (partly discernible in Plate 1.5). The strong vertical fluting
of some of the tower blocks, the proportions of the relations between glass
curtain and solid plane walls and the curves of some towers or roof features
all give the Opera House a distinctive role in the urban texture of Sydney.
Its relation to the city as a whole is highly dynamic. Because of its prom-
inent and open, uncluttered site, it is visible from many vantage points, both
near and distant, low and high. From the foot of the podium steps or a
passing ferry it rears up colossally, as Utzon intended, but from the ferry
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 25

Plate 1.5 Intersecting geometries

26 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

terminals or the far side of Circular Quay it has diminished to an imposing

sculpture against the skyline, or another sailboat cutting through the waves,
while from the Harbour Bridge or the roads descending to the Harbour
through North Sydney it has become a tantalizing jewel on a dark
velvet cloth.
We have allowed ourselves a lyrical passage here out of deference to the
many encomiums that have been written and spoken and filmed for this
'Eighth Wonder of the Modern World'. So much has been written, indeed,
that we must ask whether anything remains to be said about the Sydney
Opera House. Can a systemic-functional analysis (with or without the lyri-
cism) add anything to the mass of books, magazine, journal and newspaper
articles, architectural, historical or political speeches, interviews or discus-
sions devoted to it?
Apart from attempting to extend the limits of systemic-functional semi-
otic theory by applying it to a complex three-dimensional work of art (which
is one of the aims of this book), I believe that a functional approach allows
one to see certain features in a new light. In the first place, it counters the
simplistic tendency to interpret 'functionalism' as concerned only or primar-
ily with the utilitarian, Experiential, functions of a building. While recogniz-
ing that the practical functions may have a priority in all kinds of text about
buildings, from architects' briefs to security manuals or tourist brochures, it
asserts - and tries to prove - that the Interpersonal and Textual functions are
just as important in the elucidation of what a building 'means', whether to
the individual viewer, the citizens of Sydney, contemporary society or pos-
terity. It does this not by generalizing, but in detail, teasing out the systems
of choice which are available to the architects, engineers and builders at
different ranks of unit - Building Complex - Building - Floor - Room -
Element in each of the three functions. This then enables us to pinpoint
those features of the building where the meaning is 'hottest', where specific
functional meanings overlap, interplay or conflict to produce more complex,
sometimes contradictory interpretations. The process may well generate
new insights we can share with others in an agreed common language.
The chart of systems and functions becomes a kind of hypertext - a non-
sequential tool for exploring the hypertext of the building itself: the user can
start with any system in any box of the chart, analyse that part of the
building and interpret it in terms either of higher or lower ranks in the same
function or in terms of related systems in other functions. Like any good
map, it will still help us know where we are - theoretically as well as practic-
ally - at any stage of our exploration. Similarly, as I have tried to show, we
may stand on the Opera House podium looking at the tiles on the shells
rearing above and around us. An appreciation of their colour and shine may
lead us to the imposing grandeur of each shell or the whole building com-
plex against the harbour and sky (higher ranks in the Interpersonal func-
tion), or the geometrical textures of the tiles and chevrons may draw our
attention to the complex interplay of materials and geometry in the win-
dows which I discussed under the Textual function.
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 27

A further theoretically principled step may then be possible if the func-

tional meanings in the 'text' of the building itself are projected onto the
manifestations of the 'social semiotic', that aggregation of opinions,
assumptions and prejudices about what should be built and how it should
look that prevails in a given culture (which might be the political right or the
artistic avant-garde of Sydney in the 1960s, or world architectural opinion
in the 1990s, or mass tourist culture in 2000, Sydney's Olympic Year).
On a more prosaic and technical level, the specification of distinct ranks
of unit in the systemic-functional model allows one to discriminate the
kinds of choices the architect has made and the kinds of construal we
ourselves make as viewers, visitors and users of the building. And the specifi-
cation of the systems which make up the 'grammar of architecture' helps us
to understand the nature of the choices the architect has made in relation to
the practical, aesthetic, social, political and financial constraints which are
laid on him — and his justification in calling it quits when those constraints
become unmanageable.

Notes
1 J0rn Utzon in an interview for the film The Edge of the Possible: J0rn Utzpn and the
Sydney Opera House, director: Daniel Dellora, ABC Television, 20.10.98.
2 Michael O'Toole, The Language of Displayed Art (1994), Chap. 3 'A Semiotics of
Architecture', pp. 85-144.
3 J0rn Utzon in an interview for the film The Edge of the Possible.
4 My versions of Halliday's model for the systemic-functional analysis of painting
and sculpture (O'Toole, 1994) use the term 'Compositional function' for this kind
of meaning in those arts which are primarily for display. In the case of archi-
tecture, which, like language, is of practical use as well as display, it seems
appropriate to retain Halliday's notion of the 'Textual function'.
5 Harry Seidler in an interview for the film The Edge of the Possible.
6 J0rn Utzon in an interview for the film The Edge of the Possible.
1 Ervin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1965).

References
Dellora, D. (1998) The Edge of the Possible: J0rn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House. ABC
Television, 20.10.98.
GofTman, E. (1965) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books.
O'Toole, M. (1994) The Language of Displayed Art. London: Leicester University Press.
Sykes, J. (1993) Sydney Opera House from the Outside In. Sydney: Playbill Proprietary
Ltd/Sydney Opera House Trust.
2 Making history in From Colony to Nation: a multimodal
analysis of a museum exhibition in Singapore

Alfred Pang Kah Meng

National University of Singapore

Introduction
This paper explores how systemic-functional (SF) theory may be extended
to a social semiotic analysis of the museum exhibition as a multimodal site.
The museum exhibition is obviously multimodal in that different semiotic
resources, such as photographs, three-dimensional physical objects, space
and language, are co-deployed in complex ways to construct meaning. I
sketch here a preliminary SF framework for the multimodal analysis of a
museum exhibition and exemplify its usefulness in articulating the critical
construction of historical meaning by particular displays in From Colony to
Nation, an exhibition at the Singapore History Museum (SHM) that repre-
sents the national history of Singapore. By critical, I mean understanding
how the communicative complexity of the exhibition connects with the
discursive institution of the museum as 'a dynamic power-play of compet-
ing knowledges, intentions and interests' (Macdonald, 1998: 3). In particu-
lar, I reflect on how the making of Singapore's national history in From
Colony to Nation serves to (re)produce particular dominant imaginings of
Singapore as a 'nation'. The general point here is that making history is
never value-free; it is, rather, imbued with power-knowledge relations1
invested in the site of historical production.

From systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) to

systemic-functional semiotics
The project to extend SF theory into the analysis of multimodal terrains
such as the museum exhibition entails, in the first place, an understanding
of the theory. SF theory, as Halliday (1970, 1973, 1978, 1994) originally
formulates it, has principally centred on language as the object of analysis.
Hence, the emergence of SFL as a method of linguistic analysis informed by
the theoretical conception of language as a social semiotic; that is, language
as meaning potential that evolves with the functions it has to serve in social
living (HaUiday, 1973; HaUiday and Martin, 1993). As HaUiday (1973: 34)
asserts, 'Language is as it is because of what it has to do'. From the
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 29

standpoint of SFL, then, language constitutes the social practice of

meaning-making.
Recently, there has been much interest among some practitioners of SF
theory in the analysis of specific non-linguistic semiotic modes of meaning
(e.g. visual images in Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; displayed art
in O'Toole, 1994; movement in Martinec, 1998), as well as in the co-
articulation of meaning between them and language (e.g. Lemke, 1998;
O'Halloran, 1999; RaveUi, 2000; Thibault, 2000). Such an interest makes
explicit the fact that conceiving language as meaning potential necessarily
entails a broadening of perspective that recognizes its co-deployment (and
hence co-evolution) with other non-linguistic semiotic resources in meaning-
making. As Thibault (1997: 342, emphasis original) argues, '[t]he linguistic
semiotic is strongly coupled with the various other semiotic modalities in social
semiosis'. It follows, then, that language is as it is not only because of what it
has to do, but also what it does with and to other semiotic resources.
Implicit in the choice of SF theory to facilitate an understanding of what
multimodal texts mean is the assumption that the theory has reached a point
of development where the descriptive tools elaborated for analyzing lan-
guage can be useful in articulating the dynamic processes of meaning-
making within and across various semiotic resources (Baldry, 2000). How
valid is this assumption? That is, what are the spaces within SF theory that
render viable (or not) its extrapolation from linguistic to general semiotic
theory able to cope with the analysis of multimodal texts? Unfortunately,
there is no space here to explore in-depth these questions.2 For the purpose
of this paper, however, it suffices to recognize that the viability of extrapo-
lating SF theory into the field of multimodal analysis may be claimed on the
grounds that the principles that underpin its description of language are
conceptualized at a level of abstraction relevant to social meaning-making
in general (Kress et al., 1997) These principles are:

1. The generality of Halliday's three metafunctions of language (Ideational,

Interpersonal and Textual) as abstract semiotic functions (see Kress and
van Leeuwen, 1996; Lemke, 1998; O'Toole, 1994).
2. The exotropic lens of SF theory, which conceives of the non-accidental
relation between language and social context, potentially affords the
foundation for modelling contextual semiotics. The crucial implication
here is that 'there are no contextless signs' (Harris, 2000: 81). That is, the
language system which powers various instances of text comes into mean-
ingful existence only in their situation within social context. More than
just the socio-cultural environment, the exotropic lens of SF theory, in the
light of multimodality, entails a refining focus on co-contextualizing rela-
tions between language and other semiotic modalities.

Notwithstanding the two principles above, it is crucial to recognize what

Lemke (1998: 110) has termed as the principle of incommensurability between sign
systems. That is, every semiotic system embodies its own unique complexity
30 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

and the co-articulation between two or more semiotic systems in multimodal

texts is multiplicative of the relative specificity of each semiotic (Lemke, 1998).
Hence, the descriptive tools elaborated for language in SFL cannot be directly
imported and applied to the analysis of other non-linguistic modalities. It may
be necessary to formulate SF descriptions of specific non-linguistic semiotic
resources (e.g. O'Toole, 1994). However, this defines only partially the prob-
lematic of multimodality. The development of such specific descriptive tools
should hopefully culminate in some means of (un)packing the processes of
intersemiosis, which Ravelli (2000: 508) defines as 'a co-ordination of semiosis
across different sign systems'. In sum, we need to cultivate an integrational
semiolog/1 to better understand how multimodal texts work.

Towards the analysis of From Colony to Nation

In this section, I sketch a preliminary SF framework for the interpretative
analysis of the museum exhibition as a multimodal text. It is important to
recognize that the conceptualization of any framework to understand any
social phenomenon is inherently a reductive abstraction from the dynamic
worlds that we inhabit. As such, it is not my intention here to insist on a strict
conformal fit between the proposed framework and the myriad exhibition
styles that one encounters in social living. Rather, I aim to explore those
dimensions that can be useful in articulating and negotiating one's (dis)-
agreement with others about how an exhibition means. I also develop the
framework as far as it allows me to adequately unpack the ideological nature
of particular displays in the exhibition, From Colony to Nation.
A semiological approach towards museum communication is not new.
Delibasic (cited in Maroevic, 1997: 29), for example, has conceived of the
museum as 'filled with signs or systems of signs, which are at the disposal of
those who know how to interpret them'. It is important to recognize,
though, that museum communication is more than the exhibition. As
Hooper-Greenhill (1999) observes, catalogues, books and souvenirs in
museum shops, for example, also form a strategy through which museums
communicate with the public. Nonetheless, the exhibition warrants primary
attention in museum communication as it is still 'a typical museum medium
for expressing the museum message' (Maroevic 1997: 30).
Broadly speaking, at least two perspectives may be discerned from the
development of various semiological approaches undertaken in museum
studies. The first tends to centre narrowly on the collection of material
objects as the means par excellence of communication in a museum (e.g.
Pearce, 1991, 1994). Noteworthy in such analyses is the conclusion that the
artefactual significance of objects lies in the socio-cultural relations of their
production, circulation and use. However, it is crucial to recognize that the
values of artefactual objects are as much mediated by the institutional
environment of their display in a museum. This leads us to the second
perspective, which emphasizes the (re)appropriation and (re)interpretation
of artefactual objects in relation to the composite design of an exhibition as a
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 31

whole (e.g. Hooper-Greenhill, 1999; Kavanagh, 2000; Vergo, 1989). As

Smith (1989: 19) puts it:

artifacts do not exist in a space of their own, transmitting meaning to the specta-
tor, but on the contrary, are susceptible to a multiform construction of meaning
which is dependent on the design, the context of other objects, the visual and
historical representation, the whole environment.

Such a perspective may be increasingly relevant now, given the prevailing

trend to democratize museums through the creation of audience-oriented
exhibitions, where 'a shift in focus from individual objects to a "whole gal-
lery experience"' (Martin, 1997: 36) is encouraged. Herein lies the pressing
motivation to conceive of the exhibition as a multimodal social semiotic,
where objects are rarely left to 'speak for themselves' (Vergo, 1989: 49), but
mean in collaboration with other semiotic modalities such as space, visual
images and language.
Multimodality in an exhibition implies the multi-tiered complexity of
museum messages. While this has been generally acknowledged in various
studies on the museum exhibition (e.g. Belcher, 1991; Hall, 1987; Hooper-
Greenhill, 1999), what remains insufficiently elucidated is the 'what' of
these tiers that underlie the exhibitionary construction of meaning. In this
regard, Halliday's (1994) three metafunctions for language - Ideational,
Interpersonal and Textual - provide a useful dimension to organize this
multi-tiered meaning potential of exhibitions '[as] pieces of functional
design with the purpose of doing a specific task' (Belcher, 1991: 41). Indeed,
this tripartite organization of meaning seems latent in Bennett's (1995: 67,
emphasis mine) conception of the exhibitionary complex., which is an 'ability to
organize and coordinate an order of things and to produce a. place for the people in
relation to that order1. The museum exhibition performs an Ideational function
in representing a cultural practice that construes social 'realities'. It realizes
an Interpersonal function by powerfully addressing and shaping the inter-
ests of visitors in particular ways. The Textual function orders the intercon-
nected flow of both ideational and Interpersonal meanings to compose an
exhibition as a coherent and cohesive whole.
The metafunctional organization of the meaning potential of a museum
exhibition has been broadly conceived in Ravelli (1997, 2000). According to
her, the exhibition is a site for intersemiosis, which is 'a co-ordination of
semiosis across different sign systems' (Ravelli, 2000: 508). Rather than the
specific analyses of individual semiotic codes per se, Ravelli (2000)
emphasizes the productivity of a macro-level analysis in unpacking the
interaction between them in an integrated way. The framework formulated
here aims to abstract such macro features of meaning that emerge from the
dynamic interplay of various semiotic modalities deployed in an exhibition.
However, it does not (and perhaps should not) preclude the relevance of
micro-level analyses of individual semiotic systems whenever possible.
To recall an earlier discussion, the nature and extent of their interaction
32 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

depends on the relative specificities of each semiotic resource co-deployed.

As such, the interpretative framework I suggest is open to apply eclectically
particular SF descriptions conceptualized for specific semiotic codes
(for example, language in Halliday, 1994; visual images in Kress and van
Leeuwen, 1996; displayed art - including sculptural and architectural texts -
in O'Toole, 1994). The point of integrating such descriptions is directed to
discern that level of deep detailed analyses required for each sign system so
as to explicate its interconnection with other semiotic modalities. It is thus
my view that analytical approaches to unpacking multimodal texts in gen-
eral need to maintain a balance between micro- and macro-level perspec-
tives of the range of semiotic resources coordinated. In practice, of course,
this balance is also subject to the purposes of the research analyst.
Apart from the metafunctions, the logic of a rank-scale in SFL also
provides another dimension to conceptualize the multi-tiered complexity in
an exhibition. In the case of a museum exhibition, it is possible, by analogy,
to postulate a rank scale based on a hierarchical layering of spatial constitu-
ents: Museum, Gallery, Area and Surface/Item. These rank units, which I
term as Sites, are conceived as different environments wherein an exhibition
can be viewed. Each environment presents a set of dimensions that orients
the analytical 'eye' to interpret the (multi)semiotic space of an exhibition
from a particular angle.
Thus, as conceived in Table 2.1, the three metafunctions and the order of
sites may serve as two axes of a matrix of systemic components that charac-
terize the meaning potential of a museum exhibition. There is, however, no
space here to explain in detail each systemic component in the matrix. It is
hoped that the analysis in the section which follows will sufficiently illumin-
ate some of the components in the matrix. At this juncture, it is worth
stressing that the various components in the proposed functional semiotic
model are, in reality, more fluid than their discrete placing in the matrix
suggests; that is, 'certain features [can] either operate in more than one
function or have consequences for other features from other systems, func-
tions or ranks of unit' (O'Toole, 1999: 6).
I also explore how the co-patterning of these options from various semi-
otic modalities may be organized by the co-evaluation of some phenomena
along some foregrounded parameter. In this respect, I consider the possibil-
ity of extending Appraisal Theory (Martin, 2000a) into the domain of multi-
modal discourse analysis. The point here is that evaluation can serve as an
integrative principle organizing intersemiosis. The basis for this may be
located deeply in the question whether one can mean anything outside
evaluation. That is, when are humans not evaluating if the view is that the
'worlds' which selves inhabit are always created in dynamic relation with., for
and to others? According to Hernadi (1995: 116):

emotive awareness initiates the dialectical process through which the self and its
world 'make' each other so that the former may begin to 'mean' and 'do' — both
cognize and act upon the latter.
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 33

He further suggests that 'if our evolution has enabled us to evaluate in

greater depth, our evaluations enable us to evolve at a far more unsettling
speed than members of other species' (Hernadi, 1995: 135). That the act
of evaluating is behaviour potential (Ravelli, 2000) that possibly co-extends
with making-meaning through some material-semiotic technology in the
exosomatic evolution of the human species lends natural credence to
evaluation as an integrative principle of intersemiosis. To put it another
way, it is difficult, if not impossible, to mean something without also evalu-
ating it. The co-evolution of language with other semiotic modalities is
probably marked with co-evaluation between them, which in turn inter-
twines with the larger co-evolution of nature and cultures in the ecology
of being human. From this perspective, evaluation is multi-layered
and takes place at many levels in making-meaning. These various levels
could well afford different scales by which multiple semiotic modes are
combined.
It is critical to recognize that access to and selection of possible configur-
ations of these components towards evaluation in an exhibition are as much
regulated by the communities of values and beliefs invested in the ideological
space of the museum (Hodge and D'Souza, 1999; Karp, 1992). As Hooper-
Greenhill (1992: 214) cautions:

The total experience (in living history or interactive exhibits), the total immersion
(in gallery workshops and events), can have the function, in the apparently dem-
ocratized environment of the museum marketplace, of soothing, of silencing, of
quieting questions, of closing minds.

In other words, the current popular paradigm that pushes for the democra-
tization of the museum does not equal the dissolution of power. Instead, it
indexes the powerful capacity of the museum in strategically negotiating its
institutional authority to position the subjectivities of its audience in particu-
lar ways. This ideological motivation of meanings construed and constru-
able in an exhibition is taken seriously in an SF framework that emphasizes
a dialectical relationship between social context and semiotic system(s).

Touring From Colony to Nation — 'Communist United Front'

From Colony to Nation is a permanent exhibition at the Singapore History
Museum (SHM) and displays the national political history of Singapore.
This exhibition, which opened on 19 July 1997, was motivated by the formu-
lation of National Education (NE) by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP).
The idea of NE was initiated by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong at the
Teachers' Day Rally on 8 September 1996 in response to a survey, which
found students ignorant of Singapore's past, particularly '[t]he country's
struggle against communism, and how it went about getting self-rule and
independence' (The Straits Times., 16 September 1996).4 According to Goh
(cited in Wee, Business Times, 31 May 1998):
Table 2.1 Systemic functional framework for a museum exhibition

Site/ Ideational Interpersonal Textual

Function

Museum Museum type Disciplinary Field Target Audience Public/Private

Architectural Appeal External environment Relation to city/Relation to
Internal environment adjacent buildings
Relation to Practical
Facilities
Gallery Narrative Design Interplay of Genres Ideal Visitor Internal Cohesion
Interplay of Areas Circulation Path Traffic Flow/Flow Sequence of Areas Focal points
Rate
Setting (Mood) Lighting, Colour, Rhythm Lighting, Colour, Scale
Size, Volume, Kinds of Exhibits, Display
of Object Props Density, Degree of
Partition
Information Composition
External Cohesion (e.g. relative
prominence in museum, relation to
connectors — corridors, stairways)
Area Sub-narrative Theme Circulation Path Traffic Flow/ Rhythm Sequence of Surfaces
Interplay of Surfaces (i.e. displays on Setting Flow Rate Relative Prominence of Area
walls, floors and ceilings) Lighting, Colour,
Size, Volume, Kinds
of Object Props
Site/ Ideational Interpersonal Textual
Function

Surface/ Topics (Sub-topics) Interactivity Gaze and other sensory Display Style Classification
Item modes of attention Arrangement
Relationship Map
Intra-relationship of elements in an item Interpretive Path Interplay of modal and Visual Salience Balance:
Inter-relationship of elements across items Directional Path compositional elements Flank/ Spiral
Focus (CVI) (e.g. Colour, Light, Alignment
Shape, Size, Lines)

Image-Word-Object: Extra-
Vocalization
Semiotic
Metaphor
Obj ectification Perspective Information Composition
Metonymy Viewing height Relative Prominence of Surface/
Item
Visual semiotic O'Toole (1994)/Kress and
van Leeuwen (1996)
Linguistic semiotic: Halliday (1994)
36 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

National Education . . . is an exercise to develop instincts that become part of the

psyche of every child. It must engender a shared sense of nationhood, an under-
standing of how our past is relevant to our present and future. It must appeal to
both heart and mind.

Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong reiterated this position at the
formal launch of NE on 19 May 1997, saying that it is 'a concerted effort to
imbue the right values and instincts in the psyche of our young' through
teaching 'the Singapore Story - how Singapore succeeded against all odds
to become a nation'. Thus, From Colony to Nation, which is also referred to as
'The story of Singapore' in the exhibition guide (see Plate 2.1),5 has a strong
pedagogic purpose that is tightly circumscribed by the ideals of NE, namely
to underscore the constraints and vulnerabilities of Singapore. I discuss now
how the intent of NE motivates a selective remembering of Singapore's
recent political past, with particular focus on an Area - the 'Communist
United Front' — that displays the Communist movement in Singapore after
the Japanese Occupation.
It is worthwhile first to contextualize this Area concerning the Communist
movement in terms of the Narrative Design at the rank of Gallery. Typically
referred to as the 'storyline' among exhibition makers, the Narrative Design
is abstracted as that overall thematic content of an exhibition that binds the
particular selection and arrangement of multiple semiotic systems. As Vergo
(1989: 46) puts it:

in the case of most exhibitions at least, objects are brought together not simply for
the sake of their physical manifestation or juxtaposition, but because they are
part of a story one is trying to tell . . . Through being incorporated into an
exhibition, they [objects] become not merely works of art or tokens of a certain
culture or society, but elements of a narrative, forming part of a thread of
discourse which is itself one element in a more complex web of meanings.

The Narrative Design is, then, an 'interpretative strategy' (Dean, 1994: 103),
within which the subject matter of an exhibition is formulated at several
levels of complexity. An aspect of this complexity lies in the Interplay of
Genres, which is worked through the social experience of a museum visit.
An instance of this would be the experience of picking up and glancing
through an exhibition/gallery guide before viewing the actual three-
dimensional display. In From Colony to Nation, where no main introductory
panel is installed, the exhibition guide plays a marked role in providing
visitors with an overview of the content of the display. More significantly,
the exhibition guide, in orientating the visitor to '[t]ake a walk through
history and understand why Singapore must prize her independence above
all else', inflects the historical recount displayed as an exemplum. An
exemplum, according to Martin (2000b: 8), 'relate [s] a sequence of events in
order to make a moral point'. The moral point here is the obligation for
Singaporeans to value positively and not take for granted the country's
independence.
Plate 2.1 Exhibition guide to From Colony to Nation (layout plan)
38 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

This interplay between the guide and three-dimensional display may be

conceived as a generic chain (Fairclough, 2001)6 across media, which co-
evaluates Singapore as a vulnerable body politic. The vulnerability of
Singapore, therefore, forms an even more abstract theme that organizes the
interconnectivity between various semiotic resources in the exhibition. This
state of vulnerability is perceived within the Narrative Design through the
erection of points that risk the status quo established by the PAP govern-
ment. Communism is one such risky point.
Now, I move into the Area 'Communist United Front' (see Plate 2.2) and
discuss how the co-deployment of various semiotic resources (primarily
written language, visual images and space) serves mainly to discredit the
Malayan Communist Party (MCP).
From the outset, the undesirability of the Communists is already indicated
by the thematic classification of this Area under 'Colony in Chaos' (see Table
2.2, p. 40). In the exhibition on the left wall, this classification is indexed by
the use of a red board on which the linguistic text panel is mounted.

Linguistic text panel

Written language is used in the main text panel and in museum labels.
Table 2.3 (see pp. 42-43) contains a linguistic analysis of the main text panel
in terms of its schematic organization and the sub-system of Attitude in
Appraisal Theory (Martin 2000a).
Attitudinal evaluations of the MCP and pro-Communists are mostly
negative Judgements on propriety. For example, Material Processes like
'infiltrating' (clause 7), 'exploit/ed' (clauses 8 and 11) and 'incited' (clause
21) dramatically construct a negative Judgement of (pro)-Communists as
reactionary, unlawful, manipulative and perhaps even irrational. Note-
worthy too is the accumulation of negative Judgement from clauses 3—10,
which function to elaborate the Thesis. It is interesting to observe how the
series of non-finite in clauses 6—10 appears to 'quicken' this accumulation
by allowing a jam-pack of New information, which refers back to 'It' (clause
5) as thematized Actor. This 'It', in turn, anaphorically refers to the MCP.
A cluster of attitudinal evaluations is thus rhetorically woven to intensify the
negative evaluative force on Communism.
Noteworthy in the analysis presented above is also the embedding of two
historical recounts - the May 13th Incident in 1954 and the Hock Lee Bus
Riots in 1955 — as examples of Communist-instigated violence. This
embedding has the effect of re-interpreting the historical recounts to the point
of the Thesis (clause 2), which generalizes via an intensive identifying
relational process the use of violence as the primary strategy by which the
MCP aimed to achieve power. Indeed, the negative propriety of the Com-
munists is predicated on this use of violence. The point of this linguistic text
is not to recover the specifics of the actual perpetrators and victims in these
acts of violence. Rather, within the genre of an exemplum, the social pro-
cess here is to moralize violence as socially undesirable in order to discredit
Plate 2.2 Display area of 'Communist United Front'
40 MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Table 2.2 Classificatory scheme of From Colony to Nation

1945-50s 1960s 1965 present

Colony in Chaos Tides of Nation-Building

Transition

World War II & Mighty Malaysia On Our Own

Southeast Asia Proposal We Had to Accept Reality
Divided Population Historic PAP split Political Unrest
The Maria Hertogh Battle for Merger Who will Protect Us?
Riots Referendum The Struggle to Live
A Time of Hardship Confrontation Foreign Relations
A Political Goal: Union Political Rivalry Defending Ourselves
with Malaya Economic Problems Economic Growth
Communist United Racial Tension Caring for our People (up to
Front Racial Riots 1970s)
1955 General Elections Singapore is Out! Passing the Baton (1984/1990)
Self-Government Our Presidents (1965-present)

Communism and Communalism Elaboration of 'national'

interests in terms of what is
needed for Singapore to survive
(Economic Pragmatism)
Communitarian values

Division —> Unity in Diversity

the Communists. Any act of violence which might have been committed by
the police then is from the start tolerated and legitimized as control.

Moving into space

The spatialization of information is a central feature in the three-
dimensional text of an exhibition. As Bennett (1995: 6) remarks, 'an exhibi-
tionary space . . . is a place for "organized walking" in which an intended
message is communicated in the form of a (more or less) directed itinerary'.
The framework here conceives this 'organized' walking as the system of
Circulation Path under the Interpersonal function. There are two aspects to
Circulation Path: Traffic Flow which concerns the routing through a series
of spaces within an exhibition, and Flow Rate which relates to how a visitor
is paced along the circulation route throughout a gallery and within an area
of an exhibition. The system of Circulation Path is visually represented in
Figure 2.1.
Apart from the application of Circulation Path, I also examine in
this section the operation of semiotic metaphor in the spatial re-
representation of the meanings constructed in the linguistic text panel.
 THREE-DIMENSIONAL MATERIAL OBJECTS IN SPACE 41

Figure 2.1 System of Circulation Path (adapted from Royal Ontario Museum
1999)

FoUowing O'Halloran (1996, 1999, 2003a, 2003b), semiotic metaphor

relates to the semantic shift that takes place inter-semiotically, during
which the function of an element may be receded and new functional
elements may be introduced in the movement from one semiotic resource
to another.
In her investigation on secondary school history, Coffin (1997: 202)
notes the linguistic construal of external and internal time in organizing
the past. The linguistic text panel sets up a chronological template in
which external time unfolds categorically through marked Circumstances
(in bold):

(03) In 1948, it failed in an armed uprising during the emergency

(19) On 13 May 1954, students and police clashed
(20) In May 1955, the pro-communists incited students to join the Hock Lee
Bus workers in a strike.

Internal time is deployed to build up an explanation about the past and this
is linguistically construed in the text panel via logical links of Cause. Now, the
spatial semiotic also affords the capacity to realize external and internal
time, but perhaps in ways less differentiated than language.
The three-dimensional spatialization of external time can be seen to
involve parallel semiotic metaphor. The events dynamically recounted along
a chronological timeline of marked Circumstances in the linguistic text are
physically bounded in a more or less rectangular enclosure with exhibits
displayed along the two longer walls (see Plate 2.2). The left wall consists of
Another random document with
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if we don’t manage to find something out between us, you can write
me down an ass. And yourself, too, Alexander!”
 CHAPTER VII.
The Vase That Wasn’t
“Very well, Sherlock,” said Alec. “And what’s the first move?”
“The library,” Roger replied promptly, and rose to his feet.
Alec followed suit and they turned towards the house.
“What do you expect to find?” asked the latter curiously.
“I’m blessed if I know,” Roger confessed. “In fact, I can’t really
say that I actually expect to find anything. I’ve got hopes, of course,
but in no definite direction.”
“Bit vague, isn’t it?”
“Thoroughly. That’s the interesting part. All we can do is to look
around and try and notice anything at all, however slight, that seems
to be just out of the ordinary. Ten to one it won’t mean anything at
all; and even if it does, it’s another ten to one that we shan’t be able
to see it. But as I said, there’s always hope.”
“But what are we going to look for? Things connected with the
people you mentioned; or just—well, just things?”
“Anything! Anything and everything, and trust to luck. Now step
quietly over this bit of gravel. We don’t want everyone to know that
we’re nosing around in here.”
They stepped carefully over the path and entered the library. It
was empty, but the door into the hall was slightly ajar. Roger crossed
the room and closed it. Then he looked carefully round him.
“Where do we start operations?” Alec asked with interest.
“Well,” Roger said slowly, “I’m just trying to get a general sort of
impression. This is really the first time we’ve been able to look round
in peace, you know.”
“What sort of impression?”
 Roger considered. “It’s rather hard to put into words exactly; but
I’ve got a more or less retentive sort of mind. I mean, I can look at a
thing or a place and carry the picture in my brain for quite a time.
I’ve trained myself to it. It’s jolly useful for storing up ideas for
descriptions of scenery and that sort of thing. Photographic, you
might call it. Well, it struck me that if there had been any important
alteration in this room during the last few hours—if the position of
the safe had been altered, for instance, or anything like that—I
should probably be able to spot it.”
“And you think that’s going to help now?”
“I don’t know in the least. But there’s no harm in trying, is
there?”
He walked to the middle of the room and turned slowly about,
letting the picture sink into his brain. When he had made the
complete circuit, he sat on the edge of the table and shut his eyes.
Alec watched him interestedly. “Any luck?” he asked, after a
couple of minutes’ silence.
Roger opened his eyes. “No,” he admitted, a little ruefully. It is
always disappointing after such carefully staged preparations to find
that one’s pet trick has failed to work. Roger felt not unlike a
conjuror who had not succeeded in producing the rabbit from the
top-hat.
“Ah!” observed Alec noncommittally.
“I can’t see anything different,” said Roger, almost apologetically.
“Ah!” Alec remarked again. “Then I suppose that means that
nothing is different?” he suggested helpfully.
“I suppose so,” Roger admitted.
“Now are you going to tell me that this is really devilish
significant?” Alec grinned. “Because if you do, I warn you that I
shan’t believe you. It’s exactly what I expected. I told you you were
making too much fuss about a lot of trifles.”
“Shut up!” Roger snapped from the edge of the table. “I’m
thinking.”
“Oh, sorry!”
Roger took no notice of his fellow sleuth’s unprofessionally
derisive grin. He was staring abstractedly at the big carved oak
chimney-piece.
“There’s only one thing that strikes me,” he observed slowly after
a little pause, “now I come to think of it. Doesn’t that chimney-piece
look somehow a bit lopsided to you?”
Alec followed the other’s gaze. The chimney-piece looked
ordinary enough. There were the usual pewter plates and mugs set
out upon it, and on one side stood a large blue china vase. For a
moment Alec stared at it in silence. Then:
“I’m blessed if I see anything lopsided about it,” he announced.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Roger replied, still gazing at it curiously.
“All I can say is that in some way it doesn’t look quite right to me.
Side-heavy, if I may coin a phrase.”
“You may,” said Alec kindly. “That is, if you’ll tell me what it
means.”
“Well, unsymmetrical, if you like that better.” He slapped his knee
suddenly. “By Jove! Idiot! I see now. Of course!” He turned a
triumphant smile upon the other. “Fancy not noticing that before?”
“What?” shouted Alec in exasperation.
“Why, that vase. Don’t you see?”
Alec looked at the vase. It seemed a very ordinary sort of affair.
“What’s the matter with it? It looks all right to me.”
“Oh, there’s nothing the matter with it,” said Roger airily. “It is all
right.”
Alec approached the table and clenched a large fist, which he
proceeded to hold two inches in front of Roger’s nose.
“If you don’t tell me within thirty seconds what you’re talking
about, I shall smite you,” he said grimly. “Hard!”
“I’ll tell you,” said Roger quickly. “I’m not allowed to be smitten
before lunch. Doctor’s orders. He’s very strict about it, indeed. Oh,
yes; about that vase. Well, don’t you see? There’s only one of it!”
“Is that all?” asked Alec, turning away disgustedly. “I thought
from the fuss you were making that you’d discovered something
really exciting.”
“So I have,” returned Roger, unabashed. “You see, the exciting
part is that yesterday, I am prepared to swear, there were two of it.”
 “Oh? How do you know that?”
“Because now I come to realise it, I remember an impression of
well-balanced orderliness about that chimney-piece. It was a typical
man’s room chimney-piece. Women are the unsymmetrical sex, you
know. The fact of there being only one vase alters its whole
appearance.”
“Well?” Alec still did not appear to be very much impressed. “And
what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Probably nothing. It’s just a fact that since yesterday afternoon
the second vase has disappeared; that’s all. It may have been
broken somehow by Stanworth himself; one of the servants may
have knocked it over; Lady Stanworth may have taken it to put some
flowers in—anything! But as it’s the only new fact that seems to
emerge, let’s look into it.”
Roger left the table and strolled leisurely over to the fireplace.
“You’re wasting your time,” Alec growled, unconvinced. “What are
you going to do? Ask the servants about it?”
“Not yet, at any rate,” Roger replied from the hearthrug. He
stood on tip-toe to get a view of the surface of the chimney-piece.
“Here you are!” he exclaimed excitedly. “What did I tell you? Look at
this! The room hasn’t been dusted this morning, of course. Here’s a
ring where the vase stood.”
He dragged a chair across and mounted it to obtain a better
view. Alec’s inch or two of extra height enabled him to see well
enough by standing on the shallow fender. There was very little dust
on the chimney-piece, but enough to show a faint though well-
defined ring upon the surface. Roger reached across for the other
vase and fitted its base over the mark. It coincided exactly.
“That proves it,” Roger remarked with some satisfaction. “I knew
I was right, of course; but it’s always pleasant to be able to prove it.”
He bent forward and examined the surface closely. “I wonder what
on earth all these other little marks are, though,” he went on
thoughtfully. “I don’t seem able to account for them. What do you
make of them?”
Dotted about both in the ring and outside it were a number of
faint impressions in the shallow dust; some large and broad, others
quite small. All were irregular in shape, and their edges merged so
imperceptibly into the surrounding dust that it was impossible to say
where one began or the other ended. A few inches to the left of the
ring, however, the dust had been swept clean away across the whole
depth of the surface for a width of nearly a foot.
“I don’t know,” Alec confessed. “They don’t convey anything to
me, I’m afraid. I should say that somebody’s simply put something
down here and taken it away again later. I don’t see that it’s
particularly important in any case.”
“Probably it isn’t. But it’s interesting. I suppose you must be
right. I can’t see any other explanation, I’m bound to say. But it
must have been a very curiously shaped object, to leave those
marks. Or could it have been a number of things? And why should
the dust have been scraped away like that? Something must have
been drawn across the surface; something flat and smooth and fairly
heavy.” He meditated for a moment. “It’s funny.”
Alec stepped back from the fender. “Well, we don’t seem to be
progressing much, do we?” he remarked. “Let’s try somewhere else,
Sherlock.”
He wandered aimlessly over towards the French windows and
stood looking out into the garden.
A sharp exclamation from Roger caused him to wheel round
suddenly. The latter had descended from his chair, and was now
standing on the hearth-rug and looking with interest at something
he held in his hand.
“Here!” he said, holding out his palm, in which a small blue
object was lying. “Come and look at this. I stepped on it just now as
I got down from the chair. It was on the rug. What do you think of
it?”
Alec took the object, which proved to be a small piece of broken
blue china, and turned it over carefully.
“Why, this is a bit of that other vase!” he said sagely.
“Excellent, Alexander Watson. It is.”
Alec scrutinised the fragment more closely. “It must have got
broken,” he announced profoundly.
 “Brilliant! Your deductive powers are in wonderful form this
morning, Alec,” Roger smiled. Then his face became more grave.
“But seriously, this is really rather perplexing. You see what must
have happened, of course. The vase got broken where it stood. In
view of this bit, that’s the only possible explanation for those marks
on the chimney-piece. They must have been caused by the broken
pieces. And that broad patch was made by someone sweeping the
pieces off the shelf—the same person, presumably, as picked up the
larger bits round that ring.”
He paused and looked at Alec inquiringly.
“Well?” said that worthy.
“Well, don’t you see the difficulty? Vases don’t suddenly break
where they stand. They fall and smash on the ground or something
like that. This one calmly fell to pieces in its place, as far as I can
see. Dash it all, it isn’t natural!—And that’s about the third unnatural
thing we’ve had already,” he added in tones of mingled triumph and
resentment.
Alec pressed the tobacco carefully down in his pipe and struck a
match. “Aren’t you going the long way round again?” he asked
slowly. “Surely there’s an obvious explanation. Someone knocked the
vase over on its side and it broke on the shelf. I can’t see anything
wrong with that.”
“I can,” said Roger quickly. “Two things. In the first place, those
vases were far too thick to break like that simply through being
knocked over on a wooden surface. In the second, even if it had
been, you’d get a smooth, elliptical mark in the dust where it fell;
and there isn’t one. No, there’s only one possible reason for it to
break as it did, as far as I can make out.”
“And what’s that, Sherlock?”
“That it had been struck by something—and struck so hard and
cleanly that it simply smashed where it stood and was not knocked
into the hearth. What do you think of that?”
“It seems reasonable enough,” Alec conceded after consideration.
“You’re not very enthusiastic, are you? It’s so jolly eminently
reasonable that it must be right. Now, then, the next question is—
who or what hit it like that?”
 “I say, do you think this is going to lead anywhere?” Alec asked
suddenly. “Aren’t we wasting time over this rotten vase? I don’t see
what it can have to do with what we’re looking for. Not that I have
the least idea what that is, in any case,” he added candidly.
“You don’t seem to have taken to my vase, Alec. It’s a pity,
because I’m getting more and more fond of it every minute.
Anyhow, I’m going to put in one or two minutes’ really hard thinking
about it; so if you’d like to wander out into the garden and have a
chat with William, don’t let me keep you.”
Alec had strolled over to the windows again. For some reason he
seemed somewhat anxious to keep the garden under observation as
far as possible.
“Oh, I won’t interrupt you,” he was beginning carelessly, when at
the same moment the reason appeared in sight, walking slowly on to
the lawn from the direction of the rose garden. “Well, as a matter of
fact, perhaps I will wander out for a bit,” he emended hurriedly.
“Won’t stay away long, in case anything else crops up.” And he made
a hasty exit.
Roger, following with his eyes the bee-line his newly appointed
assistant was taking, smiled slightly and resumed his labours.
Alec did not waste time. There was a question which had been
worrying him horribly during the last couple of hours, and he wanted
an answer to it, and wanted it quickly.
“Barbara,” he said abruptly, as soon as he came abreast of her,
“you know what you told me this morning. Before breakfast. It
hadn’t anything to do with what’s happened here, had it?”
Barbara blushed painfully. Then as suddenly she paled.
“You mean—about Mr. Stanworth’s death?” she asked steadily,
looking him full in the eyes.
Alec nodded.
“No, it hadn’t. That was only a—a horrible coincidence.” She
paused. “Why?” she asked suddenly.
Alec looked supremely uncomfortable. “Oh, I don’t know. You
see, you said something about—well, about a horrible thing that had
happened. And then half an hour later, when we knew that—I mean,
I couldn’t help wondering just for the moment whether——” He
floundered into silence.
“It’s all right, Alec,” said Barbara gently. “It was a perfectly
reasonable mistake to make. As I said, that was only a dreadful
coincidence.”
“And aren’t you going to change your mind about what you said
this morning?” asked Alec humbly.
Barbara looked at him quickly. “Why should I?” she returned
swiftly. “I mean——” She hesitated and corrected herself. “Why
should you think I might?”
“I don’t know. You were very upset this morning, and it occurred
to me that you might have had bad news and were acting on the
spur of the moment; and perhaps when you had thought it over, you
might——” He broke off meaningly.
Barbara seemed strangely ill at ease. She did not reply at once to
Alec’s unspoken question, but twisted her wisp of a handkerchief
between her fingers with nervous gestures that were curiously out of
place in this usually uncommonly self-possessed young person.
“Oh, I don’t know what to say,” she replied at last, in low, hurried
tones. “I can’t tell you anything at present, Alec. I may have acted
too much on the spur of the moment. I don’t know. Come and see
me when we get back from the Mertons’ next month. I shall have to
think things over.”
“And you won’t tell me what the trouble was, dear?”
“No, I can’t. Please don’t ask me that, Alec. You see, that isn’t
really my secret. No, I can’t possibly tell you!”
“All right. But—but you do love me, don’t you?”
Barbara laid her hand on his arm with a swift, caressing
movement. “It wasn’t anything to do with that, old boy,” she said
softly. “Come and see me next month. I think—I think I might have
changed my mind again by then. No, Alec! You mustn’t! Anyhow, not
here of all places. Perhaps I’ll let you once—just a tiny one!—before
we go; but not unless you’re good. Besides, I’ve got to run in and
pack now. We’re catching the two forty-one, and Mother will be
waiting for me.”
 She gave his hand a sudden squeeze and turned towards the
house.
“That was a bit of luck, meeting her out here!” murmured Alec
raptly to himself as he watched her go. Wherein he was not
altogether correct in his statement of fact; for as the lady had come
into the garden for that express purpose, the subsequent meeting
might be said to be due rather to good generalship than good luck.
It was therefore a remarkably jubilant Watson who returned
blithely to the library to find his Sherlock sitting solemnly in the chair
before the big writing table and staring hard at the chimney-piece.
In spite of himself he shivered slightly. “Ugh, you ghoulish brute!”
he exclaimed.
Roger looked at him abstractedly. “What’s up?”
“Well, I can’t say that I should like to sit in that particular chair
just yet awhile.”
“I’m glad you’ve come back,” Roger said, rising slowly to his feet.
“I’ve just had a pretty curious idea, and I’m going to test it. The
chances are several million to one against it coming off, but if it does
——! Well, I don’t know what the devil we’re going to do!”
He had spoken so seriously that Alec gaped at him in surprise.
“Good Lord, what’s up now?” he asked.
“Well, I won’t say in so many words,” Roger replied slowly,
“because it’s really too fantastic. But it’s to do with the breaking of
that second vase. You remember I said that in order for it to have
smashed like that it must have been struck extraordinarily hard by
some mysterious object. It’s just occurred to me what that object
might possibly have been.”
He walked across to where the chair was still standing in front of
the fireplace and stepped up on to it. Then, with a glance towards
the chair he had just left, he began to examine the woodwork at the
back of the chimney-piece. Alec watched him in silence. Suddenly he
bent forward with close attention and prodded a finger at the panel;
and Alec noticed that his face had gone very pale.
He turned and descended, a little unsteadily, from the chair. “My
hat, but I was right!” he exclaimed softly, staring at Alec with raised
eyebrows. “That second vase was smashed by a bullet! You’ll find its
mark just behind that little pillar on the left there.”
 CHAPTER VIII.
Mr. Sheringham Becomes Startling
For a moment there was silence between the two. Then:
“Great Scott!” Alec remarked. “Absolutely certain?”
“Absolutely. It’s a bullet mark all right. The bullet isn’t there, but
it must have just embedded itself in the wood and been dug out
with a pen-knife. You can see the marks of the blade round the hole.
Get up and have a look.”
Alec stepped on to the chair and felt the hole in the wood with a
large forefinger. “Couldn’t be an old mark, could it?” he asked,
examining it curiously. “Some of this panelling’s been pretty well
knocked about.”
“No; I thought of that. An old hole would have the edges more or
less smoothed down; those are quite jagged and splintery. And
where the knife’s cut the wood away the surface is quite different to
the rest. Not so dark. No; that mark’s a recent one, all right.”
Alec got down from the chair. “What do you make of it?” he
asked abruptly.
“I’m not sure,” said Roger slowly. “It means rather a drastic
rearrangement of our ideas, doesn’t it? But I’ll tell you one highly
important fact, and that is that a line from this mark through the
middle of the ring in the dust leads straight to the chair in front of
the writing table. That seems to me jolly significant. I tell you what.
Let’s go out on to the lawn and talk it over. We don’t want to stay in
here too long in any case.”
He carefully replaced the chair on the hearth-rug in its proper
position and walked out into the garden. Alec dutifully followed, and
they made for the cedar tree once more.
 “Go on,” said the latter when they were seated. “This is going to
be interesting.”
Roger frowned abstractedly. He was enjoying himself hugely.
With his capacity for throwing himself heart and soul into whatever
he happened to be doing at the moment, he was already beginning
to assume the profound airs of a great detective. The pose was a
perfectly unconscious one; but none the less typical.
“Well, taking as our starting point the fact that the bullet was
fired from a line which includes the chair in which Mr. Stanworth was
sitting,” he began learnedly, “and assuming, as I think we have every
right to do, that it was fired between, let us say, the hours of
midnight and two o’clock this morning, the first thing that strikes us
is the fact that in all probability it must have been fired by Mr.
Stanworth himself.”
“We then remember,” said Alec gravely, “that the inspector
particularly mentioned that only one shot had been fired from Mr.
Stanworth’s revolver, and realise at once what idiots we were to
have been struck by anything of the kind. In other words, try again!”
“Yes, that is rather a nuisance,” said Roger thoughtfully. “I was
forgetting that.”
“I thought you were,” remarked Alec unkindly.
Roger pondered. “This is very dark and difficult,” he said at
length, dropping the pontifical manner he had assumed. “As far as I
can see it’s the only reasonable theory that the second shot was
fired by old Stanworth. The only other alternative is that it was fired
by somebody else, who happened to be standing in a direct line with
Stanworth and the vase and who was using a revolver of the same,
or nearly the same, calibre as Stanworth’s. That doesn’t seem very
likely on the face of it, does it?”
“But more so than that it was a shot from Stanworth’s revolver
which was never fired at all,” Alec commented dryly.
“Well, why did the inspector say that only one shot had been
fired from that revolver?” Roger asked. “Because there was only one
empty shell. But mark this. He mentioned at the same time that the
revolver wasn’t fully loaded. Now, wouldn’t it have been possible for
Stanworth to have fired that shot and then for some reason or other
(Heaven knows what!) to have extracted the shell?”
“It would, I suppose; yes. But in that case wouldn’t you expect to
find the shell somewhere in the room?”
“Well, it may be there. We haven’t looked for it yet. Anyhow, we
can’t get away from the fact that in all probability Stanworth did fire
that other shot. Now why did he fire it?”
“Search me!” said Alec laconically.
“I think we can rule out the idea that he was just taking a pot-
shot at the vase out of sheer joie de vivre, or that he was trying to
shoot himself and was such a bad shot that he hit something in the
exact opposite direction.”
“Yes, I think we might rule those out,” said Alec cautiously.
“Well, then, Stanworth was firing with an object. What at?
Obviously some other person. So Stanworth was not alone in the
library last night, after all! We’re getting on, aren’t we?”
“A jolly sight too fast,” Alec grumbled. “You don’t even know for
anything like certain that the second shot was fired last night at all,
and——”
“Oh, yes, I do, friend Alec. The vase was broken last night.”
“Well, in any case, you don’t know that Stanworth fired it. And
here you are already inventing somebody else for him to shoot at?
It’s too rapid for me.”
“Alec, you are Scotch, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. But what’s that got to do with it?”
“Oh, nothing; except that your bump of native caution seems to
be remarkably well developed. Try and get over it. I’ll take the
plunges; you follow. Where had we got to? Oh, yes; Stanworth was
not alone in the library last night. Now, then, what does that give
us?”
“Heaven only knows what it won’t give you,” murmured Alec
despairingly.
“I know what it’s going to give you,” retorted Roger complacently,
“and that’s a shock. It’s my firm impression that old Stanworth never
committed suicide at all last night.”
“What?” Alec gasped. “What on earth do you mean?”
 “That he was murdered!”
Alec lowered his pipe and stared with incredulous eyes at his
companion.
“My dear old chap,” he said after a little pause, “have you gone
suddenly quite daft?”
“On the contrary,” replied Roger calmly, “I was never so
remarkably sane in my life.”
“But—but how could he possibly have been murdered? The
windows all fastened and the door locked on the inside, with the key
in the lock as well! And, good Lord, his own statement sitting on the
table in front of him! Roger, my dear old chap, you’re mad.”
“To say nothing of the fact that his grip on the revolver was—
what did the doctor call it? Oh, yes; properly adjusted, and must
have been applied during life. Yes, there are certainly difficulties,
Alec, I grant you.”
Alec shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “This affair’s gone to
your head,” he said shortly. “Talk about making mountains out of
molehills! Good Lord! You’re making a whole range of them out of a
single worm-cast.”
“Very prettily put, Alec,” Roger commented approvingly. “Perhaps
I am. But my impression is that old Stanworth was murdered. I
might be wrong, of course,” he added candidly. “But I very seldom
am.”
“But dash it all, the thing’s out of the question! You’re going the
wrong way round once more. Even if there was a second man in the
library last night—which I very much doubt!—you can’t get away
from the fact that he must have gone before Stanworth locked
himself in like that. That being the case, we get back to suicide
again. You can’t have it both ways, you know. I’m not saying that
this mythical person may not have put pressure of some sort on
Stanworth (that is, if he ever existed at all) and forced him to
commit suicide. But as for murder——! Why, the idea’s too dashed
silly for words!” Alec was getting quite heated at this insult to his
logic.
Roger was unperturbed. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I had an
idea it would be a bit of a shock to you. But to tell you the truth I
was a bit suspicious about this suicide business almost from the very
first. I couldn’t get over the place of the wound, you know. And then
all the rest of it, windows and door and confession and what not—
well, instead of reassuring me, they made me more suspicious still. I
couldn’t help feeling more and more that it was a case of Qui
s’excuse, s’accuse. Or to put it in another way, that the whole scene
looked like a stage very carefully arranged for the second act after
all the débris of the first act had been cleared away. Foolish of me,
no doubt, but that’s what I felt.”
Alec snorted. “Foolish! That’s putting it mildly.”
“Don’t be so harsh with me, Alec,” Roger pleaded. “I think I’m
being rather brilliant.”
“You always were a chap to let things run away with you,” Alec
grunted. “Just because a couple of people act a little queerly and a
couple more don’t look as mournful as you think they ought, you
dash off and rake up a little murder all to yourself. Going to tell the
inspector about this wonderful idea of yours?”
“No, I’m not,” said Roger with decision. “This is my little murder,
as you’re good enough to call it, and I’m not going to be done out of
it. When I’ve got as far as I can, then I’ll think about telling the
police or not.”
“Well, thank goodness you’re not going to make a fool of yourself
to that extent,” said Alec with relief.
“You wait, Alexander,” Roger admonished. “You may make a
mock of me now, if you like——”
“Thanks!” Alec put in gratefully.
“—but if my luck holds, I’m going to make you sit up and take
notice.”
“Then perhaps you’ll begin by explaining how this excellent
murderer of yours managed to get away from the room and leave
everything locked on the inside behind him,” said Alec sarcastically.
“He didn’t happen to be a magician in a small way, did he? Then you
could let him out through the key-hole, you know.”
Roger shook his head sadly. “My dear but simple-minded
Alexander, I can give you a perfectly reasonable explanation of how
that murder might have been committed last night, and yet leave all
these doors and windows of yours securely fastened on the inside
this morning.”
“Oh, you can, can you?” said Alec derisively. “Well, let’s have it.”
“Certainly. The murderer was still inside when we broke in,
concealed somewhere where nobody thought of looking.”
Alec started. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Of course we never
searched the place. So you think he was really there the whole
time?”
“On the contrary,” Roger smiled gently, “I know he wasn’t, for the
simple reason that there was no place for him to hide in. But you
asked for an explanation, and I gave you one.”
Alec snorted again, but with rather less confidence this time.
Roger’s glib smoothing away of the impossible had been a little
unexpected. He tried a new tack.
“Well, what about motive?” he asked. “You can’t have a murder
without motive, you know. What on earth could have been the
motive for murdering poor old Stanworth?”
“Robbery!” returned Roger promptly. “That’s one of the things
that put me on the idea of murder. That safe’s been opened, or I’m a
Dutchman. You remember what I said about the keys. I shouldn’t be
surprised if Stanworth kept a large sum of money and other
negotiable valuables in there. That’s what the murderer was after.
And so you’ll see, when the safe is opened this afternoon.”
Alec grunted. It was clear that, if not convinced, he was at any
rate impressed. Roger was so specious and so obviously sure himself
of being on the right track, that even a greater sceptic than Alec
might have been forgiven for beginning to doubt the meaning of
apparently plain facts.
“Hullo!” said Roger suddenly. “Isn’t that the lunch bell? We’d
better nip in and wash. Not a word of this to anyone, of course.”
They rose and began to saunter towards the house. Suddenly
Alec stopped and smote his companion on the shoulder.
“Idiots!” he exclaimed. “Both of us! We’d forgotten all about the
confession. At any rate, you can’t get away from that.”
“Ah, yes,” said Roger thoughtfully. “There’s that confession, isn’t
there? But no; I hadn’t forgotten that by any means, Alexander.”
 CHAPTER IX.
Mr. Sheringham Sees Visions
They entered the house by the front door, which always stood
open whenever a party was in progress. The unspoken thought was
in the minds of both that they preferred not to pass through the
library. Alec hurried upstairs at once. Roger, noticing that the butler
was in the act of sorting the second post and arranging it upon the
hall table, lingered to see if there was a letter for him.
The butler, observing his action, shook his head. “Nothing for
you, sir. Very small post, indeed.” He glanced through the letters he
still held in his hand. “Major Jefferson, Miss Shannon, Mrs. Plant. No,
sir. Nothing else.”
“Thank you, Graves,” said Roger, and followed in Alec’s wake.
Lunch was a silent meal, and the atmosphere was not a little
constrained. Nobody liked to mention the subject which was
uppermost in the minds of all; and to speak of anything else seemed
out of place. What little conversation there was concerned only the
questions of packing and trains. Mrs. Plant, who appeared a little
late for the meal but seemed altogether to have regained her mental
poise after her strange behaviour in the morning, was to leave a
little after five. This would give her time, she explained, to wait for
the safe to be opened so that she could recover her jewels. Roger,
pondering furiously over the matter-of-fact air with which she made
this statement and trying to reconcile it with the conclusions at
which he had already arrived regarding her, was forced to admit
himself completely at sea again, in this respect at any rate.
And this was not the only thing that perplexed him. Major
Jefferson, who had appeared during the earlier part of the morning
subdued to the point of gloominess, now wore an air of quiet
satisfaction which Roger found extremely difficult to explain.
Assuming that Jefferson had been extremely anxious that the police
should not be the first persons to open the safe—and that was the
only conclusion which Roger could draw from what had already
transpired—what could have occurred in the meantime to have
raised his spirits to this extent? Visions of duplicate keys and
opportunities in the empty library which he himself ought to have
been on hand to prevent, flashed, in rapid succession, across Roger’s
mind. Yet the only possible time in which he had not been either
inside the library or overlooking it were the very few minutes while
he was washing his hands upstairs before lunch; and it seemed
hardly probable that Jefferson would have had the nerve to utilise
them in order to carry out what was in effect a minor burglary, and
that with the possibility of being interrupted at any minute. It is true
that he had come in very late for lunch (several minutes after Mrs.
Plant, in fact); but Roger could not think this theory in the least
degree probable.
Yet the remarkable fact remained that the two persons who
appeared to have been most concerned about the safe and its
puzzling contents were now not only not in the least concerned at
the prospect of its immediate official opening, but actually quietly
jubilant. Or so, at any rate, it seemed to the baffled Roger. Taking it
all round, Roger was not sorry that lunch was such a quiet meal. He
found that he had quite a lot of thinking to do.
In this respect he was no less busy when lunch was over. Alec
disappeared directly after the meal, and as Barbara disappeared at
the same time, Roger was glad to find one problem at least that did
not seem to be beyond the scope of his deductive powers. He solved
it with some satisfaction and, by looking at his watch, was able to
arrive at the conclusion that he would have at least half an hour to
himself before his fellow-sleuth would be ready for the trail again.
Somewhat thankfully he betook himself to the friendly cedar once
more, and lit his pipe preparatory to embarking upon the most
concentrated spell of hard thinking he had ever faced in his life.
For in spite of the confidence he had shown to Alec, Roger was in
reality groping entirely in the dark. The suggestion of murder, which
he had advanced with such assurance, had appeared to him at the
time not a little far-fetched; and the fact that he had put it forward
at all was due as much as anything to the overwhelming desire to
startle the stolid Alec out of some of his complacency. Several times
Roger had found himself on the verge of becoming really
exasperated with Alec that morning. He was not usually so slow in
the uptake, almost dull, as he had been in this affair; yet just now,
when Roger was secretly not a little pleased with himself, all he had
done was to throw cold water upon everything. It was a useful check
to his own exuberance, no doubt; but Roger could wish that his
audience, limited by necessity to so small a number, had been a
somewhat more appreciative one.
His thoughts returned to the question of murder. Was it so far-
fetched, after all? He had been faintly suspicious even before his
discovery of the broken vase and that mysterious second shot. Now
he was very much more so. Only suspicious, it is true; there was no
room as yet for conviction. But suspicion was very strong.
He tried to picture the scene that might have taken place in the
library. Old Stanworth, sitting at his table with, possibly, the French
windows open, suddenly surprised by the entrance of some
unexpected visitor. The visitor either demands money or attacks at
once. Stanworth whips a revolver out of the drawer at his side and
fires, missing the intruder but hitting the vase. And then—what?
Presumably the two would close then and fight it out in silence.
But there had been no signs of a struggle when they broke in,
nothing but that still figure lying so calmly in his chair. Still, did that
matter very much? If the unknown could collect those fragments of
vase so carefully in order to conceal any trace of his presence, he
could presumably clear away any evidence of a struggle. But before
that there was that blank wall to be surmounted—how did the
struggle end?
Roger closed his eyes and gave his imagination full rein. He saw
Stanworth, the revolver still in his hand, swaying backwards and
forwards in the grip of his adversary. He saw the latter (a big
powerful man, as he pictured him) clasp Stanworth’s wrist to prevent
him pointing the revolver at himself. There had been a scratch on
the dead man’s wrist, now he came to think of it; could this be how
he had acquired it? He saw the intruder’s other hand dart to his
pocket and pull out his own revolver. And then——!
Roger slapped his knee in his excitement. Then, of course, the
unknown had simply clapped his revolver to Stanworth’s forehead
and pulled the trigger!
He leant back in his chair and smoked furiously. Yes, if there had
been a murder, that must have been how it was committed. And that
accounted for three, at any rate, of the puzzling circumstances—the
place of the wound, the fact that only one empty shell had been
found in Stanworth’s revolver although two shots had been fired that
night, and the fact of the dead man’s grip upon the revolver being
properly adjusted. It was only conjecture, of course, but it seemed
remarkably convincing conjecture.
Yet was it not more than counterbalanced by the facts that still
remained? That the windows and door could be fastened, as they
certainly had been, appeared to argue irresistibly that the midnight
visitor had left the library while Mr. Stanworth was still alive. The
confession, signed with his own hand, pointed equally positively to
suicide. Could there be any way of explaining these two things so as
to bring them into line with the rest? If not, this brilliant theorising
must fall to the ground.
Shelving the problem of the visitor’s exit for the time being,
Roger began to puzzle over that laconically worded document.
During the next quarter of an hour Roger himself might have
presented a problem to an acute observer, had there been one
about, which, though not very difficult of solution, was nevertheless
not entirely without interest. To smoke furiously, with one’s pipe in
full blast, betokens no small a degree of mental excitement; to sit
like a stone image and allow that same pipe to go out in one’s
mouth is evidence of still greater prepossession; but what are we to
say of a man who, after passing through these successive stages,
smokes away equally furiously at a perfectly cold pipe under the
obvious impression that it is in as full blast as before? And that is
what Roger was doing for fully three minutes before he finally
jumped suddenly to his feet and hurried off once again to that happy
hunting ground of his, the library.
There Alec found him twenty minutes later, when the car had
departed irrevocably for the station. A decidedly more cheerful Alec
than that of the morning, one might note in passing; and not looking
in the least like a young man who has just parted with his lady for a
whole month. It is a reasonable assumption that Alec had not been
wasting the last half hour.
“Still at it?” he grinned from the doorway. “I had a sort of idea I
should find you here.”
Roger was a-quiver with excitement. He scrambled up from his
knees beside the waste-paper basket, into which he had been
peering, and flourished a piece of paper in the other’s face.
“I’m on the track!” he exclaimed. “I’m on the track, Alexander, in
spite of your miserable sneers. Nobody around, is there?”
Alec shook his head. “Well? What have you discovered now?” he
asked tolerantly.
Roger gripped his arm and drew him towards the writing table.
With an eager finger he stubbed at the blotter.
“See that?” he demanded.
Alec bent and scrutinised the blotter attentively. Just in front of
Roger’s finger were a number of short lines not more than an inch or
so long. The ones at the left-hand end were little more than
scratches on the surface, not inked at all; those in the middle bore
faint traces of ink; while towards the right end the ink was bold and
the lines thick and decided. Beyond these were a few circular blots
of ink. Apart from these markings, the sheet of white blotting paper,
clearly fresh within the last day or two, had scarcely been used.
“Well?” said Roger triumphantly. “Make anything of it?”
“Nothing in particular,” Alec confessed, straightening up again. “I
should say that somebody had been cleaning his pen on it.”
“In that case,” Roger returned with complacency, “it would
become my painful duty to inform you that you were completely
wrong.”
“Why? I don’t see it.”
 “Then look again. If he had been cleaning his pen, Alexander
Watson, the change from ink to the lack of it would surely be from
left to right, wouldn’t it? Not from right to left?”
“Would it? He might have moved from right to left.”
“It isn’t natural. Besides, look at these little strokes. Nearly all of
them have a slight curve in the tail towards the right. That means
they must have been made from left to right. Guess again.”
“Oh, well, let’s try the reverse,” said Alec, nettled into irony. “He
wasn’t cleaning his pen at all; he was dirtying it.”
“Meaning that he had dipped it in the ink and was just trying it
out? Nearer. But take another look, especially at this left-hand end.
Don’t you see where the nib has split in the centre to make these
two parallel furrows? Well, just observe not only how far apart those
furrows are, but also the fact that, though pretty deep, there isn’t a
sign of a scratch. Now, then, what does all that tell you? There’s only
one sort of pen that could have made those marks, and the answer
to that tells you what the marks are.”
Alec pondered dutifully. “A fountain pen! And he was trying to
make it write.”
“Wonderful! Alec, I can see you’re going to be a tremendous help
in this little game.”
“Well, I don’t see anything to make such a fuss about, even if
they were made by a fountain pen. I mean, it doesn’t seem to take
us any forrader.”
“Oh, doesn’t it?” Roger had an excellent though somewhat
irritating sense of the dramatic. He paused impressively.
“Well?” asked Alec impatiently. “You’ve got something up your
sleeve, I know, and you’re aching to get it out. Let’s have it. What
do these wonderful marks of yours show you?”
“Simply that the confession is a fake,” retorted Roger happily.
“And now let’s go out in the garden.”
He turned on his heel and walked rapidly out on to the sun-
drenched lawn. One must admit that Roger had his annoying
moments.
The justly exasperated Alec trotted after him. “Talk about
Sherlock Holmes!” he growled, as he caught him up. “You’re every
bit as maddening yourself. Why can’t you tell me all about it straight
out if you really have discovered something, instead of beating
about the bush like this?”
“But I have told you, Alexander,” said Roger, with an air of bland
innocence. “That confession is a fake.”
“But why?”
Roger hooked his arm through that of the other and piloted him
in the direction of the rose garden.
“I want to stick around here,” he explained, “so as to see the
inspector when he comes up the drive. I’m not going to miss the
opening of that safe for anything.”
“Why do you think that confession’s a fake?” repeated Alec
doggedly.
“That’s better, Alexander,” commented Roger approvingly. “You
seem to be showing a little interest in my discoveries at last. You
haven’t been at all a good Watson up to now, you know. It’s your
business to be thrilled to the core whenever I announce a farther
step forward. You’re a rotten thriller, Alec.”
A slight smile appeared on Alec’s face. “You do all the thrilling
needed yourself, I fancy. Besides, old Holmes went a bit slower than
you. He didn’t jump to conclusions all in a minute, and I doubt if
ever he was as darned pleased with himself all the time as you are.”
“Don’t be harsh with me, Alec,” Roger murmured.
“I admit you haven’t done so badly so far,” Alec pursued candidly;
“though when all’s said and done most of it’s guesswork. But if I
grovelled in front of you, as you seem to want, and kept telling you
what a dashed fine fellow you are, you’d probably have arrested
Jefferson and Mrs. Plant by this time, and had Lady Stanworth
committed for contempt of court or something.” He paused and
considered. “In fact, what you want, old son,” he concluded
weightily, “is a brake, not a blessed accelerator.”
“I’m sorry,” Roger said with humility. “I’ll remember in future. But
if you won’t compliment me, at least let me compliment you. You’re
a jolly good brake.”
“And after that, Detective Sheringham, perhaps you’ll kindly tell
me how you deduce that the confession is a fake from the fact that
old Stanworth’s pen wouldn’t write.”
Roger’s air changed and his face became serious.
“Yes, this really is rather important. It clinches the fact of murder,
which was certainly a shot in the dark of mine before. Here’s the
thing that gives it away.”
He produced from his pocket the piece of paper which he had
waved in Alec’s face in the library and, unfolding it carefully, handed
it to the other. Alec looked at it attentively. It bore numerous
irregular folds, as if it had been considerably crumpled, and in the
centre, somewhat smudged, were the words “Victor St——,”
culminating in a large blot. The writing was very thickly marked. The
right-hand side of the paper was spattered with a veritable shower
of blots. Beyond these there was nothing upon its surface.
“Humph!” observed Alec, handing it back. “Well, what do you
make of it?”
“I think it’s pretty simple,” Roger said, folding the paper and
stowing it carefully away again. “Stanworth had just filled his
fountain pen, or it wouldn’t work or something. You know what one
does with a fountain pen that doesn’t want to write. Make scratches
on the nearest piece of paper, and as soon as the ink begins to flow
——”
“Sign one’s name!” Alec broke in, with the nearest approach to
excitement that he had yet shown.
“Precisely! On the blotting pad are the preliminary scratches to
bring the ink down the pen. What happens in nine cases out of ten
after that? The ink flows too freely and the pen floods. This bit of
paper shows that it happened in this case, too. Stanworth was
rather an impatient sort of man, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I suppose he was. Fairly.”
“Well, the scene’s easy enough to reconstruct. He tries the pen
out on the blotting pad. As soon as it begins to write he grabs a
sheet from the top of that pile of fellow-sheets on his desk (did you
notice them, by the way?) and signs his name. Then the pen floods,
and he shakes it violently, crumples up the sheet of paper, throws it
into the waste-paper basket and takes another. This time the pen,
after losing so much ink in blots, is a little faint at first; so he only
gets as far as the C in Victor before starting again, just below the
last attempt. Then at last it writes all right, and his signature is
completed, with the usual flourish. He picks up the piece of paper,
crumples it slightly, but not so violently as before, and throws it also
into the waste-paper basket. How’s that?”
“That all seems feasible enough. What next?”
“Why, the murderer, setting the room to rights afterwards, thinks
he’d better have a look in the basket. The first thing he spots is that
piece of paper. ‘Aha!’ he thinks. ‘The very thing I wanted to put a
finishing touch to the affair!’ Smoothes it carefully out, puts it in the
typewriter and types those few words above the signature. What
could be simpler?”
“By Jove, I wonder! It’s jolly ingenious.”
Roger’s eyes were sparkling. “Ingenious? Yes; but in its very
simplicity. Oh, that’s what happened, sure enough. There’s plenty of
corroboration, when you come to think of it. The way the whole
thing’s got into the top half of the sheet of paper, for instance. That
isn’t natural, really, is it? It ought to be in the middle, with the
signature about two thirds down. And why isn’t it? Because the
signature was in the middle already, and the fellow had to work
upwards from that.”
“I believe you must be right,” Alec said slowly.
“Well, don’t be so grudging about it. Of course I’m right! As a
matter of fact, those scratches on the blotting paper gave me the
idea as soon as I saw them. I’d been puzzling after a way of getting
round that confession. But when I found that second sheet in the
waste-paper basket of course the thing was as plain as a pikestaff.
That was a bad blunder of his, by the way; not to look through the
rest of the basket’s contents.”
“Yes,” Alec agreed seriously. “And supposing the inspector had
found it. It might have given him something to think about, mightn’t
it?”
“It might and it mightn’t. Of course from the inspector’s point of
view there’s been nothing to afford the least question as to the plain
fact of suicide; except the absence of motive, of course, and that’s
really nothing, after all. He hasn’t had his suspicions aroused more
or less by accident, as it were, like we have.”
“We’ve had the luck, all right,” Alec remarked, possibly in his rôle
of brake.
“Undoubtedly, but we haven’t let it lie about untouched,” Roger
said complacently. “In fact, I think we’ve done very well indeed up to
now,” he added candidly. “I don’t see how we could have done
more, do you?”
“No, I’m dashed if I do,” said Alec with decision.
“But there’s one thing needed to round it off nicely.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“To find the murderer,” Roger replied calmly.
 CHAPTER X.
Mrs. Plant is Apprehensive
“Great Scott!” Alec exclaimed, considerably startled. “Find the
murderer?”
Roger seemed pleased with the impression he had made.
“Naturally. What else? It’s the logical sequel to what we’ve already
done, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Alec hesitated, “if you put it like that. But
—— Well, we seem to be getting on so jolly fast. I mean, it’s rather
difficult to realise that a murder’s been committed at all. It all seems
so impossible, you know.”
“That’s simply because it’s something foreign to your usual
experience of life,” Roger said thoughtfully. “I admit that it is a bit of
a shock at first to face the fact that Stanworth was murdered instead
of committing suicide. But that’s not because there’s anything
inherently improbable about murder itself. Murder’s a common
enough event if it comes to that. But it doesn’t generally take place
among the circle of one’s immediate friends; that’s the trouble.
Anyhow, there’s no getting over it in this case. If ever a man was
murdered, Stanworth was. And very cleverly murdered, too. I tell
you, Alec, it’s no ordinary criminal we’re after. It’s an extraordinarily
cool, brainy, and calculating sort of person indeed.”
“Calculating?” Alec repeated. “Then do you think it was
premeditated?”
“Impossible to say, as yet. But I should certainly imagine so. It
looks as if it had been very carefully thought out beforehand, doesn’t
it?”
“There doesn’t seem to have been much left to chance,” Alec
agreed.
 “And look at the deliberation of the fellow. Fancy stopping to
collect those bits of vase and cover up the traces of that second shot
like that! He must have some nerve. Yes, it certainly looks more and
more as if it was a prearranged thing. I don’t say for last night in
particular; that may only have been a favourable opportunity which
the chap was quick to seize. But I do think that he’d made up his
mind to kill Stanworth some time or other.”
“You think it was somebody Stanworth knew, then?”
“Oh, there’s not much doubt about that. And somebody he was
vastly afraid of, too, I should imagine. Why else should he keep a
revolver so handy, if he wasn’t expecting something of the kind? Yes,
that’s the line we ought to go on—see if we can discover whether
there was anybody among his acquaintances of whom Stanworth
was thoroughly frightened. If we can only find that out, and the
name of the person as well, the odds are ten to one that we shall
have solved the mystery of the murderer’s identity.”
“That sounds reasonable enough,” said Alec with interest. “Got
any theory of how it was done?”
Roger beamed. “I believe I can tell you exactly how it was done,”
he said, not without pride. “Listen!”
He recounted at some length the results of his after-lunch
meditations and explained the reasons upon which his conclusions
had been based. It took the two of them several circuits of the rose
garden before the recital was completed, and then Roger turned
expectantly to his companion.
“You see?” he concluded eagerly. “That accounts for everything
except the facts of the confession and the murderer’s escape from
the library. Now I’ve cleared up the confession, and we’ve only got
one difficulty to get over. What do you think of it?”
“Humph!” observed Alec cautiously. He paused, and it was
evident that he was thinking deeply.
“Well?” asked Roger impatiently.
“There’s one thing I don’t quite see,” Alec said slowly. “According
to you the shot that killed Stanworth was fired from the other man’s
revolver. Then how is it that the bullet they took out of his head
fitted the empty shell in his own revolver?”
 Roger’s face fell. “Hullo!” he exclaimed. “That never occurred to
me.”
“I thought it couldn’t have,” said Alec complacently. “That rather
knocks your theory on the head, doesn’t it?”
“It’s one to you, Watson, certainly,” Roger smiled a little ruefully.
“Ah!” observed Alec deeply. He was evidently not going to spoil
the impression he had just made by any rash remarks. Alec was one
of those fortunate people who know just when to stop.
“Still, after all,” Roger said slowly, “that’s only a matter of detail,
isn’t it? My version of how it happened may be quite wrong. But that
doesn’t affect the main issue, which is that it was done.”
“In other words, the fact of murder is definitely established, you
think, although you don’t know how it was carried out?” Alec asked
thoughtfully.
“Precisely.”
“Humph! And do you still think the motive was robbery?”
“I do. And—— By Jove!” Roger stopped suddenly in his stride and
turned exultantly to his companion. “That may account for Mrs.
Plant, too!”
“What about Mrs. Plant?”
“Well, didn’t you notice her at lunch? She was as cheerful and
unconcerned as anything. Rather a change from the very perturbed
person we surprised at the safe this morning, wasn’t it? And on the
face of it you’d have expected her to be still more worried, with the
prospect of the opening of the safe this afternoon and the proving of
her little story to us to be false. But was she? Not a bit of it. She
looked as if she hadn’t a trouble in the world. You must have noticed
it.”
“Yes, I did, now you come to mention it. I thought she must be
acting.”
“Mrs. Plant wasn’t acting at lunch any more than she was telling
the truth to us this morning,” said Roger with conviction. “And why
wasn’t she? Because for some mysterious reason or other she had
no need to be. In other words, she knew that when the safe was
opened this afternoon, everything would be all right as far as she
was concerned.”