by H. F. Heard
It was true. I was having more and more difficulty in stifling my yawns when, however anxious I was to get out of the trap, he would give me long lectures on natural history. His next remark was, however, to the point and cheering.
“We certainly have at least one clear day for work, for Heregrove will spend tomorrow, every minute of it, re-extirpating every suspicious trace. I wouldn’t wonder if he opened even the horse’s grave and gave it another dose of quicklime.”
That faintly awoke my interest to ask one casual question.
“How did the horse meet its death?” I questioned, as I showed him out of the garden gate.
“It was stung to death, poor brute, for demonstration purposes,” he replied, and went off into the dusk.
Chapter VII
DOUBLE-CROSSING DESTINY
In spite of such a day, a day alternately too exciting and quite tiringly boring, I slept, nonetheless, quite well. I certainly was hugely tired. But I saw I could not let things rest as they were. I was like a criminal with only a short reprieve, and I must act if I were ever really to be safe and free again. So as soon as I woke I was up, had my breakfast, and hurried off to Waller’s Lane—not without an apprehensive look up the road which led in the other direction to the dreaded honey-snare.
Mr. Mycroft was already out in his garden and greeted me with, “The first experiment is over and as we expected. Look, I’ll repeat it.” At the end of a cane he had attached a pair of tweezers in which was a speck of cotton wool, oily and brown. He put it toward one of the alighting boards of his hives. The bees scattered and the working hum turned to a buzz, but, on the cane’s being taken away, only a few followed it, half-heartedly, and they soon returned to work.
“Is that the stuff?” I asked, rather scared.
“Yes,” he said. “You see, my mild Dutch don’t like it, but it certainly does not make them homicidal. Now look at this.”
He stepped back through the open French window into the house, returning with another similarly tipped cane. He advanced it to the hive and immediately there was quite an ugly commotion—a squadron swooping out after the offensive ferrule. He thrust it into a pot of water and, after some angry rushes and swirls, the squadron also returned to work.
“That was a fairly strong brew of ordinary horse-sweat ammonia. You see how clever our man has been! His insect only goes quite mad over a special brand of distillation, a brand which actually affects the normal bee less than ordinary horse sweat.”
“But how did you get the stuff?” I asked, excitedly.
“Even the coolest, most thoughtful criminal makes a slip if you follow him carefully enough,” he replied musingly. “You remember those young murderers Leopold and Loeb, of Chicago? They planned quite coolly and, as they calculated, quite completely, to murder that schoolboy and get away with it. And all their plans run according to schedule, well enough. But, while they are disposing of their victim’s body, one of these creatures, who think they are so superior to human mistakes and weaknesses, actually drops his glasses on the ground and there they are picked up, for they are plain for any passerby to see. Within a couple of hours the Chicago oculists are all rung up, the description of these distinctive lenses given. The oculist who ground them looks up the specification in his files and Leopold and Loeb’s names are in the possession of the police. Part of their minds must have heard those glasses click as they struck the ground, part of their attention have noticed them lying there while they looked around, approving their silly, sinister skill, seeing how well they had concealed their victim’s body. But they were betrayed by that deep part of consciousness which they had disowned. We reckon ill who leave it out.
“Heregrove has done much the same. I did not tell you last night, as it might have made you sleep badly had you known that I had the deadly stuff on me. But I had, you remember, taken the precaution to bury the honey deeply, and, I believe, without their own honey to trail them to their victim, the vampire bees cannot find you simply by this ammoniac stuff. Once they have found you and you are marked—well, I have told you how happy I am you are alive and how lucky I think you are to be so. Here in this garden we are, anyhow, safe, for, if they should arrive, I can turn my siren song on them.
“But how did I get any of the stuff? Well, I have told you—because the clever criminal is just the man who makes a complete, amnesic slip every now and then, so that you have only to dog him long enough for him to let an utterly damning clue fall into your hand. I have only a little of his precious brew and that under strict glass-and-wax stoppering. The smirched scrap I showed the bees a moment ago I am now going to drop into my electric furnace where it will be ash in a moment.”
He suited the deed to the word and I could hear the damp speck of wadding hiss just before he shut to the miniature furnace’s door. He returned, picked out the first cane, twitched off its tip of sodden wadding so that it was flicked over the hedge, upset the pot of water with his foot, and, while he watched the dry soil suck up the damp, continued.
“The piece I picked up was in the stable. I had, as you know, only a moment to glance round and to see that the laboratory had been liquidated, and was just turning to meet Heregrove, for there was no use taking unnecessary risks by letting him come upon me gazing at the site of his hell’s kitchen—when I saw a scrap of whitish cloth on the dark ground. I stooped, picked it up, dropped it in my pocket, and walked out with my toadstool patter to meet our enraged but nonplused host. I guessed in a moment what it was—the sham finger-bandage which he used as his not uningenious way of tainting you.”
“But why wasn’t it covered with bees?” I questioned.
“That,” he answered, “is one of those points of psychology where, as on a wavering border line, reason touches instinct—instinct which isn’t mechanic reaction or clear calculation, the two processes we know something about, instinct of which we know, in actual fact, nothing. This is the converse of the Leopold and Loeb question—why did their senses betray them? Here we have to ask, why does that blind instinct which makes the bee sting, till it ruptures itself, an object which insults its nose, suddenly yield to a kind of reason which tells it a rag can’t suffer or at least can’t be killed? True, they stung your coat but it smelled human and they were looking for you. But, after all, our real problem is the Leopold and Loeb side of the question. What non-reasoning power betrayed also our careful, calculating Heregrove? Of course, as soon as he had seen you off the premises he went to the stable. The bees were in by that time and he was safe. But still, as it was only just dusk, a few loiterers might be coming home late and he knew well that even half a dozen stings are probably fatal. So he drops the rag, probably washes and disinfects his hands in the stable—and then why doesn’t he come back and take the rag to burn it? Probably he does mean to come when it is quite dark, so that he can be quite sure all the bees are in and also that no one will see him burning anything. He is as careful as that, and his place can be seen from the road, and, you see, all this taking care only maneuvers him into the position where the fatal forgetfulness can be brought into play. What we do know is that he did forget to come back and so we have hold of this invaluable rag.”
“I don’t see the rag is much use to us,” I said. “It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know and won’t help get us a conviction, as the glasses convicted Leopold and Loeb.”
“It will do more for us,” Mr. Mycroft replied.
“How?” I exclaimed. “How can it?”
His face went graver than I had ever seen it. He remained silent for a moment.
Then he said, “I wonder, Mr. Silchester, whether you could bring yourself really to trust me?”
That is the kind of question I can’t help profoundly disliking. It seems to me rhetorical, melodramatic.
“When a couple of people get mixed up” (I was just going to say “by Destiny,” but then that would make me also sound pompous and theatrical) “by luck in a mess with a lunatic, it seems rather silly to ask, when it
’s practically all over, whether one of them trusts the other.”
“You take a far rosier outlook on the immediate future than I do, Mr. Silchester,” he coolly replied, “if your considered opinion is that we are already almost out of this peculiarly tangled wood.”
My heart sank. Before, it had always been he who had cheered me and I recalled with growing chill that though he was in danger, he was prospective victim No. 3 while I was No. 2 and No. 1 was long in her unavenged grave.
“We are,” he went on, “at a place where two tracks divide. Our lives—I say it advisedly; I have often gambled with mine and I know something of mortal risks—our lives depend on whether the track which we decide to take is the right one. At the end of one of these trails there lies a peculiarly painful end for you and me, and” (it was this, I must own, that “put the screws on me”) “and, Mr. Silchester, you have had a taste of this weapon which is now aimed at you as certainly as any gunman has ever aimed at and shot down his victim.”
“Mr. Mycroft,” I said in a voice which, though it may have expressed apology did express defeat, “I don’t know why I am always trying to be difficult. I suppose it is because I am so frightened that I won’t own I am, and so I try to get back onto that formal relationship which we should be on if this horrid secret peril had not forced us together.”
How true that has proved—far truer than I thought even then. Mr. Mycroft evidently believed me.
“I don’t want to frighten you needlessly, I think you realize. In fact, it is of the greatest importance that you should keep your nerve. Lose that and we may both be dead far sooner than we need be. But we must be quite clear about our situation and have no illusions over it. I have here the essence which, to put it frankly, even if it sounds melodramatic, puts death on people, at least in this locality. The law can give us no protection. But destiny has put this stuff in my hands. Fate made Heregrove drop the one thing which he could give us as an adequate defense against his attack; fate made him drop it and leave it where I could find it without his seeing me do so. Fate provided that I should have in the pocket into which I thrust it that small flask of the three strong essential oils with which I had anointed your fingers. No doubt that fact gave us an additional defense against any attack we might have suffered as I came back across the paddock with the stuff on my person. You must own that such an arrangement of events, although it would not have served us had we not been ready to avail ourselves of it, did make possible the present turn of events and that it does look as though, if a human may be so rash to say so, fate was, at least, not against us in this matter.
“Well, however that may be, and acting on the saw that Providence helps those who do not neglect to help themselves, when I got home I looked up my puce periodical. As I thought, it did contain that useful if recondite piece of work on animal ammonias—a piece of sound research which perhaps at present only two men in Europe and America happen to want—the one to commit, the other to stop an indefinite series of cruel murders. With these tables and the actual smearings on the rag, don’t you see what we can do, what we can’t do, and why I cannot do less than ask for your absolute confidence?”
I suppose subconsciously I suspected already the position into which he was forcing me—no, that’s not quite fair, and I must be absolutely fair—I ought to say the position into which Destiny was forcing me, forcing us. I played for time, again.
“What can’t we do?” I asked evasively.
It seemed better to know first what couldn’t help us, for I might find a loophole there; before facing what we might have to do to help ourselves, to save ourselves.
“I needn’t labor the point,” he said, eyeing me with an embarrassing steadiness.” To this man, the law is no more than a fence to a yellow-fever mosquito. The law protects us from the sudden, unpremeditated violence of the untamed blackguard. It is helpless against the calculating malice of a man who patiently and deliberately studies to get around its limitations. When you have really faced up to the fact—I know it is hard for those who have lived protected lives to face such an actuality—that the law, the magistrate, and the village policeman are helpless to protect you, then you will be free to consider fully the unavoidability of step two: of doing what we can do.”
He waited; after some unpleasant moments of silence, I must have showed some sort of assent, for he continued.
“I think you have been right in counting the cost and I am glad you have come to the same opinion as myself, only after mature thought. Right as it is, as well as wise, it is, of course, a very unconventional view. But we are, morally, precisely in the position that frontiersmen are placed when pushing out to the limits of a new country. We have to work the law ourselves and to make it run where, as yet, there are no rails. The law one day will catch up with this situation; then we shall simply tell the railway clerk where we want to be taken and he will see that we are conveyed. Today it is still, in such cases as these, a case of the sheriff’s posse. We have to mount our own horses and under our own steam go after the criminal. It is, here, still the stage where every citizen must uphold and apply the law. You and I are the Western sheriff’s posse. Fortunately we are adequately armed—”
“You don’t mean that we have got to go like moonlighters and shoot through Heregrove’s window some night?”
He saw that my protest was hardly sincere, in fact, only a prevarication, but he took it with perfect courtesy. I felt like a hooked fish making a desperate dash and splash, trying to get off on a false issue, and let by the fisherman, while it spends its strength, have the full run of the line, only to be hauled in when spent.
“My metaphor was clumsy,” Mr. Mycroft apologized. “Of course, I only mean that we can and must counter Heregrove with nothing more than those instruments which he is attempting to use on us and which the law does not recognize as methods of murder—which, in fact, it dismisses as accidental ‘acts of God’ and not of malicious man.”
That was, certainly, put as reassuringly as possible. I could, and must own did, dismiss from my mind the Wild-West sheriff simile. It certainly did not appeal to me, the recluse, to ride about avenging murders which the law chose to overlook. I am not a Red-Cross Knight. But I am an easily scared individual, and the one fact which remained, boring down into my consciousness and pushing me to lengths which otherwise I should have thought absurdly desperate, was my actual desperate situation. I made a final twist, however.
“All right,” I said, with an air of having thought everything out to the end and seeing exactly how much would be expected of me. “All right, go ahead. I promise you I will never divulge anything of this. Obviously I shall want, quite as much as you, to keep my mouth shut.”
“Thank you,” he said, a bit dryly, I thought. My heart began sinking to new low levels. “That means, of course, that you will collaborate with me, for, while I can manage the technical part of this problem quite well by myself, I shall have to require your assistance at the end, in the practical application. We shall, may I repeat, have to call on Heregrove again.”
Those last words, which I had dreaded most, were like a knell.
“Now, Mr. Silchester,” he continued, in the same level tone, as though we had been planning a picnic, “I must go back into my laboratory. When you arrived I had started a couple of experiments and I must go and see how they are cooking. You, too, will want to think over our conversation, no doubt. Perhaps you would like to rest or read in my library. The singing of my pet birds in there will not, as you have tested for yourself, disturb you. I venture to invite and advise you to stay here; not only because we shall have several more things to talk over, which we can best do as soon as my experiments are finished, but also because I honestly believe that today you are safer here than in your own house.”
“All right,” I said none too graciously but he seemed quite content. He knew that my resistance was broken. I was his pawn; a hateful position, even if you are to be used to checkmate a man who wants to murder you.
The morning passed slowly. I could hear Mr. Mycroft cluttering about, across the hall, in his laboratory. I couldn’t read. I sat there dully, my mind slowly, like a mud-locked eddy in a stream, turning pointlessly round and round the events which had me snarled. At last my attention was caught by those silly birds as they hopped round their cage, stupidly safe, too stupid to know they were safe. As I looked, there they were, at it again, he singing silently and she listening enthralled. That soundless singing seemed to me all part of Nature’s senseless arranging of things. Then, somehow, I had evidently gone too far in my disgust with everything. I realized how self-centered I was being, expecting the world to be made for me and to care for my fate; and how perverse I must be, for, after all, if I could have heard these birds squeaking away to each other I should only have been exasperated at the noise. I began to smile at myself. I got up, went over to the cage, and was agreeably surprised when the birds, instead of stupidly fluttering in dismay, both came at once to the bars, heads on one side, evidently expecting me to give them something or to play with them. I am not good with animals—they either bore or frighten me—but I must say, I felt a sudden reassurance that if I had to be wholly in the hands and power of a stranger, that stranger should have been able to make birds not only trust him but trust strangers also. I was musing on that; it was sinking into my mind, for it was a thought I was ready to reflect on, the only pleasant one I had had for some time, when the door opened.
Mr. Mycroft said, “Lunch is ready. I have washed. You know the way to the bathroom from your last visit.”
Certainly, too, the house was very neat and efficiently run. That gave me almost as much confidence as the birds’ confidence in me. And lunch was even better than last time.
“Last time,” said my host as we sat down, “it was, I fear, a very scratch meal. Today, as I hoped I might persuade you to stay, there can be a little more design in living. Like everything else, a menu depends on foresight, in taking time in time.” We started with borsch—a soup I love but could never get Alice to make.
