by H. F. Heard
We had come abreast of the few tulips which Mr. Mycroft’s skill had somehow turned into a pivot on which he made revolve his whole delicate and dangerous operation.
“As a breeder yourself, I need hardly tell you,” he continued, addressing Heregrove, who stood by uneasily with obviously rising savage impatience, but unable to see how at that moment he could break away, “I shall take no liberties with your treasure, a treasure no doubt not less valuable than the ever-famous black tulip. But,” and Mr. Mycroft bent toward the largest of the blooms, “I know you will permit.…”
He paused as though absent-mindedly engrossed in peering into the petals, but really, I could see, to be certain that he had excited and held the cupidity of the man, who, whatever his dreams of avarice and wealth won from murder, was still certainly very hard up. Heregrove, who, it had seemed a moment ago, would break clean away or at least stroll ahead, was caught, coming closer, lured and drawn as a trout is drawn in a curve by the fine line of the dry-fly fisherman, and himself also looking now, rather stupidly, I thought, at the flower.
I think that was the first time that I had realized, while I was up against him, that after all, with his considerable cunning, he was really a stupid man. One had only thought him terrible and all-knowing because one was frightened oneself and so could not put oneself in his shoes. Nearly all murderers, I began to see, are terrible only because we fear them and appear clever only because of the short start which breaking the rules gives them. We begin by thinking they are ordinary persons and won’t violate the regulations of the game and so they get a lead for a stroke or two.
“I know you will permit me,” Mr. Mycroft absent-mindedly repeated, “to study the plant closely.”
Heregrove’s eyes went from Mr. Mycroft to the flower and back again. Obviously he was getting every moment more confused. In his muddled mind the notion which seemed to have a small but unworking majority was that Mr. Mycroft was about to snatch the precious bloom from its stem and go skimming down the path with it. I, apparently, was cast by him for the role of the interceptor, who by blundering into the path of pursuit allows the thief to make a clean getaway. Mr. Mycroft added still further to the man’s confusion by bending so far forward that he balanced himself by putting his hands behind his back. The rape of the bloom was quite impossible in such a position, a position in which Mr. Mycroft looked like a giant jackdaw as he turned his head and looked up with a keen eye at Heregrove.
“Yes,” he said. “As remarkable as I thought. But the light is failing and the petals are heavily contracted. I have seen enough to memorize the principal features for a brief account—which I shall, of course, submit to you. And, if I might advise, I would suggest that you register your find as soon as possible. If you don’t by any chance know the address, I will give it to you as we leave.”
This stroke evidently persuaded Heregrove that there was something to be got out of us, at practically no trouble to himself; that we might actually yield a little profit alive before yielding him the experimental interest of our deaths. So Mr. Mycroft prepared his next stroke until nothing could have seemed more natural and unsuspicious.
“The bulb is, of course, the thing, and as no one but ourselves knows about it, it is as safe in the ground as buried treasure. So I know you won’t mind, so as to save a second visit to a busy man, if I take the one thing which is needed to make the full description of your wonder—a few grains of its pollen. They can, of course, be of no commercial value and are only of purely scientific interest.”
I saw that Heregrove knew enough of flowers to know this to be true and that he thought he had better assent so as to conclude the interview. This would be the quickest way of getting rid of us. He may even have grunted permission. Anyhow, he stood still, looking down while Mr. Mycroft’s hands unlocked from behind his back. His right hand was hidden from me, for I was on his left, a few yards nearer the house, and already the light was not of the best. I saw him put something into the bell of the flower and then heard him give a slight exclamation of annoyance.
“It’s blocked,” I could hear him saying almost to himself. Then, to Heregrove, “These patent pollen-extractors respect the flowers’ virginity but I am not sure that the old toothpick with a speck of cotton-wool on the end wasn’t better. It was certainly less trouble. These superfine tubes are always getting congested. I must blow it out.” He turned and I could see in his hand the flask, the nozzle pointed down. Apparently engrossed solely in cleaning it, in order to make it create a good suction, he proceeded to squeeze the pump again and again. I heard the sharp wheeze and saw the tube, quite accidentally, it seemed, even to me, pointed at Heregrove’s legs. Mr. Mycroft still shook the apparatus, almost straightening himself in the effort, and evidently so engrossed in getting it into working order that he did not notice that it was still pointed at Heregrove and now was actually in line with his body. Heregrove stood still, impatiently waiting for what he took to be a small air-suction pump to be brought into working order.
“There it is,” said Mr. Mycroft, stooping again. “That’s right. Now it is drawing. Only the slightest snuff does it, once it’s working. Pollens are a wonderful study. Specks almost invisible to the eye, each has its very distinctive shape, telling you what genus it belongs to, giving you the whole history of a plant—indeed, with these wonderful fossil pollens, the whole ancestry of genera and orders of plants. But not the plant’s copyright, in this case. So you are safe, Mr. Heregrove, from our taking anything from you even unintentionally. Our task in coming here,” he continued, a less rambling manner coming into his speech, “was to make you an offer, an offer, which you, on due consideration, refused.”
He straightened up. Suddenly the old flower enthusiast completely dropped from him, as a mound of ivy at a stroke may be stripped off and leave visible a gaunt tower which it has concealed.
“Good night, Mr. Heregrove, good night, and if in the night you should—I have done so myself and have found such thoughts well deserving my prompt action—wake and reconsider your decision, I do pray that you will come straight down to me without a moment’s delay. I should really be grateful, more grateful than perhaps I can make you understand, if you could see your way to take the line I have been able to suggest. I know I must seem to you an absurd old man, fanatically fussing about what isn’t his business and, you may even think, pleading with sentimental urgency for the protection and preservation of a queer and outwardly not important variety of life’s many manifestations and mysterious forms. Is it worth, you think, being so particular? Why trouble to preserve everything that wants to live? Are things so important? Believe me, it is not the cash nor the reputation which I feel to be at stake. All life needs protection, encouragement, defense. We can’t be indifferent or ruthless, can we?”
He trailed off rather lamely, and I was glad enough. Heregrove’s patience was at an end. No shadow yet passed over his assurance that we were in his power, nor he by any possibility in ours. He turned rudely on his heel.
“I’ve wasted more time than I can spare,” he remarked over his shoulder. “Shut the gate as you go out.”
He swung off down the path toward the fields. Mr. Mycroft said nothing. I followed him as he walked swiftly past the house, reached the gate, opened it, carefully relatched it, and went down the road.
Chapter IX
FLY BREAKS FROM WASP
He kept silence until we were at my gate. Then he turned to me.
“I hope you did not mind being likened, together with myself, to a tulip of an odd variety. After all, the greatest poets have thought our lives are closely similar in their fates to the grasses of the field; and we have been asked by a high authority to consider each other, among other reasons, because of the moving, transitory beauty of flower life.” Then, more gravely, “I had to give him every chance; even to taking that considerable risk at the end. I had to count on his dismissing as a chance coincidence (though the wise know there is no chance in life) that my concern for the
plant’s life and his indifference to it, pointed to, was a parable of, his terrible indifference to human life. I hoped this queer illustration might awaken him. It was a last hope. For a moment I suspected that he wondered whether I was aware of how apposite my words were in his case. But he is too sunk in that brutal self-assurance which is the final and fatal ignorance, that ignorance, that ignoring of appeal and warning which the most merciful and wisest of all the religions, Buddhism, rightly calls the chief and the one unforgivable sin. At least in this life. And that is all we poor men of action can provide for. The lesser of two evils here—and the hope that elsewhere, under other conditions, those who have found this life and body only a noose in which their struggles of greed and fear strangle them and make them in their blind strivings only a peril to all near them, may awake to their illusion, it may drop from them like an evil dream and they begin again to live and understand.”
He was evidently moved, and though I was naturally disinclined to follow his rather extravagant speculations, I was quite distinctly willing that he should run on. I did not want to be left alone. The tension of action was over. I had come away from the drama. The curtain had gone down on the act. Now we had to wait on Destiny. My mind was being blown about, now that I was having time to reflect. I felt that, left to myself, I should hardly sleep and, if I did, my dreams all too easily might be worse than any wakeful worrying, however weary. I felt that I must retain Mr. Mycroft and keep him in my company by some means. It struck me that he might stay a little longer if I asked him to clear up a few points which in the last few hours I had failed to understand fully. Of course I had followed his main strategy, but certain details of his tactics had escaped me. I was too tired really to be interested, but I saw that by asking him to explain, his delight in showing one how clever he was would keep him hanging about and save me a little longer from the solitude which I now dreaded.
“I didn’t quite follow,” I said, in as abstract a voice as I could command, “some particulars of your behavior in the garden. Of course I grasped the main drift, but all that play with the paper, the letter, which I suppose must have been a sham?”
“Yet,” he replied with a patience which would normally have irritated me but now was a relief, guaranteeing me a little longer human company, “yet you saw every step of those preparations. You saw me go to the door and come back with a piece of letter paper printed with official headings, a piece of official stationery, and you had every reason to arrive by induction at the fact that I had had that piece of stationery specially prepared for the work we had on hand. You then watched me while I took out a similar sheet, but with writing on it and, with the sheet I had had prepared turned upside down, you saw me copy something. Again, what, and what alone, could such an action convey?”
He paused, but I was not trying to think, only to keep his company.
“I gave you,” he continued, when he saw that I was going to say nothing, “the full explanation while I talked to Heregrove. My actions could mean only one thing. I was copying, from a letter, which I had had from him, Dr. Miles’s signature, and, of course, like all copyists or forgers of signatures or handwriting, I copied it upside down. That is the only safe way of preventing tricks of one’s own handwriting from appearing in the letters and words which you wish to render facsimile. I didn’t expect that Heregrove would know Miles’s signature. But nothing must be left unprovided for and he might have seen it. If he had (for, as I said, that sign-manual is a remarkable exhibition of nervous vigor and display, if not of calligraphy), then my facsimile would have clinched his conviction that we were harmless. Only under a strong glass would suspicion be wakened, for then, as in all such slowly ‘drawn’ characters, instead of one or two small wobbles appearing at intervals on the dozen or so strokes, there would be visible quite a number of such regularly occurring little jolts in the lines. That fact has often caught forgers. These jolts are the records of the heart-beats. If you take half a minute to copy a signature and only a couple of seconds or so to write it if it is your own, you see, these tell-tale marks, giving your time and showing your amount of labor, must be much more frequent in the copy. But I took care to bring away the letter—you heard me type it after I had signed it—and I shall burn it now when I get home. I must be going. There are a number of such small things to do this evening.”
I felt that I must make a straightforward attempt to hold him; just asking questions could no longer stave off my being left alone.
“I wonder,” I said hesitatingly, “I wonder whether you would be so kind, Mr. Mycroft, as to stay with me tonight?”
“I am afraid that would not be wise,” he answered kindly. “As I have said, I must clear up a few things at home, which you will recall need tidying up.”
I understood. There was not merely the letter. The flask was still in his pocket and Mr. Mycroft, believing as he did in Destiny, left nothing to “chance.” He hesitated.
“I would ask you to come to my place but, again, the less we are seen about together, the better, at least at present. In a village a recluse cannot change his ways and make friends without people asking why he has done so and even what enmity has driven him to seek allies! After all, do what we will, our neighbors are always forming opinions about us, and if we for a long time do not see any reason why we should care, we may be sure that the stories they tell about us will be more to their fancy than to ours.”
“All right,” I said, with a sudden, tired petulance. “All right. I am the most exposed. Nearer the danger; next on the list; leave me to face it alone.”
All my restraint had gone I could not think where, but as I spoke the very words seemed to carry away that last crust of assurance and restraint. Mr. Mycroft’s face was hard to see in the late summer dusk. His face was as difficult to estimate.
“You have gone through your ordeal and now you are in the reaction,” said the even tones. “It would be wise not to fall into ignorance about your condition. It was not your normal self which carried you through today. Our lives would have been forfeit if I had taken the risk of depending on such power as you have at your command to make yourself behave reliably. I saw and studied your reaction to benzedrine hydrate. Like many of your type, you are extremely responsive to certain drugs. I therefore gave you temporarily the Batavian bravery which is not yours by nature. Now you must pay the cost in reaction. Perhaps not an exorbitant fee, considering that it is the only one charged for saving your life.”
It maddened me that this old man had played with me, treating me as an equal while all the time he was only doping me like a race horse and forcing me into acts which I already saw had made me exchange the possibility of a danger, which anyhow was growing less (after all, who knows, as the first attack had failed, I might never be set on again), for a far graver one which well might dog me all my life. And then the complete disregard of my feelings, to speak to me in that insolent way when he owned I was tired out. Not the slightest attempt to make things easy for me, but a lecture which an old, angry schoolmaster might give a child before caning it.
“Good night, Mr. Mycroft,” I said, sharply. I left him standing, slammed my gate, got into my house, went straight upstairs, and was safe in my bedroom before the energy given me by my outburst and the relief of being rude had worn off and I felt even worse.
I remembered that I had had no supper and it was quite time for it. But I couldn’t even face going down to the larder. I felt that I should see Heregrove’s face peering at me through the wire-gauze window. I took a warm bath, but the rushing of the taps made me dread I should not hear if there should come a step on the stairs. At last I was in bed, but if I have ever had a worse night I don’t remember it.
When the light came, however, as so often happens, so provokingly, I did fall asleep. I woke, therefore, late, exhausted and vexed at hearing the disturbing noise Alice was making below. She might realize that this morning of all mornings, I reflected, I might be left, as she would say, to sleep it out. And then I re
alized that she could never know, must never know, must never have a suggestion of a suspicion. I must always be bright and cheerful and on time, for fear she and then others might begin to remark on how changed I was, how moping now: “Looks like he never slept a wink”; “And all since those days when he was all about with that queer Mr. Mycroft”; “Well, birds of a feather …”; “An you know that was exactly the time when he fancied himself into a fit over bees!”
I flung myself out of bed, pounding down heavily on the floor. Alice would thus know I was up and full of energy. I splashed about in the bath—that, too, would show vitality and also give her plenty to do mopping up and polishing down—lack of work makes gossips. Then downstairs, making, I thought, a pretty good entry as an active, rested man, ready to take up his own interests and business and able to tell others to mind theirs.
But Alice was evidently not impressed. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice my carefully prepared carriage and poise. She was full of something else and, alas, I knew it, before she began: “Pore”—I must own the “dear” was omitted, but the “pore,” like a code-word, told me all. Yes, the milkman, she’d seen him herself as she’d been coming along and it was he who had found Heregrove. Stiff already, halfway up the garden path. Had called “Milk, O,” and Mr. Heregrove (disaster, I could not help noticing, had given him a “Mister”), who was always early, hadn’t answered. So Alf had thrown a glance up the garden path. Couldn’t b’lieve his eyes; why, black he was as the earth he lay on.
