An Oxford Tragedy

by J. C. Masterman

  Ah, but the Apparition – the dumb sign –

  The beckoning finger bidding me forgo

  The fellowship, the converse and the wine,

  The songs, the festal glow!

  And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit

  And while the purple joy is pass’d about,

  Whether ’tis ampler day divinelier lit,

  Or homeless night without

  How well that great but misjudged modern poet voices my blacker mood! But that mood was rare. For the most part I was supremely contented and happy in that place. The Common Room of St Thomas’s was indeed my spiritual home. In earlier days I had been accustomed to work after dinner, but now I tended more and more to sit talking and smoking until it was time for a book and bed.

  I moved to my seat at the end of the table, where the decanters and the snuff lay before me, and invited Brendel to sit at my right hand. On the other side of me I put Whitaker’s guest. The rest of the party seated themselves as they pleased. I observed with a good deal of satisfaction that the younger members moved quickly to sit near the Viennese; it was obvious that they had capitulated to his charm of manner as easily as had I.

  Hardly had we settled down, and the wine begun its first leisurely journey round the table, when Doyne reminded Brendel of his remark in Hall.

  ‘You must tell us more about your views on detection, Professor. Here we all belong to different schools of thought. Apart from Mitton, who has a school of his own, simple faith and all will come well, you know’ (the chaplain made an inarticulate murmur of protest which passed unheeded), ‘we’re really divided into three groups. Let me see. There are Dixon and Whitaker, who belong to the pseudoscientific school. They’ve discarded cigarette ends and heel marks as belonging to an earlier age, but they still believe that by picking up hairs and putting them under microscopes they can prove that the murder has been committed by a man of about fifty-five, going bald at the temples. Prendergast and I, on the other hand, believe in sitting in arm-chairs and smoking pipes, until we have discussed all the possible murderers and their motives. We then get up and point with unerring finger at the guilty man. Lastly, there’s the Bursar, who believes in official methods and the trained detective. He would have everyone who was within half a mile of the murder lined up and presented with a questionnaire of the most searching description. The man who can’t answer the questions to the Major’s satisfaction is the murderer. What could be simpler? Now, Professor, which school gets your vote? Are you for clues, or are you for logical deduction, or are you for military methods and death at dawn?’

  We all laughed, Brendel with us. I could see that he liked the young and their talk. Yet his answer, when it came, was carefully phrased and his tone was oddly serious.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I take it all a little more seriously than that. I said that I read detective tales, and so I do, but that’s only as a kind of relaxation. What fascinates me, yes at times obsesses me, is the real crime – the murder that has actually been committed. Listen.’ (I had already noticed that Brendel had a habit of saying ‘listen’ in a curiously compelling tone of voice before any sentence which he regarded as especially important.) ‘I must beg leave to tell you gentlemen how I came to be immersed in that special study. I was a young lawyer in Vienna, and a client of mine was murdered, suddenly, horribly, inexplicably. I was drawn into the investigations which followed; I could not escape from them. And gradually there was unfolded before my eyes a drama of feeling and passion, of hidden desires and secret motives, of a sort that I had never dreamed of. It so happened that I saw more clearly than the rest; I was able to suggest a line of investigation that led eventually to the arrest of the murderer. Through that I won a sort of. …’ He hesitated for a moment for a word. ‘Renommée?’

  ‘Reputation,’ said someone.

  ‘Yes, reputation. How ridiculous it is that one suddenly fails to find the simplest word when one is speaking a language not one’s own. I acquired a sort of reputation. The police consulted me not once but many times; sometimes I could help them, often I could not. And so I learned the grammar and the syntax of murder.’

  He paused for a minute, and seemed to be diving into his memories.

  ‘Have you ever really considered,’ he went on, ‘the drama behind a murder, the play of human passions, the desperation, the daring? And think of the stake at issue! Your scientist can do most things, but he can’t create life, and it is life that you are, by one quick act, taking away. And to take it you risk everything; not just your future or your goods or even your happiness, but everything you have – everything – your own life! And remember, once the stake is thrown on the board it cannot be removed. What gamble is there comparable to that, a gamble in human life?’ He held up his forefinger almost menacingly as he spoke, and his voice had grown harsh with suppressed feeling.

  In a moment he went on in a quieter voice, ‘Of course, I am speaking of the real murders, the murders that are planned and contrived and executed with intention. I don’t mean those wretched crimes of brute violence, when some poor fellow is knocked on the head for the sake of a few pounds. They’re just sordid and wretched. No, nor your American crimes either.’ He smiled and glanced round the room. I think that he wanted to be sure that there was no American among us, whose susceptibilities he might offend. ‘I love America and the Americans; they’re the kindest and most hospitable …’ He checked himself abruptly and his smile became a little chuckling laugh.

  ‘So I’ve nearly, oh, so nearly – but what’s your odd expression for making a mistake?’

  ‘Dropped a brick,’ said Doyne, laughing with him.

  ‘That’s it. Dropped a brick.’ He repeated it slowly as though memorizing it for future use. ‘My poor little brick, you must forgive it. Well, I should have said that nowhere except at Oxford is there hospitality to compare with that of the Americans. But when it comes to crime, why then I find them just a little vulgar. “Bump off, shoot up,” what expressions!’ He shrugged his shoulders with an ineffable suggestion of distaste. ‘Of course some of you know Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy; that’s a great book. I learned much from that. But somehow I still believe that the newer countries have not risen to great murders yet; they seem to lack the dignity, the aristocratic touch.’

  ‘The dignity of murder,’ said Prendergast, ‘not a bad title that, for a book.’

  ‘When you’ve cut out all the casual crimes, all these modern senseless slaughters,’ Brendel went on, ‘you’re left with murders that are worth study – the great murders; and it’s then that detection becomes a great art, too. And the motives. Sometimes it’s love of gain. At first the desire for wealth and all that it brings with it, and then the birth of temptation – the realization, perhaps, that one frail life stands between a man and all his material desires – and after that slowly, slowly, the growth of the idea, and finally the great gamble, the murder itself. Or sometimes it’s just hatred, sheer personal hatred, which grows and grows until it becomes an overmastering passion. And sometimes that hatred has begun from something in itself so trivial that only a psycho-analyst could trace it. Think of a man married to a woman whom he does not love; think of some small action at first only an irritation, and then, repeated day by day, a burden, a cancer, a disease worse than death! And then the thought of freedom, at first only a hope, then a plan, then an overmastering impulse. Yes, some murders have grown from what we lightly call incompatibility. Or again there’s sexual jealousy, jealousy that distorts the vision and blinds the judgement till it leads the straight way to disaster and to death. But all murders, using the word as I do, have this in common. They’re the result of long preparation, or desperate planning, of the struggle of some tortured soul for freedom at any cost. And that’s where the detective comes in; he’s like a historian, tracing the hidden threads, diving into the forgotten past, exposing the plans and the motives of men, or like a surgeon, cutting down deep into a malignant growth, till
at last he reaches its hidden source and origin. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I think I appreciate the point about the little sources of friction, and all that at the beginning,’ said Maurice Hargreaves with a laugh. ‘When I first came to St Thomas’s I remember being told a story about old Fothergill, who was still about the place though he must have been pretty well eighty. Winn and Shirley will have heard the story before, but that doesn’t matter. Well, Fothergill, about twenty years before, had had a scout, and that scout disappeared. One day he was there doing his job, and the next he just wasn’t. He disappeared altogether and no one ever saw him again. There was no explanation, and there never has been, but gradually a legend grew up, and finally everyone accepted it as part of the college history. What had happened, so the legend went, was this. When Fothergill was first appointed to his fellowship his scout brought him two fried eggs for breakfast. Fothergill couldn’t stand fried eggs at any price, but he was terribly shy and frightened of his scout, and so he ate both the eggs and said nothing. The scout thought that he had found out, first guess, what Fothergill really liked for breakfast. He ordered fried eggs the next morning, and Fothergill ate them again. So then the scout made it a standing order. Every day Fothergill tried to make up his mind to speak, and every day it became more difficult. How could he say after a month of fried eggs that he had only eaten them because he was afraid of saying that he hated them? Gradually he got a dreadful inferiority complex; he loathed the eggs; he couldn’t tell the scout so. And that went on for twenty years. At last he couldn’t bear it any longer and one night when his scout came in with his whisky after dinner he quietly murdered him, and buried him that night in the college meadow. Next morning, when his scout didn’t turn up, the man on the next stair came instead to call Fothergill, and to ask if there were any orders. “A hot bath and sausages for breakfast,” said Fothergill, and then went to sleep again for another half-hour.’

  Maurice’s story had relieved the tension, and I felt glad that he had told it, for Brendel had spoken with so much feeling that I feared the discussion was tending to become too serious to be altogether pleasant. Prendergast, however, who had hung on the Professor’s words ever since he had come into Common Room, had no intention of allowing the main topic to drop.

  ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that a real murderer, the sort of murderer that you have described, often escapes?’

  ‘Hardly ever,’ said Brendel. ‘How often is the murderer equal to his task? He is often ignorant of the methods or the implements which he must use, he often makes some elementary mistake, he is often destroyed by some unforeseen accident, some chance encounter or some unlucky remark. And there’s another point, too. Have you ever considered how well, how intimately, you must know a man to murder him?’

  ‘No, never,’ said little Mitton involuntarily, though the question had not been directed specially to him.

  ‘Think about that, then. They say that a man ought to know a woman well when he marries her, but how much better must the true murderer know his victim? He studies his every action and his every thought. He watches him from day to day, plotting and observing. His whole mind is filled and obsessed by the thought of his victim; he knows him as well as and better than he knows himself. And because men have few intimates, and because the society in which any man lives is small, it follows that the possible murderers of any one man are very, very few. A detective should never forget the importance of propinquity when he’s searching for the murderer. It’s the first essential, the necessary condition of guilt. Strangers don’t commit murders, though they may do acts of violence. Yet with all these difficulties the thing you suggest can be done. Listen. We are all intelligent men here – we may say that without conceit – if one of us planned a murder he could carry it out, and he could, if he would only be patient enough, carry it out without being discovered. For the cold passionless man of science can surely destroy traces and leave no clues. Only his nerve must be steel, and his patience the patience of Job.’

  ‘Do you think that the successful murderer plans his whole crime from beginning to end before he acts at all?’ said Dixon.

  ‘Sometimes, but not always. In the poison cases he often does. But there is another type as well, the type that makes up his mind, and then waits and waits and waits until fate throws into his hands the perfect opportunity to strike. He is the most dangerous of them all – the cold-blooded murderer, who has the patience to wait as well as the will to kill.’

  As he finished his sentence the door opened and Callender, the Common Room butler, entered the room with coffee. I had not rung, but he had orders to bring in coffee at twenty minutes to nine if it had not been ordered before. I could not help feeling glad of the interruption, for whatever the others might think I was myself definitely uncomfortable at the turn which the conversation had taken. I should much have preferred to discuss the rival merits of the ports of the great vintage years than the motives of even the most ‘dignified’ murderers.

  Shepardson drank his coffee quickly and got up from the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I must go. I’ve got a couple of pupils at a quarter to nine.’

  ‘Rather severe, isn’t it,’ said Doyne, ‘to take them on the last night of toggers?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s only Howe and Martin. Neither of them are rowing men, and to-night’s as good as any other evening for them, or as bad, for that matter, for I can’t get much work out of either of them.’

  ‘I must go, too. I want to go up to my Lab.,’ said Mottram.

  He got up and followed Shepardson from the room. It was Mottram’s habit to work in the laboratory, which was in South Parks Road, four or five evenings in the week. Sometimes he went early, sometimes late, often he stayed for the greater part of the night. He kept a small Morris two-seater, which he used to leave just outside college before dinner, and which often remained out of doors all night.

  I watched him go with a feeling both of sympathy and pity. It is true that I did not know him well, and that I was totally ignorant of the nature of his work. Besides, his silence and his shyness made contact with him difficult, and intimacy impossible. But I did know that a week or two before a shattering blow had fallen on him, and I wished from the bottom of my heart that I knew how to assist and befriend him. For four years Mottram had been engaged on a piece of difficult and most important research; if it was successful he would have in his hands the cure for one of the most dangerous of diseases. He had worked day by day with unfaltering application, and had refused to be deterred by many set-backs and many disappointments. He had refrained, too, from those publications of partial results by which many scientists are wont to advertise their industry and acquire a reputation for learning. After about three years of endeavour Mottram seemed to be within sight of success; Dixon, who was in touch with the medical faculty, had kept me posted as to the progress of the research, and had told me with growing excitement that after a few more months, to satisfy himself of the accuracy of his results, Mottram would be in a position to give his discovery to the world. And then, quite suddenly, the blow fell. A German in Freiburg, who had apparently been following much the same line of investigation, published in a leading journal, and with great flourish of trumpets, a paper describing his researches and their results. There was, so Dixon sorrowfully informed me, only one conclusion. Mottram’s work was now superfluous. Some few additions he might indeed contribute; but the main credit, the honour for which he had striven, had gone elsewhere. He took the blow well, indeed many of his acquaintances knew nothing of it. But for the last weeks he had become even more silent, more retiring, more aloof than before, and I felt miserably certain that he felt what had occurred as a catastrophe. I had made one attempt at commiseration, and had been firmly, almost rudely, rebuffed. He said rather grimly that such things happened, and that it really mattered little since the benefit to humanity was the same whether it came from Freiburg or Oxford, and he wanted no sympathy. To me the whole thing seemed cruel and unf
air. Some of the members of our Common Room, notably Maurice Hargreaves, had been inclined to scoff a little at our brilliant medical researcher, who never produced any results. I felt that all their criticisms, which ought to have been silenced by a great achievement, would now gain in volume and in power to hurt.

  We had moved from the table to the fire when coffee was finished, and were smoking contentedly whilst behind us Callender and his boy were busy clearing away the fruit and glasses and all the débris of dessert. Brendel had wished, I saw, to lead the conversation into other channels, but Hargreaves, Prendergast, and Doyne were obviously keenly interested in his criminal investigations and had begged him to tell them something of some of the cases which had occupied his attention in Vienna. He gave way good-temperedly enough, and I, too, became enthralled as he unfolded to us the history of a poisoning mystery, of which I remembered to have read a brief and garbled account in my paper some few weeks before. More and more I had the impression that in Brendel were combined many of the qualities that I most admired. He seemed to unite an instinctive sympathy with his fellow-men with an astonishing power of piercing to the essentials of every problem. I found myself wondering what Shirley’s intellect might not have accomplished if he could have added to it something of this visitor’s broad humanity and patience.

  Nine o’clock struck, and Shirley himself, who had been listening keenly but saying little, rose to his feet.

  ‘Hargreaves,’ he said, ‘I came in to dine really to see all the new library plans and discuss them with you. Are you ready for them now? I mustn’t be too late in getting home.’