“Well, Waters,” said Sir James, cheerfully “finished your lecture?”
“Quite. The pupil is highly commended.”
“Good. Now, I’m in your hands, Waters. What do you want me to do?”
“I think we’ll have the control solution first, if you don’t mind. Now,
Mr. Munting, you will see how this substance, prepared from the living
tissue of a fungus, rotates the beam of polarised light. Right you are,
sir.”
Sir James handed me a glass cylinder, filled with a colourless solution.
I sniffed at it, but it had no smell.
“I shouldn’t taste it if I were you,” said Sir James, a little grimly.
He struck a match and lit a Bunsen burner, the flame of which played
upon a small mass of something held above it by a platinum projection.
“Sodium chloride,” said Waters; “in fact, not to make unnecessary
mystery about it, common salt. Shall I switch off?”
He snapped off the lights, and we were left with only the sodium flame.
In that green, sick glare a face floated close to mine—a
corpse-face—livid, waxen, stamped with decay—sharp-shadowed in the
nostrils and under the orbits—Harrison’s face, as I had seen it in “The
Shack,” opening a black mouth of complaint.
“Spectacular, isn’t it?” said Sir James, pleasantly, and I pulled myself
together and realised that I must look just as ghastly to him as he to
me. But for the moment the face had been Harrison’s, and from that
moment Lathom was nothing to me any more.
Sir James settled down to his experiment with comfortable deliberation.
He placed the cylinder containing the solution in the polariscope,
adjusted the eyepiece and looked. Then he turned to Waters.
“So far,” he said, dryly, “the laws of Nature appear to hold good. Do
you want to see?”
“I should like Mr. Munting to see,” said Waters. “Here you are. Wait a
minute. We’ll take the cylinder out for a moment. Come along. You shall
do it yourself.”
My heart _was_ thumping. To my excited imagination it seemed to shake
the table as I took Sir James’s place before the polariscope.
“We’ll start,” said Waters, “with the analyser parallel to the
polariser. Right you are. You see your beam of light? Now here’s the
adjustment. Turn it yourself.”