“Hold on to it,” said Waters, cheerfully, “so that you can be sure
there’s no hanky-panky. I’m putting the muscarine solution in again. Now
then!”
As he slipped the glass cylinder into place the circle of light
returned.
“Yes,” I said, “I see it.”
“Convincing demonstration of a miracle,” said Waters, “and the
lop-sidedness of things in general. That’s all right, then. Now we’ll
have a look at the stuff that killed Harrison. No. Respect for our
governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters. We’ll let Sir James
have a go first.”
Sir James, with a shrug, took my place at the instrument. Waters put his
hand on my arm.
With maddening deliberation, the analyst set the first cylinder
carefully on one side and took up the other. My mouth was dry as I
watched him. He put the cylinder into the polariscope and looked. There
was a pause. Then a grunt. Then his hand came up, feeling for the
adjustment. There was another pause and an exclamation of impatience.
Then his eyes was jerked back from the eyepiece and his head peered
round to examine the exterior of the instrument. Waters’ grip on my arm
became painful in its tightness. Sir James’s hand came round again,
feeling, this time, for the cylinder. He took it out, held it up, looked
at it and replaced it with very great care. He looked again, and there
was a long silence.
Then came Sir James’s voice, queer and puzzled.
“I say, Waters. There’s something funny here. Just have a look, will
you?”
With a final squeeze, Waters loosened his grip of me and took Sir
James’s place before the instrument. He moved the cylinder back and
forth once or twice and said, in a judicial tone, “Well!”
“What do you make of that?” said Sir James.
“One of two things,” said Waters, briskly, “either it’s a suspension of
the law of Nature, or this muscarine of yours is optically inactive.”
“What _do_ you suggest?” demanded Sir James.
“I suggest,” said Waters, “that this is a synthetic preparation in
racemic form.”
“But how could——?” Sir James broke off, and in the corpse-light I
watched his face as he revolved the possibilities in his mind. “You know
what that means, Waters.”
“I might hazard a guess.”
“Murder.”
“Yes, murder.”
There was another pause, in which the silence seemed to become
absolutely solid. Then Sir James said, very slowly:
“The man was murdered. My God, this is a lesson to me, Waters. Never to
overlook anything. Who would ever have thought——? But that’s no
excuse. I shall have to—I must verify it first, though. Do the
preparations again. But—what put you on to this?”
“Let’s go and get a drink,” said Waters, “and we’ll tell you all about
it. You’d better have a look at this first, Mr. Munting.”
I looked through the instrument. Dead blackness. But if the thing had
shown all the colours of the rainbow, I should have been in no state to
draw any conclusions from it. I sat stunned while somebody switched on
the lights, extinguished the Bunsen burner and locked all the apparatus
up again.
Then I found myself straggling after the other two, while they talked
about something or the other. I had an idea that I came into it, and
presently Waters turned back and thrust his arm into mine.
“What you want,” he said, “is a double Scotch, and no soda.”
I don’t very well remember getting home, but that, I think, was not due
to the double Scotch, but to bewilderment of mind. I do remember waking
my wife up and blurting out my story in a kind of confused misery, which
must have perplexed and alarmed her. And I remember saying that it was
quite useless to think of going to bed, because I should never sleep.
And I remember waking this morning very late, with the feeling that
someone was dead.
* * * * *
I have written all this down. I don’t know whether it is necessary,
because, of course, Sir James will be doing something about it by now.
But I promised a statement, and here it is.
One other thing has happened. As I was reading it through to see if it
was coherent, the telephone rang. My wife answered it. I heard her say:
“Yes?—Yes?—Yes?—who is it speaking, please? —Oh, yes—I’m not
sure—I’ll go and see—Will you hold the line a minute?”
She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, almost in a whisper:
“It’s Mr. Lathom, asking to speak to you.”
“Oh, God!” I said.
If I warned him now—there would still be time—and the man had been at
school with me—and we had lived in the same rooms—and he was a great
painter—something would be lost to the world if they hanged Lathom.
Elizabeth did nothing. She stood with the receiver in her hand.
“Tell him——”
“Yes?”
“Tell him I am out.”
She turned back to the instrument.
“I am so sorry, my husband is out. Can I give any message? No, very
well. You’ll ring up again. Good night.”
She came over and stood by me.
“Elizabeth, tell me, am I an unutterable sweep?”
“No. There was nothing else you could do.”
* * * * *
I want to know whether Lathom knows the sort of woman he did it for. I
want to know how much she really knows or suspects. I want to know
whether, when she wrote that letter which drove him to do it, she was
deceiving him or herself. I want to know whether, in all these months,
he has been thinking that she was worth it, or whether, in a ghastly
disillusionment, he has realised that the only real part of her was
vulgar and bad, and the rest merely the brilliant refraction of himself.
What is the good? Whatever he realised, he must have gone on telling
himself she was worth it, or he would have gone mad.
Perry would say that this was God’s judgment. Life, outraged,
vindicating itself against the powers of death and hell. Or no, Perry
expressly refuses to recognise judgments. Besides, if Lathom had known
just a little more about chemistry, he could have defeated the judgment.
Ignorance is no excuse in law. Nor in the law of Nature. Well, we know
that. All the same, if I were in Lathom’s place, I would hate to have
been tripped up by a miserable asymmetric molecule.