This damned business of Lathom’s.

People write books about murders, and the nice young men and women in them enjoy the job of detecting. It is a good game and I like reading the books. But the emotions of the nice young people are so well-regulated, or so perfunctory, or something. They don’t feel like worms and get put off their dinners when they have succeeded in squeezing a damaging admission out of a friend. They don’t seem to suffer from fits of retching terror for fear they should find out something definite. Nor, while struggling with these complicated miseries, do they ever have to fulfil contracts with publishers. Sometimes they are filled with a stern sorrow⁠—a nice, Brutus-like sentiment. I envy their nerves.

My nerves went back on me about the time of our visit to St. Anthony’s. I took a kind of hysterical pleasure in pointing out that we had no proof of the murder. I didn’t want proof. I didn’t want to know. It was like writing one of those horrible letters which call for a decisive answer one way or another. You post it and wait, and you know that one morning you will see your correspondent’s handwriting on an envelope, and feel as hollow as a piece of bamboo. And you wait. Nothing comes. And after a time you say, “It’s been lost in the post. Now I need not know. Not now, at any rate. I can still pretend that it’s all right. Nothing will happen today. I can eat my dinner and listen to the wireless⁠—and perhaps it will go on like that forever.”

The answer to the Lathom problem seemed to have been lost in the post. We did not talk about it at home. My wife knew that I winced from it. It made other subjects impossible, too. Women, for instance, and the way they influence their lovers⁠—we would start as far off as Gordon Craig’s theatre-masks or Gryll Grange and Lord Curryfin’s echeia, and before we had gone far, the figure of Clytemnestra would come bobbing over the horizon, and I would be talking hurriedly, dismissing it, rushing into technicalities about epode and stasimen, or about the chorus or the machines⁠—anything. Or if Elizabeth merely asked what we should have for dinner, it seemed difficult to think of anything that was not flavoured with mushrooms or founded on beef-stock. We lived for a whole week on fish once, so sensitive did our minds become.

I got over it, more or less, after a time and, mercifully, Lathom let me alone. It was not till March that a faint reminding echo of the thing sounded faintly over the breakfast-table. I got a note from Mr. Perry, the parson to whom I had once lent a volume of Eddington. At the sight of his name I got a kind of painful twitching in the sore place.

The note was to invite me to dinner. An old college friend of his, the extremely celebrated Professor Hoskyns, was coming over to spend the evening with him. Hoskyns is, of course, a very brilliant physicist, and Perry thought it would interest me to meet him. One or two other people were coming as well. If I could put up with a very simple meal, he thought we should enjoy a really enjoyable talk.

My first instinct was to refuse. I hated the idea of going into the district and of seeing anybody even remotely connected with the Harrisons. But the idea of meeting Hoskyns was fascinating. I have that kind of vaguely inquiring mind that likes to be told what is going on, even though I could not be troubled to make a single experiment myself, and should not have the vaguest idea what experiment to make. A pap-fed, negative, twentieth-century mind, open on all sides and windswept by every passing gust. Elizabeth thought that a chat with a bunch of scientific men would do me good. We need not, she said, mention the Harrisons. In the end, I accepted, and I rather think Elizabeth must have conveyed some sort of warning to Perry, for the Harrisons were not mentioned.

Perry’s shabby little sitting-room seemed crowded with men and smoke when I arrived. Professor Hoskyns, long, thin, bald, and much more human-looking than his Press photographs, was installed in a broken-springed leather armchair and called Perry “Jim.” There was also a swarthy little man in spectacles, whom they both called “Stingo,” and who turned out to be Professor Matthews, the biologist, the man who has done so much work on heredity. A large, stout, red-faced person with a boisterous manner was introduced as Waters. He was younger than the rest, but they all treated him with deference, and it presently appeared that he was the coming man in chemistry. Desultory conversation made it clear that Matthews, Hoskyns and Perry had been contemporaries at Oxford, and that Waters had been brought by Matthews, with whom he was on terms of the heartiest friendship and disagreement. A thin youth, with an eager manner and an irrepressible forelock, completed the party. He sported a clerical collar and informed me that he was the new curate, and that it was “a wonderful opportunity” to start his ministry under a man like Mr. Perry.

The dinner was satisfying. A vast beefsteak pudding, an apple-pie of corresponding size, and tankards of beer, quaffed from Perry’s old rowing-cups, put us all into a mellow humour. Perry’s asceticism did not, I am thankful to say, take the form of tough hash and lemonade, in spite of the presence on his walls of a series of melancholy Arundel prints, portraying brown and skinny anchorites, apparently nourished on cabbage-water. It rather tended to the idea of: “Beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity and beer,” and I judged that in their younger days, my fellow-guests had kept the progs busy. However, the somewhat wearisome flood of undergraduate reminiscence was stemmed after a time with suitable apologies, and Matthews said, a little provocatively:

“So here we all are. I never thought you’d stick to it, Perry. Which has made your job hardest⁠—the War or people like us?”

“The War,” said Perry, immediately. “It has taken the heart out of people.”

“Yes. It showed things up a bit,” said Matthews. “Made it hard to believe in anything.”

“No,” replied the priest. “Made it easy to believe and difficult not to believe⁠—in anything. Just anything. They believe in everything in a languid sort of way⁠—in you, in me, in Waters, in Hoskyns, in mascots, in spiritualism, in education, in the daily papers⁠—why not? It’s easier, and the various things cancel out and so make it unnecessary to take any definite steps in any direction.”

“Damn the daily papers,” said Hoskyns. “And damn education. All these get-clever-quick articles and sixpenny textbooks. Before one has time to verify an experiment, they’re all at you, shrieking to have it formulated into a theory. And if you do formulate it, they misunderstand it, or misapply it. If anybody says there are vitamins in tomatoes, they rush out with a tomato-theory. If somebody says that gamma-rays are found to have an action on cancer-cells in mice, they proclaim gamma-rays as a cure-all for everything from old age to a cold in the head. And if anybody goes quietly away into a corner to experiment with high-voltage electric currents, they start a lot of ill-informed rubbish about splitting the atom.”

“Yes,” said Matthews, “I thought I saw some odd remarks attributed to you the other day about that.”

“Wasting my time,” said Hoskyns. “I told them exactly what they put into my mouth. You’re right, Jim, they’d believe anything. The elixir of life⁠—that’s what they really want to get hold of. It would look well in a headline. If you can’t give ’em a simple formula to cure all human ills and explain creation, they say you don’t know your business.”

“Ah!” said Perry, with a twinkle of the eye, “but if the Church gives them a set of formulae for the same purpose, they say they don’t want formulae or dogmas, but just a loving wistfulness.”

“You’re not up-to-date enough,” said Waters. “They like their formulae to be red-hot, up-to-the-minute discoveries.”

“Why, so they are,” said Perry. “Look at Stingo here. He tells them that if two unfit people marry, their unfitness will be visited on their children unto the third and fourth generation, after which they will probably die out through mere degeneration. We’ve been telling them that for three or four thousand years, and Matthews has only just caught up to us. As a matter of fact, you people are on our side. If you tell them the things, they may perhaps come to believe in them.”

“And possibly act on them, you think?” said Matthews. “But we have to do all the work for them, just as you have to do the godly living.”

“That’s not altogether true,” said Perry.

“Near enough. But we do get on a bit faster, because we can give reasons for things. Show me a germ, and I’ll tell you how to get rid of plague or cholera. Call it Heaven’s judgment for sin, and all you can do is to sit down under it.”

“But surely,” struck in the curate, “we are expressly warned in Scripture against calling things judgments for sin. How about those eighteen on whom the Tower of Siloam fell?”

“If it was anybody’s sin,” said Perry, “it was probably the carelessness of the people who built the tower.”

“And that’s usually a sin that finds somebody out,” added Waters. “Unfortunately, the sinner isn’t always the victim.”

“Why should it be?” said Matthews. “Nature does not work by a scheme of poetical justice.”

“Nor does God,” said Perry. “We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable cell, Stingo?”

“No,” said Matthews. “It is you that have tried to keep up that story about Man in the image of God and lord of nature and so on. But trace the chain back and you will find every link hold⁠—you yourself, compounded from your father and mother by the mechanical chemistry of the chromosomes. Back to your ancestors, back to prehistoric Neanderthal Man and his cousin, Aurignacian. Neanderthal was a mistake, he wouldn’t work properly and died out, but the line goes on back, dropping the misfits, leaving the stabilised forms on the way⁠—back to Arboreal Man, to the common ancestor Tarsius, to the first Mammal, to the ancestral bird-form, back to the Reptiles, the Trilobites, back to the queer, shapeless jellies of life that divide and subdivide eternally in the waters. The things that found some kind of balance with their environment persisted, the things that didn’t, died out; and here and there some freak found its freakishness of advantage and started a new kind of life with a new equilibrium. At what point, Perry, will you place your image of God?”

“Well,” said Perry, “I should not attempt to deny that Adam was formed of the dust of the earth. And your ape-and-tiger ancestry at least provides me with a scientific authority for original sin. What a mercy the Church stuck to that dogma, in spite of Rousseau and the noble savage. If she hadn’t, you scientists would have forced it back on her, and how silly we should all have looked then.”

“But it was all guesswork,” retorted Matthews, “unless you call it inspiration, and very inaccurate at that. If the author of Genesis had said that man was made of seawater, he would have been nearer the truth.”

“Well,” said Waters, “he put the beginnings of life on the face of the waters, which wasn’t so very far off.”

“But how did life begin?” I asked. “After all, there is a difference between the Organic and the Inorganic. Or there appears to be.”

“That’s for Waters to say,” said Matthews.

“I can’t be very didactic about that,” said the chemist. “But it appears possible that there was an evolution from Inorganic to Organic through the Colloids. We can’t say much more, and we haven’t⁠—so far⁠—succeeded in producing it in the laboratory. Matthews probably still believes that Mind is a function of Matter, but if he asks me to demonstrate it for him, I must beg to be excused. I can’t even show that Life is a function of Matter.”

“The Behaviourists seem to think that what looks like Intelligence and Freewill are merely mechanical responses to material stimuli,” I suggested.

“That’s all very well,” said Hoskyns, emerging with a grin from a cloud of tobacco-smoke, “but all you people talk so cheerfully about Matter, as if you knew what it was. I don’t, and it’s more or less my job to know. Go back again, go past your colloids and your seawater. Go back to the dust of the earth and the mass of rotating cinders which was before the ocean even began. Go back to the sun, which threw the planets off so unexpectedly, owing to a rare accident which might not happen in a million light-years. Go back to the nebula. Go back to the atom. Do some of the famous splitting we hear so much about. Where is your Matter? It isn’t. It is a series of pushes or pulls or vortices in nothingness. And as for your train of mechanical causation, Matthews, when you come down to it, it resolves itself into a series of purely fortuitous movements of something we can’t define in a medium that doesn’t exist. Even your heredity-business is fortuitous. Why one set of chromosomes more than any other? Your chain of causation would only be a real one if all possible combinations and permutations were worked out in practice. Something is going on, that is as certain as anything can be⁠—that is, I mean, it is the fundamental assumption we are bound to make in order to reason at all⁠—but how it started or why it started is just as mysterious as it was when the first thoughtful savage invented a god to explain it.”

“Why should it ever have started at all?” said Matthews. “As Matter passes from one form to another, so forces change from one to another. Why should we suppose a beginning⁠—or an end if it comes to that? Why not a perpetually shifting kaleidoscope, going through all its transformations and starting again?”

“Why, my lad,” replied Hoskyns, “because in that case you will come slap up against the second law of thermodynamics, and that will be the end of you.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Perry, “the formula that starts so charmingly about ‘Nothing in the statistics of an assemblage’⁠—that appears to be all the Law and the Prophets nowadays.”

“Yes,” said Hoskyns. “Its general meaning is that Time only works in one direction, and that when all the permutations and combinations have been run through, Time will stop, because there will be nothing further by which we can distinguish its direction. All the possibilities will have been worked out, all the electrons will have been annihilated, and there will be nothing more for them to do and no radiant energy left for them to do it with. That is why there must be an end. And if an end, presumably a beginning.”

“And the end is implicit in the beginning?” said I.

“Yes; but the intermediate stages are not inevitable in detail, only overwhelmingly probable in the gross. There, Perry, if you like, you can reconcile Foreknowledge with Freewill.”

“Life, then, I suppose, is but one more element of randomness,” said I, “in the randomness of things.”

“Presumably,” said Hoskyns.

There was a pause.

“What is Life?” I asked, suddenly.

“Well, Pontius,” said Waters, “if we could answer that question we should probably not need to ask the others. At present⁠—chemically speaking⁠—the nearest definition I can produce is that it is a kind of bias⁠—a lopsidedness, so to speak. Possibly that accounts for its oddness.”

“I’ve said that kind of thing myself,” I said, rather astonished, “just as a sort of feeble witticism. Have I hit on something true by accident?”

“More or less. That is to say, it is true that, up to the present, it is only living substance that has found the trick of transforming a symmetric, optically inactive compound into a single, asymmetric, optically active compound. At the moment that Life appeared on this planet, something happened to the molecular structure of things. They got a twist, which nobody has ever succeeded in reproducing mechanically⁠—at least, not without an exercise of deliberate selective intelligence, which is also, as I suppose you’ll allow, a manifestation of Life.”

“Thank you,” said Perry. “Do you mind saying the first part over again, in words that a child could understand?”

“Well, it’s like this,” said Waters. “When the planet cooled, the molecules of that original inorganic planetary matter were symmetric⁠—if crystallised, the crystals were symmetric also. That is, they were alike on both sides, like a geometrical cube, and their reversed or mirror-images would be identical with themselves. Substances of this kind are said to be optically inactive; that is to say, if viewed through the polariscope, they have no power to rotate the beam of polarised light.”

“We will take your word for it,” said Perry.

“Oh, well, that’s quite simple. Ordinarily speaking, the vibrations in the aether⁠—need I explain aether?”

“I wish you could,” said Hoskyns.

“We will pass aether,” said Perry.

“Thank you. Well, ordinarily the aetheric vibrations which propagate the light takes place in all directions at right angles to the path of the ray. If you pass the ray through a crystal of Iceland spar, these vibrations are all brought into one plane, like a flat ribbon. That is what is called a beam of polarised light. Very well, then. If you pass this polarised light through a substance whose molecular structure is symmetric, nothing happens to it; the substance is optically inactive. But if you pass it through, say, a solution of cane sugar, the beam of polarised light will be twisted, and you will get a spiral effect, like twisting a strip of paper either to the right or to the left. The cane sugar is optically active. And why? Because its molecular structure is asymmetric. The crystals of sugar are not fully developed. There is an irregularity on one side, and the crystal and its mirror image are reversed, like my right hand and my left.” He laid the palm of the right hand on the back of the left to show his meaning. We all frowned and practised on our own hands.

“Very good,” continued Waters. “Now, we can produce in the laboratory, by synthesis from inorganic substances, other substances which were at one time thought to be only the products of living tissues⁠—camphor, for instance, and some of the alkaloids used in medicine. But what is the difference between our process and that of Nature? What happens is this. The substance produced by synthesis always appears in what is called a racemic form. It consists of two sets of substances⁠—one set having its asymmetry right-handed and the other left-handed, so that the product as a whole behaves like an inorganic, symmetric compound; that is, its two asymmetrics cancel one another out, and the product is optically inactive and has no power to rotate the beam of polarised light. To get a substance exactly equivalent to the natural product, we have to split it into its two asymmetric forms. We can’t do that mechanically. We can do it by the exercise of our living intelligence, of course, by laboriously picking out the crystals. Or we can do it by swallowing the substance, when our bodies will absorb and digest the dextro-rotating form of, for example, glucose, and pass the laevo-rotating form out unchanged. Or we can get a living fungus to do it for us, such as blue mould, which will feed on and destroy the dextro-rotatory half of the racemic form of paratartaric acid and leave unchanged the laevo-rotatory half, which is the artificial, laboratory-made half. But we can’t, by one mechanical laboratory process, turn an inorganic, inactive, symmetric compound into one single, asymmetric, optically active compound⁠—and that is what living matter will do cheerfully, day by day.”

Waters finished his exposition with a smart little thump of the fist on the table. I knew what that was. It was the postman’s knock, bringing the answer to that letter of mine. A horrid sinking feeling at the solar plexus warned me that in a very few minutes I should have to ask a question. Why need I do it? The subject was remote and difficult. I could easily pretend not to understand. If there really was a difference between the synthetic and the natural product, it was not my business to investigate it. Waters was changing the subject. He had gone back to the first day of creation. Hang him! Let him stay there!

“So that, as Professor Japp said, as long ago as 1898, ‘The phenomena of stereo-chemistry support the doctrine of vitalism as revived by the younger physiologists, and point to the existence of a directive force, which enters upon the scene with Life itself and which, in no way violating the laws of the kinetics of atoms’⁠—that ought to comfort you, Hoskyns⁠—‘determines the course of their operation within the living organism. That is that at the moment when Life first arose, a directive force came into play⁠—a force of precisely the same character as that which enables the intelligent operator, by the exercise of his will, to select one crystallised enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric opposite.’ I learnt that passage by heart once, as a safeguard against cocksureness and a gesture of proper humility in face of my subject.”

“In other words,” said Matthews, “you believe in miracles, and something appearing out of nowhere. I am sorry to find you on the side of the angels.”

“It depends what you mean by miracles. I think there is an intelligence behind it all. Else, why anything at all?”

“You have Jeans on your side anyway,” put in Hoskyns. “He says, ‘Everything points with overwhelming force to a definite event, or series of events, of creation at some time or times, not infinitely remote. The universe cannot have originated by chance out of its present ingredients.’ I can’t tell you what produced the first molecules of gas, and you can’t tell me what produced the first asymmetric molecules of Life. The parson here may think he knows.”

“I don’t know,” said Perry, “but I give it a name. I call it God. You don’t know what the aether is, but you give it a name, and deduce its attributes from its behaviour. Why shouldn’t I do likewise? You people are making it all very much easier for me.”

It was no good. I had to ask my question. I burst in, violently, inappropriately, on this theological discussion:

“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that it is possible to differentiate a substance produced synthetically in the laboratory from one produced by living tissue?”

“Certainly,” said Waters, turning to me in some surprise, but apparently accepting my tardy realisation of this truth as mere vagary of my slow and unscientific wits. “So long, of course, as the artificial substance remains in the first or racemic form, for this would be optically inactive, while that from the living tissues would rotate the beam of polarised light, when viewed in the polariscope. If, however, that racemic form had been already split up by the intelligent operator, or some other living agency, into its two dextro- and laevo-rotary forms, it would be impossible to distinguish between them.”

I saw a path of escape opening up. Surely the synthetic muscarine at St. Anthony’s would have had this other operation performed on it. There was no reason at all why I should interfere. I relapsed into silence, and the conversation wandered on.

I was recalled to myself by a movement about me. Matthews was explaining that he had to be getting home. Waters rose to accompany him. In a minute he would be gone and the opportunity lost. I had only to sit still.

I got up. I made my fatuous farewells. I said I had a perfectly good wife to go home to. I thanked my host and said how much I had enjoyed the evening. I followed the other men out into the narrow hall, with its loaded umbrella-stand and ugly, discoloured wallpaper.

“Dr. Waters,” I said.

“Yes?” He turned smiling towards me. I must say something now or he would think me a fool.

“May I have a word with you?”

“By all means. Which way do you go?”

“Bloomsbury,” said I, hoping desperately that he lived at Hendon or Harringay.

“Excellent, I am going that way myself. Shall we share a taxi?”

I murmured something about Professor Matthews.

“No, no,” said he, “I’m going by tube to Earl’s Court.”

We found our taxi and got in.

“Well, now?” said Waters.

I was in for it now. I told him the whole story.

“By God,” he said, “that’s damned interesting. Fine idea for a murder. Of course, any jury in the country would be only too ready to believe it was accident. Tempting Providence, and all that. And unless your man was fool enough to use the synthetic muscarine in its racemic form, you know, I’m very much afraid he’s pulled it off. There’s a chance, of course. They may not have gone further than that. Why didn’t you ask Benson while you were about it?”

“I thought of doing so,” I admitted. “At least, I didn’t know about this racemic business, but I thought there might be some way of telling the artificial stuff from the real. But Harrison seemed satisfied⁠—”

“He would be. I know these people. Wrapped up in their own subjects. An engineer⁠—he ought to know something about molecular structure. But no. He’s no occasion to study Organic, so it doesn’t occur to him that there’s anything to know about it. The word of a first-year student at Anthony’s is enough for him. You have more imagination. Why didn’t you⁠—?”

“I don’t know that I quite wanted to.”

“Let bad alone, eh? But damn it, it’s interesting. I say, what a scoop for the papers, if it comes off! ‘First murder ever caught by the polariscope.’ Better than Crippen and the wireless. Only they’ll have a bit of a job explaining it. Now, look here, what are we going to do about it? Who did the analysis?”

“Lubbock.”

“Oh, yes⁠—Home Office man, of course. We’ll have to get on to him. It’s chance if he’s kept the stuff by him. What? Oh, he has. That’s all right then. We’ve only got to take a squint at it and then we shall know. I mean, if the stuff really is racemic, we shall know. If not, we never shall. What’s the time? Quarter-past eleven. No time like the present. Here, driver!”

He thrust his head out of the window and gave an address in Woburn Square.

“It’s all on our way, and Lubbock never goes to bed before midnight. I know him well. He’ll be keen on this.”

His energy swept me up, feebly protesting, and in a few minutes’ time we were standing on Sir James Lubbock’s doorstep, ringing the bell.

The door was opened by a manservant, of whom Waters inquired whether Sir James was at home.

“No, sir. He is working late tonight, sir, at the Home Office. I think it’s the arsenic case, sir.”

“Oh, of course. That’s luck for us, Munting. We’ll run down and catch him there. You might give him a ring, Stevens, and say I’m coming down to see him on an urgent matter. You know who I am?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Dr. Waters. Very good, sir. You’ll find him in the laboratory, sir.”

“Right. We’d better hurry up, or we may just miss him.”

We plunged back into the taxi.

“Shall we find any difficulty in getting in?”

“Oh, no. I’ve been there before. We’re making very good time. Provided he hadn’t started before Stevens got through to him, he’ll wait for us. Ah! here we are.”

We drew up at a side door in the big Government building. After a short colloquy with the man on duty, we were passed through. I stumbled at Waters’ heels through a number of dreary corridors, till we fetched up in a kind of small anteroom.

“I feel strongly persuaded,” I said, “that I am on a visit to the dentist.”

“And you hope very much he’ll say there’s nothing to be done to you this time. I, on the contrary, hope very much that it’s something malignant and unusual. Have a fag.”

I accepted the fag. I tried to think of Harrison, perishing horribly in his lonely shack, but instead I could only see Lathom with his hair rumpled and his teeth set, painting with his usual careless brilliance. I got the idea that God or Nature or Science or some other sinister and powerful thing had set a trap for him, and that I was pushing him into it. I thought it was ruthless of God or whoever it was. Pom, pomty; pom, pomty; pom, pomty; pom, pomty⁠—I was nervously humming something and I couldn’t think what. Oh, yes⁠—Haydn’s Creation⁠—that bit, where the kettledrums thump so gently, so ruthlessly, on one note⁠—“And-the-spi‑rit-of-God (pomty) moved-upon-the-face-of-the-waters-(pom)”⁠—only apparently it wasn’t the Spirit of God, but an asymmetric molecule, which didn’t fit the rhythm. Somebody was walking down the corridor, with a soft, muffled beat, rather like kettledrums. “Let there be light (pomty-pom) and there was⁠—”

The door opened.

I recognised Sir James Lubbock at once, of course, though now, in a white overall and pair of crimson carpet slippers, he presented an appearance less point-devise than he had done at the inquest. He greeted Waters cordially and received my name with a faint look of puzzledom.

“Mr. Munting? Yes⁠—let me see, haven’t we met before?”

I reminded him of Manaton.

“Of course, of course. I knew I knew your face. Mr. Munting, the novelist. Delighted to make your acquaintance under more pleasant auspices.”

“I don’t know that they are much more pleasant,” said Waters. “As a matter of fact, it’s the Harrison case we wanted to see you about.”

“Really? Has something fresh turned up? You know, the other day I had a letter from the man’s son. Rather an odd letter. He seemed to have got the idea that there was more in the case than met the eye. Hinted that we might have found something else⁠—strychnine or something. Quite ridiculous, of course. There wasn’t the faintest doubt about the cause of death. Muscarine poisoning. Perfectly straightforward.”

“Just so. By the way, Lubbock, did it by any chance occur to you to give that muscarine the once-over with the polariscope?”

“With the polariscope? Good heavens, no. Why should it? That wouldn’t tell one anything. You know all about muscarine. Dextro-rotatory. Nothing abstruse about it.”

“Oh, quite. But we’ve been having a little discussion, and⁠—as a matter of fact, Lubbock, it would relieve Mr. Munting’s mind⁠—and mine⁠—considerably, if you would just check up on that point.”

“Well, if you insist, there’s nothing easier. But what’s the mystery?”

“Nothing at all, probably. Just an extra bit of collateral evidence, that’s all.”

“You’ve something at the back of your mind, Waters. Can’t I be allowed to know?”

“I’ll tell you after you’ve done it.”

Sir James Lubbock shook his handsome grey head.

“That’s Waters all over. He’s like Sherlock Holmes. Never can resist a touch of the dramatic.”

“No,” said Waters. “It’s just native caution. Don’t want to commit myself and be made to look foolish.”

“Oh, well, come along and we’ll get it over.”

“Aren’t we interrupting your work?” I said. I hope this question was prompted by politeness, but I think I spoke in a vain hope of delaying the crisis.

“Not a bit. I’d just finished⁠—was packing up, in fact, when I got your message.”

We traversed some more corridors and eventually came out into a large laboratory, faintly lit by a single electric bulb. An attendant was just locking a cupboard. He turned as he saw us.

“It’s all right, Denis. I’ll see to things. You can trot away home.”

“Very well. Good night, Sir James.”

“Good night.”

Sir James switched on some more lights, flooding the gaunt room with what Poe has called somewhere a “ghastly and inappropriate splendour.” Stepping across to a tall cupboard labelled with his name, he unlocked it with a key that hung upon his watch-chain.

“Here’s my bluebeard’s chamber,” he said, smiling. “Relics of all kinds of crimes and tragedies. Bottled murders. Bottled suicides. Plenty of plots for novels here, Mr. Munting.”

I said I supposed so.

“Here we are, Harrison. Extract from stomach. Extract from vomit. Extract from dish of fungus. Which is it you particularly want, Waters?”

“Doesn’t matter. Try the extract from the dish of fungus. It’ll be less open to⁠—that is, it is possibly better for our purpose. What’s this, Lubbock?”

“That? Oh, that’s a fresh solution of muscarine I made myself for control purposes, to assist in determining the strength.”

“Made from the fungus?”

“Yes. I don’t altogether guarantee that I’ve isolated the principle. But it’s near enough.”

“Oh, yes. I’d like to have a look at that, too, if I may.”

“By all means.”

He brought the bottles out and set them on one of the laboratory tables. In appearance they were indistinguishable⁠—the same white salt that I had seen before in the laboratory at St. Anthony’s.

Sir James Lubbock unlocked another cupboard, and produced a large, heavy instrument, rather like a telescope fixed to a stand. He put it down beside the two bottles and departed in search of water. While he was preparing solutions from the respective bottles of muscarine, Waters turned to me.

“You’d better have this quite clear in your mind⁠—I mean, you’d like to know what you may expect to see, exactly.”

“Yes,” I said. “At present I feel rather like the good lady in The Moonstone, who wanted to know when the explosion would take place.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be so exciting as that. Cheer up, man, you look as white as a sheet. At the further end of the instrument is a thin plate of the semitransparent mineral, tourmaline. You’ve seen it in jewellers’ shops. Pretty stuff, and all that, and, what is more to the purpose, it has a very finely foliated structure. In a ray of ordinary light, the vibrations take place in all directions, but when passed through a slice of tourmaline they are confined to one plane, and the light is then polarised. We talked about that at dinner⁠—you remember. This slice of tourmaline is called the polariser. Right. Now at this end, near the eyepiece, is a second slice of tourmaline, which can be rotated, and which is called the analyser. Now, when the analyser is turned so that its foliations are parallel to those of the polariser, light will pass through both, but if the analyser is turned so that its foliations are at right angles to those of the polariser, then no light will pass and there will be darkness. All clear so far?”

“Perfectly.”

“Very well. Now, if, when the analyser is thus turned to darkness, I place the solution of an optically active substance between the two slices of tourmaline the light will⁠—you can tell me that yourself⁠—it’s a band of light, remember.”

“I remember. Yes. The band of light will be rotated as it passes through.”

“That’s right. It will come round into line with the foliations of the analyser, and⁠—”

“Come through!” said I, triumphantly.

“Thank God for a man of intelligent mind. As you rightly say, it will come through. And therefore you will see⁠—”

“Light!” said I.

(Pom, pomty; pom, pomty⁠—if I could have got rid of that relentless drumbeat. My heart seemed to be going very heavily too.)

“But if,” went on Waters, with his eye on Sir James, who was stirring his solutions with a glass rod over the sink, “if the substance should be optically inactive⁠—if, for example, it should turn out to be a synthetic product, prepared from inorganic substances in the laboratory⁠—then it will not rotate the beam of polarised light. The darkness will persist.”

I saw that.

“Well, now you perfectly understand. If, when we put the muscarine solution in the polariscope, we get light, it proves nothing. Either the stuff is natural, or else the synthetic preparation has already been split up into its two active forms, and we can make no pronouncement about it. But if we get darkness⁠—then it’s a pretty dark business, Mr. Munting.”

I nodded.

“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.”

I turned it, and the light vanished.

“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 lopsidedness 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.

I hope Lathom will not ring up again.