The Complete Four Just Men Page 56

  Manfred opened his eyes at this.

  ‘Your typists’ wages?’ he repeated slowly. ‘Are you preparing a book?’

  ‘Here are the ladies,’ said Dr Felix.

  His manner was abrupt to rudeness and later when they sat round the table in the little dining-room Manfred had further cause to wonder at the boorishness of this young scientist. He was seated next to Miss Moleneux and the meal was approaching its end when most unexpectedly he turned to the girl and in a loud voice said: ‘You haven’t kissed me today, Margaret.’

  The girl went red and white and the fingers that fidgeted with the table-ware before her were trembling when she faltered: ‘Haven’t – haven’t I, Felix?’

  The bright eyes of Gonsalez never left the doctor. The man’s face had gone purple with rage.

  ‘By God! This is a nice thing!’ he almost shouted. ‘I’m engaged to you. I’ve left you everything in my will and I’m allowing your mother a thousand a year and you haven’t kissed me today!’

  ‘Doctor!’ It was the mild but insistent voice of Gonsalez that broke the tension. ‘I wonder whether you would tell me what chemical is represented by the formula Cl2O5.’

  The doctor had turned his head slowly at the sound of Leon’s voice and now was staring at him. Slowly the strange look passed from his face and it became normal.

  ‘Cl2O5 is Oxide of Chlorine,’ he said in an even voice, and from thenceforward the conversation passed by way of acid reactions into a scientific channel.

  The only person at the table who had not been perturbed by Viglow’s outburst had been the dumpy complacent lady on Manfred’s right. She had tittered audibly at the reference to her allowance, and when the hum of conversation became general she lowered her voice and leant toward Manfred.

  ‘Dear Felix is so eccentric,’ she said, ‘but he is quite the nicest, kindest soul. One must look after one’s girls, don’t you agree, Señor?’

  She asked this latter question in very bad Spanish and Manfred nodded. He shot a glance at the girl. She was still deathly pale.

  ‘And I am perfectly certain she will be happy, much happier than she would have been with that impossible person.’

  She did not specify who the ‘impossible person’ was, but Manfred sensed a whole world of tragedy. He was not romantic, but one look at the girl had convinced him that there was something wrong in this engagement. Now it was that he came to a conclusion which Leon had reached an hour before, that the emotion which dominated the girl was fear. And he pretty well knew of whom she was afraid.

  Half an hour later when the tail light of Dr Viglow’s limousine had disappeared round a corner of the drive the two men went back to the drawing-room and Manfred threw a handful of kindling to bring the fire to a blaze.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ said Gonsalez, rubbing his hands together with evidence of some enjoyment.

  ‘I think it’s rather horrible,’ replied Manfred, settling himself in his chair. ‘I thought the days when wicked mothers forced their daughters into unwholesome marriages were passed and done with. One hears so much about the modern girl.’

  ‘Human nature isn’t modern,’ said Gonsalez briskly, ‘and most mothers are fools where their daughters are concerned. I know you won’t agree but I speak with authority. Mantegazza collected statistics of 843 families – ’

  Manfred chuckled.

  ‘You and your Mantegazza!’ he laughed. ‘Did that infernal man know everything?’

  ‘Almost everything,’ said Leon. ‘As to the girl,’ he became suddenly grave, ‘she will not marry him of course.’

  ‘What is the matter with him?’ asked Manfred. ‘He seems to have an ungovernable temper.’

  ‘He is mad,’ replied Leon calmly and Manfred looked at him.

  ‘Mad?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘Do you mean to say that he is a lunatic?’

  ‘I never use the word in a spectacular or even in a vulgar sense,’ said Gonsalez, lighting a cigarette carefully. ‘The man is undoubtedly mad. I thought so a few days ago and I am certain of it now. The most ominous test is the test of memory. People who are on the verge of madness or entering its early stages do not remember what happened a short time before. Did you notice how worried he was when I told him of the conversation we had this morning?’

  ‘That struck me as peculiar,’ agreed Manfred.

  ‘He was fighting,’ said Leon, ‘the sane half of his brain against the insane half. The doctor against the irresponsible animal. The doctor told him that if he had suddenly lost his memory for incidents which had occurred only a few hours before, he was on the high way to lunacy. The crazy half of the brain told him that he was such a wonderful fellow that the rules applying to ordinary human beings did not apply to him. We will call upon him tomorrow to see his laboratory and discover why he is paying £60 a week for typists,’ he said. ‘And now, my dear George, you can go to bed. I am going to read the excellent but often misguided Lombroso on the male delinquent.’

  Dr Viglow’s laboratory was a new red building on the edge of Dartmoor. To be exact, it consisted of two buildings, one of which was a large army hut which had been recently erected for the accommodation of the doctor’s clerical staff.

  ‘I haven’t met a professor for two or three years,’ said Manfred as they were driving across the moor, en route to pay their call, ‘nor have I been in a laboratory for five. And yet within the space of a few weeks I have met two extraordinary professors, one of whom I admit was dead. Also I have visited two laboratories.’

  Leon nodded.

  ‘Some day I will make a very complete examination of the phenomena of coincidence,’ he said.

  When they reached the laboratory they found a post-office van, backed up against the main entrance, and three assistants in white overalls were carrying post bags and depositing them in the van.

  ‘He must have a pretty large correspondence,’ said Manfred in wonder.

  The doctor, in a long white overall, was standing at the door as they alighted from their car, and greeted them warmly.

  ‘Come into my office,’ he said, and led the way to a large airy room which was singularly free from the paraphernalia which Gonsalez usually associated with such work-rooms.

  ‘You have a heavy post,’ said Leon and the doctor laughed quietly.

  ‘They are merely going to the Torquay post office,’ he said. ‘I have arranged for them to be despatched when – ’ he hesitated, ‘when I am sure. You see,’ he said, speaking with great earnestness, ‘a scientist has to be so careful. Every minute after he has announced a discovery he is tortured with the fear that he has forgotten something, some essential, or has reached a too hasty conclusion. But I think I’m right,’ he said, speaking half to himself. ‘I’m sure I’m right, but I must be even more sure!’

  He showed them round the large room, but there was little which Manfred had not seen in the laboratory of the late Professor Tableman. Viglow had greeted them genially, indeed expansively, and yet within five minutes of their arrival he was taciturn, almost silent, and did not volunteer information about any of the instruments in which Leon showed so much interest, unless he was asked.

  They came back to his room and again his mood changed and he became almost gay.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘by Jove, I’ll tell you! And no living soul knows this except myself, or realises or understands the extraordinary work I have been doing.’

  His face lit up, his eyes sparkled and it seemed to Manfred that he grew taller in this moment of exaltation. Pulling open a drawer of a table which stood against the wall he brought out a long porcelain plate and laid it down. From a wire-netted cupboard on the wall he took two tin boxes and with an expression of disgust which he could not disguise, turned the contents upon the slab. It was apparently a box full of common garden mould and then Leon saw to hi
s amazement a wriggling little red shape twisting and twining in its acute discomfort. The little red fellow sought to hide himself and burrowed sinuously into the mould.

  ‘Curse you! Curse you!’ The doctor’s voice rose until it was a howl. His face was twisted and puckered in his mad rage. ‘How I hate you!’

  If ever a man’s eyes held hate and terror, they were the eyes of Dr Felix Viglow.

  Manfred drew a long breath and stepped back a pace the better to observe him. Then the man calmed himself and peered down at Leon.

  ‘When I was a child,’ he said in a voice that shook, ‘I hated them and we had a nurse named Martha, a beastly woman, a wicked woman, who dropped one down my neck. Imagine the horror of it!’

  Leon said nothing. To him the earthworm was a genus of chaetopod in the section oligochaeta and bore the somewhat pretentious name of lumbricus terrestris. And in that way, Dr Viglow, eminent naturalist and scientist, should have regarded this beneficent little fellow.

  ‘I have a theory,’ said the doctor. He was calmer now and was wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, ‘that in cycles every type of living thing on the earth becomes in turn the dominant creature. In a million years’ time man may dwindle to the size of an ant and the earthworm, by its super-intelligence, its cunning and its ferocity, may be pre-eminent in the world! I have always thought that,’ he went on when neither Leon nor Manfred offered any comment. ‘It is still my thought by day and my dream by night. I have devoted my life to the destruction of this menace.’

  Now the earthworm is neither cunning nor intelligent and is moreover notoriously devoid of ambition.

  The doctor again went to the cupboard and took out a wide-necked bottle filled with a greyish powder. He brought it back and held it within a few inches of Leon’s face.

  ‘This is the work of twelve years,’ he said simply. ‘There is no difficulty in finding a substance which will kill these pests, but this does more.’

  He took a scalpel and tilting the bottle brought out a few grains of the powder on the edge of it. This he dissolved in a twenty-ounce measure which he filled with water. He stirred the colourless fluid with a glass rod, then lifting the rod he allowed three drops to fall upon the mould wherein the little creature was hidden. A few seconds passed, there was a heaving of the earth where the victim was concealed.

  ‘He is dead,’ said the doctor triumphantly and scraped away the earth to prove the truth of his words. ‘And he is not only dead, but that handful of earth is death to any other earthworm that touches it.’

  He rang a bell and one of his attendants came in.

  ‘Clear away that,’ he said with a shudder and walked gloomily to his desk.

  Leon did not speak all the way back to the house. He sat curled up in the corner of the car, his arms lightly folded, his chin on his breast. That night without a word of explanation he left the house, declining Manfred’s suggestion that he should walk with him and volunteering no information as to where he was going.

  Gonsalez walked by the cliff road, across Babbacombe Downs and came to the doctor’s house at nine o’clock that night. The doctor had a large house and maintained a big staff of servants, but amongst his other eccentricities was the choice of a gardener’s cottage away from the house as his sleeping place at night.

  It was only lately that the doctor had chosen this lonely lodging. He had been happy enough in the big old house which had been his father’s, until he had heard voices whispering to him at night and the creak of boards and had seen shapes vanishing along the dark corridors, and then in his madness he had conceived the idea that his servants were conspiring against him and that he might any night be murdered in his bed. So he had the gardener turned out of his cottage, had refurnished the little house, and there, behind locked doors, he read and thought and slept the nights away. Gonsalez had heard of this peculiarity and approached the cottage with some caution, for a frightened man is more dangerous than a wicked man. He rapped at the door and heard a step across the flagged floor.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked a voice.

  ‘It is I,’ said Gonsalez and gave the name by which he was known.

  After hesitation the lock turned and the door opened.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Viglow testily and locked the door behind him. ‘You have come to congratulate me, I am sure. You must come to my wedding too, my friend. It will be a wonderful wedding, for there I shall make a speech and tell the story of my discovery. Will you have a drink? I have nothing here, but I can get it from the house. I have a telephone in my bedroom.’

  Leon shook his head.

  ‘I have been rather puzzling out your plan, Doctor,’ he said, accepting the proffered cigarette, ‘and I have been trying to connect those postal bags which I saw being loaded at the door of your laboratory with the discovery which you revealed this afternoon.’

  Dr Viglow’s narrow eyes were gleaming with merriment and he leant back in his chair and crossed his legs, like one preparing for a pleasant recital.

  ‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘For months I have been in correspondence with farming associations, both here and on the Continent. I have something of a European reputation,’ he said, with that extraordinary immodesty which Leon had noticed before. ‘In fact, I think that my treatment for phylloxera did more to remove the scourge from the vineyards of Europe than any other preparation.’

  Leon nodded. He knew this to be the truth.

  ‘So you see, my word is accepted in matters dealing with agriculture. But I found after one or two talks with our own stupid farmers that there is an unusual prejudice against destroying – ’ he did not mention the dreaded name but shivered – ‘and that of course I had to get round. Now that I am satisfied that my preparation is exact, I can release the packets in the post office. In fact, I was just about to telephone to the postmaster telling him that they could go off – they are all stamped and addressed – when you knocked at the door.’

  ‘To whom are they addressed?’ asked Leon steadily.

  ‘To various farmers – some fourteen thousand in all in various parts of the country and Europe, and each packet has printed instructions in English, French, German and Spanish. I had to tell them that it was a new kind of fertiliser or they may not have been as enthusiastic in the furtherance of my experiment as I am.’

  ‘And what are they going to do with these packets when they get them?’ asked Leon quietly.

  ‘They will dissolve them and spray a certain area of their land – I suggested ploughed land. They need only treat a limited area of earth,’ he explained. ‘I think these wretched beasts will carry infection quickly enough. I believe,’ he leant forward and spoke impressively, ‘that in six months there will not be one living in Europe or Asia.’

  ‘They do not know that the poison is intended to kill – earthworms?’ asked Leon.

  ‘No, I’ve told you,’ snapped the other. ‘Wait, I will telephone the postmaster.’

  He rose quickly to his feet, but Leon was quicker and gripped his arm.

  ‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘you must not do this.’

  Dr Viglow tried to withdraw his arm.

  ‘Let me go,’ he snarled. ‘Are you one of those devils who are trying to torment me?’

  In ordinary circumstances, Leon would have been strong enough to hold the man, but Viglow’s strength was extraordinary and Gonsalez found himself thrust back into the chair. Before he could spring up, the man had passed through the door and slammed and locked it behind him.

  The cottage was on one floor and was divided into two rooms by a wooden partition which Viglow had erected. Over the door was a fanlight, and pulling the table forward Leon sprang on to the top and with his elbow smashed the flimsy frame.

  ‘Don’t touch that telephone,’ he said sternly. ‘Do you hear?’

  The do
ctor looked round with a grin. ‘You are a friend of those devils!’ he said, and his hand was on the receiver when Leon shot him dead.

  * * *

  Manfred came back the next morning from his walk and found Gonsalez pacing the lawn, smoking an extra long cigar.

  ‘My dear Leon,’ said Manfred as he slipped his arm in the other’s. ‘You did not tell me.’

  ‘I thought it best to wait,’ said Leon.

  ‘I heard quite by accident,’ Manfred went on. ‘The story is that a burglar broke into the cottage and shot the doctor when he was telephoning for assistance. All the silverware in the outer room has been stolen. The doctor’s watch and pocket-book have disappeared.’

  ‘They are at this moment at the bottom of Babbacombe Bay,’ said Leon. ‘I went fishing very early this morning before you were awake.’

  They paced the lawn in silence for a while and then: ‘Was it necessary?’ asked Manfred.

  ‘Very necessary,’ said Leon gravely. ‘You have to realise first of all that although this man was mad, he had discovered not only a poison but an infection.’

  ‘But, my dear fellow,’ smiled Manfred, ‘was an earthworm worth it?’

  ‘Worth more than his death,’ said Leon. ‘There isn’t a scientist in the world who does not agree that if the earthworm was destroyed the world would become sterile and the people of this world would be starving in seven years.’

  Manfred stopped in his walk and stared down at his companion.

  ‘Do you really mean that?’

  Leon nodded.

  ‘He is the one necessary creature in God’s world,’ he said soberly. ‘It fertilises the land and covers the bare rocks with earth. It is the surest friend of mankind that we know, and now I am going down to the post office with a story which I think will be sufficiently plausible to recover those worm poisoners.’

  Manfred mused a while, then he said: ‘I’m glad in many ways – in every way,’ he corrected. ‘I rather liked that girl, and I’m sure that impossible person isn’t so impossible.’