The Widening Stain

by W. Bolingbroke Johnson

  “Well,” said Professor Hyett, feeling the need for appeasement, “women do have a good deal to answer for. Look at Eve. I suppose, Belknap, if you had been Adam, you would never have been tempted?”

  Professor Belknap smiled. “No. I would have put Eve in her place. And saved the race a lot of trouble about Original Sin.”

  “He probably would have fixed it by bringing the race to a full stop right there,” said Hyett to Parry, sotto voce.

  Another conversation was rising to the surface.

  “Have you been out on the links at all, Caleb?” said Professor Casti.

  “I played nine holes yesterday. The leaves are beginning to fall, and you spend half your time hunting your ball. If this goes on, some day I’ll have to get a caddy. I would have done pretty well, though, if I hadn’t taken four shots to get out of the sand-trap on the seventh. I had to burrow for my ball like a mole.”

  Professor Hyett chuckled. “Parry has a great idea for a murder! He’s going to bury the body in a sand-trap, where Caleb will uncover it with his niblick.”

  Professor Parry smiled with much satisfaction.

  “But how are you going to get your corpse in the first place?” pursued Professor Hyett.

  “Well, I haven’t given the matter much thought. But I think I’d try to find something simple and obvious. None of these elaborate gadgets or mysterious poisons you read about in detective stories. Too much research necessary, and I have enough of that to do in my own field. What I think is this: we are so well protected by society and our own hygienic habits that we don’t realize we are protected. For instance, we’re so used to getting purified water that we drink any water that’s offered to us, provided it is in a glass. A little really foul water would destroy us. If we open a can of something, we immediately empty it out; never leave it in the can, for fear of poisoning. Well, I would leave some canned meat in the can for a week, and then mix it in my victim’s hash.”

  “I don’t think I would eat much of that hash,” said Professor Hyett.

  “Well then, I’ll get you good and tight some night and take you for a ride in your car to cool off, and when you pass out I’ll shut all the windows and leave the motor running. And everyone will say you did it yourself, in a fit of remorse for your evil life.”

  “I never get tight, and I never pass out. And I will remember to keep the top down, if I want to cool off.”

  “Well, there are lots of ways. I don’t want to give away my really good ones. Anyway, I think there’s too much fuss about ingenuity in murder nowadays. Perverse, I call it. I like the casual, offhand murders of the old aristocracy. There was a great chap in Dublin at the end of the eighteenth century. He killed a servant in his club, and ordered that the fellow should be put on his bill, at two hundred and fifty pounds. Buck English, his name was.”

  Professor Casti spoke up. “There was a very good method used in the famous Affaire des Poisons, in the seventeenth century.”

  The smoking-room looked to Professor Casti politely.

  “There was a noble lady named, if I remember rightly, Madame de Poulaillon. She impregnated her husband’s undershirt in a solution of arsenic.”

  “Did it kill him?”

  “No. But it made him very sick for about three months. She finally had to hire some soldiers to kill him. And the soldiers took her money and denounced her to her husband.”

  “What do you make of that, Parry?” said Professor Hyett.

  “I make of it that it is a mistake to wear an undershirt for three months.”

  “We have some contemporary pamphlets on the Affaire des Poisons in Criminology,” said Dr. Sandys. “I think they might give some ideas to some of our mystery-writers.”

  “There are some good recipes in the medieval grimoires,“ said Professor Belknap.

  “What are they like?”

  “Most of them are very complicated. The trouble is that the properties are very difficult to obtain. You have to have a lot of things like candles made of human fat; strange herbs mixed with the blood of a goat, a bat, and a mole; four nails pulled out of the coffin of a man who has been tortured to death; the head of a cat which has been fed on human blood for five days, and preferably the skull of a parricide.”

  “You see? It would really be easier just to strangle your man,” said Professor Parry.

  “But there is one simple one which I think would be workable. Let’s see. On a Saturday you buy a beef-heart, and you must not haggle over the price. I don’t understand at all the reason for that provision about not haggling, but there it is. Perhaps an old folk-feeling that the devil acts like a grand gentleman, magnificently. You take the beef-heart to a cemetery and bury it in a deep hole on a bed of quicklime. You prick the beef-heart with large needles, each time uttering the name of your victim. Fill in the grave, and recite over it the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John. Every succeeding day recite the same chapter while still fasting, and with all the malevolence possible. The victim will feel horrible pains, and will soon waste away and die.”

  “It seems too simple,” said Professor Hyett. “I don’t think it would work.”

  Professor Belknap smiled slowly. “If you had really the scientific attitude, you would not venture a conclusion until you had made an actual experiment.”

  “It’s funny, the vogue for supernaturalism in our scientific age,” put in Professor Coffman of Psychology. “Look at all these books about witchcraft and the beliefs of primitive peoples. For instance, about Haiti and their zombies, who are brought back to life with their brains removed entirely.”

  “That explains something. I have two of them in my Drama 10,” said Professor Parry.

  Dr. Sandys had something to contribute.

  “There was one of the Emperors of Russia, Thomas Basilides, I think; yes. He had the novel idea of sewing up his victims in bear-skins, and then setting a pack of fierce mastiffs on them.”

  “Impracticable,” said Professor Parry.

  “There was a curious case in my home town,” said Professor Coffman. “It wasn’t in fact homicide, but it might just as well have been. A fellow who worked in a filling-station or something was suspicious of his wife; thought she was cutting up with a lodger in his house. A very jealous fellow, apparently. Well, one morning after he had left the house he turned around and came back. He entered the house very quietly, and sure enough, he found his wife and the lodger in, shall we say, a compromising position, in the living-room. He pulled a pistol out of his pocket and threatened his wife and the lover. The wife distracted his attention and the lover sprang on him. The two men grappled with each other and fought for the pistol. The lover succeeded in pointing the pistol downward and fired it through the floor, wounding in the leg a meter-reader from the gas company, who had been listening with great interest. It was only a flesh-wound, but he might easily have been killed.”

  “That reminds me of a story I heard,” said Professor Caleb. “One of the boys was telling it at the Ethical Education Convention. How did it go now?—There was a traveling salesman—”

  Professor Hyett raised his voice a little and brought the conversation back to its track.

  “How would you commit a murder, Casti?”

  Professor Casti pondered. He seemed to take the question seriously.

  “I wonder,” he said, “how far hypnotism would go? I don’t remember ever reading about a case in actual fact. But I should think if you could establish absolute hypnotic control over another, the victim would go even as far as suicide. Especially if the action was not so clear and shocking as to break the hypnotic spell. For instance, you might order your subject to go swimming in a place you knew to be dangerous. Or to go and sit for an hour in a kitchen in which you had turned on the gas stove.”

  Suddenly everyone felt that the note was wrong. If this was joking, it was too gruesome for the Faculty Club smoking-room.

  “I’ll tell you one of my better ways,” said Professor Parry. “Supposing, for in
stance, I want to murder Coffman, here. I will dress up with a silk hat and a tennis blazer and an umbrella, and I will walk into his classroom while he’s giving one of his famous lectures on psychology, and I’ll shout: ‘You are the man who stole my wife! Take that! And that!’ And I will shoot him in his tracks. And then naturally all the class will sit back and sneer, and say: ‘Aw, that old stuff! They try it on us every year!’ And I will calmly walk out, and take off my costume and hang it up in the Dean’s anteroom, and go back to my own class. The point is that you psychologists have proved over and over again that when you give such a surprise test in observation, none of the students ever describe what happened accurately. Since they always get everything wrong, I will be perfectly safe.”

  There was a satisfactory amount of laughter.

  “I would kind of miss old Coffman,” said Professor Caleb. “Couldn’t you murder someone else, Parry?”

  But Parry, for some reason, was tired of badinage. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think I could. Let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

  But Professor Coffman had something to say first.

  “I don’t think you could either, Parry. It’s the simple people, like that filling-station man I was telling about, who proceed from the simple cause of jealous hatred to the simple result of shooting with a pistol. We teachers think too much, and thought paralyzes the motor responses. The uncomplex person answers an offense with a blow; we answer it with an analysis of the case. And when we have got the case analyzed, it is too late for the blow. Therefore what we have on this campus is a large number of situations painful and menacing. But they never result in action. Or hardly ever. The situations just go on until the persons concerned in them die, or become emeritus and move to Florida.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” said Professor Caleb, warmly. “I will grant, with you, that the campus is a mass of repressed emotions. Most professors, like most people, sublimate their repressed emotions successfully. But some do not. When you repress, or suppress, or compress anything, whether it’s emotions or gases, you are likely to get an explosion. And you know perfectly well that every now and then some respected leader of American education blows up with a loud bang.”

  “Oh, of course, anything can happen,” admitted Professor Coffman. “Probably in time everything does. But people on the faculty as a rule know enough about psychology, including their own, to diagnose their own troubles. We work off our crimes in conversation, or in imagination, or in reading. That’s what love stories are for. And murder stories. Here’s a motto for the faculties: Read a good book and keep the commandments.”

  Professor Hyett spoke in a strangely hollow voice.

  “Thou shalt do no murder!”

  Everyone was quite startled.

  Chapter XI

  ON FRIDAY morning, as soon as Library good form permitted, Gilda went to Dr. Sandys’s office. She had an idea.

  Dr. Sandys was sitting slouched in his desk-chair, staring out the window. His morning mail lay before him untouched, like a bad child’s breakfast.

  “Good morning, Dr. Sandys.”

  “Good morning, Miss Gorham.”

  “If you will permit me to be disagreeable, you aren’t looking very well, Dr. Sandys. You look tired. Aren’t you sleeping well?”

  “Oh yes, I’m sleeping all right,” said Dr. Sandys, wearily. “Just a little worried, perhaps.”

  “About that hoax?”

  “Yes. That hoax. And other things.”

  “Well, I was thinking about the hoax. We assumed, without question, that the mysterious sixth commandment was patched into the film, unless the boy made the whole thing up. There is at least one other possibility: that the commandment was written on the fly-leaf of the manuscript, and was properly photographed with the rest. I think we ought to take a look at the manuscript.”

  “That is true. Perhaps we should. Suppose we do it immediately.”

  Dr. Sandys seemed glad of a reason for action. He unlocked a drawer of his desk with a key from his key-container. He took from the drawer a Yale-type key, attached to a small block of wood.

  The two proceeded to the ground floor of the Wilmerding. Gilda glanced at the second-hand of her wrist-watch. The time from the Librarian’s office to the Wilmerding was twenty-six seconds.

  They crossed the Wilmerding to the locked press in the bay of the south side. Dr. Sandys turned his key in the lock and pulled open the heavy grilled door.

  Gilda pointed with her finger and made a queer gobbling noise, half scream, half an effort at speech.

  Inside the door, sitting on a chair, was Professor Hyett. His shoulders had slid a little sideways, and rested in the angle formed by one of the projecting uprights of the book-shelves and an extra-illustrated set of Casanova’s Memoirs. His noble-Roman head leaned forward in a reverent attitude. His face was gray. The wispy white hair on his skull stood up with an air of comic surprise.

  Dr. Sandys sprang to his side, pulled open the coat, and burrowed beneath it with his hand.

  “This is too much,” he said, inadequately. “This is too much.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yes. Stone cold.”

  “But how?”

  “Maybe a stroke. A heart attack or something. I don’t see any blood.”

  “This is a case for the police. I’ll go and call them.”

  “Come to my office. There’s no reason to rouse the whole catalogue room.”

  The two left the locked press. Dr. Sandys slammed the door, and the spring lock engaged. He removed the key.

  “How did he get into the locked press?” said Gilda.

  “I don’t know. There are only two keys: this one and the Assistant Librarian’s. But if that were missing, Mr. Dickson would have reported it to me immediately. At any rate, the police will no doubt find a key on him.”

  “No doubt.”

  “This is too much,” said Dr. Sandys.

  He called the police station and was connected with Lieutenant Kennedy. He told his story briefly. The telephone rasped; the Lieutenant was probably very angry. His ideal, to which he would possibly attain in heaven, was a city without sin, but with a steady flow of traffic violations. He directed Dr. Sandys and Gilda to wait for him and to stay away from the locked press.

  The two sat in silence.

  “Should we tell him about the—the hoax?” said Gilda.

  “I suppose so. It may have some bearing. Though I must say I don’t see—”

  “Neither do I.”

  Again silence.

  “You know,” said Gilda, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the death of Lucie Coindreau?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Sandys, miserably.

  “One thing seems to lead to another. What is that phrase of the detective stories?—‘the ever-widening stain.’ Crime seems to make more crime, and bloodshed makes more blood. The ever-widening stain.”

  Dr. Sandys looked at her with wide eyes.

  And again silence. Gilda gave up any effort to understand.

  It was a relief to hear the police car slide to a stop and park in the no-parking area in front of the Library’s entrance.

  Lieutenant Kennedy entered, storming, with the Medical Examiner, a nervous young man from the District Attorney’s office, and the Detective Sergeant, who did the stenography, fingerprinting, and photography, and helped out the traffic squad on Saturday afternoons.

  Dr. Sandys led the party to the locked press. Gilda was directed to remain in the Librarian’s office for questioning. She spent there an interminable half-hour, trying to think, trying not to think, her mind mostly occupied with longing for a cigarette. Smoking was certainly no vice for a librarian.

  At last the party returned. A few minutes were spent in routine telephoning.

  “What’s the answer?” said Gilda, in an aside to Dr. Sandys.

  “The answer has not been divulged. The medical man says that he died of strangulation; th
at, to judge from certain superficial signs, someone choked him, facing him and pressing on the windpipe with his thumbs. It must have happened somewhere around midnight, but he can’t tell very closely, after this lapse of time.”

  “But who did it? And why?”

  “Maybe the police will find that out for us.”

  “Maybe.” Gilda looked doubtfully at Lieutenant Kennedy.

  “Now, Miss Gorham.”

  Lieutenant Kennedy, seated in the Librarian’s desk-chair, glared at her. Whatever he had learned as an investigator he had learned by bullying, shouting, and occasionally slapping down. His favorite device was to stare silently into space, then to turn suddenly on his victim with a roar.

  “Now, Miss Gorham, I got some questions to ask you. Just some little questions. Routine, you might say. Don’t get scared. Make yourself easy, Miss Gorham.”

  His voice rose to a bellow. “How you happen to go into that there locked press this morning?”

  “I was curious about a certain manuscript, and I asked Dr. Sandys to let me see it.”

  “Ho, a certain manuscript! We heard about that manuscript already. How you happen to get so interested in this manuscript all of a sudden?”

  “Some of the faculty were working on it, and I wanted to compare it with the microfilm.”

  “Ho, the microfilm, hey?”

  He stared moodily at the ceiling. With an abrupt convulsion he shot a finger at her and shouted: “Didn’t have any reason to suspect something funny going on in that locked press?”

  “No.”

  “No, hey?” His tone was heavily sarcastic.

  “No.”

  Lieutenant Kennedy brooded for a moment. He turned to his Sergeant. “Write down she says no,” he directed. He swung on Gilda.

  “How many keys was there to this locked press?”

  “So far as I know, two.”

  Dr. Sandys spoke up. “My own was in my desk this morning, locked up. And Mr. Dickson has already told us that his own was locked in his desk, and the drawer has not been tampered with.”

  Lieutenant Kennedy seemed not to hear. Contorting his face terribly, he snarled at Gilda: