The Widening Stain

by W. Bolingbroke Johnson

  “Of course, you heard about the mysterious warning in the microfilm, and you put two and two together and realized that the warning must come from Hyett. So on Thursday night you followed him to the Library, just a few minutes before closing-time. It probably was you whom Casti saw. You saw Hyett unlock the locked press and go in. He was being careful and working in the dark. You could probably gather from the sound of his movements that he was opening the safe. I suppose that he was going to slip that warning card, you know, the thesis slip with ‘Thou shalt do no murder’ on it, into the original manuscript of the Filius Getronis. He knew you would consult it sooner or later. The card, you remember, was found in his pocket. Before he had time to put it in place, you had followed him into the locked press and strangled him. And then you reached into the safe, in the dark, and took the Filius Getronis. You knew just where it was kept, and you recognized it by the feel. Then you shut the safe door and spun the combination, and apparently had the wits to wipe it clean of fingerprints. You set Mr. Hyett’s body on the chair, shut the door of the locked press, took the key out of the lock, put it in your pocket, and walked out the main door just before it was locked for the night. I suppose the whole thing didn’t take more than five minutes.”

  “This is really very absorbing. Why did I take the Filius Getronis?”

  “Perhaps on impulse. An old secret longing for the book. Or else as a blind, to make people think that robbery was the motive. But it soon appeared that it was too dangerous for you to keep the manuscript, and you couldn’t bring yourself to destroy it. Anyway you were anxious, above all things, to publish it. So you sent it back to the Library, typing the address on my typewriter.”

  “That was unkind of me.”

  “You thought it was a good false scent, and you knew that I could not be convicted of the crime.”

  “Miss Gorham, I urge you to go to Lieutenant Kennedy and to tell him your thrilling tale. You recognize that there is not an atom of proof in all this. As a historian, accustomed to the weighing of evidence, I should throw it out relentlessly. It is a pure hypothesis. You may remember Pascal’s words, reported in Bishop’s masterly biography: ‘To make an hypothesis an evident truth, it is not enough that all the phenomena should follow.’ The law follows the same principle. If you can make up a story which includes all the known facts, the story is not proved true. I have no doubt that I could invent a romantic tale which would indicate equally well the guilt of Casti, or Parry, or Sandys—or yourself. Have you told your story to Lieutenant Kennedy, by the way?”

  “No.”

  “That is really sensible of you.”

  “But my reason is not that I am afraid of being laughed at.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Gilda was silent for some time.

  “Mr. Belknap, I shall have to make a confession to you. This is the first time in my life I have been involved in a problem of this sort; a problem, let me say, in which I have to make some serious moral judgments. I have had to decide whether I would accept without question the code of society, and report you to the police, and let society take over the obligations of morality, according to its own code. Or whether I would venture to establish my own code of morality, and act according to it.

  “Well, I am afraid I have discovered that I am fundamentally immoral. I don’t want you to be tried and convicted for murder. Perhaps death doesn’t seem so dreadful to any of us now as it did a year or two ago. Death seems a small matter. And I am sorry to discover that I am not particularly grieved by the death of Lucie Coindreau and Mr. Hyett. I don’t think that because they have died, you should die.”

  “You shock me, Miss Gorham.”

  Gilda spoke rapidly, feverishly, as if entranced.

  “You are strong and they were weak. I don’t think the strong should die because the weak are weak. There is a kind of power about you which I can’t help feeling. You may be a murderer; I don’t care. Maybe it’s because you are a murderer that I feel something—well—a sort of admiration for you.”

  “You are out of your head, Miss Gorham; I don’t know what’s the matter with you!”

  “I feel weak in the presence of your strength! You have put some sort of spell on me. I would do anything you ordered me. Oh, my dear, I love you! I love you!”

  Gilda, with a hysterical laughing cry, flung her arms about Belknap’s neck and clasped him tight. Her head fell on his breast.

  Belknap tore at her arms, in an effort to loosen them. His face lost all its lines of grim control and put on a mask of rage. His eyes dilated; his mouth fell open, and saliva oozed forth from the corners and dribbled down his chin. Still Gilda clung to him with a frenzied grip.

  Belknap’s hands crept to her throat; his thumbs found her windpipe and pressed, cutting off her breath, and in a moment cutting off the world.

  The pressure lessened.

  “I just wanted to tell you something before you die,” said Belknap. “You might like to know while you’re dying—and after. It’s all true. I killed them, just as you said. But that’s not why you’re dying!”

  The pressure was resumed on Gilda’s throat, and her mind darkened. Belknap was laughing, a horrible giggling laugh. Gilda’s last coherent thought was that she had never heard him laugh so before. As if he were really amused.

  She was drowning in deep water. All struggle was over, and all pain. Yielding, she had a dim awareness that she was passing over gently to death. Death. Come, lovely and soothing death, undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving. . . .

  But if you were dead, would you be aware of it? And would you quote poetry from the little old world? Well, possibly. But would it be quite so noisy in the after life? People being banged around so?

  She opened her eyes. She was lying on the metal floor of the aisle. A few steps from her face was the face of Belknap. He too was lying on his back, motionless. Dr. Sandys knelt on his chest and with each hand held one of Belknap’s arms pinned to the floor. Blood was dripping from Dr. Sandys’s cheek and flowing down into the red quagmire of his beard.

  Francis Parry danced beside them. “Shall I kick him?” he cried, in a high, unnatural voice. “Or sit on his feet?”

  “No, I’ve got him all right. He’s knocked out. You tend to Gilda.”

  “All right.” Francis leaped to her side and began uncertainly patting her face.

  Gilda sat up. “Don’t bother. I’m all right.”

  Down the aisle came Lieutenant Kennedy, limping.

  “Fell over a damn stool in the dark. Brought down a stack of books on my head. I don’t know what they was, but they felt like dictionaries.”

  Gilda groaned.

  “Gilda! Are you all right?” said Parry.

  “Yes. I was just thinking that the Lieutenant must have brought down the Siamese classics, and we’ll never get them back in the right order.”

  She started to rise, painfully. Parry helped her to her feet.

  The Lieutenant blew his whistle. There was a clattering from the stairway, and in a moment the Sergeant appeared.

  “We’ll take this fellow off to the station and charge him,” said the Lieutenant.

  “You have the confession all right?” said Gilda.

  “Sure. Prof Casti’s little machine worked fine. But we had to set it up way off at the other end of the crypt, so Belknap wouldn’t hear the machine. That’s why we were a little slow getting here.”

  “Dr. Sandys seemed to be right on the job.”

  “He was certainly quick on his feet. I could hardly make him wait for the pay-off. I would have put a mark in the next aisle, only you said there wasn’t any danger.”

  “I didn’t want you interfering too soon. I had an idea Mr. Belknap would say something incriminating, and I thought it might come toward the end.”

  “Gilda!” said Parry and Sandys, reproachfully.

  Professor Belknap, supine, opened his eyes. The Lieutenant and the Sergeant dragged him to his feet and snapped on the handcuf
fs. He gazed about, bewildered.

  “Why,” he said, “what does all this mean? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  The Lieutenant replied in a tone of great satisfaction. “It means, buddy, or prof, rather, that you are charged with the murder of Miss Coindreau and Prof Hyett!”

  Professor Belknap sneered. “On what grounds?”

  “On your own confession, took down by a kind of dictograph machine set up by Prof Casti. Is there anything you want to add?”

  Belknap looked around at the group facing him.

  “No. I will say nothing except in the presence of my lawyer.”

  “It’d better be a damn good lawyer,” said Kennedy, cheerfully. He urged Belknap toward the stairs.

  Belknap halted.

  “Yes, there is something. Parry, will you see my assistant, young Wanley, and tell him to meet my classes Monday? Tell him to give out the reading-lists and make the assignments. And announce that the classes will meet as usual. If I am not released, the department, in consultation with President Temple, will arrange for a substitute lecturer.”

  “Certainly, Belknap. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Say that on the reading-list the corresponding chapters in the first edition of Hodgkin’s Italy and Her Invaders may be substituted for the chapters in the latest edition. That is all, I think. Good-by.”

  As he turned, he paused before Gilda and spat full in her face.

  Parry pulled out the handkerchief which always peeped, neatly folded, from the breast pocket of his coat.

  “There’s one thing I’m glad to learn!” said Gilda, with a hysterical little laugh. “It’s real!”

  “What’s real?”

  “The handkerchief. I always thought it was a dummy, sewed in your coat.”

  “No. I was saving it for just such an emergency.”

  “Dr. Sandys, do you, too—”

  Dr. Sandys held out his handkerchief. It was red and sticky with blood.

  “Oh, my poor William! We were forgetting all about you! You must tend to that immediately!”

  “Oh no, it’s all right. Just a scratch. The blood has stopped flowing already.”

  “Really? Yes, it doesn’t look so bad. You know, you were wonderful!”

  Dr. Sandys shifted, and blushed under the dried blood above his beard.

  “Oh, it wasn’t much. I just caught him a rabbit punch behind the ear, while he was throttling you, and then he turned and I gave him a one-two and he went down. He only landed once on me, and then it was a kind of scrape.”

  “Who ever would have thought you were such a fighter!”

  “Well—as a matter of fact, I used to box a little when I was in the army. Indeed, I was light-heavyweight champ of my regiment.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell us? The girls will be so thrilled!”

  Dr. Sandys stood uneasily on one foot and then the other. “Well, it all worked out nicely, didn’t it? Casti’s part was very well done. Belknap clearly had no suspicion of a microphone among the duplicates.”

  “By the way,” said Parry, “where is Casti?”

  “That’s true,” said Gilda. “I hope nothing has happened to him.”

  The three went rapidly to the storeroom. Beside the recording machine lay Casti, at full length on the floor.

  “Not another crime!” cried Gilda.

  Dr. Sandys was shaking him by the shoulder. Casti opened his eyes.

  “Just fainted,” said Sandys. “He’ll be all right.”

  “How about the record?” said Gilda.

  “It seems to be all right. Lieutenant Kennedy will probably be sending for it in a minute.”

  “You know,” said Parry suddenly, “there are a number of things about this whole affair that I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s go up to my office,” said Sandys. “Miss Gorham—Gilda and I need to wash our faces. And Casti would feel better for a cold sponge.”

  “What I need is a smoke,” said Gilda. “In spite of a nasty sore throat I seem to have picked up somewhere.” She felt her neck ruefully.

  Dr. Sandys looked around cautiously and lowered his voice.

  “It’s late Saturday afternoon. I think, in the circumstances, we would be justified in smoking in my office. If we are very careful, and never tell anyone.”

  He lowered his voice still farther.

  “I also have some brandy, which I keep there in case someone in the Library should need first aid.”

  “My God, I need first aid!” said Parry.

  Casti rose suddenly to his feet, and the four climbed the stairs to the Librarian’s office.

  Chapter XX

  GILDA, WITH the three men, entered the Librarian’s office. Dr. Sandys closed the door carefully, pulled down the shades, and turned on the ventilating fan. He found some reproductions of Roman lamps to serve as ashtrays. Each of the men drew a package of cigarettes from his pocket and gave Gilda her choice.

  Dr. Sandys unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and felt in the back of the drawer. He brought out a bottle of brandy wrapped in a towel.

  “You see, it’s never been opened,” he said. “In mint condition.”

  Professor Parry looked at it doubtfully.

  “Have you got a corkscrew?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are we going to get it open?”

  “We could break off the neck,” suggested Professor Casti.

  “Where were you during Prohibition?” said Dr. Sandys, scornfully.

  “I carried a pocket corkscrew,” said Parry.

  Dr. Sandys carefully wrapped the base of the bottle in the towel.

  “This wall would be safe,” he said. “Only my lavatory on the other side.”

  He pounded the base of the bottle against the wall, with strong and careful taps. The cork began to protrude tinily from the bottle-neck.

  “Casti, get the glass out of my lavatory, will you?”

  “There’s one in the women’s rest room, too,” said Gilda. “I’ll get it and be right back.”

  In the rest room, she gave her face a good treatment. She returned, with the drinking-glass concealed, as far as possible, under folded arms. Though she met no one, her heart was in her mouth. For the first time she had a sense of guilt.

  When she reached the Librarian’s office, the men looked cleaned and refreshed. A policeman, they told her, had called for the record of Professor Belknap’s confession. Dr. Sandys had borrowed two Bohemian glass goblets from the display in the Wilmerding. He poured the brandy.

  “Gentlemen,” said Parry, “I propose a toast to Miss Gilda Gorham, who has saved all of our reputations—and perhaps more!”

  The three men solemnly drank.

  “I did it only for the Library’s reputation,” said Gilda.

  “I propose a toast to the Library!”

  All drank the toast. They settled themselves in the chairs where they had so lately sat as suspected witnesses.

  “One thing I want to know,” said Parry. “Gilda, where did you get that radiesthésie ball? I thought it was confiscated by the police with the rest of Lucie’s things.”

  “It was. I went to Lucie’s room and looked for one, in the hope of startling the murderer with it. I couldn’t find one, so Casti turned me out a very good substitute in his laboratory.”

  “What I want to know is how you were so sure the murderer was Belknap,” said Sandys.

  “It all came clear at the Giulia Thalmann concert.”

  “It didn’t come clear to me,” said Parry.

  “There was one thing that had puzzled me. I didn’t tell any of you, because on principle I suspected all of you equally. Cameron told me that on Monday morning he heard Lucie talking to a man in the Occulta. And she called him ‘Papoose.’ Well, that doesn’t make any sense, in either French or English. But I thought it might be a clue, and I wondered about it quite a lot.

  “Then at the concert Giulia Thalmann sang that thing from Thaïs: ‘Qui te fait si sévère.’ Thaïs
sings it to Athanaël, in reproach for his coldness. And I got to thinking that Athanaël is a fine sonorous singable name, but I didn’t remember him in Anatole France’s Thaïs. Maybe Massenet changed the name because the original was too hard for a singer. The corresponding character in Anatole France, I seemed to remember, was Paphnuce.

  “And Paphnuce was Papoose! At least, it is what Cameron might have supposed, because he probably doesn’t know any French. To check up, I looked over Lucie’s books. She had in her room quite a row of Anatole France. Her Thaïs was falling to pieces. I have determined by exhaustive tests that if you read a French novel three times it falls to pieces. Lucie probably fancied herself as Thaïs.”

  “I still don’t see—” said Casti.

  “Remember the story. Thaïs, the irresistibly seductive courtesan of Alexandria, tries all her blandishments on Paphnuce, the grim ascetic from the desert, and in vain. And then—”

  “Oh yes. I remember the rest of it now.”

  “So I guessed that Lucie had tried out some of her little cajoleries on Belknap in the Occulta, and he had remained impervious.”

  “Wouldn’t he have recognized the implications of ‘Paphnuce’?” said Sandys.

  “Probably he didn’t. That wasn’t his field. Or else he didn’t care. At any rate, Lucie lured him back to the Occulta that evening.”

  “She was awfully persistent,” said Casti.

  “Wouldn’t take no for an answer,” murmured Parry.

  “What troubles me about the whole affair,” said Sandys, “is the essential question Why. I don’t see why Belknap should have pushed Lucie over the rail. The motivation seems to me insufficient, as the boys say.”

  Gilda took another cigarette and lighted it slowly.

  “I think I know why. But it is pretty hard to tell, and impossible to prove.”

  She was silent, knitting her brows at the curling smoke.

  “Try it anyhow, my dear,” said Parry.

  “You started it, Francis, by reflecting on the virginity of some of our male faculty members. That thought has returned to me a good deal. And I have an idea that a middle-aged female can really understand a middle-aged male virgin better than his own men friends can.”