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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
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RGL e-Book Cover
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WE three students, who had arrived early, stood at the window of the laboratory and looked at the ruins of the house opposite. It was a windy, showery morning; the roadway glistened with the wet, and the sky behind the blackened ruins showed gaps of deep blue through its drifting covering of cloud. The vivid spring-green of the young chestnuts and lilacs in front of the house contrasted strangely with the black wreck behind them. The fire had completely gutted the place; most of the roof had fallen in, and through the carbonised outlines of the windows, which retained scarcely a shred of glass, one looked upon charred walls and all the indescribable desolation that follows a conflagration. Oddly enough, though some part of the wall had collapsed over the portico, the little bedroom above it was completely uninjured, and we could see, still hanging upon the water-streaked wallpaper a framed photograph of a soldier in uniform.
The new student, a pale man with black hair—Chabôt, I think, was his name—was especially absorbed in the contemplation of the wreck. "Was no one injured?" he asked.
"No one, fortunately," said Wilderspin.
The new man grunted.
Porch entered shouting: "Have you chaps heard? Great Anarchist outrage! London in panic! Why aren't you terror-stricken? This comes of the abominable examination system. Not one of you has had leisure to see a newspaper this morning."
We all started round.
"Listen," said Porch, striking an attitude. "Yesterday that was the home of Inspector Bulstrode—the celebrated Inspector Bulstrode—and we never knew it! Now behold it!"
"How do they know it is the work of an Anarchist?" asked the new student, as Askin entered the room.
"They put every accident that happens down to Anarchists, just now," said Wilderspin.
"The police," said Porch, "have very good reason to regard this outrage as the work of an Anarchist, so the papers say. But nothing has transpired. However, it's very nice of the Anarchists to pick a house right in front of our windows. It will relieve the rigours of our last week's cramming immensely."
"It has made Smith late for once," said Wilderspin, looking at his watch.
"I saw him over the way," said Askin, "as I was coming down the street."
"Jove! What was he doing over there?" asked the new man very quickly.
"Prying, I suppose," said Askin. "He was talking to one of the policemen, and he had a box in his hands with some black stuff in it. I suppose he will expect us to analyse that."
"Here he comes!" said Wilderspin.
We all turned to the window again. Mr. Somerset Smith, our excellent instructor in chemistry, had appeared at the side-door opposite, and was coming along by the side of the house towards the street gate. He carried a box labelled "Hudson's Soap," and in it was a quantity of blackened rubbish, including, among other curiosities, a broken glass jar. His queer broad face was screwed up into an inscrutable expression. He came across the roadway deep in thought, and was presently hidden from us as he approached the steps to the portico. We heard him come up to his little preparation room, next the laboratory, and slam the door.
The four or five other students who constituted the class came in one by one.
We were soon loud in an animated discussion of Anarchist outrages. Mason had heard that it was Smith himself who had discovered that the fire opposite was the work of an incendiary, and that he had found a charred scrap of an inflammatory placard. Askin made an obvious joke at this. The new man asked a great many questions in a quick nervous manner. The excitement seemed to be bringing out his conversational gifts; for hitherto he had been rather conspicuous for a reserve that most of us considered sulky in its quality. We stopped our clamour as Smith entered.
Contrary to his usual practice he did not go straight to the blackboard, but came down the middle aisle of benches towards the window. He was carrying a paper-weight of black marble in one hand, and in the other a number of slips of white paper. These he put down on Wilderspin's bench. He peered at the crowd of us from beneath his heavy eyebrows.
"Anyone absent?" he asked.
"No one, sir," said somebody.
"This fire over the way, gentlemen, is a very singular affair indeed—very singular. Possibly none of you know how it was occasioned. But you ought, I think, to know without any delay that a strong suspicion attaches here; a suspicion, that is to say, that the incendiary—for it was no accident, but deliberate arson—obtained his materials from this place. So far as I can judge, the house was fired by means of phosphorus dissolved in carbon bisulphide."
There was a simultaneous exclamation from the class.
"As you are aware, gentlemen, from the course of elementary study we pursued last autumn, when phosphorus dissolved in carbon bisulphide is exposed to evaporation, the phosphorus is precipitated in such a finely divided state that it catches fire. Well, the coal-plate, it would seem, had been taken up, a considerable amount of paper thrown down among the firewood and small coal that lay on the floor of the cellar, and then a copious supply of this solution—which must, gentlemen, have been mixed in this house—was poured upon it. Evaporation began at once, the phosphorus presently caught and set the paper going, and in half an hour a nice little fire was burning its way upstairs to wake the Inspector and his family.
"How did I ascertain this? Partly by accident and partly by research. The accident was this. About ten o'clock last night I had occasion to visit my preparation room, and I smelt the very distinctive smell of carbon bisulphide vapour. I traced this to the store-room next door, and, entering, saw at once that the stores had been tampered with. A bottle of starch mucilage had been upset, and the contents were dripping from the table to the floor. Several other bottles had been taken down and not replaced. Looking round with the idea of discovering a theft, I failed to detect the absence of anything at first except the carbon bisulphide, but presently I noticed the phosphorus jar was empty. The inference was either that some student contemplated a chemical entertainment at home at my expense, or that some incendiarism was on foot. In either case I was naturally anxious to discover the culprit, and it seemed to me that no time was so favourable as the immediate moment when the room was exactly as he had left it. You know we scientific people are rather fond of problems of evidence."
He looked keenly round the group of us. So did I. Unless he was a far better physiognomist than I, nothing was to be detected. To me every one looked interested, and all more or less disconcerted by his suspicion. Askin, for instance, was blushing; Wilderspin, who had a nervous trick of twitching the corner of his mouth, was twitching it violently; and the lips of the new man were white.
"Now I am happy to say that when I left the laboratory I had a hint, that presently developed into evidence as absolutely conclusive of who had taken my carbon bisulphide as any evidence could be."
A dramatic pause. For my own part I was a little scared. Suppose Mr. Smith was jumping to a conclusion? It might be inconvenient for some of us.
"The gentleman, quite inadvertently, had written his signature to the theft; had left his sign-manual to his act—literally his sign-manual, gentlemen."
He smiled oddly at us. We expected him to point someone out with his finger. He looked for a moment at the little slips of paper on the bench beside him, and hesitated. We were all naturally very much excited by this time.
"You don't mean," said the new student—"you don't mean that the man who stole that carbon bisulphide was so absentminded—so madly absent-minded—as to write his name—?"
Our teacher, still smiling, shook his head in negation. "Not quite that," he said. Clearly he meant to prolong the agony.
"When this fire broke out opposite," he proceeded calmly, "I had a suspicion that the things were connected. Very early this morning—before sunrise, in fact—I went over there. I traced the fire, with the help of the firemen, down to the cellar. It had been lit, as I supposed it must have been, through the coal-plate. I raked about for my carbon bisulphide bottle among the cinders and ashes in the cellar so soon as they were cool enough for the search; and I could not find it. My suspicions of our connection with that fire grew a little fainter, but I still clung to them. The cellar was extremely hot, and my investigations in consequence superficial, so that I determined to repeat the search more thoroughly later in the day. To fill the time up, after breakfast and a bath I went into the garden and hunted about there. First I found a familiar stopper, and that excited me; then, under a lilac-bush, I found the bottle—broken, I suppose by the foot of a fireman. The label, you will remember, on those store-room bottles is a large paper one, and goes almost all the way round."
He stopped and smiled benevolently at us.
"On that label there were visible the words 'Carbon Bisulphide,' and also 'Dismal Stinks,' written by some gentleman in pencil."
"Oh, but I wrote those three or four days ago!' said Askin, hotly.
"I can quite imagine you did. I say there was nothing else visible upon the label. But you will remember, gentlemen, that our friend had upset a bottle of starch mucilage. Now let me remind you of the properties of starch mucilage. It is colourless itself, but with iodine it gives a beautiful purple-blue colour. It is a test for iodine, even when the latter is in the smallest conceivable proportion."
"It will go blue with one part of iodine in four hundred and fifty thousand of water, Thorpe says," said Wilderspin.
"Very good. I see you are ready for your examination. Now, before I left the laboratory I had noticed that our friend had dabbled his fingers in this starch, for upon the door-handle I perceived something that might be the dim marks of them, and on testing with iodine was delighted to verify my suspicion. They were, however, too vague for my purpose. Now, I felt that if I got the bottle there would certainly be some traces of our friend's fingers on the label, since he must inevitably have held it in such a way as to print them. Accordingly I have developed that label with a very weak solution of iodine; and now, gentlemen, I am happy to say I have three blue fingermarks and a beautiful thumbprint."
He paused for our astonishment.
"You may have heard of Professor Galton," said our teacher, going on a little more rapidly, and taking the paper slips up again. "He has made a special study of the lines upon the human thumb, and has proposed it as a method of identifying criminals. He has taken thousands of impressions from inked human thumbs at the Anthropometric Laboratory at South Kensington, and in no two human beings are these impressions alike. He has published a book of his prints, and a very good book it is too. So here you see I have a little printers' ink mixed with oil smeared on this paperweight, and here are some little slips of paper, and the whole matter will be settled in a few minutes. If the miscreant is present we shall find him; if not—"
"Look out!" cried Wilderspin.
I turned round, to see the new man holding a bottle in either hand. The Anarchist had discovered himself. One bottle was poised ready to throw. It had a ground glass label, and was probably some acid. I ducked instinctively, and the missile whizzed over my head, touched Smith on the shoulder, and ricocheted with a terrific smash into a stand of boiler-tubes beyond. There was the keen smell of nitrogen oxides in the air. The second bottle happily flew wide, bowled over a Bunsen burner and two tripods, and mowed down all the small bottles of reagents on Wilderspin's bench.
I never saw men scatter so quickly. I turned with some idea of grappling with the lunatic, and saw him grip a bottle of sulphuric acid—oil of vitriol, that popular ingredient of the Parisian love-philtre. This was too much for me, and I dodged round the bench forthwith. Some of the fellows had got out of the room and stood on the staircase, whither Smith had also made good his retreat. I saw Wilderspin, his mouth twitching more than ever, behind one of the other benches. As soon as we got a chance we both followed the example of the rest and scuttled out upon the landing. A small bottle of hydrochloric acid caught Wilderspin in the neck, made him yell dismally, and turned his coat a bright red forthwith.
There was method in the Anarchist's madness. He threw nothing more so soon as he had gained possession of the laboratory, but proceeded to raid round and collect together all the bottles of acid, corrosive sublimate, lunar caustic, and so forth, upon the bench nearest the window. He clearly meant to invest his arrest with peculiar difficulty. But Smith was still equal to him. He had run into the store-room, and re-emerged with a huge jar of that most unendurable gas, sulphuretted hydrogen. "Take out the bung and fling it in," said he—"quick!" and returned for the pungent virtues of the ammonia. We followed this up with a carboy of hydrochloric acid and the ammonium sulphide, a gas only rivalled in its offensiveness by the sulphuretted hydrogen. The enemy scarcely grasped our import until these vapours spread towards him, and merely dodged behind a bench. In thirty seconds there was as unpleasant a conflict of chemical odours in that room as one can well imagine, and the air was dense with white clouds of ammonium chloride. The enemy soon discovered our aim and tried a charge. As the jar of ammonium sulphide went in and smashed on the floor, I saw a small bottle fly towards me through the reek, but it missed the doorway and knocked the blackboard over.
"Stand out of the way!" shrieked the Anarchist, looming up through the rising fog and stench, but we slammed the door and shut him and his atmosphere in together. He tugged furiously at the handle and hammered madly at the panel. I heard him yell for mercy and fall a-coughing. I thought we had beaten him, and would have opened the door had not Smith, fearing a rush, restrained me. The Anarchist's footsteps retreated and there was silence. We expected another rush at the door. Presently a bottle smashed against it, and after a minute or so another. Then there was an interval of silence. Possibly three minutes passed. Askin was attending to Wilderspin in the store-room, the rest of us were grouped about the landing. "He must have fallen down suffocated," said Porch. "The window!" exclaimed Smith, suddenly; "he must have got out by the window. I never thought of the window. Has anyone heard the window go? You three men"—he indicated myself, and Porch and Mason—"stop by the door."
The rest clattered downstairs with Smith. We heard the front-door open and their voices from the little courtyard in front of the house. Then we ventured to open the laboratory door again, and saw the end window open and the clear air beating in through the mist. The Anarchist had escaped us. Smith had been a little too intellectual in his treatment of the case, and scarcely vigorous enough.
"After that thumbmark," said he when the class met next morning amid the debris of the laboratory—"after that thumbmark he ought to have surrendered at once. There was not a loophole left for him. Logically, at any rate, he was hopelessly cornered. For him to start throwing acids about, gentlemen! It was a thing I did not anticipate. Most unfair of him. This kind of thing robs detective work of all its intellectual charms."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.