Mark Aldridge - The Passing of Mr Quinn

PROFESSOR APPLEBY listened.

He stood in the centre of his study, his hands in the pockets of his dinner jacket, and a curious half smile on his lips as he listened intently.

He heard nothing, for his house was silent as the grave.

If there had been any sound Professor Appleby would assuredly have heard it, for amongst the rows of valuable books that lined the walls of his study there were dummy books. Dummies that held microphones which could carry any sound made in any room of that house to its master in the centre study.

Professor Appleby alone had knowledge of this. His wife, Eleanor, was terrified of his omniscience of everything that went on in the house. She knew that she could not give an order to the servants without the professor knowing of it. It was one of Professor Appleby’s subtle means of cruelty, and it had contributed a great deal towards the state of nervous exhaustion to which she had become prostrated.

After listening for a moment or two Professor Appleby laughed softly. It was a precise, mirthless sound like the tinkle of ice in a glass.

Satisfied that, as yet, all was quiet in his house, he crossed the thick pile red carpet to the broad mahogany desk in the centre of his study. It was a study indicative of his tastes, for it was furnished with every luxury and refinement, yet it bristled with the bizzarre. The bookcases contained exquisite vellum-bound volumes, old editions, and strange works of foreign publishers. A glass-door cupboard on one side of the room held chemicals and test-tubes, giving the study the appearance of a laboratory, which was offset by the cushions which lay on chairs and settee, the soft-shaded lamp and the glowing radiator which gave the big room generous warmth.

On the carpet near the mahogany desk was a stout wickerwork basket. Professor Appleby, with a strange smile twitching his lips, bent over it, and untying a string lifted a lid. He straightened himself with a huge Haje snake coiling and wriggling in his arms and round his shoulders, and he laughed again softly.

It was a startling and repellant sight in that room of luxury and taste. The red curtains were drawn over the window to shut out the gathering dusk, and all was silent in the study save for the ticking of the clock and Professor Appleby’s long-repressed breath. It was a ticklish job he was doing.

After a few moments of manipulation with instruments from a case on the desk, Professor Appleby jerked erect, satisfied that his experiment was coming to a successful issue. The smile on his lips was scarcely pleasant.

Spite of his huge, elephantine figure there was a suggestion of pantherish power in Professor Appleby’s movements. Now once again he seized the snake with cruel, strong white fingers just below its head, and bent over it with an instrument in his other hand.

He had a gross white face that appeared to be carefully attended, and very finely pencilled eyebrows that had a satanic uplift; an extremely strong nose and jaw, and lips that were a red, twitching line. A monocle gleamed in his right eye, and those eyes were as bright as a snake’s themselves, holding the heavy-lidded droop of mastery.

Such was Professor Appleby, a monstrous figure of ebony and white in his dinner suit, as he wrestled under the soft-shaded lamp with the Haje spitting snake.

There sounded all at once a slight hiss. The Haje’s long body wriggled and coiled sinuously, so that its black and white diamond markings seemed to blur. A glass vessel fell to the carpet, knocked over by the snake in its struggles, and Professor Appleby’s monocle dropped on its black cord as he smiled grimly.

He had forgotten for a moment that Doctor Portal had arranged to call that evening on Eleanor, his wife—forgotten it in the fascination of the strange experiment he had been conducting.

The Haje, a fierce species of African cobra, had just exercised its remarkable and disconcerting habit of ejecting poison from its mouth to a considerable distance, and the professor had collected the discharge and had drawn the cobra’s fangs. It was now completely harmless, its poison-spitting propensities stopped for all time.

The professor dropped into a chair, watching the snake’s convulsions a moment, while he wiped his white hands fastidiously with a handkerchief.

There were tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead. For all his coolness he had known the experiment to be a dangerous one.

It was such experiments as this that had gained for Professor Appleby a reputation entirely enviable in the world of science and research. He was a noted expert in poisons and a pathologist of world-wide repute. Such ability—in the eyes of the world, at least—condoned a personal reputation that was somewhat dubious.

If the consensus of opinion was that Professor Appleby was the most brilliant scientist of his day, it was also freely rumoured that he had paid the penalty of genius. The dividing line between genius and insanity is a very thin one, and Professor Appleby was very much on the borderline: he had a cruel and sinister side to his character which could scarcely be called normal.

There were rumours current of strange habits he had acquired during his long sojourn in the East. Gossip has many votaries in an English country village, and Professor Appleby’s house, the Lodge, discreetly retired though it was, behind a long avenue of trees, was the object of much curiosity and an astonishing penetrative insight on the part of the villagers.

‘How he ever married her. I don’t know’—this referred to the gracious woman with hair of golden-brown and large, pathetic brown eyes who was occasionally to be seen flitting through the village with flushed face averted as though she knew she were an object of pity. Local opinion was unanimous about Eleanor Appleby. Two years before she had been a girl of breathless beauty; now it was evident that she walked with fear. She had been induced by the persuasions of her mother and her friends to accept the brilliant Professor Appleby as suitor—and now she was paying the cost of her husband’s erratic genius.

There was a great deal more gossip. Stories of his cruelty, and of his preference for the society of other women. How these got about in the village it is difficult to tell, for Professor Appleby was careful to throw a barricade of secrecy around the Lodge. His menage consisted of two domestics, a white-haired cook whose frightened manner and consistent head-shaking was the answer to any curious question about life at the Lodge, an old gardener and handy man who for some reason of his own had the silence of the sphinx in his tongue, and Vera, the house parlourmaid. Vera? Well, Vera, too, may have had her own reasons for not talking.

Yet rumour had got about, and Professor Appleby was conscious of it. He was sensitive about it, too, sensitive as a man who has some secret vice. As he stood back from the snake which was now twisting to the carpet, a sudden savagery flitted across his gross, white face. It was quickly eradicated. Indeed, he crossed the carpet, softly as a cat, and looked at his own reflection in a mirror, screwed his monocle in his eye and wagged a white forefinger warningly at himself.

No one must see it. No one must guess.

He turned away from the mirror again, and tried to capture elusive memories of an astonishing outburst he had made at a medical board in London a week before. What had he done—what had he said? Really he ought not to do these things. He must keep a closer guard over himself.

He thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers and stood with feet apart, his chin sunk as he stared with glittering eyes at the cobra.

Suddenly he started.

Through the microphone concealed in one of the dummy books had come distinctly the sound of a knock at the front door of the Lodge, then faintly the sounds of the maid’s footsteps and the opening of the door. Then voices; a man’s deep and hearty, and a woman’s confused low tones.