‘I won’t say no,’ said Bill, and the light began to glow behind his coal-black eyes.
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH
Vivian Vosper was a bachelor who lived alone in a very small mews house in a burglarious part of London. All parts of London are burglarious to some extent, but this one was particularly so. Twice his house had been burgled, and the second time he had been beaten up and tied up by some masked men and had only managed to wriggle himself free from his bonds after an hour or more of skin-abrasive effort and a great deal of physical and nervous discomfort. The police, when he was able to summon them, were very kind and helpful as they always are; they asked him if he was suffering from shock, and he said No, but he was wrong, for no sooner had they left, promising to do their best to find the culprits, than he was seized by uncontrollable shivers, and felt obliged to call in his doctor in the early hours of the morning, a thing he had never done before.
He survived, however, and he hadn’t lost much of value for he hadn’t much of value to lose; chiefly the drinks he kept on the sideboard, to which the thieves had liberally helped themselves, before relieving themselves, as in the habit of burglars, all over his sitting room floor. With the help of his daily help, who came at eight o’clock in the morning, he cleared up the mess; but the material stink of it, no less than the indescribable smell of violation that any burglary brings, remained with him for several days.
Then there was all the bother of applying to the insurance company for the value of the articles he had lost, not only the bottles of drink, so expensive nowadays—but silver, and vases, and trinkets.
But though he hadn’t much minded the first burglary—indeed he was in bed and asleep when it happened and didn’t know about it until the morning—he did mind the second, with its violence and its sequel of nervous shock, not to mention the loss of objects that he treasured; and like the hero of Poe’s story, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, he vowed revenge.
It was the story that gave him his idea, for though he had no cask of Amontillado and no cellar to wall up the miscreants, or the ‘villains’ as the police sometimes called them—such a quaint old-fashioned word—supposing he had been able to; he had a few bottles of Amontillado sherry which would serve as a bait. He would doctor them; but how, and with what?
As a butterfly-collector many years ago (he was now over sixty) he still had a small phial of cyanide of potassium to refresh (if that was the word) the evaporating supply in the white plaster-of-Paris basis of his killing-bottle. In those far-off days you could obtain the stuff simply by signing the chemist’s poison-book; but there was enough of it left to account for several gangs of burglars.
It was so long since he had given up butterfly-collecting and moth-collecting. For some reason he preferred moths to butterflies. Not only because there were so many more of them—two or three thousand compared with a mere seventy species of butterflies. True, some of the moths were very dreary; there was the Wainscot family, the Footman family, each member of those two families being almost indistinguishable from the other and only of interest in their slightly varied drabness to experts of whom Vivian had never professed to be one.
On the other hand, some of the moths were very exciting. The Oak Eggar, for instance, with its strange capacity (radar-inspired no doubt) for attracting a husband or a wife from many miles away; there were the tiger-moths, so decorative; there was the lappet moth (lasciocampa quercifolia) which Vivian had never succeeded in capturing. And the puss-moths, dear creatures, with their green caterpillars, aggressive and hostile in demeanour, but with their soft silken tongues making impenetrable chrysalis little fortresses out of the hard bark of a poplar tree.
And the hawk-moths of course, all the hawk-moths. More than once it had been Vivian’s good fortune to capture the Convolvulus Hawk Moth (sphinx convulvuli), that rare visitant; but never, in spite of diligent study of the potato fields had he ever discovered either the larva or the imago (as they called the perfect insect) of the Death’s Head (acherontia atropos) both of which were said to squeak, if disturbed.
Looking at the little poison-bottle, so long disused, he thought of these creatures (now, thanks to chemicals, much rarer than they used to be) which he had loved and yet had doomed to an untimely death, stretched out on a setting-board, the wings that had borne them so freely through the air pinned down at an unnatural angle, and when released from the bondage of the stretching-board transferred to another more elegant mausoleum.
They had died painlessly, of that he was sure; a slight fluttering of wings over the poison-drenched plaster, and all was over. When at one time he had sealed their fate with an infusion, an exhalation of chopped-up laurel leaves, it had been more lingering.
They had done him no harm, no harm at all, and as he thought of their poor bodies slowly decaying under glass-covered shelves in a cabinet which neither he nor any one else looked at, he did not feel happy with himself.
But the burglars had done him harm; they had not only robbed him and beaten him up and pinioned him as if he was a moth on a stretching-board, they had callously left him to get free as best he could, or to die if he couldn’t. ‘Ye are of more importance than many sparrows’ Christ had said; and Vivian persuaded himself that he was of more importance than many moths.
He uncorked the little bottle, and cautiously, very cautiously, sniffed its contents. Yes, there it was, that almond-breathing, aromatic, but lethal smell. He snatched his nose away. Better be on the safe side. The moths and butterflies, poor creatures, hadn’t been able to snatch their noses or probosces away; they had the stopper of the bottle clamped down on them.
Vivian’s mind went over these old memories, from the time when he thought it was almost a personal triumph to insert a crimson-underwing, its helpless wings held tightly between his fingers, into the lethal chamber, a miniature forecast of the gas-chambers employed by Hitler.
‘Why am I doing this?’ he asked himself as, with the cyanide safely stoppered, he advanced towards the elegant, festive, festive, cheer-inducing bottle of Amontillado. ‘Why am I doing it? Is it like me to do it? I have never wanted to hurt anyone before—except a few insects, and I never thought I was hurting them, only collecting them, as so many naturalists have. Has my nature changed? Have I become a different person just because a few bandits from whom half the people I know, people with far more precious things to lose, have suffered more than I have? Would it not be better,’ he asked himself, still with the half empty little bottle in his hand, as he approached the big brim-full bottle of Amontillado, ‘to forget all about it? If it is true, as they now say, that violence is inherent in human nature, who am I to resent being its victim? I mean’—he hastily corrected himself—‘to resent suffering from it at the hands of other people? Of course I’—and he looked down at the innocent-looking poison—‘were to retaliate, it wouldn’t be violence, it would just illustrate the well-known law that every action has an equal and consequent reaction.’
He took the bottle of sherry and uncorked it. Better drink a glass, he thought, that way it will look more natural. He enjoyed the drink; what a pity (for now his sense of behaving unlike himself was taking the upper hand) to spoil such good wine. Yet spoilt it must be or else—he couldn’t finish the sentence even to himself. He took the little bottle—how small it was compared with the big one—and decanted from it into its large neighbour a fragrant tablespoonful, then corked both bottles up.