“You have a heavy post,” said Leon and the doctor laughed quietly.
“They are merely going to the Torquay post office,” he said. “I have arranged for them to be despatched when—” he hesitated, “when I am sure. You see,” he said, speaking with great earnestness, “a scientist has to be so careful. Every minute after he has announced a discovery he is tortured with the fear that he has forgotten something, some essential, or has reached a too hasty conclusion. But I think I’m right,” he said, speaking half to himself. “I’m sure I’m right, but I must be even more sure!”
He showed them round the large room, but there was little which Manfred had not seen in the laboratory of the late Professor Tableman. Viglow had greeted them genially, indeed expansively, and yet within five minutes of their arrival he was taciturn, almost silent, and did not volunteer information about any of the instruments in which Leon showed so much interest, unless he was asked.
They came back to his room and again his mood changed and he became almost gay.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “by Jove, I’ll tell you! And no living soul knows this except myself, or realises or understands the extraordinary work I have been doing.”
His face lit up, his eyes sparkled and it seemed to Manfred that he grew taller in this moment of exaltation. Pulling open a drawer of a table which stood against the wall he brought out a long porcelain plate and laid it down. From a wire-netted cupboard on the wall he took two tin boxes and with an expression of disgust which he could not disguise, turned the contents upon the slab. It was apparently a box full of common garden mould and then Leon saw to his amazement a wriggling little red shape twisting and twining in its acute discomfort. The little red fellow sought to hide himself and burrowed sinuously into the mould.
“Curse you! Curse you!” The doctor’s voice rose until it was a howl. His face was twisted and puckered in his mad rage. “How I hate you!”
If ever a man’s eyes held hate and terror, they were the eyes of Dr. Felix Viglow.
Manfred drew a long breath and stepped back a pace the better to observe him. Then the man calmed himself and peered down at Leon.
“When I was a child,” he said in a voice that shook, “I hated them and we had a nurse named Martha, a beastly woman, a wicked woman, who dropped one down my neck. Imagine the horror of it!”
Leon said nothing. To him the earthworm was a genus of chaetopod in the section oligochaeta and bore the somewhat, pretentious name of lumbricus terrestris. And in that way, Dr. Viglow, eminent naturalist and scientist, should have regarded this beneficent little fellow.
“I have a theory,” said the doctor. He was calmer now and was wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, “that in cycles every type of living thing on the earth becomes in turn the dominant creature. In a million years’ time man may dwindle to the size of an ant and the earthworm, by its super-intelligence, its cunning and its ferocity, may be preeminent in the world! I have always thought that,” he went on when neither Leon nor Manfred offered any comment. “It is still my thought by day and my dream by night. I have devoted my life to the destruction of this menace.”
Now the earthworm is neither cunning nor intelligent and is moreover notoriously devoid of ambition.
The doctor again went to the cupboard and took out a wide-necked bottle filled with a greyish powder. He brought it back and held it within a few inches of Leon’s face.
“This is the work of twelve years,” he said simply. “There is no difficulty in finding a substance which will kill these pests, but this does more.”
He took a scalpel and tilting the bottle brought out a few grains of the powder on the edge of it. This he dissolved in a twenty-ounce measure which he filled with water. He stirred the colourless fluid with a glass rod, then lifting the rod he allowed three drops to fall upon the mould wherein the little creature was hidden. A few seconds passed, there was a heaving of the earth where the victim was concealed.
“He is dead,” said the doctor triumphantly and scraped away the earth to prove the truth of his words. “And he is not only dead, but that handful of earth is death to any other earthworm that touches it.”
He rang a bell and one of his attendants came in.
“Clear away that,” he said with a shudder and walked gloomily to his desk.
Leon did not speak all the way back to the house. He sat curled up in the corner of the car, his arms lightly folded, his chin on his breast. That night without a word of explanation he left the house, declining Manfred’s suggestion that he should walk with him and volunteering no information as to where he was going.
Gonsalez walked by the cliff road, across Babbacombe Downs and came to the doctor’s house at nine o’clock that night. The doctor had a large house and maintained a big staff of servants, but amongst his other eccentricities was the choice of a gardener’s cottage away from the house as his sleeping place at night.
It was only lately that the doctor had chosen this lonely lodging. He had been happy enough in the big old house which had been his father’s, until he had heard voices whispering to him at night and the creak of boards and had seen shapes vanishing along the dark corridors, and then in his madness he had conceived the idea that his servants were conspiring against him and that he might any night be murdered in his bed. So he had the gardener turned out of his
