An Oxford Tragedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

been pretty well eighty. Winn and Shirley will have heard the story before, but that doesn’t matter. Well, Fothergill, about twenty years before, had had a scout, and that scout disappeared. One day he was there doing his job, and the next he just wasn’t. He disappeared altogether and no one ever saw him again. There was no explanation, and there never has been, but gradually a legend grew up, and finally everyone accepted it as part of the college history. What had happened, so the legend went, was this. When Fothergill was first appointed to his fellowship his scout brought him two fried eggs for breakfast. Fothergill couldn’t stand fried eggs at any price, but he was terribly shy and frightened of his scout, and so he ate both the eggs and said nothing. Thescout thought that he had found out, first guess, what Fothergill really liked for breakfast. He ordered fried eggs the next morning, and Fothergill ate them again. So then the scout made it a standing order. Every day Fothergill tried to make up his mind to speak, and every day it became more difficult. How could he say after a month of fried eggs that he had only eaten them because he was afraid of saying that he hated them? Gradually he got a dreadful inferiority complex; he loathed the eggs; he couldn’t tell the scout so. And that went on for twenty years. At last he couldn’t bear it any longer and one night when his scout came in with his whisky after dinner he quietly murdered him, and buried him that night in the college meadow. Next morning, when his scout didn’t turn up, the man on the next stair came instead to call Fothergill, and to ask if there were any orders. “A hot bath and sausages for breakfast,” said Fothergill, and then went to sleep again for another half-hour.’
    Maurice’s story had relieved the tension, and I felt glad that he had told it, for Brendel had spoken with so much feeling that I feared the discussion was tending to become too serious to be altogether pleasant. Prendergast, however, who had hung on the Professor’s words ever since he had come into Common Room, had no intention of allowing the main topic to drop.
    â€˜Do you think,’ he said, ‘that a real murderer, the sort of murderer that you have described, often escapes?’
    â€˜Hardly ever,’ said Brendel. ‘How often is the murderer equal to his task? He is often ignorant of the methods or the implements which he must use, he often makes some elementary mistake, he is often destroyed by some unforeseen accident, some chance encounter or some unlucky remark. And there’s another point, too. Have you ever considered how well, how intimately, you must know a man to murder him?’
    â€˜No, never,’ said little Mitton involuntarily, though the question had not been directed specially to him.
    â€˜Think about that, then. They say that a man ought to know a woman well when he marries her, but how much better must the true murderer know his victim? He studies his every action and his every thought. He watches him from day to day, plotting and observing. His whole mind is filled and obsessed by the thought of his victim; he knows him as well as and better than he knows himself. And because men have few intimates, and because the society in which any man lives is small, it follows that the possible murderers of any one man are very, very few. A detective should never forget the importance of propinquity when he’s searching for the murderer. It’s the first essential, the necessary condition of guilt. Strangers don’t commit murders, though they may do acts of violence. Yet with all these difficulties the thing you suggest can be done. Listen. We are all intelligent men here – we may say that without conceit – if one of us planned a murder he could carry it out, and he could, if he would only be patient enough, carry it out without being discovered. For the cold passionless man of