An Oxford Tragedy Read Online Free Page A

hang them, as it were, out of hand. So I suppose there was irritation in my voice when I spoke to Maurice, as he completed his tale.
    â€˜I do wish that you wouldn’t leave that loaded revolver lying on the table just inside your room,’ I said. ‘It’s childish to say that you mean to use it as the text for a lecture on the danger of lethal weapons to-morrow morning, and it’s positively dangerous to leave it loaded where it is.’
    â€˜My dear Francis,’ he answered, ‘you really are, if I may say so with all due respect, tending to become the least bit of an old woman. For consider …’ He ticked off the points as he made them on his fingers. ‘One, it is only in books that loaded firearms go off. In my limited experience it requires some human agency to pull the trigger. Two. There are no children, women, or imbeciles within the walls of this college. Three. What grown man would point a revolver at himself or at any other living creature before he pulled the trigger to discover whether it was loaded? And four. I have sported the oak of my rooms, and the key lies safely in my pocket. Is the peril which you suggest really so very imminent?’
    His easy bantering tone had its usual effect on me. I felt both impotent to reply and irritated at my own insignificance.
    â€˜Well,’ I said, ‘it can’t be right to leave loaded weapons lying about. If someone’s shot don’t say that I didn’t warn you. I was brought up in the belief that all firearms are loaded and that all horses kick, and that both are dangerous. A very good lesson to teach a boy, too!’ I turned to Brendel, anxious to change the conversation.
    â€˜Do you know that before I came in I was quite frightened about you,’ I said. ‘I expected to be either overwhelmed with learning, or else compelled to carry on an interchange of polite inanities in a language which I know very imperfectly.’
    All the little wrinkles showed round his eyes. ‘And you find the foreign professor not all too alarming?’ he answered with a smile.
    â€˜On the contrary; and conversation a pleasure instead of a burden.’
    He made me a quaint little half bow. ‘Thank you. I also. But you know I was perhaps a little nervous too – one poor lawyer from Vienna and a dozen great English professors!’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, ‘I can understand that. I remember a rather famous admiral dining here one night. He was the best company you can imagine, and kept us all in roars of laughter the whole evening. I never saw anyone who captured a roomful of people so quickly or held them all so easily. What the moderns call getting it across. As he was going away I thanked him for the pleasure his yarns had given us. “Well,” he said, “you know when I arrived I was in the devil of a fright at spending the evening among a crew of highbrows, but as I came into your Common Room I heard a white-haired old professor complaining bitterly to a sympathetic circle of the price of bottled beer, and I felt at home right away. Human nature doesn’t vary much when you get down to fundamental issues like the price of beer.”’
    Brendel chuckled. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’ve generally got plenty in common with everyone we meet if only we’ll let ourselves talk about it. Now I feel a kind of fascination when you begin to talk of loaded revolvers, for, you see, the study of crime and its detection is my passion. Yes, that kind of thing is really my one great hobby. What did your Lord Birkenhead write? “I have surrendered myself often and willingly to the deception of the detective tale.” Something like that, wasn’t it? Well, I suppose that I’ve read almost every good detective tale that has ever been written, and a good many thousand bad ones as well, and all that only as a kind of appetizer to the study of the true tale of crime.