Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 12, 1967

Morley Roberts Mithridates the King

How can a truly “classic” short story remain “unknown,” sink into biblivion? We haven’t the slightest notion; it seems impossible. And yet, when you’ve read “Mithridates the King,” you will agree, we think, that it is a classic story. Nevertheless, we cannot recall an anthology in which the story was included, or an anthologist or critic who has ever referred to it. Bringing the story to you now makes us feel like a “detective Frank Buck” — as if we too were a great hunter who believed in “bringing back alive” the unusual and the unique.

Here, then, for your pleasure, is a “lost” story written by a man whose very name is also undeservedly “lost” these forgetful days. Morley Roberts died in 1942 at the age of 85, and in his 54 years of sustained creativity he averaged one book per year. He used, often brilliantly, nearly every form of literary expression — nonfiction as well as fiction — and yet, who remembers the title of a single one of his more-than-50 books? The personal friend of many of the celebrated writers of his time, including Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Motley Roberts was — to quote John Keats’s epitaph for himself — “one whose name was writ in water”...

The War Office is on the left side of Pall Mall as you go West, and it is a compound, complex, intricate, protoplasmic mass of amorphous rooms, passages, and cells, in which it is easy for a man, or an improvement, or a project to get so thoroughly lost that he or it is never heard of again. There are rooms in it with bookcases of fine old books, well worth any man’s stealing; there are others with human fossils, admirably adapted for exhibition, though no one would think of stealing them; there are a good many clever men there spoiled for life; there are some not quite spoiled; there are a few absolutely worth any man’s money as workers, for even the Civil Service cannot always destroy natural energy. And of these Hetherwick Coutts, of A.G. 15, was one. In the eyes of his superiors he was invaluable. To his inferiors he was a beast and they hated him unanimously, and said so without the slightest reserve — when he was on leave or out of the room.

To reach the Department known technically as A. G. 15, you go in the first door you come to next to the Reform Club, and then turn to the right. After going a few hundred yards or so, past a few score doors, taking care not to tumble over boxes of papers which are humorously described as “on transit,” because no one knows where they are, there is a stone staircase. Here it is best to call a messenger and fee him. After a long and weary journey the traveler reaches a black passage like the entrance to a catacomb, and probably ruins his hat against an unlighted gas-jet. Opening a door, he stumbles into A.G. 15, and almost on the occupants thereof, who are usually six in number.

Hetherwick Coutts sat in the second room with a subordinate, whom a long course of previous military service in a low grade had rendered proof to any superior’s bad temper, unless that superior took to kicking him. And it is only just to Coutts to say he never did that, nor even constructively threw things at his subordinates. A constructive shying is to throw papers on the floor and request the harmless gentleman who has brought them to pick them up again. It is an unpleasant way of making objections, and in any but Her Majesty’s employ might give rise to actions for assault and battery. However, Hetherwick Coutts was not so gross as all that. He dressed well, and tried to live up to his tailor at any rate. His forte was sarcasm, and a kind of military insolence he had picked up from one or two Staff officers, who had been relegated to the purlieus of the W. O. as Deputy-Assistant-something-or-others because they were a deal too smart to live with their regiments.

For it is very easy to learn to sneer in a big office. There is sure to be one fool at least in the room, and if he is too irascible, or too much of a fighting man to go for verbally, there are times when he retires upstairs to have a smoke. Then the others can stand before the fire and say what they think without any danger of a row, which may end in the real slinging of ink or of the sacred Bible of the W. O., which is bound in pinkish paper. In some departments of the Foreign Office they fight with illuminated addresses to Her Majesty, in which our noble Queen is congratulated on her birthday or some other event, for very few ever reach Windsor, in spite of the lying letters which acknowledge them. But in Pall Mall most larking or rowing is done with Army Lists, or candles, or both. But this is a digression, though not without its uses, because Hetherwick Coutts was brought up in the office from his early youth.

How he was hated! — for he was not a fool, and had a prodigious memory.

“There was a paper on this subject about ten years ago,” he would remark easily, and the whole dusty Registry cursed him when that paper was called for.

“You made exactly the same mistake before, Mr. Smith, so you are not even original.”

And he would recall Mr. Smith’s folly with exact persistence into ancient detail very sickening to a man who was always careful.

Then he descended to absurd particulars. A wretched writer at ten-pence an hour was not to cross his t’s in such a way unless he wished to look for another office. He was mean too, and more than once made a mistake on purpose to catch a clerk for not detecting it. Sometimes he had to sign a number of papers and put “No remarks” on them.

“If I were called upon to report on the intelligence of those who help me,” he remarked brightly, “I should require a new supply of minute paper.”

He always cut his subordinates if he met them in the street, which of course greatly endeared him to them. If they had only known that the D. A. A. G. had cut him in the Row, it would have poured balsam into their wounds, and made them work cheerfully for a whole week. Sometimes when a man asked him a question he snorted; he snorted some clean out of the room. The messengers loathed him. The orderlies wanted to catch him in the dark and cut his entrails out with their belts. The waiter who brought him his dinner, or rather his lunch, thought of poisoning him.

There were others besides the waiter who had notions it would be the best thing that could happen if Hetherwick Coutts would take up his abode in the next world and run A.G. 15 in Dante’s nethermost Inferno, with Satan for the Field Marshal Commanding-in-chief; for a man’s subordinates usually hate him if there is any chance of their obtaining an increase in their monthly checks when he deceases; and the higher men get, the more their greedy ambition is roused. This is the curse of the Civil Service. Hidden in the backroom of a dingy building, their doings are nothing to the world. Their only ambition centers on a petty power and a fuller purse. And if you would hate the man next above you at any time and in any place, how much more — O poor Obscurity — will you abhor him when he bars the way to you, and is neither old, nor an idiot, and has robust and indecent health. The only hope the men below had was that he would die of apoplexy. He had a red, healthy face, and they tried to think it a good sign — for them; for there were two of them who both hoped to be made chief when Hetherwick Coutts went below. They hated each other, but their hate for him was a crescent disease: though it seemed to reach the full, it still encroached.

F. W. Palmer, or Frederick Wentworth Palmer, was the man with the best chance according to official routine, for he was slightly the senior in service of Lyall Burke. But Burke was the cleverer man of the two, and had the neater knack of nice obsequiousness. Coutts was rather better disposed towards Burke than to most of the men about him. He had been distinctly civil to him several times, and Burke wondered why, expecting the deluge some day.

The rank obscurity of the paths that foiled ambition and baffled desire will lead men into, has had many a detective’s bull’s-eye thrust into it, but for all that, one can’t survey jungle or mallee scrub by the fiercest storm of thunder and lightning. Given severity of purpose, a man must act some way or another. He may wait and wait, but at last he grows tired of sharpening his razor in vain. He must shave someone. According to his disposition his thoughts grow; from them bud the flower of design and the fruit of deed. In a wider life, we may dissipate our civil energies; but in a narrow groove, anger, hatred, and all uncharitableness do more than blossom. If a man harms us without knowing it, we may grin and endure, and hold our peace, and sharpen no knives; but when he hates us, and we him, the devil is in the imbroglio, and all the hideous contents of the witches’ pot will strengthen the incantation we mutter.

For this man set thorns in his subordinates’ path; he grew inhuman, bestial. They loathed their own forced civility; under their smooth tongues lurked malice. Their own jealousy and distrust were nothing when they thought of him. Warm feelings simulating comradeship thrilled them when they spoke subtly against him. They estimated his life-forces: how long should he live? They canvassed every change he showed: the marks of a later night than most sent up their hopes. When he was really unwell, his slackened pulses set theirs galloping; as he failed, they grew stronger; when he went on leave, they turned on each other. And then the beast came back so strong, so hearty, so healthy that they, almost sickened. They congratulated him palely, like two curs; and, more cur-like still, they made two homes like hell that night.

Who put it in their hearts, who instructed them, who gave them the unnatural courage to even think of his death otherwise than they had done? The seeds of all crimes are in all hearts, as the seeds of all high virtues, all noble desires. Crush a man, he may not turn; he lacks sufficient courage; but at last he will. These two men, independently of each other, determined to rid themselves of Hetherwick Coutts. They would kill him. And naturally enough they turned to poison. They studied in secret.

Meanwhile, Hetherwick Coutts behaved like a rampant housekeeper who, after keeping her bed, gets up to discover flue and dirt in every hole and corner in the house. This was wrong, and that was wrong; and why was it that when his back was turned everything went wrong? He licked the skin off everyone, and rubbed caustic into their wounds with great delight in seeing them squirm: he used one hemisphere of his big brain to do his work with, the other he employed to invent sarcasms. For two weeks he thoroughly enjoyed himself, and he was getting into his usual routine when he had worked up both Burke and Palmer to be as good as their bad resolutions.

The next best thing to making up your mind to do a good deed without any slackness, or slowness, or want of utter completion, is to do exactly the reverse, and get on the side of Ahriman without reserve. Not five minutes before I began this particular paragraph I read a letter which accused me of letting my imagination run away with my perceptive faculties. If that is true, I may be wrong in thinking that it must be far beyond any art, or the practice thereof, to have no conscience and no remorse and a passion for poisoning. So I think that the best moment Coutts’ two subordinates had in their life of miserable service was when they rose to the occasion and began to act on their real impulses. But the passion that leads to crime is usually like the dawn of a wet day. There is blood, and fire, and strange immortal-looking color in the east, but it dies in gray as the sea turns cold and wind and rain come together to blot out its evil glory. They were cowards, after all, these men, though they once dared to act: for they did dare.

They poisoned him both on the same day, at the same hour, for some strange sympathy linked them together. The rising heat of one’s blood, in the lower plane of man where crimes flourish redly, urged on the other; and when Hetherwick Coutts insulted them together in a tone that was like the hissing of hot metal and ice, with his Celtic and Saxon temperaments laid close in one bitter intention, they retorted vulgarly and in silence, with mixed poisons in his beer. They sat apart at the other end of the room and saw him empty his pint jug. Their blood ran cold, they shook, and whined excuses to their own souls. How sick they felt when he announced at half-past two that he did not feel well and would go home. Their throats were as dry as the fountains of the pit, and they repented for fear, and sweated ice. Before a man commits crimes he should test his courage, and not rush blindly into hell before he knows his endurance of torment.

With the same passion of fear came the same expression to their ghastly faces. They looked at each other stealthily, and ended by fearing each other. “Why did Burke look so?” said Palmer, and Palmer questioned himself equivalently. They went on paltry excuses to each other’s desks; they stared at each other out of the corners of their eyes. The avoidance that each felt in the other was confirmation. As the long hours went on, they were confirmed in their mutual suspicions. As the clock struck five, the others went like beasts of burden, glad at unyoking time. They remained and washed their hands as they would have washed their stained memories. Burke communed with himself; he would say he felt uninclined to go home; he would ask Palmer to dine with him. The same thought was in the slower brain of his colleague.

“If you will,” said Burke, “come and dine with me tonight at some restaurant. I don’t feel inclined to go home.”

“Very well,” replied Palmer, hoarsely. And Burke felt a little easier. “Would this man dine with him if he thought him what he was; if he had seen?”

So they went out together, and they walked down Pall Mall to Charing Cross.

“Let’s go into Gatti’s,” said Burke, and they sat at the best end of the long restaurant. Both maneuvered to get their faces most in shadow. But there was little for either, and Palmer got what there was.

Burke ordered a good dinner — soup and a vol-au-vent and a bird — and suggested champagne. Though he was meaner than Meanness itself, standing a shame to relative things in the realm of Noumena, Palmer was not surprised. And it made his entertainer’s heart sink that he was not.

They ate as if they were eating dry crusts in a prison, and looked at each other furtively. They drank as though they wanted to swamp hot fires within, and grew a little braver. But for all that, they looked strange, white-livered hounds, and not to be liked. The foolish young men and girls, and the foolish old men with girls by no means foolish in their generation, looked wise and great beside them. As there are different infinities, there are different degradations. To be greatly afraid after a deliberate act is to wallow in the sink of the nethermost pit. They drank on.

Palmer insisted on ordering more wine, for which he was to pay. What would have sent them both into the gutter a week ago was nothing to them now. They were strangely conscious that each drank enormously without getting affected They turned to liqueur brandy, and their sad and extraordinary sobriety made the waiter respect them. Such dry sticks of men, yet how they could drink! He reported their deeds to the manager, who inspected them to estimate their solvency. At last they went out together and the chill air affected them. They went down the Strand and turned into a wine shop to take a farewell. They affected friendship. Burke grew bold.

“To the devil with old Hetherwick Coutts!” said he.

“Yes,” said Palmer, pallid to the gums. His tongue clove to his mouth. Burke looked at him suddenly, and Palmer turned away; his boon companion followed him. They walked up towards Picadilly in silence.

“I wonder whether he is going home,” they said to themselves. “When he gets rid of me he will inform the police,” they murmured. They walked into Piccadilly, it was twelve o’clock, half-past twelve, and Walpurgis night. Palmer reeled at the next turning and stumbled a little up the narrow street. It leads to Vine Street; the police station is there at the back of St. James’s Hall, that home of music and morals. Burke had a sudden blind access of rage, he struck at Palmer fiercely and smote him on the jaw; the other retorted, and they rolled over, locked together. There was a rush of men and women, and oaths and yells and laughter roared over them as they fought on the pavement.

“Two swells fighting,” said one girl, and a policeman pushed her aside. In half a minute they were inside the station, for that policeman had refrained three times in one night from arresting anybody. Even a policeman’s temper is not everlasting.

They almost fought again trying to get the first word, and were plucked roughly apart by another constable.

“Well, what’s this?” said the night inspector.

“Two drunks fighting, sir,” said the policeman.

“He’s poisoned a man at the War Office!” screamed Palmer, who in his rage of fear thought to accuse the other of his own crime.

“It is he that did it!” said Burke readily. “I saw him.”

“Did what?” said the inspector. “Hold your tongue, sir!”

This was to Burke, and as he was fast recovering his cunning and self-control, he bowed.

“Now then, sir, what is this you say?”

“I say that man poisoned Mr. Hetherwick Coutts of the War Office this afternoon. I saw him,” said Palmer, reeling, for he was full to the lips.

“And you say that he did it?”

“Yes,” said Burke; “I saw him.”

The inspector shrugged his shoulders and looked at them curiously. He turned to a sergeant, for he had only just come on duty.

“There is no talk of anything at the War Office?” he said.

“Not that I know of,” said the sergeant stiffly.

“Then I think that we had better accommodate these two gentlemen for the night; for if they have poisoned no one else, they have been poisoning themselves,” said the inspector.

They were marched off and put in the cells.

“This is a rather queer thing, is it not, Bowes?” remarked the inspector, leaving his seat and warming himself at the fire.

“Yes, sir,” said the laconic sergeant.

“Do you think there is anything in it?” The inspector could not refrain from asking the question, for it certainly seemed very curious.

“Drink, sir!” replied Bowes.

“Early tomorrow send down to the War Office and inquire about this man, this Mr. Hetherwick Coutts.”

And in the morning they did so. At eleven o’clock Mr. Hetherwick Coutts was in his usual place, and in answer to the inquiries as to his health, he replied that he was well enough, though he had felt very ill during the previous afternoon and evening. At the inquiry Palmer and Burke held their peace, and knew nothing.

“Yet I gave him enough atropine to have killed two men,” said Palmer to himself.

“Yet I gave him enough muscarine to have killed a donkey,” said Burke.

But these two poisons are antidotes.