第33章

Owen stood up and began walking about the room, oppressed with a kind of terror.Presently he returned to the fire and began rearranging the clothes that were drying.He found that the boots, having been placed too near the fire, had dried too quickly and consequently the sole of one of them had begun to split away from the upper: he remedied this as well as he was able and then turned the wetter parts of the clothing to the fire.Whilst doing this he noticed the newspaper, which he had forgotten, in the coat pocket.He drew it out with an exclamation of pleasure.Here was something to distract his thoughts: if not instructive or comforting, it would at any rate be interesting and even amusing to read the reports of the self-satisfied, futile talk of the profound statesmen who with comical gravity presided over the working of the Great System which their combined wisdom pronounced to be the best that could possibly be devised.But tonight Owen was not to read of those things, for as soon as he opened the paper his attention was riveted by the staring headline of one of the principal columns:

TERRIBLE DOMESTIC TRAGEDY

Wife And Two Children Killed Suicide of the Murderer It was one of the ordinary poverty crimes.The man had been without employment for many weeks and they had been living by pawning or selling their furniture and other possessions.But even this resource must have failed at last, and when one day the neighbours noticed that the blinds remained down and that there was a strange silence about the house, no one coming out or going in, suspicions that something was wrong were quickly aroused.When the police entered the house, they found, in one of the upper rooms, the dead bodies of the woman and the two children, with their throats severed, laid out side by side upon the bed, which was saturated with their blood.

There was no bedstead and no furniture in the room except the straw mattress and the ragged clothes and blankets which formed the bed upon the floor.

The man's body was found in the kitchen, lying with outstretched arms face downwards on the floor, surrounded by the blood that had poured from the wound in his throat which had evidently been inflicted by the razor that was grasped in his right hand.

No particle of food was found in the house, and on a nail in the wall in the kitchen was hung a piece of blood-smeared paper on which was written in pencil:

`This is not my crime, but society's.'

The report went on to explain that the deed must have been perpetrated during a fit of temporary insanity brought on by the sufferings the man had endured.

`Insanity!' muttered Owen, as he read this glib theory.`Insanity!

It seems to me that he would have been insane if he had NOT killed them.'

Surely it was wiser and better and kinder to send them all to sleep, than to let them continue to suffer.

At the same time he thought it very strange that the man should have chosen to do it that way, when there were so many other cleaner, easier and more painless ways of accomplishing the same object.He wondered why it was that most of these killings were done in more or less the same crude, cruel messy way.No; HE would set about it in a different fashion.He would get some charcoal, then he would paste strips of paper over the joinings of the door and windows of the room and close the register of the grate.Then he would kindle the charcoal on a tray or something in the middle of the room, and then they would all three just lie down together and sleep; and that would be the end of everything.There would be no pain, no blood, and no mess.

Or one could take poison.Of course, there was a certain amount of difficulty in procuring it, but it would not be impossible to find some pretext for buying some laudanum: one could buy several small quantities at different shops until one had sufficient.Then he remembered that he had read somewhere that vermillion, one of the colours he frequently had to use in his work, was one of the most deadly poisons: and there was some other stuff that photographers used, which was very easy to procure.Of course, one would have to be very careful about poisons, so as not to select one that would cause a lot of pain.It would be necessary to find out exactly how the stuff acted before using it.It would not be very difficult to do so.Then he remembered that among his books was one that probably contained some information about this subject.He went over to the book-shelf and presently found the volume; it was called The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, rather an old book, a little out of date, perhaps, but still it might contain the information he wanted.Opening it, he turned to the table of contents.Many different subjects were mentioned there and presently he found the one he sought: