Nightshade and Damnations (14 page)

I said, “It might appear, old friend, that things aren’t all they should be.”

He answered, “Confidentially, I’m stone broke. I say nothing of taxes. Certain domestic affairs, which we’ll not discuss, set me back more than I had—over a quarter of a million. Everything you see, except the wine, the tobacco and these books, is entailed or mortgaged.”

I said, “I know, Massey. Norway sardines and Argentine beef might be a quirk of taste; but never penny paraffin candles in silver-gilt sconces.”

“Well, I can’t bilk the fishmonger and the butcher,” said he. “The books must go next.”

I was shocked at this; Sir Massey Joyce’s library was his haven, his last refuge. It was not that he was a bibliophile: He loved his library—the very presence of all those ranged volumes with their fine scent of old leather comforted him and soothed his soul.

He went on, “Anyway, this is a deuced expensive room to heat. I’ll save insurance too. I’ll read in the little study, where it’s snug. Oh, I know what’s in your mind, old boy. How much do I need, and all that, eh? Well, to see my way out with a clear conscience, I want ten thousand pounds. Borrowing is out of the question—I could never pay back.”

I said, “Between old friends, Massey, is there nothing I can do for you?”

“Stay with me a day or two. There’s a man coming about the library. I thought I might get more, selling by private treaty. He isn’t a dealer; he’s an agent for the Society for the Clarification of History. You know, ever since Boswell’s diary was found in an old trunk, there’s hardly an attic or a private collection in England they haven’t pawed over. I’m told they have all the money in the world, and anything they want they’ll pay a fancy price for. What the devil
is
this Society for the Clarification of History, anyway?”

I said, “You know how it is; a few people like to make something, but most people prefer to break something. You may earn a crust praising great men, but you will get rich belittling them. The Society for the Clarification of History is fundamentally a debunking society; it’s just the kind of thing fidgety millionaires’ widows like to play with.

“It’s back-fence gossip on a cosmic scale. There’s excitement in it and controversy in it and publicity; and it’s less bourgeois than endowing orphanages—and not half as expensive. They like to prove all kinds of things—they are heritage busters and tradition wreckers: Paul Revere couldn’t ride; Daniel Boone was a Bohun and, therefore, rightful king of England; the author of
Othello
, in certain lines addressed by the Moor to Iago, prophesied the great fire of Chicago. Touching which, their great ambition is to prove beyond doubt that Francis Bacon wrote the works of William Shakespeare. They’d give their eyeteeth for incontrovertible evidence of that.”

“All poppycock!” Massey Joyce shouted. “Bacon did nothing of the sort.”

“Drop it. I know he didn’t. Why do you want me to stay?”

“I beg pardon, old fellow. That Baconian nonsense always irritates me. Apart from the joy it is to have you here, I want you with me because one of these Clarification of History people called Dr. Olaf Brod is coming Wednesday morning. You’re shrewd. I’m not. Handle the business for me?”

I said I would and that he was not to worry; but my heart misgave me. True, Massey Joyce had
25
,
000
volumes, many of them rare, especially in the category of the drama. But books, when you want to buy them, are costly and, when you need to sell them, valueless. However much had been spent on the library, Massey Joyce would be very lucky to get a couple of thousand pounds for the lot.

I did not sleep well that night; the owls kept hooting
O Iago!
.
 
.
 
.
Iago
. . .
Iago
. . . .

I was concerned for my old friend; in times like these, we must preserve such honorable anachronisms as Sir Massey Joyce. He was one of the last of a fine old breed: a benevolent landlord, proud but sweet-natured and a great sportsman. He was the Horseman of the Shires, who had finished the course in the Grand National; at the Amateurs’ Club he had fought eight rounds with Bob Fitzsimmons; as a cricketer he was one of the finest batsmen in the country; and he was a stubborn defender of individual liberty, a protector of the poor and third-best-dressed man in England. A Complete Man. And, furthermore, a patron of the arts, especially of the theatre—his first wife was Delia Yorke, a fine comic actress and a very beautiful woman in her day.

This marriage was perfectly happy. Delia was the good angel of the countryside. But they had a wretch of a son, and he went to the dogs—he drank, swindled, forged, embezzled and, to hush matters up, Massey Joyce paid. Having run down to the bottom of the gamut of larceny, the young scoundrel became a gossip columnist and then went out in a blaze of scandal, when a woman he was trying to blackmail shot him. This broke Delia’s heart, and she died a year later.

But my dear friend Massey Joyce had to live on, and so he did, putting a brave front on it. Then he married again, because he met a girl who reminded him of his truly beloved Delia. She was much younger than Massey, also an actress, and her only resemblance to Delia was in her manner of speaking: she had studied it, of course. This was the best job of acting that shallow little performer ever did. Massey financed three plays for her. They were complete failures. She blamed Massey naturally, left him and ran off with a Rumanian film director.

Massey let her divorce him, saying, “That Rumanian won’t last. Poor Alicia can’t act, and she ain’t the kind of beauty that mellows with age. She’ll need to eat. It’s my fault anyway. What business has an old man marrying a young woman? Serves me right.”

Outwardly he looked the same, but he seemed to have lost interest. He sold his stable, rented his shooting, stopped coming up to town for the first nights, sold his house in Manchester Square, resigned from his clubs, locked up most of King’s Massey and lived as I have described. I had not known he was so poor. Before dawn, giving up all hope of sleep, I carried my candle down to the library: the electricity had been cut off, of course.

A glance at the catalogue more than confirmed my misgivings, Readers of these kinds of books are becoming fewer and fewer; there was not a dealer in the country who would trouble to give Massey Joyce’s treasure shelf space. Hoping against hope I opened a cabinet marked MSS:
Elizabethan
. The drawers were full of trivial stuff, mostly contemporary fair copies, so-called, of plays and masques, written by clerks for the use of such leading actors as knew how to read.

My heart grew heavier and heavier. All this stuff was next door to worthless. The sun rose. Chicago, Chicago, Chicago! said a sparrow. And then I had an idea. I took out of the cabinet a tattered old promptbook of the tragedy of
Hamlet
, copied about
1614
and full of queer abbreviations and misspellings, and carried it up to my room. Although I knew the play by heart, I reread it with minute attention, then put the manuscript in my suitcase, and went down to breakfast.

Over this meal I said to Massey Joyce, “It’s understood, now. I have a free hand to deal with this Dr. Olaf Brod and his Society for the Clarification of History?”

“Perfectly,” he said, “I’m grateful. He might come out with some of that damned Baconian stuff, and I’d lose my temper.”

“Just keep quiet,” I said.

And it was as well that Massey Joyce did as I advised, for Olaf Brod was one of those melancholy Danes that rejoice only in being contradictory. His manner was curt and bristly, like his hair. He bustled in about lunchtime and said, in a peremptory voice, “I haf time now only for a cursory glance. I must go unexpectedly to Vales. Proof positif has been discovert at last of the nonexistence of King Artur. Today is the secondt of July. I return on der tventiet.”

He rushed about the library. “I had been toldt of manuscripts,” he said.

I replied, “Doctor, we had better leave those until you can study them.”

“Yes,” he said, “it is better soh.” But he stopped for a quick luncheon. Massey had up some golden glory in the form of an old still champagne. Doctor Brod was severe. “I am a vechetarian,” he said.

Massey asked, “Isn’t wine a vegetable drink, sir?” With his mouth full of carrots, Brod replied, “Not soh! Dat bottle is a grafeyard. Effery sip you take contains de putrefiedt corpses of a trillion bacteria of pfermentation.”

“Hubbard, fresh water to Doctor Brod,” said Massey, but Brod said, “Der vater here is full of chalk; it is poisonous. It makes stones in der kidleys.”

Massey said, “Been drinking it sixty-five years, and I have no stones in my kidneys, sir.”

Olaf Brod answered, “Vait and see. Also, der cigar you schmoke is a crematorium of stinking cherms and viruses.” Luckily he was in a hurry to leave. But he paused on the threshold to say, “On de tventiet I come again. No more cigars, no more vine, eh? Soh! Boil der vater to precipitade de calcium. Farevell!”

I said to Massey Joyce, having calmed him down, “I’ll be here on the nineteenth, old fellow.”

He said, “There’ll be murder done if you ain’t!” Then I hurried back to town, taking that old promptbook copy of
Hamlet
with me. I also took a little lead from one of the old gutters in the Tudor part of King’s Massey. What for? To make a pencil with, of course; and this was a matter of an hour. I simply rubbed the sliver of metal to as fine a point as it would conveniently take: it wrote dull gray. This done, I went to see Melmoth Agnew.

You would have loved to describe him; you would have pulled out all the stops (said Karmesin and, in a horrible mockery of my voice and style, he proceeded to improvise). Melmoth had pale, smooth cheeks. His large round eyes, shiny, protuberant and vague, were like bubbles full of smoke. The merest hint of a cinnamon-brown moustache emphasized the indecision of his upper lip. He carried his cigarette in a surreptitious way, hidden in a cupped hand. He had something of the air of a boy who has recently been at the doughnuts and is making matters worse by smoking. I half expected his black silk suit to give out a faint metallic crackle, like burnt paper cooling. His silk shantung shirt was of the tints of dust and twilight, and his dull red tie had an ashen bloom on it like that of a dying ember . . . That’s your kind of writing, give or take a few “ineluctables” and “indescribables” and whatnot. Bah!

Agnew was a kind of sensitized Nobody. You have heard of that blind and witless pianist whom P. T. Barnum exhibited? The one who had only to hear a piece of music played once, and he could play it again, exactly reproducing the touch and the manner of the person who had played before him, whether that person was music teacher in a kindergarten or a Franz Liszt? Great executants deliberately made tiny mistakes in playing the most complicated fugues; Blind Tom, or whatever they called him, reproduced these errors too. Agnew was like that, only his talent was with the pen. He had only to look at a holograph, to reproduce it in such a manner that no two handwriting experts could ever agree as to its complete authenticity.

I had previously found several uses for Melmoth Agnew; this time I carried him off to the British Museum, where I made him study some manuscripts of Francis Bacon. This peculiar fellow simply had, in a manner of speaking, to click open the shutters of his eyes and expose himself for a few minutes to what he was told to memorize.

I warned him to take especial care, but he assured me in the most vapid drawl that ever man carried away from Oxford, “The holograph of Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, is indelibly imprinted on my memory, sir. I am ready to transcribe in his calligraphy any document you place before me. Problems of ink, and so on, I leave to you.”

“It is to be written with a lead point.”

“Then it is child’s play,” said he, wanly smiling, “but it would be so much nicer in ink.” I knew all about that. There are other experts who, with chemicals and spectroscopes and microscopes, could make child’s play of detecting new from old, especially in mixtures like ink and the abrasions made by pens.

Against a coming emergency, which I was anticipating, I had in preparation an ink of copperas, or ferrous sulphate, which I made with unrefined sulphuric acid and iron pyrites; gum arabic out of the binding of a half-gutted Spanish edition of Lactantius dated
1611
; and the excrescences raised by the cynips insect on the
Quercus infestoria
, better known as nutgalls—the whole adulterated with real Elizabethan soot out of one of the blocked up chimneys of King’s Massey. But it would take a year to age this blend, and there was no time to spare. This was none of Agnew’s business.

I showed him the promptbook copy of
Hamlet
and said, “Observe that the last half page is blank. Take that lead stylus and, precisely in Francis Bacon’s hand, copy me this.” I gave him a sheet of paper.

Having perused what I had written there, he said, “I beg pardon, but am I supposed to make sense of this?” I told him, “No. You are to make a hundred pounds out of it.”

So Agnew nodded in slow motion and went to work, silent, incurious, perfect as a fine machine, and the calligraphy of Francis Bacon lived again. He was finished in half an hour.

“I’m afraid it’s rather pale,” he said apologetically.

I said, “I know. Forget it.” And such was his nature that I believe he forgot the matter forthwith; he even had to make an effort to remember his hundred pounds—I had to remind him.

Now I will write out for you, in modern English, what I had given Agnew to copy. In this version, I will make certain modifications in spelling, so that the riddle I propounded conforms with the key to it. Here:

I seek in vain the Middle Sea to see,

Without it I am not
,
yet here I be

Lost
,
in a desperate Soliloquy
.

If you would learn this humble name of mine

Take
3
and
16
and a score
-
and
-
9
.

Count
30
,
31
,
and
46
,

Be sure your ciphers in their order mix
,

Thus
,
after
46
comes
47

As surely as a sinner hopes for Heaven
.

Take
56
,
and
64
and
5
,

And so you will by diligence arrive