Nightshade and Damnations

BONE FOR DEBUNKERS

On a blast of bitter east wind that rushed down Great Russell Street came a spatter of cold raindrops that bit like small shot. I reached the portico of the British Museum one jump ahead of the storm, and there, standing apart from the students who had come out of the reading room for air and sandwiches, illuminated by a lightning flash, stood Karmesin in a black rubber Inverness cape reaching to his ankles and an oilskin hat shaped like a gloxinia. One hand grasped a Kaffir knobkerrie with a gold-plated head, while the other applied motions as of artificial respiration to his half-drowned moustache, and he was glaring at a Polynesian monolith in such a manner that I half expected its great stone eyes to look uneasily away.

“Third storm this morning,” I said. He looked at me, glowering like the Spirit of the Tempest.

“A wretched day would not be complete without you. I would invite you to offer me coffee, if I did not object to sitting at table with imbeciles,” he muttered. “Do you realize I could sue you, your publishers and printers, your distributors, newsagents and booksellers for millions? And I would, too, if I needed petty cash. How dare you describe me as ‘either the greatest criminal or the greatest liar the world has ever known’? This is libelous: a liar always betrays a desire to be believed. Damn your impudence, have I ever cared whether you believed me or not?”

“No,” I said, “but——”

“No,” he interrupted. “And you assume that a truly great criminal never talks of his work, but how wrong you are! A confession unsupported by evidence is only a story, and I leave no evidence. I run no risk in telling you certain incidents, you scribbler, to enable you to put a few greasy pennies in your moth-eaten pockets. Remember this: the most pitiful sucker on earth is your sceptic. If you insist, we will go to the Cheese Restaurant and have a bit of Brie and a glass of wine.”

The rain abating, we went; but Karmesin was not easily to be placated this morning. He continued, “It’s not so much your catchphrases that annoy me as your writing; I read your version of how, having disguised myself as a statue in Westminster Abbey, I discovered a sonnet of Shakespeare in Spenser’s tomb, and I blushed for you.”

“All I did was——” I began, but Karmesin interjected, “You be quiet!” At least the cheese appeared to please him. “I like Brie and wine,” he said.

“They are the two things in this world that are impossible to fake. Not even Melmoth Agnew could successfully counterfeit their flavor.”

“Strange name,” I said.

“Strange man,” said Karmesin. “If only you could write, what a story you might tell about him and me—for without me, he is nothing—and about the Society for the Clarification of History.” He shook his great head. “But I can just see you describing Melmoth Agnew, for instance, as ‘an anaglyphic character’—here you put three dots—‘a personality in low relief’—then more dots—‘In other words, he had practically no individuality of his own.’”

I said, “Have more cheese. For goodness’ sake, have some more wine. Have a cigarette.”

He accepted gruffly and continued, “I had occasion just now to upbraid a certain inky little penny-a-liner not a hundred miles from here in connection with a sonnet of Shakespeare. Then, the name of Melmoth Agnew comes up in connection with cheese, and in spite of myself I find myself telling you that I once employed the fellow in a matter concerning quite a different kind of Shakespearean document.”

I said, “What sort of document?”

“Ah, you are saying to yourself, ‘Old Karmesin is going to tell me now that he discovered a lost play by that greatest of poets.’ As usual, you are entirely wrong,” he said, then told this story:

I employed Agnew when I felt morally bound to do a service for a distressed gentleman. Do you know what a gentleman is? A gentleman is one who, among other things, does not twist his friends’ conversation into excruciating prose forms and hawk them from editor to editor (said Karmesin, giving me a hard look).

The gentleman we will call Sir Massey Joyce of King’s Massey, in Kent. I had not seen him for a long time; nobody had. They said he had turned recluse and buried himself in the country. Having been abroad for some years I had lost touch with him. Then, one day, certain business taking me to Ashford, it occurred to me to drive over and say “How d’you do.”

You have seen photographs of King’s Massey in Stately Homes of England. It is a beautiful old house, in three different styles of architecture—early Tudor, part of it “modernized” by Inigo Jones in the 1620’s, with a wing by Adam built in the eighteenth century—the incongruities oddly harmonious. Massey Joyce was confused, almost embarrassed. He said, “My dear fellow, come in! Come in!”

For a recluse, I thought, he was remarkably pleased to have company. “It’s nearly dinner time,” Massey said. “Let’s have a glass of sherry,” and the old butler, Hubbard, served us, while my host chattered of things past in London.

He is lonely, I said to myself as we went in to dinner. The great mahogany table was set sumptuously with the Joyce plate. The huge silver-gilt centerpiece was heaped with fresh fruit. Old Hubbard poured us a rare old Chablis and served a fish course—three tinned sardines. After this, the entrée came up: there was a profusion of garden vegetables and, on a gleaming silver platter, canned corned beef, thinly sliced. With this—Well, did you ever try bully beef with a vintage Clos de Vougeot? It’s rather curious. And then there was a little block of pasteurized synthetic cheese with a bottle of rare old port, and some coffee-type essence in cups of Sèvres porcelain accompanied by a hundred-year-old brandy and superlative cigars.

After dinner, sitting over more brandy in the library, Massey Joyce said to me, “There’s enough wine and cigars in the cellar and the cabinets to last out my time: I don’t entertain much nowadays. But for the rest, one rubs along, what?”

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:

Of course, this should not tax the intelligence of the average coal heaver, in possession of all the clues I have given. Yet, for you, I had better explain!

What desperate soliloquy in Hamlet contains the words, “No more?” The familiar one, of course: “To be, or not to be,” and so on.

Examine that sombre opening to Hamlet’s soliloquy; and you will notice that, curiously enough, the letter C does not occur anywhere in the first six lines. The writer is not a homesick Spaniard or Italian from the Mediterranean, which formerly was called the “Middle Sea.” He refers to the missing C in his name. He has buried his identity in the first half dozen lines of Hamlet’s familiar soliloquy.

Having guessed this far—why, babes in kindergarten solve trickier puzzles than this riddle of the rhyming numbers. Starting with “To be,” count the letters by their numbers, as far as “No more.” Letters 3, 16, 29, 30, 31, 46, 47, 56, 64, 65, 69, 72, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 156, 157 and 158. So it reads:

Hence, “Ba-on writ this tragedie.” Without his middle C, Bacon is not; yet here he is. And so he tells you, and in his own handwriting too!

A real lawyer’s split-hair quibble, what? Just tortuous enough. A meaty bone for the debunkers, eh? It might be asked, “Why should Bacon have written this?” The answer is: “Bacon liked actors; he wrote it in a promptbook to amuse some sprightly player after a theatrical supper, circa 1615.”

So, having suitably oxidized the faint lead in the pencil marks, half erasing them in a process of ever so gentle abrasion, I returned to King’s Massey on the nineteenth and slipped the promptbook back where I had found it.

Massey Joyce said, “I do hope this Brod man coughs up. Do you know, Hubbard and his wife—who cooks and housekeeps—haven’t had any wages for three years? I tried to pay ’em off when I sold my guns and sporting prints, but they wouldn’t go. Begged pardon; said they’d known the good times, and by the Lord Harry they’d stand by in the bad.”

“Do those Elizabethan manuscripts of yours mean much to you?” I asked.

He said, “No. Why?”

I told him, “Why then, Massey, we’ll save your old books yet. Only you keep right out of it. Have a migraine; keep to your room and leave it to me.”

So he did; and Doctor Brod turned up on the morning of the twentieth with a friend, one Doctor Brewster, also of the Society for the Clarification of History, but lean and keen, with a businesslike dry-cleaned look about him. As I had expected, they found little enough to interest them on the bookshelves.

By the time they got to the manuscripts cabinets Brod was already fidgeting and looking at his watch. Casually forcing my marked promptbook on them, somewhat as a conjuror does when he makes you pick a card, I said, “I doubt if there’s much here. But Sir Massey regards these holographs as the apple of his eye. The one you have there is rather defaced, I’m afraid. A lot of the others are in much better condition.”

But Brod, suddenly perspiring like a pressed duckling, had a reading glass out, and Brewster was putting on a pair of microscope spectacles, and they were scrutinizing my little poem in the strong sunlight by the window. Brod took out notebook and pencil and made voluminous notes, occasionally nudging Brewster, who remained blank and impassive. They knew Bacon’s hand, bless their hearts! And cryptograms were meat and drink to the likes of them.

After a while, with complete composure, Brewster said, “I don’t know. It’s possible the society might be interested in two or three of these manuscripts.”

But I said, “I’m awfully sorry; two or three won’t do, I’m afraid. Sir Massey regards this collection as a whole. He’d never break it up. There are interesting fragments by Nathaniel Field, for example, and Middleton, and Fletcher. I’m no expert, doctor, only a friendly agent.”

“Sir Massey Joyce vould not refuse permission to photograph or copy certain excerpts,” said Brod.

I answered, “I’m afraid he would.”

Then Brewster asked, “Has this collection ever been offered for sale before?” I told him, “Never. It has never even been properly catalogued, I’m afraid.”

Brewster tossed the Hamlet nonchalantly, as if it were a mail-order catalogue, on to a baize-covered table—I wouldn’t advise a novice to play poker with that one—and he asked, “How much is Massey Joyce asking for the collection?”

Apologizing, as for an embarrassing but harmless eccentric, I said, “Well, you see, Sir Massey values things strictly in proportion to how much he personally likes them. So he swears he won’t sell the manuscripts for a penny less than twenty-five thousand pounds.” I laughed here, and so did Doctor Brewster, while Brod muttered something about “vine drunkards” and “devourers of the charred carcasses of slaughtered beasts.”

I put the Hamlet back in its drawer and continued, “I know it’s absurd; but when a man of Sir Massey’s age has an idée fixe—you know? I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time. Well, I suppose you can’t find something in your line every time you look. Oh, by the way, do you happen to know a collector named Lilienbach? He’s coming next Monday. I wondered if he was all right.”

I knew, of course, that Doctor Lilienbach of Philadelphia was one of the richest collectors of rare books and manuscripts in the world; and, of course, these fellows were sure to know this too.

“Lilienbach,” Brod began, but Brewster cut in, “Lilienbach, Lilienbach? No, I can’t say I know him. Let’s not be hasty. These things take time. Look here; say I pay Sir Massey Joyce a small sum down for an option to purchase on terms to be mutually agreed?”

I said, “I shouldn’t, if I were you—not until Sir Massey has had a chance to talk to Doctor Lilienbach.”

Then there was a silence until, at last, Brewster said, “I’ll have to call Chicago. Even if I were interested, I couldn’t make any sort of bid before tonight.”

I said, “Why not do that? Only I’m afraid you’ll have to call from Ashford, Sir Massey does not believe in telephones. He thinks they cause rheumatism.”

And, to cut a long story short: after a day of negotiation the Society for the Clarification of History authorized Brewster to purchase Sir Massey Joyce’s Elizabethan manuscripts, with all rights pertaining thereto, for 17,599 pounds. So my old friend kept his books and had some money to support himself and the Hubbards in their declining years.

Karmesin paused. I asked, “And you got nothing?”

Karmesin said, “Massey Joyce wanted me to take half. I couldn’t possibly, of course. Am I a petty larcenist to work for chicken feed? No. My amusements are few; I had my fun. For a small outlay, I had the double-barrelled pleasure of helping a friend in need at the expense of an organization which I despise.”

There being a wedge of cheese left, Karmesin wrapped it in a paper napkin and put it in his pocket.

I said, “I’ve read nothing of your ‘Baconian’ document as yet.”

“You will. They are preparing a book about it, and my ink is brewing for a counterblast that will shake the world. You just wait and see!”

“So there the matter ended?”

Karmesin grunted, “After dinner that night, Massey Joyce said to me, ‘It is astounding that such societies can exist. They really believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare! No, really, there are limits! Was ever a more pernicious fable hatched by cranks?’

“‘Never,’ I said.

“‘It is wonderful what people can be gulled into believing—Bacon, indeed! Why, every shopgirl knows that the plays of William Shakespeare, so-called, were written by Christopher Marlowe!’ said Massey Joyce.”