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.”