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
At numbers 69 and 72.
Five figures running now must wait on you
As 86, 7, 8, 9, ten fall due,
’Tis nearly done. Now do not hesitate
To mark 100; 56, 7, 8,
My mask is dropt, my little game is o’er
And having read my name, you read no more.
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:
To Be, or not to be—thAt is the questiON: