Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 21, No. 115, June 1953

Glimpses of the Moon by Leslie Bigelow

It is a pleasure to welcome Leslie Bigelow and his prize-winning story to the pages of EQMM. The author is in his early forties and a Special Lecturer in English at Arizona State College. He tells us, somewhat ruefully, that this is the eleventh American college and university where he has “menaced the minds of the young.” (Read Mr. Bigelow’s story, absorb his love for English literature, and judge for yourself how much of a “menace” he is in a classroom!) The author has had the good luck to travel extensively in Europe, and during the war he served with the Air Force in the Philippines. Out of all this background — especially out of his knowledge of London and its literary associations — has come a tale of a fabulous treasure and a pea-soup fog and a trio of sinister spivs and a “gross and greasy globe of a man” who proved to be the real menace — to the whole world...

You know me, of course: I am Henry Winford Platt, the Des Moines accountant and amateur litterateur. You know what I found in London, and you know that I sold it to the British nation for three pounds, ten shillings — about $10.

Just 31 sheets of yellowed paper, eight inches by six and one-half, watermarked with a court jester’s bauble. Yellowed sheets of paper. But I tell you that the cobra-guarded vaults of maharajahs glitter with nothing so precious, and the loot of Attila, buried with him on the Danube shore, is not half so bewitching.

Do you say, “Well, I’ll take Attila’s plunder?” Then you don’t know that I declined seven cabled offers, including one of $975,000 (about one-tenth of the true value of those sheets) from a well-known collector of manuscripts in Dallas, Texas...

On a Saturday night in London I like to prowl along the Strand to Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square; then across the Thames to Southwark, halting now and then among the crowd for a game of darts and a beer or a small scotch. Ah, those tavern names! The Trip to Jerusalem. The Goat and Compasses (out of an old error for “God encompasseth”). The Black Boy and Stomach-Ache. The Elephant and Castle. And all the rest. (Although I remember an even finer one in Paris — Le Pourquoi Pas, which is, so to say, The Why Not?)

Oh, I wander foolishly enough, and as I wander I pretend. Perhaps that some glorious woman will run out of a sinister purlieu. She is afraid, of course, insanely afraid, but I... Or in a flurry of shots, smash-and-grab thieves loot a jeweler’s window. The bobbies are baffled, but with great cunning I... Anyhow, at closing time I always end in Southwark at The Magpie and Tailor, where a spidery little fellow, the neighborhood darts champion, has learned to expect a gulp of Irish whiskey from the Des Moines Yank. The Magpie and Tailor stands near the site of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; the darts champion is straight from old England, cranky and tough.

This evening, behind the oval bar with its gleaming brass beer engines, a few bottles of lager floated in a wash-tub with a pill of dirty ice — iced beer, no less. True, once I used to chuckle at the Englishman who scorns refrigeration, central heating, and the rest because he hasn’t got them — pure fox-and-the-grapes. But after The Battle of Britain (and much else) I no longer chuckle at the British.

As I decanted the lager, a frayed little fellow beside me turned to say, with a Dundee burr, “An American, a Yank, eh, lad?”

Catching my eye, the barkeep shook his head. I gathered that the little man was a kind of tavern mascot: I was to step gingerly. So I excused myself, went to the toilet, and when I came out the barkeep was waiting beside the door. “Don’t mind ’im, sir,” he said. “A sawbones. Or used to be. Don’t work at it now. Won’t let ’im, I daresay.” He wagged a sympathetic head. “Drink, you know.”

I handed the barkeep a ten-shilling note. “Let him drink that up. On the house, of course.”

And fortified with brandy, the little seedy man talked with me for a long while: extraordinary talk, keen and cracked. Through many worlds he reeled, now a philosopher, now a fool, now a bloomin’ duke. The brave talk rang out, but the little man was lost and sad, like a small boy in a strange woods. Gradually the story came out — in a phrase here and a phrase there: wife died, then drink, then a bungled diagnosis; then the children go to an aunt in Glasgow, and then...

When the old cry of “Time, gentlemen! Time, please!” began to nudge us out, the little doctor had drunk up the ten shillings; and as I left, the barkeep said, “Thanks, mate. He was a damned fine man once.”

Outside in the street the doctor tugged at my sleeve and said, “Just a moment, guv’nor, will ye, please?” A counterfeit arrogance masked a dreadful shrinking inside him, and I listened, there in a beginning fog from the south.

“Look, guv’nor.” He extended a heavy parcel, wrapped in an old London Observer. That Observer lies before me on my desk now. It is the issue of Sunday, March 3, 1940. The first page is crammed with ads. On page 9 one reads: HITLER’S MOOD DEFIANT, “Germans Must Lead in Europe.”

When he folded back the Observer, I saw four heavy books and perhaps a dozen flat sheets. “Sorry,” I said. “You know I’m an American. Going back soon. Hate to carry anything unnecessary.”

Then he convinced me altogether. For this solid objection of mine silenced him, as it would not have silenced a fraud. The fraud would slide glibly over the objection with a rehearsed patter. But this little doctor was still a man, aware of other men’s problems. He began to fold the newspaper back into place.

I said, “All right, man. May I see what you’ve got there?”

The books were German. The sheets were good prints of old London: Covent Garden, the Haymarket, and so on. There was a print of the Fortune tavern on the bankside, where perhaps Shakespeare wandered after a first performance of, say, Hamlet. “Been in the family since God knows when,” the little man said.

“How much?”

“Guv’nor, I’ve got to have three quid ten. I’ve just got to have it.”

“Why three pound ten?”

“Guv’nor, I’ve just got to, I tell ye.”

I drew out four banknotes, and I really offered them to Dunkirk and Churchill and the Battle of Britain. With jerky haste he tucked them away and touched his cap. “Guv’nor—” But I had let him scrape and bow enough. “Well worth it,” I said. “The prints alone are worth it.” And they were.

“Where d’ye live, guv’nor?”

I told him.

“I’ll be to see ye tomorrow afternoon. Ye’re a good Yank, guv’nor.” I almost told him that I was sure to be out; but then, he was a good Scot, too.

He hurried through the fog into a fish-and-chips shop. A few moments later, with a huge greasy newspaper package under his arm, he vanished down the steps of an areaway below a To Let sign. Just before he went in, he glared at the sign, counted his money, and with enormous satisfaction tore it down.

I travel for Banning & Platt, installing accountancy systems for European firms. Because I had worked through Sunday, Monday morning the job was done for Harrington & Sons, Ltd., Leather and Findings. “Young” Mr. Harrington, 6o-odd, offered me a farewell Madeira in the quiet cellar hideaway near the Bank of England where we always lunched. Before its fireplace, the roast beef of old England once suffused its noble steam; and Harrington and I drank to the speedy return to England of that steam. Then, in a thickening fog, I sauntered up High Holborn toward Cartwright Gardens.

As always, the footways were dog-fouled. The bomb cavities were indecent, like gaps left in a sound mouth by the villainous extraction of sound teeth. The fog rolled thicker, a regular pea-souper, yellow and dirty, while I paused a moment before a tailor’s on Holborn, inspecting a gray tweed, matching it to my pudgy figure in the window. Just why I can’t say, but an English suit or a French one looks no more American than an American girl in Paris or Milan can ever look French or Italian.

In London I always stay at the Monmouth Arms, a tiny residential hotel in the crescent of Cartwright Gardens, near the roaring King’s Cross station. The slavey, Alice, always grins at me with splintered teeth. I’ve known Alice for eighteen years now. From year to year her hair fluctuates violently in color. Some years she looks a good deal older than others, depending on the brutality of her current sweetheart. But the teeth are constant: socialized dentistry has done nothing for them yet.

At the head of the first flight of stairs my room always awaits me dingily. Next door, the retired captain of artillery drunkenly squabbles with his French wife over shillings for the gas meter. But just now there were only three other guests: Ellen, the Yorkshire curate’s daughter, a typist; Terry the Irishman, office man for a dog-racing syndicate; and Tim the Cockney, lorry-driver for a wholesale fruiterer.

Or at least, so they said and so I believed, until one day Macclin, the fine Shakespearean scholar, visited me. Versed in London types, he said of them, “Pfui! Spivvies. Black marketeers. Watch out for them.”

Prompted by Macclin, I examined them more carefully, and was interested to note that each of them looked precisely like what each claimed to be. Ellen was the true curate’s daughter; Terry the true Irish betting man; Tim the true London truckman, down to the tweed cap and twisted teeth. But all this in a world where people seldom look like what they are: where the professor often looks like a cardsharp, the preacher like a ward politician, and the madam like the President Emeritus of the Ladies Saturday Morning Tennyson, Lobster-Fishing, and Uptown Marching Society.

Obviously, they had looked shrewdly at themselves. They had determined just what they really looked like. And then they had declared that they were what they seemed to be — anything but mere spivvies, butterflies, black market insects, carrion prowling the mews with illicit petrol and nylons. Spivvies — but clever and dangerous ones.

As I entered the hotel, they were whispering together in the parlor. I walked past them and then in my room unwrapped the books I had bought from the little doctor. One was a standard text on Latin grammar. I seemed to see the ten-year-olds, standing at attention in the Prussian classroom, announcing that all Gaul was divided into three parts.

Another was the first volume of a three-volume set of Hegel. It seemed rather unfair that Hegel, who argued everything in three steps, should be stripped of his middle premise and his conclusion. Another was a battered Almanach de Gotha.

The fourth was an edition of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Now, the. Germans are devoted to Shakespeare. Disposed to class him as a German, they regard his Stratford birth as merely another vile trick of perfidious Albion, probably accomplished with forged records. Here were Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Coriolanus. For some reason, no Macbeth.

The Shakespeare had been rebound in black pebbled leather, with heavy manila pockets pasted inside the covers for notes. The front pocket was plump with a square yellowed packet, folded in two. And I thought I saw a grim old German Dry-as-Dust methodically tucking away the sheets and I seemed to hear him say, “Abominable handwriting, nicht wahr? English handwriting.” And then the sheets, from God knows where, were forgotten in the vital current of Prussian life, the goose-stepping parades, the gruff barkings, the heraldic eagles.

God bless you, Herr Dry-as-Dust, God bless you!

I tell you I was staggered near to fainting. I’ll wager I stood stock-still for 50 seconds. Then I ransacked a set of postcards I’d bought at the Guildhall Museum the week before. Yes! There was the signature, on a property deed. I compared it with the yellowed sheets. Yes!

Oh, God bless you, Dry-as-Dust!

For here — here in my hand — were 31 yellowed sheets, carrying Hamlet in manuscript — in manuscript, mind you! — through that steamy scene in which the prince crucifies his mother. The handwriting? It was precisely like the signature and like the handwriting, too, of that odd single scene in the play Sir Thomas More which Shakespeare may have written. The paper? Right; an irregular laid paper with fibrous edges, where larger sheets had been torn, against a rule. The ink? Right; and oak-gall brown.

Perhaps you think I babbled like a child? But you must understand that no manuscript of Shakespeare had existed until then. Oh, manuscripts of poets laureate, manuscripts of driveling poetasters — by the trunkful, by the atticful, by the libraryful; but no manuscript of the lord of them all. God bless you, Dry-as-Dust!

While the fog coiled dirtily against the window, one of the three or four divining minds in all man’s history moved and felt and spoke in those yellowed sheets:

I turned to the place in the manuscript.

And I seemed to hear Burbage speak in the accent of Shakespeare’s day:

God bless you, Dry-as-Dust! May you rest at peace forever in your Prussian heaven, with regiments to bark at, with helpless children to terrify and helpless France to invade...

But of course I must check; and Alford Macclin was my man. Macclin was a fellow of a college at — call it whichever you like, Camford or Oxbridge. No doubt he fulfilled his duties there, whatever those duties may have been, with competence, but to the consternation or at least surprise of his scholars and colleagues. Consternation, for the great scholar Macclin was a gross and greasy globe of a man, dirty in habit, bald, and with a jagged half-moon scar beside the left side of his mouth.

Just when he was busy with his duties I could never determine, for I always found him in London (after I had found him the first time on the advice of a cataloguer at the British Museum) and always in the back room of a fusty cabman’s pub off Southampton Row, The Begging Wife. There he lolled in his greasy tweeds at the greasy table with its red-and-white checked oilcloth; sipping cherry brandy and teasing the cockney waitresses as they scampered about with ale or stout or veal pie and brussels sprouts. “Glimpses of the moon,” he used to say of this tawdry scene.

Now, I have seen several men perform their intellectual tasks, for a time at least, while drinking a very great deal indeed: two quarts a day of hard liquor appears to be an outside limit, except for fabled heroes. But I have never seen anybody else do it on cherry brandy — yet Macclin was in absolutely the first rank of world Shakespeareans. And it is worth adding that although the waitresses disliked him, they could not altogether despise him. His love of Shakespeare flickered in his ruined grossness like a candle still alight at some altar slimed with neglect.

Macclin glared at me. “Honorificabilitudinitatibus!” he declaimed.

Sighing, I was obliged by our custom to answer, “Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi.”

This mumbo-jumbo is scarcely worth explaining. The “word” Macclin used is a nonsense word put in the mouth of a pedantic ass in Love s Labour’s Lost. Although it is shaped like a Latin word, it means nothing whatever. But some ingenious rogue, dreaming that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays for him, transposed the letters into my Latin phrase, which means, roughly, “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.”

Pure claptrap, clever but absurd, and today I had no time for our bookish folderol. “Macclin, I want your opinion of something.”

“Ah?” He sipped his brandy. “In these days of the death of reason does an American approach an Englishman for an opinion? Preposterous!” Again he sipped. “And how fare your fine friends at the hotel?”

Of course he meant Ellen, Terry, and Tim. “Still there,” I said. Then I handed him the precious packet.

Languidly he extended his right hand, raising his brandy glass, smeared and sticky, with his left. He made a complex ritual of these two actions: the languid right hand declared the triviality of my request; the left hand saluted important transactions.

I said, “Wipe your fingers first.”

“Ah?”

“Wipe your fingers.” He drew out a dirty handkerchief. I handed him a clean one, and he said “Ah?” again — but he used it.

Then he opened the packet. I saw the little eyes, first indifferent, then amused, then intent. He held a sheet to the light of the filthy window to check the watermark. Then he half glanced up with a quick, sly speculation, returning to the sheets which, for all his bored air, began to tremble in excited fingers. The half-moon scar crimsoned.

“Well?”

Macclin said flatly, “There is no manuscript of Shakespeare.”

“Don’t you mean, there was no manuscript of Shakespeare?”

Something hostile, even dangerous, seemed to enter his mood. He strove to destroy my belief with, “A clumsy fraud. Wrong paper. Wrong ink. Wrong watermark. Wrong everything.” But those potato fingers trembled enough to rustle the sheets.

“Ah?” I said.

His whole manner had become elaborate. With an ornate indifference he asked, “What are you going to do with this — transparent forgery?”

“Shouldn’t it be in the British Museum?”

Macclin poured more brandy, then forced himself to sip very slowly with little animal grunts of pleasure; he hummed idly, his eyes blankly scanning the dirty room. “Fraudulent, but amusing. You know” — meditatively — “you know there are collectors of frauds — such frauds, for example, as those of Thomas James Wise; and I think” — wearily — “I think I might be able to find you 50 or even £100 pounds for this. For a fraud, it’s rather well done, you know.”

But he had told me all I needed to know. Macclin knew as much as anybody, and Macclin was convinced. Rising, I grasped the packet firmly. “Thank you, Macclin.”

He coughed; a little spray of brandy misted over the oilcloth. “This man — a fool you know, but quite devoted to his little hobby — this man might go as high as 200.”

“Thank you, Macclin. I’d better call the Museum, don’t you think?”

Now the whole shabby hulk heaved slowly up, like a sea elephant emerging from the depths. He was half menacing, half beseeching. “Great God, Platt! You’re not going to throw this away for nothing? Why, we could... Why, great God, the thing’s worth thousands, hundreds of thousands. With my backing...”

He touched my arm; for an instant I was sure he would throw himself upon his knees. And I can never forget the face of Macclin as he wavered there, squalid but with the oblique power of decay, his face as covetous as a devil’s in pursuit of the soul of a saint. With those hundreds of thousands, out of the greasy chrysalis of Macclin could flutter something clean, something fresh and new... But now all this, this new-birth of Macclin, was vanishing through the door in the pocket of an impudent Yank. The man was equally pitiful and repulsive; like all men, he was equally dreadful and touching.

“Great God, Platt!”

“Thank you very much,” I said.

Then I made phone calls which impressed me all over again with how hard it is to give away something valuable. Had I whispered stealthily, “I’ve got a manuscript, a Shakespeare manuscript, to sell. Smuggled in from Timbuktu by a Javanese stowaway on an Argentine freighter,” there might have been derision. But there would scarcely have been the mingled caution and bureaucratic indignation — yes, indignation! — which were audible when I asked, “Who should I see about the donation of an extremely important item of Shakespeareana?”

Finally, after an hour’s quibbling, I made an appointment with a Dr. Merganser of the British Museum. Even he was secretly afraid, somehow, but he covered his feelings with brisk efficiency and consented to receive me in a week’s time. In a week’s time! I determined to call in the reporters and have a week’s carnival with bureaucracy.

As I walked to Cartwright Gardens through the fog, I stole constant but almost furtive glances at this sheet or that of the manuscript. Why furtive? I cannot say for sure, but I felt somehow as guilty as a little boy who has discovered the secret hiding place of the Christmas presents. I was simply not up to this treasure; I had no business carrying it, but like the little boy I could not forbear looking.

At the Monmouth Arms I was still glancing at a leaf after I had closed the door. Then I stammered, “Oh, you!”

When nobody spoke, I demanded, “Just what in the devil are you doing here?”

Macclin did not answer. Ellen and Tim and Terry stood there negligently; and behind them, sweating but determined, hulked Alford Macclin, like some bloated pirate instructing active youngsters in veteran methods of foray.

They were all obviously in league. I seemed almost to hear the covenant: (“Only a damned Yank, after all. The... er... the property is actually mine, in any case. Merely a somewhat irregular recovery, you know.” “How much, fattie?” “Ah, perhaps... ah, perhaps five pounds apiece.” “Make it ten, fattie.” Hesitation. “Very well, then, ten.” Knowing looks. “Quite valuable, eh, fattie? But yours, all yours.”)

“Macclin,” I said, “You’re a damned fool.”

It was curious to watch him. For a moment his intelligence assented — as it had to assent — to the statement. But then greed overrode all. Greed exploded through his whole nature like a galvanic dose of strychnine. “Get it,” he whispered to the spivs.

The whisper was curious, too. It was almost as though he felt that a low voice lowered the offense. There was no sound now anywhere. The hotel was empty — no captain’s wife wailing at the meter. Cartwright Gardens is a crescent with little traffic, and the old mansions, converted into these little hotels, were built like fortresses lest any worldly noise disturb the old Victorian teaparties.

“Get it!” Macclin whispered again.

Terry and Tim? The American tough is alarming, but in a way you know him. Although he may do savage things, at least you know the kind of thing that he may do. But the alien tough alarms you with the prospect of an alien violence. You do not know him, and you do not know what he may do. The American tough carries a pistol, but the English tough may carry a potato filigreed with razor blades.

“Get what?” I asked.

Macclin whispered, “That envelope. That manila envelope. There under his arm.”

With a calm as false as Macclin’s when he first saw the manuscript, I asked, “All this over a few sheets of scratch paper?”

But Macclin’s excitement — and mine — had their contagion. Ellen and Terry and Tim began to sniff like terriers.

Unblinking as a snake’s, the pale eyes of Ellen stared at me through her horn-rimmed glasses. With a curate primness and classroom air of culture intolerable in view of what she was, she asked quietly, “Chaucer?”

I said nothing; she watched my face.

“Milton?”

I said nothing.

“Shakespeare?”

Some ungovernable twitch of my face informed her. Without changing her expression she became deadly. It was clear at once who dominated the shabby trio.

Again Ellen asked, “Shakespeare?” She made little flickering finger motions to Terry and Tim. And now Macclin was aghast. Even through his greed it penetrated to him that if the packet departed from me, it would certainly never arrive at him.

Of course I was frightened: this pudgy Des Moines accountant is no warrior at all. But overmastering mere fright, I saw a series of images, and they appalled me. These precious sheets in the manicured hands of some porcine British swindler, or some filthy gangster grown “respectable” in America. Or worse still, in the hands of trash and depravity.

Or perhaps it was a disdain of their position that supported me. After all, there had been no time for them to rehearse strategy. Someone might — someone must — come in soon; the hotel being vacant had been pure luck. And unless they killed me (would they risk that? — the English crook does not relish murder) unless they killed me, they had only the slenderest of chances, for the enormity of the theft would alert all England.

“Macclin,” I said, “let’s stop this nonsense, shall we?”

I believe that Macclin whispered, “All right.” But Ellen smiled, a vain, witch’s smile, motioning again to Tim and Terry. And then they stared behind me... I felt a draft as though someone had opened the door to peep in, unsure of welcome. I was afraid to turn around. But the draft increased, wisps of fog rolled in, and with a slam the door flung full open against its stop. Then someone brushed my shoulder to stand beside me, saying, “Ho, Yank, my lad. The devil’s own time finding ye.”

The little doctor’s voice faded away as he watched their faces. “Ho, Yank. All right, lad?”

“Careful.”

“Ho! Careful is it? And with my friends from The Three Crowns awaiting outside.”

Now they were troubled. Did his friends wait outside? The door was open: I should have rushed through it into the crescent, shouting. The stupid game should have been over.

But instead I asked foolishly, “Is anybody with you?”

Ruefully, “Me, lad? Friends? Me?”

For an instant, they were puzzled that I did not run. Then I could see a certainty that the doctor was alone pass over their faces. The doctor saw it too, and like a sprinter from the mark he made a dead set at Macclin, shouldering aside Tim and Terry.

“Sassenachs!” he shouted, and charged full against Macclin. Within that demented lard, muscles stirred, a gross hairy fist slammed against the side of the little doctor’s head, smashing him against the rail of the staircase, and without a word the doctor fell face down, bleeding.

Macclin sucked a knuckle with a vacant, imbecile air. But Terry and Tim knew what they were doing.

“Dead,” Terry said. His tone was quite abstract, as though he offered a laboratory report on a stricken animal.

“Or dying,” Tim added coolly.

Then with almost invisible gestures, all three divorced themselves from the scene. Except for Ellen’s, their faces were blank. But in bad moments I still see her standing there, pale-eyed behind her glasses. Across her face flashed a dreadful, murderous look — the grimace of a monstrously vain person, thwarted.

As I hurried to the doctor, the slavey, Alice, and the artillery captain and his wife lurched in with a wild hurrah of laughter. A ragged regiment indeed: Alice with her peroxided hair; the captain barking half-remembered orders; his wife jigging in a kind of sailor’s hornpipe. Macclin never had a chance; and now it was all over. I could almost hear the furies clamoring in Macclin’s brain: ruin; ruin; oh, red, red ruin. He looked at something far away, perhaps in distance, perhaps in time. What he saw, who could tell. But Macclin began to cry.

The little doctor opened his eyes and smiled. “Good luck to ye, Yank.” And then he turned on his side to murmur, “I thank ye, God. I thank ye, God.”

Oh, he may have been pleased to think that he had helped avert some unimaginable calamity. But I do not think so. I think he said, “I thank ye, God! I thank ye, God!” only because he knew that very soon now he would be dead.

As you now know — and the pedantic squabble made a retching contrast with the little doctor’s fineness — as you know, Dr. Ferret declared that if a genuine manuscript had existed to be found, he would have found it. With his world-famous squint, Dr. Squint squinted; and Dr. Flimflam announced that the manuscript was a noble specimen of Bacon’s handwriting. “All the distinguishing peculiarities are present,” he told the attentive press. With inexorable logic he added, “If Bacon did not write it, nobody wrote it.”

But I tell you that Shakespeare, William Shakespeare himself, stands up in those yellowed sheets, watermarked with the jester’s bauble. He stands up, and he looks mellowly about, and he does most solidly revisit the glimpses of the moon. Authenticated and enshrined, the manuscript is now precisely where it ought to be — in the British Museum.

And the little doctor? Let me say with very special pleasure that I talked with a personage, an Exalted Personage. He was exquisite in manner: the tradition of Palmerston still lingers in high places. He thanked me again for my gift. He thanked me on behalf of the British nation, and I asked him, “Just one more thing.”

His countenance did not change. He changed. I had been his excellent friend. Now I was merely his acquaintance. “Yes,” he said. “A grateful nation, you may be sure. Still, one must be aware that your title is really quite tenuous. In case of dispute...”

With great elegance of manner I interrupted. “Nothing of the sort, sir. Oh, I was tempted. An American collector offered me almost a million, sir. And to the shame of your nation I had several secret British offers, too.” Then I smiled. “I do not know, sir, and I do not wish to know, in what degree I have been influenced by fear that I could not permanently make off with the plunder.”

As he smiled with me, I spoke of the little doctor; I had loved that gallant little man. “There’s nothing can be done for him now,” I said. “He is happy at last, I think. And yet, you know, I should like to see his name replaced on the medical roster.”

“But his license was revoked?”

“And could be reinstated. Why not, sir? Where’s the harm?”

“Ah, perhaps.”

Then I did what the British declare that Americans do so well. I became righteous. I looked at him and through him at the British nation — as a duke might contemplate a welshing bookmaker.

He recognized the look and said, “One cannot be sure.”

“But one can make sure?”

The exalted personage nodded.

“And his children?”

Again the personage nodded.

So perhaps the little doctor is at peace. His children’s annuity comes from a truly British source: from a fund set up originally by Victoria’s ministers to pension the widow of an Egyptian khedive who was bribed to hinder de Lesseps during the construction of the Suez Canal — and then, after Disraeli’s purchase, unbribed to guard it.

Framed, the check for £3 ten shillings hangs over my Des Moines desk, quite correctly made out to Henry Winford Platt, the Des Moines accountant and amateur Shakespeare scholar. Oh, I am human enough, and therefore I am sometimes rueful. Sometimes the check fades away to be replaced by a shimmering check for $1,000,000 from some clandestine collector. But then I see the wretch, some darkened miser, gloating in his vault alone; and I grunt, “Faugh!”

Four times the Museum has begged me to cash that check. By gad, sir, can’t even a Yank accountant be businesslike?