# Tales from a Rolltop Desk/The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby

THE CURIOUS CASE OF KENELM DIGBY
We had been dining together at the Hotel Ansonia, and as we walked up the shining breezy channel of Broadway my friend Dove Dulcet (the well-known poet and literary agent) vigorously expounded a theorem which I afterward had occasion to remember.
"There is every reason," he cried, "why a poet should be the best of detectives! My boy, there is a rhyme in events as well as in words. When you see two separate and apparently unconnected happenings that seem (as one might say) to rhyme together, you begin to suspect one author behind them both. It is the function of the poet to have a quick and tender apprehension of similarities. The root of poetry is nothing else than describing things as being like other apparently quite different things. The lady who compared herself to a bird in a gilded cage was chaffed for her opulent and spendthrift imagination; but in that lively simile she showed an understanding of the poetic principle. Look here: ​what is the commonest phrase of the detectives? To put two and two together. What else, I ask you, is the poet doing all the time but putting two and two together—two rhymes, and then two rhymes more, and making a quatrain."
He swung his stick, puffed strongly at his cigar, and amorously surveyed the deep blue of the night, against which the huge blocks of apartment houses spread their random patterns of lighted windows. Between these granolithic cliffs flowed a racing stream of bright motors, like the rapids of a river of light hurrying downward to the whirlpool of Times Square.
"Either for a poet or for a detective," he said, gaily, "this seems to me the ideal region. I tell you, I walk about here suspecting the most glorious crimes. When I see the number of banana splits that are consumed in these glittering drugstores, I feel sure that somewhere, in the purple silences of the night, hideous consequences must follow. Those who feed so violently on that brutalizing mixture of banana, chocolate ice cream, cherry syrup, and whipped marshmallow, must certainly be gruesome at heart. I look out of my window late at night toward the scattered lights of that vast pile of apartments, always thinking to see them blaze some great golden symbol or letter ​into the darkness, some terrible or obscene code that means death and terror."
"Your analogy seems to have some sense," I said. "Certainly the minor poet, like the law breaker, loves to linger about the scene of his rhyme, or crime."
"You are an amateur of puns," he replied. "Then let me tell you the motto I have coined to express the spirit of this Little White Way—Ein feste bourgeois ist unser Gott. This is the proud kingdom of the triumphant middle class. It is a perilous country for a poet. If he were found out, he would be martyred at the nearest subway station. But how I love it! See how the quiet side streets cut across highways so richly contrasting: West End Avenue, leafy, expensive, and genteel; Broadway, so gloriously cruel and artificial; Amsterdam Avenue, so honestly and poignantly real. My club is the Hartford Lunch Room, where they call an omelet an omulet, and where the mystic word Combo resounds through the hatchway to the fat man in the kitchen. My church is the St. Agnes branch of the Public Library, over on Amsterdam Avenue. In those cool, quiet rooms, when I watch the pensive readers, I have a sense of treading near an artery of fine human idealism. In all this various neighbour​hood I have a cheerful conviction that almost anything might happen. In the late afternoons, when the crosswise streets end on a glimpse of the Jersey bluffs that glow like smoky blue opals, and smell like rotten apples, I feel myself on the very doorsill of the most stunning outrages."
We both laughed, and turned off on Seventy-seventh Street to the small apartment house where Dulcet had a comfortable suite of two rooms and bath. In his book-lined sitting room we lit our pipes and sat down for a gossip.
We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. As it is almost unnecessary to remind you, there was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the elevator shaft. In the case of Mrs. Carboy, the police were distracted because her body was found at the top of the building, and the detective bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen up the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors' League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the ​accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist, whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed signs of having been poisoned. Frank Lebanon, the brilliant short-story writer, was stabbed in the fulness of his powers; and there were others whom I do not recall at the moment. Mr. Dulcet had suffered severely by these sad occurrences, for a number of these authors were his clients, and the loss of the commissions on the sale of their works was a serious item. The secret of these tragedies had never been discovered, and there had been something of a panic among members of the Authors' League. The rumour of a pogrom among best-selling writers was tactfully hushed.
"What is your friend Kenelm Digby writing nowadays?" I asked, as I looked along Dulcet's shelves. Digby, the brilliant novelist, was probably Dulcet's most distinguished client, an eccentric fellow who, in spite of his excellent royalties, lived a solitary and modest existence in a boarding-house somewhere in that part of the West Side. Outside his own circle of intimates Dulcet was almost the only man whom Digby saw much of, and many of us, who admired the novelist's work, ​had our only knowledge of his person from hearing the agent talk of him.
"By George, I'm glad you reminded me," said Dulcet. "Why, he has just finished a story, and he telephoned me this afternoon asking me to stop over at his house this evening to get the manuscript. He never has any dealings with the editors on his own hook—likes me to attend to all his business arrangements for him. I said I'd run over there about ten o'clock."
"That last book of his was a great piece of work," I said. "I've been following his stuff for over ten years, and he looks to me about the most promising fellow we've got. He has something of the Barrie touch, it seems to me."
"Yes, he's the real thing," said Dulcet, blowing a blue cloud of his Cartesian Mixture. "I only wish he were not quite so eccentric. He lives like a hermit-crab, over in a lodging-house near the Park. Even I, who know him as well as most people, never feel like intruding on him except when he asks me to. I can't help thinking it would be good for him to get out more and see something of other men in his line of work. I tried to get him to join The Snails, but he says that Amsterdam Avenue is his only amusement. And Central Park seems to be his country club. I wonder if you've ​noticed that in his tales whenever he wants to describe a bit of country he takes it right out of the Park. I sometimes suspect that's the only scenery he knows."
"He has attained a very unusual status among writers," I said. "In my rambles among bookshops I have noticed that his first editions bring quite a good price. It's very seldom that a writer—at any rate an American—gets 'collected' during his lifetime."
"Did you ever see any of his manuscript?" asked Dulcet; and on my shaking my head, he took out a thick packet of foolscap from a cabinet.
"This is the original of 'Girlhood'," he explained. "Digby gave it to me. It'll be worth a lot some day."
I looked with interest at the neatly written sheets, thickly covered with a small, beautiful, and rather crabbed penmanship.
"Worth a lot!" I exclaimed. "Well, I should say so! Why the other day I was browsing round in a bookshop and I found a lot of his first editions marked at $15 each. It struck me as a very high price for I know I have seen them listed for three or four dollars in catalogues."
"Exorbitantly high," Dulcet said. "I'm afraid your bookseller is profiteering. I admire Digby ​as much as any one, but that is an artificial price. The firsts aren't rare enough to warrant any such price as that. Still, I'm glad to know about it as it's a sign of growing recognition. I remember the time when it was all I could do to get any editors to look at his things. I'll have to tell him about that, it will please him mightily."
We sat for a while chatting about this and that and then Dulcet got up and put on his hat.
"Look here, old man," he said. "You squat here and be comfortable while I run round to Digby. It won't take me more than a few minutes—he lives on Eighty-second Street. I'll be back right speedily, and we can go on with our talk."
I heard him go down in the elevator, and then I relit my pipe, and picked out a book from one of his shelves. I remember that it was Brillat-Savarin's amusing "Gastronomy as a Fine Art". I smiled at finding this in Dulcet's library, for I knew that the agent rather prided himself on being something of a gourmet, and I was reading the essays of the jovial French epicure with a good deal of relish when the telephone rang. I went to it with that slight feeling of embarrassment one always has in answering someone else's phone.
To my surprise, it was Dulcet's voice.
"Hullo?" he said. "That you, Ben? Listen, ​I want you to come round to Digby's right away," and he gave the address.
Thinking he had arranged a chance for me to meet Digby (I had long wanted to do so), I felt hesitant about intruding; but he repeated his message rather sharply. "Please come at once," he said. "It's important." Again he gave the street number, made me promise to come immediately, and rang off.
It was nearly half-past ten, and the streets were fairly quiet as I walked briskly along. The house was one of a row of old cocoa-coloured stone dwellings, and evidently someone was watching for me, for while I was trying to read the numbers a door opened and from a dark hall an arm beckoned to me. I went up the tall steps and a stout woman, who seemed to be in some agitation, whispered my name interrogatively. "Is this Mr. Trovato?" she murmured.
"Yes," I said, puzzled.
"Third floor front," she said, and I creaked quietly up the stairs.
I tapped at the front room on the top floor, and Dulcet opened.
"Thank goodness you're here, Ben," he said. "Something has happened."
It was a large, comfortable room, crowded with ​books on three walls, furnished with easy chairs and a couch in one corner. A brilliant blaze of light from several bulbs under a frosted hood poured upon a reading table in the middle of the room. Sitting at this table, in a Windsor chair, slumped down into the seat, was a short stout man whose head lolled sideways over his chest. He was wearing a tweed suit and a soft shirt, and looked as though he had fallen asleep at his work. In front of him were some books and a can of tobacco. I recognized him, of course, from the photographs I had often seen. It was Digby.
I looked at Dulcet, aghast. But, as always at such moments, what was uppermost in my mind was something trivial and irrelevant. I had an intense desire to open a window. The air in that room was thick and foggy, a sort of close, strangling frowst of venomously strong tobacco and furnace gas. After the clear elixir of the wintry night it was loathsome. It was the typical smell that hangs about the rooms of literary bachelors, who work all day long in a room without ever thinking of airing it.
"Yes," he said. "He's dead. Pretty awful, isn't it? I found him like this when I got here. No sign of injury as far as I can see."
There was something profoundly dreadful in ​this first sight, as mere sagging clay, of the brilliant and powerful writer whose books I had so long admired, and whom I had thought of as one of the strong and fortunate few who shape human perplexities to their own ends. I looked down at him with a miserable blackness in my spirit, and laid a hand on Dulcet's shoulder in sympathy.
"I've sent for a doctor," he said. "Before he comes I want to get all the information I can from the landlady. I wanted to have you here as a witness. I haven't touched anything."
The woman had followed me upstairs, and stood crying quietly in the doorway.
"Come in, Mrs. Barlow," said Dulcet. "Now please tell us everything you can about where Mr. Digby went this evening, and anything that has happened."
Mrs. Barlow, who seemed to be a good-hearted, simple-minded creature, snuffled wretchedly. "Oh, dear, oh dear," she said. "He was such a nice gentleman, too. Let me see, he went out about seven, I suppose for his supper, but he was always irregular about his meals, you never could tell, sometimes he would eat in the middle of the afternoon, and sometimes not till late at night. I always would urge him that he would die of indigestion, but he was so kind-hearted."
​"You don't know where he went?" said Dulcet.
"Perhaps he went round to the laundry," she said, "for he had a parcel with him, which I took to be his laundry because he usually took it out on Monday evenings because by that time the clean shirt he put on on Sunday was ready to go to the wash. I hate to think that in all the years he lived in this house his laundry was the only thing we ever had a difference about, because I used to have it done in the house for him but he said my wash-woman tore the buttons off his shirts or collars or something, so a little while ago he started taking his things out to be done, but I don't know where because he used to call for them himself."
"You haven't any idea where he used to eat?" insisted Dulcet.
"Oh, no, sir, he liked to go different places, you know yourself how he was always a bit queer and concentric and he never talked much about where he went, but always so nice and considerate. Oh, he was a fine gentleman."
Mrs. Barlow, plainly much grieved, wept anew.
"Please try to tell us everything you can think of," said Dulcet, gently. "What time did he come in, and did you notice anything unusual?"
"Nothing out of the way that I can think of, but then I was down in the basement most of the ​evening, for I let my maid go to the movies and I had a deal to do. I suppose he went along Amsterdam Avenue, he was always strolling up and down Amsterdam or Columbus, poor man, getting ideas for his literature I guess. He came back about nine o'clock I should say, because I heard the door about then. Just a few minutes before he came in there was a man came to the door with a tin of tobacco for him, which he said Mr. Digby had ordered sent around, and I took it up and put it on his table, there it is now, poor man, Carter's Mixture."
Mrs. Barlow pointed to the tin of Cartesian Mixture that stood on the table. Evidently it had only just been opened, for it was practically full.
"Yes," said Dulcet. "Here's his pipe lying on the floor under his chair." He picked up the briar and glanced at it. "Only just begun to smoke it, for the tobacco is hardly burned. He must have been smoking when he. . . . There wasn't anything else you can think of?"
The woman dried her eyes with her apron. "There was just one other thing I noticed, but I suppose it's silly. But I took note of it special, because I thought I had heard it before, lately. While he was out, and a little before the man ​brought the tin of tobacco, I heard a sharp tapping out on the street in front of the house. I noticed it special, because I thought at first it was someone rapping on the door, and I wondered if the bell was out of order again, but when I went I couldn't see any one. But I wondered about it because I heard it two or three times, a sharp kind of tapping, it sounded some way like hitting on stone with a stick of some sort."
Dulcet and I looked at each other rather blankly.
"And after that," she went on, "I didn't think about anything one way or another till you came in and I told you to go right up."
There was a clear peal from the front door bell.
"That's the doctor," said Dulcet, and Mrs. Barlow hurried downstairs.
I have never seen any one so brisk and matter of fact as that physician, and after his arrival the affair seemed to pass out of Dulcet's hands into the painful official machinery that takes charge in such events. Dulcet, acting as the dead writer's literary representative, went into the adjoining room, which was Digby's study, to look over the papers in the desk for any manuscripts that he ought to take care of. He wrote out a list of friends and relatives for me to send telegrams to ​and I went out to attend to this. I don't know how they get wind of these affairs, but the reporters were already beginning to arrive when I left.
The next day, and for several days afterward, the papers all carried long stories about poor Digby's brilliant career. Then the literary weeklies took it up. At the libraries and bookshops everyone was asking for his books, and I have never seen a more depressing illustration of the familiar fact that a writer's real fame never comes until it is too late to do him any good. Editors and people who had hardly been aware of Digby's genius while he was alive now praised him fluently, speaking of him as "America's most honest realist," and all that sort of thing. Moving-picture people began inquiring about the film rights of his novels. Some of the sensational newspapers tried to play up his death as a mystery story, but the physicians asserted heart failure as the cause, and this aspect of the matter soon subsided.
Except at the funeral, which was attended by a great many literary people, I did not see Dulcet for some days. I gathered from what I read in the news that Digby's will had appointed him executor of his literary property, and I knew that he must have much to attend to. But one afternoon the telephone rang, and Dulcet asked me if I ​could knock off work and come round to see him. As I was living up town at that time, it only took me a few minutes to go round to his apartment. I found him smoking a pipe as usual, and looking pale and fagged. He welcomed me with his affectionate cordiality, and I sat down to hear what was on his mind.
"You must excuse me if I'm a little upset," he said. "I've just had an interview with a ghoul. A fellow came in to see me who had heard that I have a number of poor Digby's books and manuscripts. He wanted to buy them from me, offered big prices for them. He said that since Digby's death all his first editions and so on have gone up enormously in value. Apparently he expected me to do trading over the dead body of a friend."
He smoked awhile in silence, and then said:
"Sorry not to have seen you sooner, but to tell the truth I've had my hands full. His brother, who was the nearest kin, couldn't come from Ohio on account of serious illness, and everything fell on me. I had to pack up all his things and ship them, all that sort of business. But I've been wanting to talk to you about it, because I'm convinced there was something queer about the whole affair. I'm not satisfied with that heart-failure ​verdict. That's absurd. There was nothing wrong with his heart that I ever heard of. It's very unfortunate that for the first few days I was too occupied with urgent matters to be able to follow up the various angles of the affair. But I've been turning it over in my mind, and I've got some ideas I'd like to share with you. You remember what I told you, with unfortunate levity, about the secret of detective work being ability to notice the unsuspected rhymes in events? Well, there are one or two features of this affair that seem to me to rhyme together in a very sinister fashion. Wait a minute until I put on my other coat, and we'll go out."
He went into his bedroom. I had not liked to interrupt him, but I was yearning for a smoke, for leaving my rooms in a hurry I had forgotten to bring my pouch with me. On his mantelpiece I saw a tin of tobacco, and began to fill my pipe. To my surprise, just as I was taking out a match he darted out of the bedroom, uttered an exclamation, and snatched the briar from my hand.
"Sorry," he said, bluntly, "but you mustn't smoke that. It's something very special." He opened his penknife, scraped out the weed I had put in the bowl, and carefully put it back in the tin. He took the tin and locked it in his desk.
​"Try some of this," he said, handing his pouch.
I concluded that the tension of the past days had troubled his nerves. This rudeness was so unlike him that I knew there must be some expla- nation, but he offered none. As we went down in the elevator he said: "The question is, can you make a rhyme out of tobacco and collar buttons?"
"No," I said, a little peevishly. "And I don't believe any one could, except Edward Lear."
"Well," he continued, "that's what we've got to do. And don't imagine that it's merely a nonsense rhyme, any more than Lear's were. Edward Lear was as great as King Lear, in his own way."
He led me to Eighty-second Street. The December afternoon was already dark as we ap- proached Mrs. Barlow's house. At the foot of her front steps he halted and turned to me.
"Is your pipe going?" he said.
"No," I said, irritably. "It's out. And I haven't any tobacco."
"Don't be surly, old chap; I'll give you some if you'll tell me what you do when your pipe goes out."
"Why, you idiot," I cried, "I do this." And I knocked out the ashes by striking the bowl smartly against the palm of my hand.
"Ah," he said. "But some people do this." ​He bent down and rapped his pipe against the stone ramp of the steps, with a clear, sharp, hollow sound.
"Yes, a good way to break a nice pipe," I was remarking, when the basement door of the house flew open, and Mrs. Barlow darted out into the sunken area just below the pavement level. In the pale lemon-coloured glare of a near-by street lamp we could see that she was strongly excited.
"Good gracious," she panted. "Is it Mr. Dulcet? Oh, sir, you did give me a turn. Oh, dear, that was just the tapping sound I heard the night poor Mr. Digby died. What was it? Did you hear it?"
"Like this?" said Dulcet, knocking his pipe again on the stone step.
"That was it, exactly," she said. "What a fright, to be sure! Was it only someone knocking his pipe like that? Oh, dear, it did bring back that horrid evening, just as plain."
"So much for the mysterious death rap," said Dulcet as we walked back toward Amsterdam Avenue. "I can't claim much ingenuity for that, however. You see, the morning after Digby's death I went round to Mrs. Barlow's early, before she had been out to sweep her pavement. The first thing I noticed, by the lowest step, was a ​little dottle of tobacco such as falls from a half-smoked pipe when it is knocked out. That seemed to me to make a perfect couplet with Mrs. Barlow's tale of the tapping she had heard. She heard it several times, you remember, in a short space of time. That suggests to me someone standing on the street, or walking up and down, in a state of nervousness, because he didn't smoke any of his pipes through. When they were only half smoked he knocked them out, in sheer impatience. Was he waiting for someone?"
"Perhaps it was Digby himself?" I suggested.
"I don't think so," he said. "Because, in the first place, nervousness was the last thing I would associate with his temperament, which was calm and collected in the extreme. And also, he always smoked Brown Eyed Blend, and had done so for years. That was the first thing that struck me as unusual the night we were there—that tin of Cartesian on the table. He was a man of fixed habits; why should he have made a change just that night? I picked up the little wad of tobacco I found lying on the step, and took it carefully home. It's Cartesian, or I'm a Dutchman. So item 1 in our criminal rhyme-scheme is: Find me a nervous man smoking Cartesian."
"It's a bit fanciful," I objected.
​"Of course it is," he cried. "But crime is a fanciful thing. Ever let the fancy roam, as Keats said. What the deuce is the line that follows? Suppose we stroll down Amsterdam Avenue and find a new place to have dinner."
"Poor old Digby," he said, as we walked along admiring the lighted caves of the shopwindows. "How he enjoyed all this. You know, there is a certain honest simplicity about Amsterdam Avenue's merchandising that is pleasant to contemplate after the shining sophistications of Broadway In a Broadway delicatessen window you'll see, such horrid luxuries as jars of cocks' combs in jelly; whereas along here the groceries show candid and heartening signs such as this: 'Coming Back to The Old Times, 17c lb. Sugar.' Amsterdam Avenue shopkeepers speak with engaging directness about their traffic; for instance, there's a barber at the corner of Eighty-first Street who embosses on his window the legend: 'Yes, We Do Buster Brown Hair Cutting.' That sort of thing is very humane and genuine, that's why Digby was so fond of it. There's a laundry along here somewhere that I have often noticed; it calls itself the Fastidious Laundry———"
"Speaking of laundries," I said, "what do you think of this?" We stopped, and I pointed to a ​neatly lettered placard in a window which had caught my eye. It said:
"By Jove," I said, "there's a laundry that has the right idea. I think I'll bring my———"
I broke off when I saw my companion's face. He was leaning forward toward the pane, and his eyes were bright but curiously empty, as though in some way the mechanism of sight had been reversed, and he was looking inward rather than out.
"That's very odd," he said, presently. "I've been up and down this street many times, but I never noticed that sign before."
He turned and marched into the shop, and I followed. In the soft steamy air several girls were ironing shirts, and a plump, pink-cheeked Hebrew stood behind a counter wrapping up bundles.
"I noticed your sign in the window," said Dulcet. "What do you charge for laundering soft collars?"
"Five cents each, but we mend them, too, and sew on the buttons."
​"That's a good idea," said Dulcet, genially. "I wish I'd known that before; I'd have brought my collars round to you. How long have you been doing that? I often go by here, but I never saw the sign before."
"Only about a week," the man replied. "Let's see—a week ago last Monday I put that sign up. You wouldn't believe how much new trade it has brought in. I thought it would be a kind of a joke—the man next door suggested it, and I put it in to please him. But 'most everybody wears soft collars nowadays, and it seems good business."
"The man next door?" said Dulcet, in a casual tone.
"Sure, the cigar store."
"Is his name Stork?" said Dulcet, reflectively.
"Stork? Why, no, Basswood. What do you mean, Stork?"
"I mean," said Dulcet, slowly, "does he ever stand on one leg?"
"Quit your kidding," cried the laundryman, annoyed.
"I assure you, I do not trifle," said Dulcet, gravely. "I'll bring you in some collars to fix up for me. Much obliged."
We went out again, and my companion stood ​for a moment in front of the laundry window, looking thoughtfully at the sign.
"While you ponder, old son," I said, "I'll run into Mr. Stork-Basswood's and get some tobacco."
He seized my arm in a firm and painful clutch and whispered, "Look at the corner!"
The laundry was the second shop from the corner. Under the lamp-post at the angle of the street I saw, to my amazement, a man standing balanced on one leg. Directly under the light, he was partly in shadow, and I could only see him in silhouette, but the absurd profile of his onelegged attitude afflicted me with a renewed sense of absurdity and irritation. Dulcet, I thought, had evidently suffered some serious stroke in the region of his wits.
"Now," he said, softly, "can you see any rhyme between soft collars and standing on one leg?"
As he spoke, we both started, for somewhere near us on the street there sounded a sharp tapping, a ringing hollow wooden sound. Evidently it came from the one-legged man. This was too much for my composure. I broke away from Dulcet and ran to the corner. As I got there the one-legged creature put down a concealed limb ​and stood solidly on two feet, in a state of normalcy, as an eminent statesman would say. I was confused, and said angrily to the man:
"Here, you mustn't stand like that, on the public street you know, on one leg. It's setting a bad example."
To my amazement he made no retort whatever, but turned and scuttled hastily down the avenue, disappearing in the crowds that were doing their evening marketing.
"My dear fellow," said Dulcet, calmly, coming up to me, "you shouldn't have done that. You've very nearly spoilt it all. Come on, let's go in and get your tobacco."
Basswood's proved to be one of those interesting combination tobacco, stationery, toy, and bookshops which are so common on the upper West Side. I have often noticed that these places are by no means unfruitful as hunting ground for books, because the dealers are wholly ignorant of literature and sometimes one may find on their shelves some forgotten volume that has been there for years, and which they will gladly part with for a song. A good many of these stores have, tucked away at the back, a shabby stock of circulating library volumes that have come down through many changes of proprietorship. Only the other ​day I saw in just such a place first editions of Kenneth Grahame's "The Golden Age" and Arthur Machen's "The Three Impostors," which the storekeeper was delighted to sell for fifteen cents each.
A dark young man was behind the tobacco counter, and from him I got a packet of my usual blend.
"Mr. Basswood in?" said Dulcet.
"Just stepped out," said the young man.
We lit our pipes and looked round the shop, glancing at the magazines and the queer miscellany of books. As it was approaching Christmas time there was a profuse assortment of those dreadful little bibelots that go by the name of "gift books," among which were the usual copies of "Recessional" and "Vampire," Thoreau's "Friendship," and "Ballads of a Cheechako," bound in what the trade calls "padded ooze". I was particularly heartened to observe that one of these atrocities, called "As a Man Thinketh," was described on the box (for all such books come in little cardboard cases) as being bound in antique yap. This pleased me so much that I was about to call it to Dulcet's attention, when I saw that he was looking at me from the rear of the store with a spark in his eye. I approached and found that he was ​staring at a doorway partly concealed by a pile of Christmas toys and novelties. Over this door was a sign: J. Basswood, Rare Book Department.
"Can we go in and look at the rare books?" said Dulcet.
"Sure thing," said the young man. "Help yourself. The boss'll be back soon, if you want to buy anything."
Mr. Basswood was evidently a man of some literary discretion. To our amazement we found, in a dark little room lined with shelves, a judicious assortment of modern books, several hundred volumes, and all first editions or autographed copies. The prices were marked in cipher, so we could not tell whether there were any bargains among them, but I know that I saw several particularly rare and desirable things which I would have been glad to have.
"Good heavens," I said to Dulcet, "friend Basswood is a real collector. There isn't a thing here that isn't of prime value."
He was staring at a shelf in the corner, and I went over to see what he had found.
"Upon my soul," I cried, "look at the Digbies! Not merely one copy of each, but three or four! This man must have specialized in Digbies."
"Not only that," said Dulcet, "but he has ​three of 'The Autogenesis of a Novelist', the first thing that Digby wrote. It was privately printed, and afterward suppressed. It's devilish rare; even I haven't got a copy. I wish I knew what prices he asks for these things."
"Look at this," I said. "Perhaps this will tell us." I picked up one of a pile of pamphlets that were lying in a large sheet of wrapping paper in a corner of the room. It was evidently a new catalogue of Mr. Basswood's rare books, that had just come from the printer.
"Here we are," I said, turning over the leaves. "Look at this."
Special Note
Fine Collection of Digbiana: J. Basswood wishes to call particular attention to the Digbiana listed below. Anticipating the growing interest in collectors' items of this great writer's work, J. Basswood has taken pains to gather a stock of first editions and presentation copies which is absolutely unique. The prices of these items, while high, are a fair index of the appreciation in which this author's work is held among connoisseurs. All are copies in good condition and their authenticity is guaranteed.
November 15, 19———.
Dulcet seized the catalogue and ran his eye down the pages.
'Girlhood,' first edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1901, $100," he read. "The Nuisance ​of Being Loved,' first edition, $75. 'The Princess Quarrelsome,' $90. 'The Anatomy of Cheerfulness,' autographed copy, $150. 'Distemper,' acting copy, signed by the author and Richard Mansfield, $200.
"Why," he cried, shrilly, "this is madness! I am in touch with all the dealers in this sort of thing, and I know the proper prices. This man has multiplied them by ten." He thrust the catalogue into his pocket and glared round at the musty shelves.
"I suppose it's due to poor Digby's death," I said. I saw that Dulcet was overwrought, and suggested that we go out and get some supper.
"Supper?" he said. "A good idea. I know a place on Broadway where we can get some guinea pigs." He strode out of the store and I followed, wondering what next. He seized my arm and hurried me along Seventy-ninth Street to Broadway.
In the clarid blue of the evening that blazing gully of light seemed to foam and bubble with preposterous fire. Chop suey restaurants threw out crawling streamers of red and yellow brilliance; against the peacock green of the western sky the queer church at the corner of Seventy-ninth, with the oriental pinnacle and truncated ​belfry rising above its solid Baptist wings, seemed like the offspring of some reckless marriage of two infatuated architects, one Jewish and one Calvinist. It was a fitting silhouette, I thought, congruent with an evening of such wild humours. Guinea pigs for supper, how original and enlivening! "Are guinea pigs properly kosher?" I asked, sarcastically.
Dulcet paid no heed, but, holding my arm, urged me along the pavement to an animal shop on the western side of Broadway. The window was full of puppies and long-haired cats. All down the aisle of the establishment were tiers of birdcages, covered with curtains while the birds slept. In lucid bowls persevering goldfish pursued their glittering and unprofitable round.
"Those guinea pigs I ordered," said Dulcet to the man, "are they ready?"
"All ready, sir," he said, and took out a cage from under the counter. "Very fine pigs, sir, strong and hearty; they will stand a great deal."
"Yes," I said, with a wild desire to shout with laughter. "But will they stand being eaten? They will find that rather trying, I fancy."
Dulcet tapped his forehead, and the dealer smiled indulgently. My companion took the cage, paid some money, and sped outdoors again. ​I made no further comment and in a few minutes we were in Dulcet's apartment.
"You have no kitchenette here, have you?" I protested. "Or do we devour them raw? Oh, I see, you have a camp oven. How ingenious!"
He had put on the table a large tin box. With complete seriousness he now produced a small spirit lamp, over which he fitted a little basket of fine wire mesh. When the flame of the lamp was lit, it played upon the basket, which was supported by legs at just the right height. He now put the unsuspecting guinea pigs into the tin box, which was shaped like a rural-free-delivery letter-box, with a hinged door opening at one end. He took the spirit lamp with its attached basket and pushed the contraption carefully into the box with the pigs. Then he opened both windows in the room.
"Admirable!" I exclaimed. "Like those much-advertised cigarettes, they will be toasted. But won't it take a long time?"
"Don't be an ass," he said.
He went to his desk, and took out the tin of Cartesian Mixture he had snatched away from me earlier in the evening.
"Your mention of those cigarettes is apt," he ​said, "for in this case also the fuel is tobacco. Please go over by the window, and stay there."
I watched, somewhat impressed by the gravity of his manner. From the tin of tobacco he took a small pinch of mixture and carefully placed it in the mesh basket above the lamp. Reaching into the box, he lit the wick of the lamp with a match, and hastily clapped to the hinged lid. The guinea pigs seemed to be awed by these proceedings, for they remained quiet. Dulcet joined me at the window, and remarked that fresh air was a fine thing.
We waited for about five minutes, while the guinea-pig oven stood quietly on the table.
"Well," said Dulcet, finally, "we ought to be able to see whether it rhymes or not."
He snatched open the door of the tin box, and skipped away from it in a way that seemed to me perfectly insane. He picked up a pair of tongs from the fireplace, and standing at a distance, lifted out the lamp. The tobacco was smoking strongly in its mesh basket. Holding the lamp away from him with the tongs, he carried it into the bathroom, and I heard him turn on the water. Then, coming back, he inserted the tongs into the tin box, and gingerly withdrew first one guinea pig and then the other. Both were ​calm as possible, quite dead. Looking over the sill to see that the pavement was clear, he threw the tin box into the street, where it fell with a crash.
"Surely they're not cooked already?" I said.
"I haven't heard from the doctor yet," he said; "but he promised to ring me up this evening. I'm awfully sorry to have delayed your dinner, old man. Meet me at the Lucerne grill room, Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam Avenue, to-morrow evening at seven o'clock and we'll eat together. You've been a great help to me."
"I hope the doctor is a mental specialist," I said; but he pushed me gently out of the room. "We'll finish our rhyme at dinner to-morrow evening."
I went out into the night, and sorrowfully visited a Hartford Lunch.
The next evening I was at the Lucerne grill promptly. This modest chop house was one of Dulcet's favourite resorts, and I found him already sitting in one of the alcoves studying the menu. He was in fine spirits, and his quizzical blue eyes shone with a healthy lustre.
"Are you armed?" he said, mysteriously.
"What," I cried, "are we going to do some more guinea pigs to death? It was cruel. I have scruples against taking innocent lives. Besides, ​your experiment proved nothing. Those pigs would have died anyway, shut up in an air-tight box like that."
"Stuff!" he said. "The box was not hermetic. I had left small apertures: there was plenty of oxygen. No, it was not the confinement in the tin box that killed them. After you had gone, the chemist whom I had consulted called me up. My suspicions were sound. Have you ever heard of fumacetic acid?"
This is going to be terrible, I thought to myself, and ordered tenderloin steak, well done, with a double order of hashed brown potatoes.
"Have you ever heard of fumacetic acid?" he repeated, relentlessly.
"No," I said, nervously.
"It is a deadly and little-known drug," he said, "which (so the chemist tells me) possesses the property that when vaporized the slightest whiff of it causes instant death if inhaled into the lungs. The tobacco in that tin had been doctored with it. I sent the chemist the pipe that poor Digby was smoking when he died, and he analyzed what was left in the bowl. There is no doubt whatever. He was poisoned in that way. I tell you, my professional duty as a literary agent requires that in my clients' interest I should sift this thing ​to the bottom. It may explain some of those earlier deaths that baffled the Authors' League."
"But Mrs. Carboy, surely, did not smoke," I was about to say; but I checked myself in time.
"Dove," I said, "you are superb. But I wish you would tell me how you worked the thing out. What was it that first aroused your suspicions? If it had not been for you, I should never have guessed anything wrong."
"Of course," he said, grimly, "it was that murderous placard in the laundry window, and that is to your credit, for you noticed it. That was the one thing that made plain the whole complicated business. Naturally I suspected the tobacco from the first, for (as I told you) it was a mixture that Digby never smoked ordinarily. But when I heard that that eccentric and damnable placard had been put there at the suggestion of the tobacconist next door, and then found that the tobacconist was also a bookseller, I knew the worst. I have spent to-day in rounding up the threads, and I think I may say without vainglory that the miscreant is in my power."
"But the man standing on one leg?" I said, puzzled. "What was he up to, and why did he run?"
Dulcet's face shone with quiet triumph.
"I told you," he said, "to look for a nervous ​man smoking Cartesian Mixture. That tobacconist, Basswood, smokes Cartesian. It is a very moist, sticky blend, as you know. It can only be shaken out of the pipe, after smoking, by vigorously knocking the bowl on something hard. Very well, and if there is no stone step or something of that sort handy, what will a smoker tap his pipe on? Why, he will stand on one leg and knock it out on the lifted heel of the other. And his running away when you addressed him so whimsically, wasn't that a pretty good sign of nervousness—and also of a guilty and doubtful spirit?"
He finished his tumbler of the near-beer that has made Milwaukee infamous, and leaned forward earnestly.
"You know very well," he said, "that that laundryman would never have thought of his grotesque notice, addressed to 'Artists and Authors', if someone hadn't suggested it to him. Obviously he was only a gull. That card was intended as a decoy, to lure Digby away from his room, so that Basswood could leave the poisoned tobacco for him. Basswood had studied Digby's habits, and must have known that the notice about the collars would be sure to catch his eye. Now we had better be going. The police will be at Basswood's shop at eight o'clock."
​I could have done with a little strong coffee, but he haled me out of the restaurant, and we walked up Amsterdam Avenue. How little, I reflected, did the passersby, hurrying about their kindly and innocent concerns, suspect our dark and perilous errand.
"The motive, of course," said Dulcet, "was to profit by the increase of value Digby's death would give to his literary work. You will see a proof of that in a moment. Here we are. Come on, this is no time to hang back!"
He strode into the brightly lighted shop, and I followed with a clumsy assumption of carelessness. I must confess that my eye wandered in search of suitable cover in case there should be any gun play.
Mr. Basswood was behind his counter, smoking a battered-looking briar. One side of the bowl was worn down nearly half an inch (from repeated knocking out on stone steps, I suppose). He was a fat, cross-looking person, with a black jut of moustache and a small, vindictive eye.
"A friend told me about your bookshop," said Dulcet. "He said that you sometimes buy books and manuscripts and that sort of thing."
"Yes, sometimes," said Basswood, without enthusiasm.
​"I have an unpublished story of Kenelm Digby's," said Dulcet. "It is about forty pages of manuscript. What would you give for that?"
The dealer's eyes brightened. He took his pipe from his mouth, and knocked it out smartly on his heel, tramping on the glowing cinders. Dulcet looked at me gravely.
"Let me see it," Basswood said, eagerly.
"I haven't got it with me. But give me an idea what it would be worth to you."
"If it is genuine, and characteristic of Digby's genius," said Basswood, slowly, "I would give you two hundred dollars for it."
"Nonsense!" said Dulcet. "It isn't worth half that. I would not dream of selling it for more than seventy-five."
Basswood looked startled.
"I guess you are not in touch with the market for such things," he said. "There is more interest among collectors in Digby's work than in any other recent writer. Perhaps you don't realize what a difference his sad death has made in the prices of his editions. It is very regrettable, but the death of a writer of that kind always puts a premium on collectors' items, because there will never be any more of them."
​"Oh, I see," said Dulcet, politely. "It is his death that has made the difference, is it?"
"Exactly."
"Well, then, I suppose this manuscript is worth more than I thought. By the way, I think the title of it will interest you. It is called 'The Mystery of the Soft Collars' and deals with a murder that took place on Eighty-second Street."
I couldn't help admiring the glorious nonchalance with which Dulcet made this remark, gazing the dealer straight in the eye. Basswood's face was a study, and his cheek was pale and greasy. But he, too, was a man of considerable nerve.
"I don't believe it's genuine," he said. "That doesn't sound to me like Digby's style." His voice shook a little, and he added: "However, if it's as interesting as it sounds, I might pay even more than two hundred for it."
"You rascal!" shouted Dulcet. "Do you think you can buy me off? No. keep your hands above the counter!"
He had whipped out his revolver, and held it at the man's face.
"Look here, Mr. Basswood," he said. "Even the cleverest of us make mistakes. Let me call your attention to one thing. If it was Digby's ​death that made the difference in the values of his books, how is it that this bill from your printer, for that new catalogue of yours, is dated ten days before Digby died? I picked it up in your back room the other day. Doesn't that seem to show that you knew, ten days before the event, that there was going to be a sudden boom in Digbiana? Ten days before he died you were multiplying the prices of the items you had gathered. Now, you dog, can you explain that?"
Basswood shook, but still he clung to his hope.
"I'll give you a thousand for that manuscript," he said.
"Ben," said Dulcet to me, "just slip around the corner and whistle three times. The police are waiting on Eighty-fifth Street."
"There's still one thing that puzzles me," I said to Dulcet late that night as we sat in his room for a final smoke. "I remember that before we discovered that sign in the laundry you said that what we needed to do was to find a rhyme between tobacco and collar buttons. Now what the deuce started you off on collar buttons?"
He smiled patiently.
"When I had to pack up poor old Digby's belongings," he said, "I had the sad task of going ​through his bureau drawers. You know the devilish little buttons that the manufacturers insist on putting on soft collars. They always come off after one or two washings, and then the collar collapses round your neck into an object of slovenly reproach. Digby was a bachelor, and there was no one to do any mending for him. And when I found that every one of his soft collars had its little button neatly sewed on, I knew there was something wrong. I ask you, wouldn't that have aroused the alarm of the least suspicious?"
Up to the present time, as far as I know, Basswood remains the only bookseller who has ever been electrocuted.