The Wish House and Other Stories (72 page)

This, as far as I remembered, was the autumn when Manallace holidayed in the Shetlands or the Faroes, and came back with a stone ‘quern’ – a hand corn-grinder. He said it interested him from the ethnological standpoint. His whim lasted till next harvest, and was followed by a religious spasm which, naturally, translated itself into literature. He showed me a battered and mutilated Vulgate of 1485, patched up the back with bits of legal parchments, which he had bought for thirty-five shillings. Some monk’s attempt to rubricate chapter-initials had caught, it seemed, his forlorn fancy, and he dabbled in shells of gold and silver paint for weeks.

That also faded out, and he went to the Continent to get local colour for a love-story, about Alva and the Dutch, and the next year I saw practically nothing of him. This released me from seeing much of Castorley, but, at intervals, I would go there to dine with him, when his wife – an unappetizing, ash-coloured woman – made no secret that his friends wearied her almost as much as he did. But at a later meeting, not long after Manallace had finished his Low Countries’ novel, I found Castorley charged to bursting-point with triumph and high information hardly withheld. He confided to me that a time was at hand when great matters would be made plain, and ‘recognition’ would be inevitable. I assumed, naturally, that there was fresh scandal or heresy afoot in Chaucer circles, and kept my curiosity within bounds.

In time, New York cabled that a fragment of a hitherto unknown Canterbury Tale lay safe in the steel-walled vaults of the seven-million-dollar Sunnapia Collection. It was news on an international scale – the New World exultant – the Old deploring the ‘burden of British taxation which drove such treasures, etc.’, and the lighter-minded journals disporting themselves according to their publics; for ‘our Dan’, as one earnest Sunday editor observed, ‘lies closer to the national heart than we wot of’. Common decency made me call on Castorley, who, to my surprise, had not yet descended into the arena. I found him, made young again by joy, deep in just-passed proofs.

Yes, he said, it was all true. He had, of course, been in it from the first. There had been found one hundred and seven new lines of Chaucer tacked on to an abridged end of
The Persone’s Tale
, the
whole the work of Abraham Mentzius, better known as Mentzel of Antwerp (1388–1438/9) – I might remember he had talked about him – whose distinguishing peculiarities were a certain Byzantine formation of his ‘g’s, the use of a ‘sickle-slanted’ reed-pen, which cut into the vellum at certain letters; and, above all, a tendency to spell English words on Dutch lines, whereof the manuscript carried one convincing proof. For instance (he wrote it out for me), a girl praying against an undesired marriage, says:

Would I, please, note the spelling of ‘mishandeelt’? Stark Dutch and Mentzel’s besetting sin! But in
his
position one took nothing for granted. The page had been part of the stiffening of the side of an old Bible, bought in a parcel by Dredd, the big dealer, because it had some rubricated chapter-initials, and by Dredd shipped, with a consignment of similar odds and ends, to the Sunnapia Collection, where they were making a glass-cased exhibit of the whole history of illumination and did not care how many books they gutted for that purpose. There, someone who noticed a crack in the back of the volume had unearthed it. He went on: ‘They didn’t know what to make of the thing at first. But they knew about
me!
They kept quiet till I’d been consulted. You might have noticed I was out of England for three months.

‘I was over there, of course. It was what is called a “spoil” – a page Mentzel had spoiled with his Dutch spelling – I expect he had had the English dictated to him – then had evidently used the vellum for trying out his reeds; and then, I suppose, had put it away. The “spoil” had been doubled, pasted together, and slipped in as stiffening to the old book-cover. I had it steamed open, and analysed the wash. It gave the flour-grains in the paste – coarse, because of the old millstone – and there were traces of the grit itself. What? Oh, possibly a handmill of Mentzel’s own time. He may have doubled the spoilt page and used it for part of a pad to steady woodcuts on. It may have knocked about his workshop for years. That, indeed, is practically certain because a beginner from the Low Countries has tried his reed on a few lines of some monkish hymn – not a bad lilt tho’ – which must have been common form. Oh yes, the page may have been used in other books before it was used for the Vulgate. That doesn’t matter, but
this
does. Listen! I took a wash, for analysis, from a blot in one corner – that would be after Mentzel had given up trying to make a possible page of it, and had grown careless – and I
got the actual
ink
of the period! It’s a practically eternal stuff compounded on – I’ve forgotten his name for the minute – the scribe at Bury St Edmunds, of course – hawthorn bark and wine. Anyhow, on
his
formula.
That
wouldn’t interest you either, but, taken with all the other testimony, it clinches the thing. (You’ll see it all in my statement to the press on Monday.) Overwhelming, isn’t it?’

Overwhelming,’ I said, with sincerity. ‘Tell me what the tale was about, though. That’s more in my line.’

‘I know it; but I have to be equipped on all sides. The verses are relatively easy for one to pronounce on. The freshness, the fun, the humanity, the fragrance of it all, cries – no, shouts – itself as Dan’s work. Why “Daiespringe mishandled” alone stamps it from Dan’s mint. Plangent as doom, my dear boy – plangent as doom! It’s all in my statement. Well, substantially, the fragment deals with a girl whose parents wish her to marry an elderly suitor. The mother isn’t so keen on it, but the father, an old knight, is. The girl, of course, is in love with a younger and a poorer man. Common form? Granted. Then the father, who doesn’t in the least want to, is ordered off to a Crusade and, by way of passing on the kick, as we used to say during the war, orders the girl to be kept in duresse till his return or her consent to the old suitor. Common form, again? Quite so. That’s too much for her mother. She reminds the old knight of his age and infirmities, and the discomforts of crusading. Are you sure I’m not boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, though time had begun to whirl backward through my brain to a red-velvet, pomatum-scented side-room at Neminaka’s and Manallace’s set face intoning to the gas.

‘You’ll read it all in my statement next week. The sum is that the old lady tells him of a certain knight-adventurer on the French coast, who, for a consideration, waylays knights who don’t relish crusading and holds them to impossible ransoms till the trooping-season is over, or they are returned sick. He keeps a ship in the Channel to pick ’em up and transfers his birds to his castle ashore, where he has a reputation for doing ’em well. As the old lady points out:

‘You see? Modern in essence as Gilbert and Sullivan, but handled as only Dan could! And she reminds him that “Honour and olde bones” parted company long ago. He makes one splendid appeal for the spirit of chivalry:

Then she hints that the daughter’s young lover, who is in the Bordeaux wine trade, could open negotiations for a kidnapping without compromising him. And
then
that careless brute Mentzel spoils his page and chucks it! But there’s enough to show what’s going to happen. You’ll see it all in my statement. Was there ever anything in literary finds to hold a candle to it?…And they give grocers knighthoods for selling cheese!’

I went away before he could get into his stride on that course. I wanted to think, and to see Manallace. But I waited till Castorley’s statement came out. He had left himself no loophole. And when, a little later, his (nominally the Sunnapia people’s) ‘scientific’ account of their analyses and tests appeared, criticism ceased, and some journals began to demand ‘public recognition’. Manallace wrote me on this subject, and I went down to his cottage, where he at once asked me to sign a memorial on Castorley’s behalf. With luck, he said, we might get him a KBE in the next Honours List. Had I read the statement?

‘I have,’ I replied. ‘But I want to ask you something first. Do you remember the night you got drunk at Neminaka’s, and I stayed behind to look after you?’

‘Oh,
that
time,’ said he, pondering. ‘Wait a minute! I remember Graydon advancing me two quid. He was a generous paymaster. And I remember – now, who the devil rolled me under the sofa – and what for?’

‘We all did,’ I replied. ‘You wanted to read us what you’d written to those Chaucer cuts.’

‘I don’t remember that. No! I don’t remember anything after the sofa-episode…
You
always said that you took me home – didn’t you?’

‘I did, and you told Kentucky Kate outside the old Empire that you had been faithful, Cynara, in your fashion.’

‘Did I?’ said he. ‘My God! Well, I suppose I have.’ He stared into the fire. ‘What else?’

‘Before we left Neminaka’s you recited me what you had made out of the cuts – the whole tale! So – you see?’

‘Ye-es.’ He nodded. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What are
you?’

‘I’m going to help him get his knighthood – first.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you what he said about ‘Dal’s mother – the night there was that air-raid on the offices.’

He told it.

‘That’s why,’ he said. ‘Am I justified?’

He seemed to me entirely so.

‘But after he gets his knighthood?’ I went on.

‘That depends. There are several things I can think of. It interests me.’

‘Good Heavens! I’ve always imagined you a man without interests.’

‘So I was. I owe my interests to Castorley. He gave me every one of ’em except the tale itself.’

‘How did
that
come?’

‘Something in those ghastly cuts touched off something in me – a sort of possession, I suppose. I was in love too. No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d
been
Chaucer for a week! Then I thought the notion might make a comic opera. But Gilbert and Sullivan were too strong.’

‘So I remember you told me at the time.’

‘I kept it by me, and it made me interested in Chaucer-philologically and so on. I worked on it on those lines for years. There wasn’t a flaw in the wording even in ‘Fourteen. I hardly had to touch it after that.’

‘Did you ever tell it to anyone except me?’

‘No, only ‘Dal’s mother – when she could listen to anything – to put her to sleep. But when Castorley said – what he did about her, I thought I might use it. ‘Twasn’t difficult.
He
taught me. D’you remember my birdlime experiments, and the stuff on our hands? I’d been trying to get that ink for more than a year. Castorley told me where I’d find the formula. And your falling over the quern, too?’

‘That accounted for the stone-dust under the microscope?’

‘Yes. I grew the wheat in the garden here, and ground it myself. Castorley gave me Mentzel complete. He put me on to an MS. in the British Museum which he said was the finest sample of his work. I copied his “Byzantine ‘g’s” for months.’

‘And what’s a “sickle-slanted” pen?’ I asked.

‘You nick one edge of your reed till it drags and scratches on the curves of the letters. Castorley told me about Mentzel’s spacing and margining. I only had to get the hang of his script.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘On and off – some years. I was too ambitious at first-I wanted to give the whole poem. That would have been risky. Then Castorley told me about spoiled pages and I took the hint. I spelt “Dayspring mishandeelt” Mentzel’s way – to make sure of him. It’s not a bad couplet in itself. Did you see how he admires the “plangency” of it?’

‘Never mind him. Go on!’ I said.

He did. Castorley had been his unfailing guide throughout, specifying in minutest detail every trap to be set later for his own feet. The actual vellum was an Antwerp find, and its introduction into the cover of the Vulgate was begun after a long course of amateur bookbinding. At last, he bedded it under pieces of an old deed, and a printed page (1686) of Horace’s
Odes
, legitimately used for repairs by different owners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and at the last moment, to meet Castorley’s theory that spoiled pages were used in workshops by beginners, he had written a few Latin words in fifteenth century script – the statement gave the exact date – across an open part of the fragment. The thing ran:
‘Ilia alma Mater ecca, secum afferens me acceptum. Nicolaus Atrib.’
The disposal of the thing was easiest of all. He had merely hung about Dredd’s dark bookshop of fifteen rooms, where he was well known, occasionally buying but generally browsing, till, one day, Dredd Senior showed him a case of cheap black-letter stuff, English and Continental – being packed for the Sunnapia people – into which Manallace tucked his contribution, taking care to wrench the back enough to give a lead to an earnest seeker.

‘And then?’ I demanded.

‘After six months or so Castorley sent for me. Sunnapia had found it, and as Dredd had missed it, and there was no money-motive sticking out, they were half-convinced it was genuine from the start. But they invited him over. He conferred with their experts, and suggested the scientific tests. I put that into his head, before he sailed. That’s all. And now, will you sign our memorial?’

I signed. Before we had finished hawking it round there was a host of influential names to help us, as well as the impetus of all the literary discussion which arose over every detail of the glorious trove. The upshot was a KBE
^*
for Castorley in the next Honours List; and Lady Castorley, her cards duly printed, called on friends that same afternoon.