Bland Beginning (6 page)

“Free as air.” Basingstoke sat with his face half turned away from them, so that the two women could not see his scar. “I say – what are you going to do about that bookseller’s offer?”

“Refuse it,” said Anthony shortly.

“Then wouldn’t it be a good thing to do so at once? Sort of force the hand of whoever made the offer – so that we could see what they do next.” Reluctant though Anthony was to accept any suggestion made by Basingstoke, it was agreed that this would be sensible. Anthony went away to telephone them, and came back looking puzzled. “They didn’t seem very much concerned. Didn’t offer another fiver or anything, I mean. I suppose it’s all right.” He looked rather dubiously at the little blue book, which lay in his large hand.

“Of course it’s all right. Come on now; we’ve got no time to waste. And bring that book – we shall need to show it to Jebb.”

“What does he do for a living, this chap Jebb?” Anthony asked as the Bentley drew up outside 18 Madderly Gardens.

“Publisher’s reader,” said Miss Cleverly. “And a bit of hackwork here and there. Pity – he’s got a first-class scholastic brain, but no money.” She dashed quickly up the steps and rang one of several bells. Anthony saw that it said “A Jebb – Grnd Flr.” They waited, and the door shot open to reveal a large woman, who glared at them in a bellicose way. Miss Cleverly glared back. “’Oo are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m Miss Cleverly. Who are you?”

“I’m Mr Jebb’s char, Mrs Upton. If it’s about a bill, ’e’s out.”

“Of course it’s not about a bill. And I know perfectly well he’s in. Kindly tell him we’re here. This is my friend Mr Shelton.”

“Orl right,” said Mrs Upton doubtfully. “But you’ll ’ave to stay outside until –” A door along the passage opened, and a high voice said, “What is this interminable altercation?” There was a creak and Anthony saw, to his astonishment, a figure in a wheel chair. “Ruth,” said the figure, “my dear Ruth, how are you? Mrs Upton, what can you be thinking of to keep my friend Ruth on the doorstep?”

“I don’t let
anyone
in to see you unless I knows ’em, sir,” said Mrs Upton. It was plain that she regarded the figure in the chair with proprietorial affection.

“Come in, Ruth; come in. But who is that I see behind you?
Not
somebody known to me, surely? You know what I feel about receiving strangers.”

“Yes, Arthur, but I thought–” Ruth Cleverly made a gesture which was oddly ineffectual, in contrast to her usual efficiency. “This is Mr Shelton, and he’s – Oh dear, I suppose I should have telephoned. This comes of dashing into things.”

Anthony’s face was very red. “I don’t need to come in if Mr Jebb objects,” he said stiffly.

The figure in the wheel chair stared at him, and then smiled suddenly and charmingly. “Do come in, Mr Shelton, and pray forgive my churlishness, if you can. My good friend, Mrs Upton, acts as a dragon in preserving me from unwelcome visitors, and I fear I have forgotten my manners in greeting welcome ones.” He wheeled his chair dexterously down the passage, and into a door on the left.

The room was a pleasant one, with a large window looking out on to the Square. Books crowded the room – there were even more books, Anthony thought, than in his father’s library at Barnsfield, and these books unlike his father’s had an air of continual use. Some of them, indeed, were scattered about the floor, and the wheel chair moved dexterously to avoid them. There was a small, neat desk, and some shabby but comfortable armchairs. Jebb himself was a man about forty years old. His eyes were bright and darting behind an enormous pair of horn-rimmed spectacles perched rather low on a large, hooked nose. His face was the colour of wax, with two spots of rouge on the cheekbones. A rug covered his body below the waist.

“We’ve come –” Miss Cleverly said, but he held up a hand.

“Let me first of all offer you some refreshment.” He wheeled his chair over to a cupboard underneath some bookshelves, and drew from it a Cona coffee percolator, coffee, and some biscuits. He put the coffee-machine on a table, lighted the burner beneath it, and got out from the cupboard cups and saucers. Anthony watched these proceedings with increasing discomfort. “Can we – ah – do something to help –” he began, and then felt the warning pressure of Ruth Cleverly’s arm. Mr Jebb looked round from the cupboard with a bright smile and said in his piping voice, “No, thank you. I am very well able to manage.” He wheeled his chair round suddenly, and looked at Anthony. “You will hardly be able to imagine, Mr Shelton, in the pride of your youth and beauty, what it means to lack the use of your legs. That misfortune has been mine from birth. I will not trouble you with the abominable details. I am able to move about a little with the aid of crutches, but this chair is much more convenient. But the greatest trouble I am called on to bear, Mr Shelton, and the one I can face with the least patience, is – sympathy.” His hands moved like butterflies among the teacups. “Ruth knows this – and she is very good to me. But you, Mr Shelton, how should you know it or understand it? How can you understand the intense envy of normality that makes me take pleasure in my very ordinary ability to make coffee unaided? I can only hope that you will bear with me in charity – and pray, while I am engaged in making coffee, tell me what I can do for you.”

Haltingly at first, but with a fluency that grew under the cripple’s intense and watchful gaze, Anthony told the story of the book sale, his purchase, Basingstoke’s suspicions of the pamphlet, the offer he had received that morning and his refusal of it. Jebb scribbled idly with his pencil on a blotting-pad during the recital. “Miss Cleverly says that Lewis’s are probably acting on behalf of some wealthy client who wants this book to complete a collection.”

Jebb nodded. In his high, thin voice he said, “There could be other reasons. May I see the pamphlet, Mr Shelton.” Anthony handed it to him and the cripple held it between his thin hands, like something very delicate and precious. He examined it, paying particular attention to the title page, and looking closely at several pages of the interior. He switched on a lamp at his desk, produced a magnifying glass and examined the paper of the booklet with minute attention. Then, with an exclamation which certainly denoted excitement, but might have indicated also either pleasure or dismay, he wheeled his chair rapidly over to a bookcase, took down several books, and compared them with the copy of
Passion and Repentance.
He continued absorbed in this occupation for at least five minutes, until Anthony began to fidget. He felt a touch on his arm and saw Miss Cleverly, her monkeyish face puckered in a grin, mouthing at him the words, “Keep calm.” Suddenly she said, “Arthur, your coffee is going to boil.”

He looked up. “Eh, eh? Why, so it is. Thank you, Ruth, my dear.” He briskly wheeled his chair over, took away the burner, made the coffee and gave it to them. Anthony could stand it no longer. “What do you say, Mr Jebb? Is it a forgery?”

The cripple laughed. “You go too fast.” He paused, and looked at Ruth Cleverly over his enormous spectacles. “What does this young man know of my researches, Ruth?”

“Nothing, except that they’re epoch-making.”

“Then I will make an exception, since this is an exceptional case, and tell him something about them. Bear with me, Mr Shelton, if I seem a little long-winded. I shall reach the point of your purchase before very long. And I should like you to bear in mind that what you are hearing now is confidential.” Anthony nodded, mesmerised by the earnest eyes behind the enormous horn-rims, by the eager, gesticulating hands. “Many people know me as a publisher’s reader and literary journalist. Very few know me as a detective of a very special kind, a detective investigating – literary forgeries.” Anthony stirred at the word, which Jebb almost whispered. “The kind of forgeries I mean are very special ones, for they involve first editions. Just how much do you know about first editions, Mr Shelton?”

Anthony shook his head vaguely. The questioner hardly seemed to expect a reply.

“A first edition is a book which is valuable because it is just what its name calls it – the
first
of its kind. A first edition of a book by Dickens may be worth – let us say – a hundred pounds. The second edition, published in the following year, may be worth only five.”

“But why?” Anthony asked, genuinely puzzled.

Jebb chuckled. “That is a question I cannot answer. Such enthusiasm, such a valuation, is rooted in human intelligence or stupidity. All I can tell you is that the valuation of first editions in a modern sense began sometime in the eighteen-seventies, when people started to collect the romantic poets. It was fostered by booksellers – because, of course, it was profitable to them – and by the ’nineties it was in full swing.

“Now it sometimes happens that a previously unknown first edition turns up. When this happens, the newly discovered first edition immediately becomes valuable, and the book that had formerly been regarded as the first edition declines in value correspondingly. Very much that kind of thing happened with this little book,
Passion and Repentance.”
Again the cripple’s hand reached out and lovingly patted the little blue book. “For a long time the edition of 1868 was regarded as the first. Then, lo and behold, this little edition, published in 1860, turns up and becomes the first. The 1868 edition is now worth very little and this 1860 edition, because only a few copies are known to exist, is very valuable. Does that suggest anything to you?”

With a look of concentration on his regular features Anthony said, “Must be stupid, I suppose, but I can’t say it does.”

Jebb beat the table in excitement with his thin hand. His spectacles slipped further down his nose, and he pushed them back impatiently. “When I tell you that there were many, many cases like this one – of unknown first editions appearing suddenly – can you see then?” Anthony shook his head helplessly. “Can’t you see what a wonderful opening there was for – somebody – to
create
first editions, and make themselves a fortune? It’s beautifully simple. You take a pamphlet by Ruskin, or a story by George Eliot, or a poem by Matthew Arnold. You have a number of copies printed, quite privately, being careful to make no foolish mistakes. And then – the crucial point – you transform them into valuable first editions by putting a date on them which is a few years before the date of the known first edition. If the pamphlets and poems were published with the correct date on them, they would be pirate editions which were evading the copyright law, but not first editions. They would be worth nothing. By adding an incorrect date, somebody made them first editions, and made them exceedingly valuable.”

Anthony was rapt. “You say ‘somebody’. You mean – a master forger?”

Jebb’s smile held a touch of complacency. “A master forger.”

“And he’s operating now?”

The cripple shook his head. “No. He hasn’t operated for twenty-five to thirty years.”

“But he’s still alive?” Jebb nodded. “And you know who he is?”

“I think so.”

Miss Cleverly said sharply, “You shouldn’t say that, Arthur. You can’t have any proof.”

Still with that irritating smile, Jebb said, “I haven’t named anybody – yet.”

Anthony was listening with a kind of bursting impatience. “But what about this?” He touched the little blue book.

“I cannot say for certain – yet. I strongly suspect it of being a forgery. I should like you to leave it with me so that it can be subjected to scientific tests.”

“But how can any scientific tests tell you when a book was produced?”

The upper part of the cripple’s body rocked backwards and forwards in the wheel chair. The rug that covered his legs remained unmoved. “You are asking me my most intimate secrets,” he said in his high-pitched voice. Anthony became aware that it was hot in the room. “But I shall reveal them to you, Mr Shelton, because I like you. Ruth here knows something about them already. The application of these tests to various so-called first editions will be the subject of my forthcoming work of research – and it is upon this epoch-making work, Mr Shelton, that I have been engaged for the past five years.” He leaned forward in the wheel chair, and it occurred to Anthony to wonder, as he caught the wild stare behind those enormous glasses, if the little man was altogether sane. Perhaps something of his thought communicated itself to Jebb, for he dropped back in the chair and said, with a note of bitterness replacing the elation in his voice, “It will seem to you, perhaps, who are filled with the energy and the joy of youth, that this is a curious occupation for a grown man.” Anthony, slightly dazed, did not speak. Jebb put his fingertips together and looked up at the ceiling as he went on talking. He had, Anthony saw, extraordinarily hairy nostrils.

“There are several lines of approach that can be used for testing the validity of books and pamphlets published in the nineteenth century.

“First of all, you can compare the texts. Let us suppose that Martin Rawlings made some alterations to the poems in
Passion and Repentance
when the second edition appeared, and that the forger foolishly followed the later text. Then you would get the forgery showing a different text from that of the real first edition. That, of course, would be gross carelessness on the forger’s part, but it has been known. In this case it does not arise, because Martin Rawlings made no alterations in the text of his poems.

“Then there is the evidence to be obtained from the publisher or the printer. Actually, in the forgeries I have in mind a publisher’s name was rarely used. The forger generally said ‘Privately Printed for the Author’, or something of that sort. And all of the forgeries I have found were produced a long time ago – when Victorian first editions were becoming valuable – and few printers or publishers have records going back so far. The publisher’s name doesn’t help in your case, because the firm no longer exists, and it’s going to be very difficult to trace the printer.”

Miss Cleverly interrupted. “I suppose Basingstoke is right about the discrepancy in the publishers’ name? Can you check on that?”