by Howard Mason
“That,” pronounced Hu Fong unperturbedly, “is where we will commence to examine the mind of the dead man as well as his workmanship. Yea, the line of eggs.” He did pause for the most fleeting of seconds. “But in the so doing,” he explained—“the following of the mind of the dead man—we must perforce realize that whatever he would have composed would adhere most rigorously to the tenets of our musical composition, departing therefrom only to the degree in which it excelled all ordinary compositions. For he did possess, as I did note in examining his body, the long tapering fingers denoting the true artist, and thin nostril walls, betokening one to whom a violation of musical precepts would have been tantamount to cutting the queue from the head of his own grandmother. Thus, in following the dead man’s mind, we may most rigorously follow the precepts of our classical music, and not some monstrous non-existent aberration of such which may someday exist, amidst paler or darker races than we, and be erroneously termed ‘music.’”
With which dissertation upon the subject of pure and correct music, Hu Fong gazed challengingly around, and since none did dispute his words, did then proceed.
“So as I have stated,” he repeated, “it is here where we will commence to examine the mind of the dead man as well as his workmanship—his line of eggs.” He paused again, thoughtfully, then went on. “Now since there happen to have been an even number of speckled pheasant eggs within the row, and an odd number of all other kinds, and since a musical piece, to possess equilibrium, must always end upon its opening note—must indeed, for every time it renders within itself that note, return once, but once only, to that note—then Chung Po’s piece did obviously, and beyond any doubts whatsoever, begin and end upon a speckled pheasant’s egg. Or, to be precise, upon the note that egg does stand for.” With which classical dictum, Hu Fong, extracting from the woven basket all the speckled pheasant eggs it did contain, which proved to be 8 in number, did lay two of such, far apart from each other, at the King’s feet, setting off the undisposed of 6 to one side. “But since, moreover,” Hu Fong now went on, “the opening note in a melody must always be immediately followed by the highest note in that melody, if the piece of music be a cheerful piece of music—or by the lowest, if the piece of music be a sad piece—and since that highest or lowest note must thereafter, whenever sounded, be sounded no less than thrice, then obviously one of the round blue robin’s eggs to be found here represent the note which was second in Chung Po’s piece. For—”
“I do no more perceive thy reasoning,” commented the King quite helplessly, “than can a pair of greased lips utter sweet words.”
“Oh,” Hu Fong hastened to apologize, “that is because, Most High One, the robin’s eggs are 7 in number, and no other kind of eggs there permit themselves to be divided into 3’s, and still leave exactly 1.” With which explanation Hu Fong extracted from the woven basket the 7 blue round eggs, setting off 6 in a pile, and laying one to the right of the first speckled pheasant’s egg, but in contact with it.
He now stood erect.
“But is that robin’s egg,” he queried, though to none in particular, “the highest note in the piece, or is it the lowest? For here indeed lies our clue to Chung Po’s system of recording notes.” He paused. “We may, however, answer this with full certainty. Thanks, again, to careful examination of Chung Po’s corpse. For since Chung Po bore not the downturned corners at his mouth betokening a sad and dour man—since he even bore, at the outer corners of his eyes, tiny wrinkles betokening one who laughed much and jovially to himself—then his piece is a most cheerful piece, and hence the blue robin’s egg the highest note in it! And thus we immediately know the System he employed: wherein the smaller the eggs, the higher the notes—the larger the eggs, the lower. Thus—” reaching into the woven basket, he withdrew a large cumbersome dark egg—“this ordinary duck’s egg here is no less than the lowest note. But how low, and where rightfully should it first be placed?” And thus interpreting, as he went along, the mind of the dead man, the laws of music, and the eggs, he lay the latter, one by one, into a line.
The eggs were played. Upon a huge mzien-ch’in.
And they made music! Quaint, but beautiful. And thereby completed the proof of the efficacy of Hu Fong’s elaborate and time-consuming methods. And confirmed completely that correct objectives are never reached by snap judgments. Or, as even the Sage Wong Hsi has put it:
MORAL: “Birds ready cooked do not fly into the mouth.”
Chapter XX
BEAN CHESS
Boyce Barkstone, reaching the end of the old Chinese fable, closed the book in his hands with a sharp snap.
And looked up, to see the lawyer grinning broadly, almost from ear to ear.
“Birds ready cooked,” the latter was repeating, “don’t fly into the—boy,” he broke off, “I’ll say they never fly into the mouth! Not in the legal profession, certainly. Nor—” But now Oliver Tydings’ grim smile faded. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he now commented. “The 5 Chinese musical notes—for it is 5 of course, isn’t it, against our 8?—or rather our 13, if we include our half-notes—the 26 American alphabetical letters—the 5 kinds of Chinese eggs used—the 26 types of beans—well, the whole thing certainly is a beautiful analogy. Except—where do we go from here?”
“Here,” declared Boyce firmly, “is where we have to begin to follow Hu Fong’s edict. To—well, to study the mind of the ‘dead man,’ my grandfather—the ‘laws of music’—in this case, the rules of spelling and what not—and the ‘workmanship’—in this case the beans.”
He was thoughtfully silent a moment. Then spoke.
“As you might gather, though, I’ve done some work along that line before I came over here.”
The lawyer looked more than astonished.
“Why, you entrepreneur, you, so you’ve been holding out on me? We-e-ell—how far did you get? Go ahead. Spill.”
“Gladly,” assented the younger man. “Well, in the first place we might say we have a short cut to both the unscrambling and the decoding of the beans. Just as Hu Fong had to whether that undeniably second note was the highest or the lowest. And—but the short cut to me, Mr. Tydings, lies in the fact that Mr. Jumping Bean is involved in Grandfather’s message! For the Jumping Bean isn’t a bean—even the Seedateria, whom I called up once today, and from whom Grandfather undoubtedly garnered the beans he needed, told me on the phone that a sign above the Jumping Bean case specifically points out that it’s not a bean; yet nevertheless Grandfather, a most accurate and punctilious man in whatever he did, included it in a message based on beans, and so—well, do you know what that signifies to me?”
“Not having the Barkstonian mind,” said the lawyer dryly, “I confess I don’t.”
“Well, it simply signifies this—as I look at it: Grandfather could say most anything he wished with 25 beans—with 25 letters of the alphabet, that is—for in the case of the actual situation, where there is no bean beginning with J—hence no ‘J’ showable by beans—had he wanted to express a word such as, for rough instance, JEW, he could have put it in as ISRAELITE; or JOY he could have put in as DELIGHT or HAPPINESS. But the fact that Grandfather had to drag in a bean that was no bean, to get a J, signifies to me that he had to include in his message a word, containing a J, for which there was no synonym whatsoever. And what possible word could there be that there could be no synonym for?”
“Why, a—a person’s name, of course?”
“Even the mind Barkstonian figured that way,” Boyce laughed. “Well, what name, might I ask, is the most logical name for Grandfather to have used in some message—any message?”
“We-ell—let’s see? Your own—however, you’ve no J in yours. Not mine, for—”
“It strikes me it could be that of his own black servant ‘Josiah,’” said Boyce mildly.
“Hrmph?” returned the lawyer. “It may strike you so, but you can’t prove it.”
&
nbsp; “Well, the fact that the letters that make up the word ‘Josiah’ are there in that string—” and Boyce pointed to the sheet of pink paper lying on the lawyer’s desk reading:
FDSSSTEJPOOHLABI
“—at least half proves it. And nobody can prevent me from plucking ’em out of the string, and putting ’em all up in front of it, in a group J-O-S-I-A-H.” And Boyce, withdrawing from his breast pocket another pink halfsheet, laid it down. Since it read:
JOSIAHFDSSTEPOLB
“And,” said Tydings, “where d’we go from here? The number of permutations of that muddle of letters following your ‘J-O-S-I-A-H’ is—”
“—thousands fewer in number if the entire muddle, as you rightfully term it, can be diminished by one letter! In short, even after using up an S in Josiah, there’s still a superfluity of S’s in the unintelligible section of that string and, after all, one doesn’t refer to a Josiah nearly as much as something of or belonging to a Josiah—in short, ‘Josiah’s’, in the possessive case—”
“O—kay,” said Tydings grimly. “Move up an ‘S’ for a possessive case.”
Which Boyce had already virtually done on the next half-sheet he now laid in front of the lawyer. Which read:
JOSIAH’SFDSTEPOLE
“And now?” queried Tydings, who obviously surmised from Boyce’s outturned breast pocket that Boyce was at the end of his decryptification exhibits.
“Well,” said Boyce, “if we are going out on a limb of possession—of one, Josiah—then we have a pretty good clue, haven’t we, in the matter of the things that Josiah possesses? Which are mighty few. For what they are, they are in his room. A couple of books he owns. A Negro quilt. A mahogany bed that Grandfather virtually gave him; a—”
“Oh-ho!” said the lawyer, getting markedly interested. “I see that a bed—that is, the letters B-E-D can be plucked from that jamboree on the end.”
Upon which, he himself, uncorking his fountain pen hastily, re-lettered beneath the string a revised order, which ran:
JOSIAH’S BEDFSTPOL
“That,” announced Boyce, “permits me to do away with one pink half-sheet!” And, from two he was just withdrawing from a right-hand side pocket, he tossed one into the lawyer’s wastebasket.
“But Josiah’s bed—Josiah’s bed?” said the lawyer. “The only next word I can get is F-L-O-P—Josiah’s bed; flop!—Josiah’s bed; flop! Well what might happen if we flopped on Josiah’s bed I don’t know—and besides, that leaves a T and an S, over—”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Boyce hastened to extricate the other. “Having gone out on a ‘Josiah’ limb to Josiah’s bed—I now went out on the ‘bed’ limb to—what has a bed got? Castor? A back? A spring? A mattress? Well, Josiah’s bed has 4 very ornate bedposts, and—”
“For—for God’s sake, Boyce!” put in the lawyer. “It—”
“Yes,” nodded Boyce, and laid the last half-sheet down, which, with a pencilled comma, in addition to a pencilled apostrophe, and also a couple of pencilled periods, read:
JOSIAH’S BEDPOST, L. F.
“That L. F.—what—”
“Left front, do you suppose?” queried Boyce. “Why not? There’s only four. Left and right, back; left and right, front? So—”
“Josiah’s bedpost, the left front one?” the lawyer was saying. “We-e-ell, that’s a plenty enough logical arrangement of those beans, or their initials, for yours truly, Boyce! For if that isn’t the message they contain, then the moon is made of Roquefort cheese instead of the green cheese we all know it be made of!” He thrust his hat on his head, and grabbed his gloves. “I don’t know where you’re bound for now, Boyce, but I know mighty well where I, as lawyer for your grandfather, when he was alive, am bound for. It’s to flag a cab downstairs on 47th Street—I didn’t come downtown in my car today, pick up a couple of official legal witnesses on the way, and hie me all the long, long, long way uptown to Van Cortlandt Park, get Josiah to let us in, and see what in the devil your grandfather could have meant by ‘Josiah’s bedpost, left front.’ Are you coming?”
“I’m afraid I’m not,” said Boyce Barkstone. “Because I’ve already come from there, and I’ve already been inside that bedpost!”
Chapter XXI
—AND WHAT CAME FORTH
“You’ve already been in it?” Tydings ejaculated. “W-e-ell—in that case—”
And he sank back into his chair.
“Well,” he now questioned tensely, “was there anything at all there?”
“Yes, there was,” Boyce assented. “In that left front one. All the bedposts, quite plainly, are hollow. But the knob of that left front one had been sawed smoothly off at the base of the nubbin from which it rises, doubtlessly with a fine hacksaw. A huge demijohn cork had been lowered way down in—perhaps with the aid of Grandfather’s 14-inch shears—to where the hollow section narrowed markedly, and the cork had been then shoved in—perhaps with Grandfather’s yardstick! To make a stop, of course, that would keep anything deposited there from falling to the bottom of the post! The knob and nubbin had been glued on again. Neatly. Though evidently with a most powerful glue. ‘Iron glue,’ as I called it when I was a boy. The kind you have to heat up yourself! A very neat job, too. For you couldn’t tell the knob had even been tampered with. ’Twas all done, quite plainly, the day that Josiah went to Albany all day. Though, come to think of it, you wouldn’t know about that. Well, it was the day after Grandfather drew that will down here. And a day when he was alone in the house all day.”
Tydings scratched his chin.
“But, Boyce, you—really, you ought not to have gone in that space without legal witnesses.”
“Yeah, I know—I know! But did you ever work out a cryptogram based on beans, thanks to the help of a bit of old Chinese wisdom that had nothing whatsoever to do with beans, yet was quite apro—well, anyway, did you ever work out such a cryptogram, right on the very spot where the cryptogram revealed something might be, and then delay the final step of your solution by going 200 streets or so downtown, then digging up lawyers and witnesses and what not, then going 200 streets back and—”
“Heavens no! Not in all my legal practise. Nor has any of my clients. All right! I guess I do concede that, in your position, I might have ripped a half dozen beds apart.”
“Well, I ripped apart only the post of one, and didn’t damage that beyond all repair. And fortunately there won’t need to be any official witnesses to my finding. For I had sense enough, after I got that far—to finding it, I mean—to call an immediate halt and—”
Now he was reaching toward his left back pocket.
“I found,” he said, a bit undecidedly, “a—a document of sorts. A somewhat curious document. For it—”
“A document?” Tydings was now echoing, surprised. “Well, I was certain you were going to tell me you found a family heirloom. Well, what sort of document was it?”
“It was a somewhat curious document, as I said. For it bequeaths a few things to a few people. And in mighty, mighty few words, so it seems to me. It devotes more words, by far, to something else than it does to its bequcathals. It—”
“Well,” declared the lawyer with an emphatic gesture of both hands, “if it bequeaths anything to anybody, it’s a will, no matter how curious a thing it may be otherwise. Was it witnessed?”
“I’m sorry to say, no,” Boyce said, frowning, and scratched a rib on his way to that left hip pocket. “It was handwritten from beginning to end. And—”
“Ah—good! Holographic. Doesn’t require witnesses. Then—but here—the date on it—what date was on it?”
“The date it was put in that bedpost! The date Josiah went away. The date of the day after the will Grandfather drew down here.”
“The devil you say! And definitely not some old, old one, then? Well, well, then that will he drew down here is finis. But the new
one—what—”
But now Boyce Barkstone had scratched that rib to his complete satisfaction, and had gone on the rest of the way—had, in fact, produced what he had been reaching for. Which was a tight roll of apparently double cloth—a roll, moreover, which exhibited a marked tendency to stay stubbornly curled into a roll—showing at least that it had rested thus for some days. As Boyce uncurled it, it proved itself to be in actuality a huge cloth envelope, about 6 inches wide by 8 inches deep in dimensions, its square top flap, some 3 inches deep alone, pasted down tight as well as sealed in addition with a generous gob of red wax. The flap,-as well as the entire face, was covered with a fine, almost microscopic penwriting; and that it was the flap writing with which the document—as document it was—opened, was emphasized by the fact that that writing thereon was preceded by the date of June 2nd, that year. Curiously, again, Boyce scanned the words with which the writing covering that flap opened:
Being of sound mind and memory, I declare this to be my last will and testament, and I hereby revoke all previous wills made by me. I direct that after the payment of my just debts and funeral expenses, the sum of $10,000 be paid to—
Boyce turned the big envelope over. And glanced, again, at that continuation covering its entire back which, he knew, when this envelope were opened out at all its junctions, would no longer be a “second page” or “second section” to the writing on the flap, but would be one with it—the two parts but one document. And gazing again at that continuation, he assured himself for perhaps the hundredth time that that quaint signature
Balhatchet Barkstone
at the bottom of it was in the same writing as the rest—was, indeed, in his grandfather’s own indisputable handwriting. With which—and a relieved sigh—he shoved the sealed envelope, flap uppermost, over to Tydings, whose fingers were curled, eagerly, lawyerlike, towards it.
