The Detections of Dr. Sam Johnson

by Lillian de la Torre

  He bent over the font, and his voice changed.

  “Pray, gentlemen, step over here.”

  We did so as he made a light and opened his dark lanthorn.

  The money was gone. In its place lay a pile of yellowed papers, thick-writ in a fair court-hand.

  Beholding with indescribable feelings this relique of the great English Bard, I fell on my knees and thanked heaven that I had lived to see this day.

  “Get up, Bozzy,” said Dr. Johnson, “and cease this flummery.”

  “Oh, sir,” I exclaimed, “the very handwriting of the great Bard of Stratford!”

  “’Tis not the handwriting of the great Bard of Stratford,” retorted Dr. Johnson.

  Old Ararat’s jaw fell. The boy Anthony opened his mouth and closed it again. By the light of the lanthorn Dr. Percy peered at the topmost page.

  “Yet the paper is old,” he asserted.

  “The paper may be old,” replied Dr. Johnson, “yet the words are new.”

  “Nay, Dr. Johnson,” cried old Mr. Ararat, “this is merely to affect singularity. Eminent men from London have certified that my manuscript is genuine, including David Garrick and Dr. Warton.”

  “Garrick and Warton are deceived,” returned Dr. Johnson sternly. “‘Caractacus; or, the British Hero’ is a modern forgery, end no ancient play.”

  “Pray, sir, how do you make that good?” enquired Malone.

  “I knew it,” replied Dr. Johnson, “when I heard King use a word Shakespeare never heard—‘mob’—a word shortened from ‘mobile’ long after Shakespeare died. Nor would Shakespeare have understood the verb ‘to compliment’.”

  “Then,” said I, “the thief has had his trouble for his pains, for he has stolen but waste paper indeed.”

  “Not so,” replied Dr. Johnson, “the thief has come nigh to achieving his object, for the thief and the forger are one.”

  “Name him,” cried Dr. Percy. All eyes turned to old Ararat. His face shewed the beginnings of a dumb misery, but no guilt. Anthony’s face might have been carved out of a pumpkin.

  “If,” said Dr. Johnson slowly, “if there were in Stratford a young man, apprenticed to a scrivener and adept with his pen; a young man who has the plays of Shakespeare by heart; and if that young man found as it might be a packet of old paper unused among the dead stationers’ gear; is it unreasonable to suppose that that young man was tempted to try out his skill at writing like Shakespeare? And when his skill proved more than adequate, and the play ‘Caractacus’ was composed and indited, and the Jubilee had raised interest in Shakespeare to fever pitch—what must have been the temptation to put forward the manuscript as genuine?”

  “Yet why should he steal his own manuscript?”

  “For fear of what has happened,” replied Dr. Johnson, “for fear that Dictionary Johnson, the editor of Shakespeare, with his special knowledge might scrutinize the manuscript and detect the imposture.”

  Old Ararat’s face was purple.

  “Pray, sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “moderate your anger. The boy is a clever boy, and full of promise. Let him be honest from this time forward.”

  Old Ararat looked at his son, and his jaw worked.

  “But, Dr. Johnson,” cried Percy, “the hundred pounds!”

  Anthony Ararat fell on his knees and raised his hand to Heaven.

  “I swear before God,” he cried vibrantly, “that I never touched the hundred pounds.”

  It was the first word I had heard out of Anthony. By the fitful light of the lanthorn I stared in amazement at the expressionless face. The boy spoke like a player.

  “Believe me, father,” cried Anthony earnestly, still on his knees by the font, “I know nothing of the hundred pounds; nor do I know how the manuscript came to be exchanged for the money, for indeed I never meant to restore it until Dr. Johnson was once more far from Stratford.”

  “He speaks truth,” said Dr. Johnson, “for here is the hundred pounds, and it was I who laid the manuscript in the font.”

  He drew the purse from his capacious pocket and handed it to Dr. Percy.

  “How came you by the manuscript?” asked Percy, accepting of the purse.

  “It was not far to seek. The forger was the thief. It was likely that the finder was the forger. If Malone’s panegyric on my learning frightened him into sequestering the manuscript to prevent it from falling under my eye, then it must have been hid between the time young Anthony left the shop and the time he returned with the empy coffer. He was gone long enough for Mr. Ararat to spin us his long-winded tale. In that space of time he hid the manuscript—surely no further afield than his father’s out-buildings. When he came in to us his face and shoulders were wet with rain.”

  “Tears, surely?”

  “Why, his eyes were full of tears. The boy is a comedian. But the drops on his shoulders never fell from his eyes; they were raindrops.”

  “But, Dr. Johnson,” put in Edmond Malone, “we searched the out-buildings thoroughly, and the manuscript was not to be found.”

  “The manuscript,” replied Dr. Johnson, “lay in plain sight before your eyes, and you passed it by without seeing it.”

  “How could we?” cried Malone, “we turned over the old papers in the shed.”

  “Did you turn over the other old papers?”

  “There were no other old papers.”

  “There were,” said Dr. Percy suddenly, “for when I visited the—the necessary-house, I turned over a pile of old accounts of the greatest interest, put to this infamous use by the carelessness of the householder. I—ah—” his voice trailed off.

  “The forged sheets of ‘Caractacus’ were hastily thrust among them,” said Dr. Johnson. “I guessed so much when I heard the allusion to the jakes as the destination of bad poetry. What more likely hiding-place for a day or two, till Dr. Johnson be far from Stratford once more? In short, I left the play and hurried thither, and found the pages undisturbed where young Ararat had thrust them into the heart of the pile.”

  “Yet if you only meant to sequester the writings, boy,” said Dr. Percy sternly, “how came you to offer to barter them for money?”

  Anthony rose to his feet.

  “Sir,” he said respectfully, “I never meant to touch the money. But Dr. Johnson saw clearly, and said so, that ’twas no theft for profit; and I feared that such thoughts might lead him to me. I saw a way by which a thief might profit, and I wrote the letter and dropped it at my father’s feet that the deed might seem after all the work of a real thief. Consider my apprehension, sir,” he turned to Dr. Johnson, “when you fitted my thumb into the impression it had made.”

  Dr. Johnson shook his head.

  “Too many thumbs fitted it,” he said. “Another way must be found to fit a thumb to its print. ’Twas so, too, with the paper. ’Twas clearly from your father’s shop; but Percy and I and half Stratford were furnished with the same paper. Again the undistributed middle term.”

  “Pray, sir, how came you to spare me in your thoughts?” enquired old Ararat.

  “I acquitted you,” replied Dr. Johnson, “because after Malone’s eulogy you never left my side; nor did your thumb fit the print in the wax.”

  “Pray, Dr. Johnson,” added Malone, “coming down here from Mr. Ararat’s necessary-house with the manuscript in your pocket, why did you play out the farce? Why not reveal all at once?”

  “To amuse Mr. Boswell,” replied my friend with a broad smile. “I thought an hour’s watch by the bones of Shakespeare, and a dramatic discovery at its end, would give him a rich range of those sensations native to a man of sensibility, and enrich those notes he is constantly taking of my proceedings.”

  In the laugh that followed at my expense, the Ararats sullenly took themselves off, and we four repaired to the Red Lion.

  “Sir,” said young Malone, taking leave of us at the door of “Much Ado about Nothing,” “this is a lesson in the detection of imposture which I will never forget.”

  “Sir,” said Dr. Johns
on, “you are most obliging. Be sure, sir, that I shall stand by you in your every endeavour to make known the truth. Pray, Dr. Percy, accept of the forged manuscript as a memento of the pitfalls of antiquarianism.”

  Dr. Percy accepted with a smile, and we parted on most cordial terms.

  “I blush to confess it,” I remarked as we prepared to retire, “but I made sure that Dr. Percy was carrying stolen documents about with him in yonder folio-sized packet he was so particular with.”

  “So he was,” remarked Dr. Johnson. “Therefore I exchanged packets with him. I knew with certainty then that Thomas Percy had not stolen the Shakespeare manuscript, for all his antiquarian light fingers.”

  “How so?” I enquired.

  “Because I knew what he had stolen.”

  “What?”

  “A household reckoning of the first Anthony Ararat, showing that the good stationer’s family consumed an unconscionable quantity of small beer during the year 1614. The magpie clergyman had filched it from old Ararat’s necessary-house!”

  [Barring larceny, this is the story of William Henry Ireland and his amazing Vortigern (1796), transferred to Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee, which Johnson did not really attend, but Boswell did, blatantly accoutered as described.]

  THE TRIPLE-LOCK’D ROOM

  (London, 1775)

  The affair of the triple-lock’d room began as an affair of gallantry, and ended as an affair of mystery and horror. The scene of the tragedy was commonplace enough, being the staymaker’s house where I lodged near Piccadilly. The dramatis personae all lodged there. The strange knot of Jamaicans had the parlour floor. Sanry the drunken rope-dancer pigged it in the attick. The two-pair-of-stairs floor was divided between James Bruce the Abyssinian traveller and your humble servant, James Boswell younger of Auchinleck, advocate, amateur of crime, and friend to the great Sam: Johnson.

  Everybody snubbed the rope-dancer; Bruce the traveller snubbed everybody but the Jamaican lady; and the Jamaican lady snubbed nobody. ’Twas pleasant to attend her levee of mornings before I set out on my daily ramble. On a memorable day in that summer of 1775, Dr. Sam: Johnson was my companion in the lady’s chamber.

  Her name was Mrs. Winwood. She was newly come to London from the plantations to set up for a lady of fashion, and her boudoir lacked no detail of the ton. ’Twas all in the Chinese taste. The four-poster bed was richly canopied in China damask. Mr. Chippendale’s Chinese chairs were everywhere. There was plenty of red and gold lacquer. An ornate cabinet held ivory knickknacks. Gold dragons two feet high writhed up the japanned coal-box and coiled about its brass handles. The fire-place had a brass fender, and for the summer a fan of white paper in the grate. A Gothick book with gilded margins lay open on a marquetry table, though I seriously doubted whether Mistress Winwood could read its crabbed black-letter. Next it a small Benares coffer, open, revealed a blaze of jewelry within.

  We had the field to ourselves, save for the lady’s fashionable menagerie of creatures. A motley paraqueet pranced on a carven stand. A snubby creature of the canine kind blinked on a silken cushion, half-closing contemptuous eyes in a sooty face.

  “’Tis a picture,” cried I, surveying the scene, “from the pencil of Mr. Hogarth!”

  “Aye,” assented Dr. Johnson, “it shall be called The Lady’s Toilette-table.”

  Indeed only my burly friend himself in his old snuff-brown suit was out of drawing as he sat oscillating upon one of the Chippendale chairs, causing the chair to creak ominously and the Jamaican lady to flinch.

  ’Twas the sweetest little pink-and-gold pocket Venus ever I saw, sitting at her toilette-table among a confusion of patch-boxes and ribbands, her mask, her fan, her stay-lace, her pomander, lying lost in the litter. She wore a sacque of willow-green tissue, frothing with lace about a bosom more revealed than hid. There were diamonds at throat, wrist, and bosom. The waves of her dusky hair were piled high. She wore a patch like a half-moon beside one liquid black eye, and a patch like a star at the edge of the tiny, perfect pout of her mouth. Her skin glowed like a golden peach. She smiled upon us with pursed lips, making a mouth like a kiss. I could have been her knight-errant.

  Much I envied the tiny black page who leaned at her knee. Not that the little savage appreciated his position; for though gorgeous in cloth-of-gold caftan and turban plumed and jewelled, he bore in his ugly brown face a timeless sorrow.

  “Sure ’tis a Lilliputian philosopher,” remarked Dr. Sam: Johnson, scanning the impassive face.

  “A pygmy Nestor—” I concurred.

  Johnson quoted:

  “Klagge tai ge petontai ep’ okeanoio rhoaon,

  Andrasi Pygmaioisi phonon kai kera pherousai.”

  “O, Lord, Sir, spare us your Greek!” cried I. “What does this little animal understand of Homer’s works?”

  “Little enough, I’ll wager. What would you give, my lad,” bending to place his great paw on the small cloth-of-gold shoulder, “what would you give to learn about Homer?”

  The dark eyes blinked.

  “Pompey give what he have, sah,” piped the page.

  Dr. Johnson was much pleased with his answer.

  “Sir,” said he to me, “a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.”

  I doubt whether either Pompey or his mistress understood this discourse. Dr. Johnson, however, whose good sense keeps pace with his benevolence, omitted to gratify Pompey with an account of the Greek poet. He gratified him rather with a thing more to the purpose, namely sixpence; and the lady, pleased, patted the small golden shoulder.

  Standing at her back, her waiting-woman glowered and muttered. Sure never had pocket Venus a stranger Abigail. She was a powerful mulatto, not tall but wide, with watchful black eyes in a broad ugly face. Above her narrow furrowed brow she had twisted a clout of red marked with tortuous figures of black. Her red stuff gown strained with muscles as her arms moved. With an angry jerk she fastened a brilliant pin like a coach-and-four in the lady’s tower of curls, and said something between her teeth to the little brown page. He shrank against the lady.

  “Ma’am,” says Dr. Sam: Johnson bluntly, ignoring this by-play, “you’ve not brought me hither to discuss Homer. Pray what is it that disquiets you?”

  Mistress Winwood gave him a level look.

  “I will tell you,” said she. “You must know that I went with the company of comedians to Jamaica. I was much admired in both comedy and tragedy, and thus I formed many—friendships—” said the lady delicately, “and received many a gift of jewels, before I married. My husband was a rich planter of Montego Bay, and ’twas his pleasure to adorn me with still handsomer jewels of his own providing. He bought me my mulatto woman, whom you see here, and nothing was wanting that would satisfy me. But alas, within short months, the sultry vapours of Jamaica had carried off my beloved Mr. Winwood, and I was left to mourn.”

  A tear stole down the golden cheek.

  “There was naught left for me but to leave the scene of my sorrow and begin life anew. I realized my holdings. I took my jewels, and Hannah her little son, and hither came we—to find,” the comedian inclined gracefully in my direction, “friendship and consolation in Mr. Boswell.”

  This was fast progress! I returned the inclination, with a smile into which I infused as much meaning as I could.

  “What’s this to the purpose?” growled Johnson.

  “Why, Sir, the jewels. They lie there,” she nodded towards the Benares coffer, “and I go in fear for jewels and life together.”

  “How so, ma’am?”

  “Look. I found under my pillow last night—this.”

  Dr. Sam: Johnson looked with contempt on the strange toy she displayed. ’Twas nothing so fearsome, being most like a shuttlecock, made of white feathers bound together with long dark hair. The bunch protruded from a little sack of yellow leather, stuck with seven pins.

  “Foh,
” said Dr. Johnson. “This is a child’s toy; this is one of Pompey’s amusements. Come here, boy.”

  Pompey, idly whisking flies by the window, looked around, and began to approach. When he saw the white feather toy he stood stock still, and would approach no further.

  “Come on, boy. Acknowledge your property.”

  Pompey put his little black hands behind him.

  “No, sah. Not Pompey’s.”

  He backed into the chimney-corner. As the rusty wig and the glossy black head bent together over the feathered shuttlecock, the jewelled turban sought diversion. First he tried the pug-dog’s temper, who shewed ugly teeth. Then he reached up and pulled the paraqueet’s tail-feathers. For that he got a sharp jab in his small brown finger, and one crimson drop started. Savagely he bit at the torn place with his sharp white teeth, and his eyes rolled in anger. The next thing I knew, he had bundled the paraqueet, chain and all, into the Chinese box, and slammed the slanting lid. Then ensued such a clanking and squawking as brought the lady from her shuttlecock and the mulatto from the toilette-table. Mistress Winwood released the indignant bird, which sat on her finger croaking. Hannah gave the erring page a box o’ the ear that staggered him, and then dragged him screaming into the backward regions.

  As his cries faded, peace returned. Mistress Winwood set the paraqueet back on his perch and refastened the chain. Dr. Johnson returned his attention to the shuttlecock.

  “’Twas under my pillow,” the lady told him, “and I found it there in the morning. And last night after I blew out my candle, something outside tried to lift the hook on my door. I cried out, and it went away.”

  “Let us look at this door-fastening.” Dr. Sam: Johnson heaved his great bulk erect and lumbered to the door. The lady followed him, and I followed her.

  ’Twas the slightest of hooks, that fell into a loop of metal affixed to the jamb.

  “’Twill never do, ma’am,” says my ingenious friend. “Any knife-blade can lift it from without. We’ll fix you bolts above and below, that shall repel intruders and make you and your jewels safe.”

  “Let it be as you wish,” said the lady. “Yet I trust no lock nor bolt, I. Pray, Mr. Boswell, take upon you to watch my door from without, that nobody enters to do me harm.”