AHMM, April 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He led them up the stairs to his room on the top floor. “I had just returned from the theatre and was telling my sister about the play when I heard a scream. A maid had chanced to look into my room and found it—like this."

  He opened a door. The sergeant clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Made a mess, didn't ‘e?"

  The room was a shambles—furniture overturned, contents of desk drawers scattered across the floor, papers strewn everywhere. The warm breeze of a June evening could be felt through the open window.

  The sergeant carefully picked his way through the debris and looked out the window. “Got in this way, did ‘e?"

  "It would seem so,” Max said, “although I confess I can't imagine how he did it."

  "Some of them sneaksmen could give a bloomin’ fly lessons. But we'll ‘ave a look. ‘E might have come in by the front door and left the window open as a blind."

  "Walking through the house twice without being seen?” Max asked sceptically.

  The sergeant nodded. “People see mostly what they expect to see. Your servants don't expect to see a burglar prowling about, so a glimpse of one might not register at all. What did ‘e take?"

  "Nothing,” Max said.

  "Do you ordinarily keep valuables here?"

  Max shook his head. “I lent my Mona Lisa to the Louvre many years ago, and they refuse to return it. You know how Frenchmen are. The British Museum is almost as bad. It has my First, Second, and Third Shakespeare Folios. There is nothing here except my own scribbles and sketches, and their value—I can tell you, sadly—would not interest any self-respecting burglar. As far as I've been able to determine, he took nothing."

  "'E must have thought there was something valuable here,” the sergeant persisted. “'E went to considerable trouble to find it."

  Max shook his head again. “I'm telling you—I am newly employed as a dramatic critic for The Saturday Review. My remuneration is five pounds a week. At that rate it will take me a lifetime or two to accumulate enough to interest burglars. All of this makes no sense whatsoever."

  "Maybe something you own has a value you don't know about,” the sergeant said thoughtfully.

  "Unless the burglar confused one of my drawings with something of Rembrandt's, not even the most desperate thief could find anything here worth stealing.” He patted the man's sturdy shoulder. “Here's a bit of sound advice for you. Concentrate on catching the murderer and don't trouble yourself over some madman's irrational foray into my room. There will be less fuss for everyone that way, especially for me. I definitely do not care for fuss."

  "We'll get the murderer,” the sergeant promised. “'E can't get away. The young lady marked ‘im, you see. Put up quite a fight, she did, while ‘e was strangling ‘er. Raked ‘is hands good. There was blood and strips of flesh under ‘er fingernails. We'll get ‘im, all right. But about your burglary...” He glanced around and shook his head. “No one seeing this room could doubt someone wanted something and wanted it badly. As you clean up this mess, keep your eyes open. I suspect there is, after all, something missing. Try to find out what it is. Do you have any property elsewhere?"

  "Only some drawings. I lend them, I sell them when I can, I send them to publishers to be considered for publication, I leave them with dealers for exhibit and sale. Usually I have a few on hand, but at this moment there are only some scribbled notes for my Saturday Review articles. No state secrets, no lurid confessions of the socially prominent, nothing."

  The sergeant looked around again. “Maybe ‘e found what he was looking for. ‘E looked hard enough. If ‘e didn't find it, ‘e'll look elsewhere. Take it from me—a man who'd tear a room apart like this is desperate to find something."

  Max usually breakfasted with his mother, Mrs. Eliza Beerbohm, and his sister, Constance. When he joined them the next morning, some order had been restored to his room but none at all to his wounded feelings. A burglary, he reflected, makes a person feel violated. His mother had reacted to the mess in his room by murmuring something about properly punishing the person responsible, but Max hushed her. “Proper punishment” suggested a tedious series of court appearances, not to mention notoriety of a kind that benefited no one except the newspapers, and he wanted none of it.

  Constance was reading a lurid report in one of those papers about the latest developments in the Montagu Square murder. Popular rumour made the young woman, Miss Letty Tapping, the mistress or former mistress of several prominent men. Scandals within scandals were hinted; the police, it seemed, were eager to converse with Lord George Pallister, Duke of Arlington; with Sir Gordon Wade, M.P.; with Viscount Jeffrey Sandell, eldest son of the Earl of Dunston; with Jamison Weyman, a wealthy baronet; and with Colonel Thornton Poggs, D.S.O., alleged to have distinguished himself in many obscure battles about the Empire. Oddly enough, none of these men seemed to be available for questioning.

  "Do you know any of them, Max?” Constance asked.

  Max, who had been paying no attention, was jolted back to reality. The violence done to his room had been a major disruption in his life, and he disliked disruptions. He was not interested in murders.

  "Know them? Why would I know them?"

  "I mean—have you drawn any of them?"

  "Probably,” Max said lightly. “A man with the character to become a suspect in a murder case ought to have an interesting face. I'm sorry, I wasn't listening. Who were they?"

  Constance read the names again.

  "Yes, I've drawn all of them,” Max said. “Colonel Poggs is the only one who is totally uninteresting. I drew him for that reason—to see whether his face could somehow be made interesting. It couldn't. Lord George Pallister is ‘The Beard,’ of course, beard and moustache. Any portrait of him would show a mass of hair with a rim of face around it and an unusually sharp nose protruding—an amazing achievement for a relatively young man. He is the anti-social peer, rarely seen anywhere, always taking himself off to remote places, where apparently he lives a hermit's life, so it figures that he wouldn't be available for questioning or anything else. Sir Gordon is distinguished for his luxurious side-whiskers and his small nose. The viscount looks like an errant schoolboy. Jamison Weyman, who is a man with a very great wealth and a very small title, tries unsuccessfully to look as though the two are in balance. His large nose and meagre moustache are against him."

  "How interesting that you should know all of them!” Constance exclaimed.

  Max shrugged modestly. He made it a point to be familiar with the face of anyone who was a suitable subject for his pencil, and that included the nobility, politicians, public figures of every kind, anyone at all of note. He collected faces—in his mind—from newspaper pictures, art galleries, all kinds of public occasions, private occasions like parties, at theatres, in lawcourts, or in the galleries of the House of Commons. Some of his collected faces he met accidentally in the street.

  He stored his impressions, for he never drew directly from life. He waited until his memory had coalesced them into his own unique satiric view of the subject. Two years previously, in 1896, a collection of his drawings had been published, Caricatures of Twenty-Five Gentlemen. Many had appeared singly in other publications. Max was an anomaly—not quite famous, not yet, but becoming known as a writer as well as an artist.

  But surely he had not yet reached that level of distinction where anyone would have considered it worthwhile to steal from him. The ransacking of his room was a major disturbance in his life—not so much because of the mess it left but because it made no sense.

  He quickly swallowed the remainder of his breakfast and hurried away, murmuring something about errands. He was still brooding, and he felt an urge to complain to something, though he couldn't have said exactly what he meant to complain about. Fate, perhaps. Fate had always been kind to him in the past. Could it be that he had somehow displeased her?

  He was impeccably dressed, as always. Max was a dandy and took pride in it. He was not merely correctly but artistically dressed at all t
imes. He looked after his own wardrobe, pressing his clothes and ironing his silk hats. Fortunately, the violator of his room had left his wardrobe untouched, and Max would never have allowed a trifling domestic catastrophe like having his room torn apart prevent his making morning calls properly attired with hat, cane, and gloves. His first stop was the Mannerly Galleries, the Oxford Street shop of James Mannerly, an art dealer specialising in prints, etchings, and drawings, and there he abruptly walked into a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of the one he had experienced in his home the night before.

  Chaos had struck randomly about the shop, and several police officers were contemplating the scene with solemn puzzlement.

  Mannerly came hurrying to meet him. “Max!” he exclaimed. “I am devastated. I meant to send you a message, but the police insisted that everything be checked to see what is missing, and what with one thing and another—how did you find out about it?"

  He was a large, untidy, unpleasant-looking man, and his enemies claimed his success was due to the fact that any work of art looked better in his presence.

  "What happened?” Max asked.

  "Someone broke in last night and made this ghastly mess, but the only things they seem to have stolen are your drawings."

  Max carefully righted an overturned chair and sat down in it. “My drawings?"

  Mannerly nodded.

  "I suppose I should be flattered that somewhere in London there is one Beerbohm collector,” Max mused. “One active Beerbohm collector, I suppose I should say. These weren't very good drawings. As you know, they were only a few leftover odds and ends that I gave you to fill out your display. I would have been surprised if any of them sold. Why would anyone bother to steal them?"

  Mannerly raised his hands perplexedly. “Art thieves are unpredictable. Some are knowledgeable enough to take only the one or two most valuable things in a collection. They scorn touching anything else. Others take whatever they can and hope it will turn out to be valuable."

  "Who is the police officer in charge?” Max asked.

  "Sergeant Hoskin. He's in back checking for jemmy marks or whatever it is police do. Just a moment."

  Mannerly moved with a quickness surprising for his bulk. He returned with a dour, lank police officer who obviously took a grim view of life and everything connected with it. Mannerly performed the introductions. “Max Beerbohm—he's the artist whose drawings were stolen."

  Sergeant Hoskin eyed Max narrowly. “What would you say your drawings were worth?"

  "If I had received five pounds for each one, I would have felt blessed by whatever fairy it is who watches over financiers, but I don't think James was asking five pounds."

  "Three,” Mannerly said. “As you said, they weren't very good drawings."

  Hoskin scowled. “Twelve drawings stolen, you would have been glad to sell them for three pounds each, total loss about thirty-five pounds and probably less, not much of a burglary. An unusual amount of damage done, though. If all he wanted was those drawings, why didn't he just take them and leave?"

  "Unfortunately, the mystery goes far deeper than that,” Max said. “Last night, while I was at the theatre, my room in my mother's home on Upper Berkeley Street was burgled."

  The sergeant procured a chair for himself. A boring case had suddenly become interesting. “What was taken?"

  "As far as I've been able to tell, nothing. But whoever did it left a far worse mess there."

  "Perhaps he went to your quarters looking for drawings before he came here. Did you have any drawings there?"

  "None. I gave everything I had on hand to James to fill out his display."

  "Who was in charge of the police investigation?"

  "A Sergeant Ashburn."

  "I know him,” Sergeant Hoskin said.

  "He thought I might possess something of value without knowing it. Are you positive, James, that one of my drawings wasn't a masterpiece in disguise?"

  Mannerly shook his head emphatically. “There is no way we can make the estimated value more than thirty-five pounds."

  "Just a moment,” Sergeant Hoskin said. “You're an artist—"

  "And a writer. And a dramatic critic,” Max added.

  "And you've done other drawings?"

  "Many."

  "Are any of them worth more than the three-pound value you put on these?"

  "I certainly hope so!"

  "In that case, the burglar, hearing that some of your work was on display here, may have been hoping to steal one of those better drawings. Where are they?"

  Max stared at him. He had the feeling of having been suddenly tumbled into an utterly strange landscape, like that of Alice in Wonderland. He and his sisters had often speculated on what life in such a place would be like. Now he knew. All rules of logic had been suspended. Why steal a drawing by Max Beerbohm? He could, very quickly, produce another. In fact, he could reproduce a copy of every stolen drawing from memory and do it far quicker than the time the originals had taken.

  "Ackroyd Galleries on Old Bond Street,” Max said. “Special exhibit, ‘Twelve Drawings by Max Beerbohm.’”

  Sergeant Hoskins turned to a constable. “Get over to the Ackroyd Galleries and find out whether anything unusual has happened there."

  "Ackroyd Galleries?” the constable repeated, his face screwed up in puzzlement.

  "On Old Bond Street,” Max said again. “Near the Royal Arcade."

  The constable's expression brightened, and he hurried away.

  Max's newly discovered illogical world continued to spin around him until the constable returned. Then it fractured into very small pieces.

  "They had a burglary at the Ackroyd Galleries last night,” the constable announced. “The place is a mess, just like here, but nothing was stolen but this gentleman's twelve drawings."

  * * * *

  Max attended the Haymarket Theatre that night with a friend, the artist Wilson Steer. Steer had a mind that was most singularly focused on art. When he talked about a play, his comments were principally directed at the scenery. That night the scenery had been abominable, and when they left the theatre, Steer enlarged upon this as they walked along.

  Max listened silently. His thoughts were still in a turmoil over the burglaries. Further, this was Wednesday night. The following day, Thursday, was his day of agony, the day when his Saturday Review article had to be written. He had taken Steer to the theatre with him in the hope that the artist might contribute an insight he could base his article on, but Saturday Review readers were unlikely to appreciate dramatic criticism that treated a play as an art exhibit.

  Before the play began, Steer had tried to talk Max out of the funk he was in by applying logic. “Max, be reasonable. You're twenty-five years old. You stand at the beginning of a career everyone expects will be brilliant, but you are better known as a writer than as an artist, and your art, that of a caricaturist, is highly specialised and one-dimensional—especially so with you, since you work with a pencil. No mad collector is going around London stealing your work. No collector could possibly be that demented. No one has a vendetta against you. You're one of the most popular men in London. Hostesses love you. Whenever they need an extra male to match with a visiting spinster cousin, you are always available, and you arrive impeccably dressed and exude charm all evening no matter how plain the cousin is. You are a gem. Forget this business of stolen drawings—you can do all of them over again in an hour or two, can't you? Call all of it a stupid mistake and get on with your life."

  By the time they left the theatre, Steer had already forgotten the stolen drawings. They walked along together, Steer—tall and sturdy with a bristling moustache—towering over the slender, diminutive Max and expounding truisms of colour and form at him, none of which, it seemed, Steer had detected in the scenery of the play they had just seen. Max only half listened. The article he must write on the morrow already loomed heavily over him—he had no idea what he was going to write about—and the puzzle of his stolen drawings hung over
him just as oppressively.

  As they reached Shaftsbury Avenue, chaos erupted. There were shouts, the screech of heavy wheels turning suddenly, the neighing of horses. Max felt himself jerked bodily into the air. Something struck his head, and he was momentarily dazed. Behind him came a continued shouting, crashes and thuds, and the utterly unreal reek of beer splashed about in quantities.

  Steer said calmly, “Don't you ever look about you? Lucky for you you weren't walking with Will Rothenstein. He's much too small to perform a rescue like that."

  Max's head ached. His top hat was in his hand, though he had no recollection of picking it up or having it handed to him. It had been crushed, ruined.

  "What happened?” he asked Steer.

  "Stupid driver of a brewer's dray must have been half asleep when something frightened his horses. They came right at us. Fortunately, one of us was looking about. I plucked you from under the horses’ hooves.” He laughed and slapped Max on the back. “So you'll live to write that article tomorrow after all. What are you going to write about? The drama of being run down by a brewer's dray?"

  "Saturday Review readers wouldn't find that any more interesting than the other topics I've been able to think of,” Max said sadly. “The problem is, I have no idea what would interest them."

  "Then write about something that interests you,” Steer said.

  He hailed a four-wheeler, and he boosted Max into it and announced his intention of seeing him safely to his door. “You shouldn't be allowed out after dark,” he said.

  At the Beerbohm residence, Constance took one look at Max's disarrayed appearance and wailed, “How terrible! And on Wednesday night too! How will you get your article written?"

  Mrs. Beerbohm arrived a moment later and added her own wail. “Poor Max! And tomorrow's Thursday. How will you manage?"

  "By forgetting all this,” Max said, “and getting a good night's sleep.” He thanked Steer for saving his life and assorted smaller favours and hurried off to bed, where he was quite unable to sleep at all.