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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Specimen Case,' Ernest Bramah delves into the complexities of human nature through a captivating blend of mystery and philosophical inquiry. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century England, the novel employs a witty narrative style characterized by sharp dialogue and keen observations. The story unfolds as an engaging investigation into the mind of a peculiar specimen, exploring themes of identity, perception, and the ethics of scientific curiosity. Bramah'Äôs adept use of humor and irony adds depth to the narrative, while the interplay between reason and the supernatural serves as a reflection of contemporary debates in Victorian and Edwardian literature concerning science and mysticism. Ernest Bramah, renowned for his creation of the fictional detective Max Carrados, was deeply influenced by the era's fascination with the occult and psychological exploration. His extensive literary career, coupled with his background in journalism and an avid interest in Eastern philosophy, informs the multifaceted characters and intricate plotting that characterize 'The Specimen Case.' Bramah's experiences and diverse interests culminate in a work that not only entertains but prompts readers to consider the boundaries of knowledge and the human condition. For readers seeking a thought-provoking narrative that intertwines intellectual rigor with thrilling suspense, 'The Specimen Case' stands as a landmark example of early 20th-century literature. Bramah's masterful storytelling and incisive commentary on the nature of observation and understanding make this novel essential for enthusiasts of mystery and philosophical fiction alike.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Specimen Case
Table of Contents
Introduction
An unassuming object becomes a proving ground for the limits of perception, where order, curiosity, and concealed motives intersect to test how we decide what truly matters.
The Specimen Case is a short mystery by the English author Ernest Bramah, whose career spanned the late Victorian and early twentieth-century eras. Best known for the Kai Lung tales and the Max Carrados detective stories, Bramah wrote with a precision that suited the puzzle-driven mode of his time. The piece belongs to the early twentieth-century British tradition of rational detection, when mysteries frequently appeared in magazines before being gathered into collections. Its milieu is recognizably that of modernizing Britain, attentive to the small mechanisms of daily life and to the social transactions that allow seemingly trivial items to gain unexpected significance.
Readers encounter a controlled, quietly suspenseful narrative that builds its tension through incremental detail rather than spectacle. The story centers on a concrete, manageable mystery whose ramifications widen as the implications of its central object are considered. Bramah’s voice is measured and urbane, more concerned with inference and the weight of circumstantial fact than with melodrama. The atmosphere is one of careful listening and watchful patience, rewarding close attention as patterns emerge from the ordinary. The experience is that of a thoughtful puzzle, where each observation offers not just information but a prompt to reconsider how the parts cohere.
At heart, the story invites reflection on how we classify the world and how easily those classifications can be turned to advantage. It suggests that the gulf between what is seen and what is understood may be bridged by disciplined reasoning rather than intuition alone. Questions of expertise, trust, and the ethics of handling specialized knowledge hover over the action, as do the ambiguities of possession and provenance. Bramah’s interest in method quietly underscores the narrative, nudging readers to weigh the difference between a thing’s label and its function, and to notice how context can make the ordinary appear either innocuous or perilous.
Stylistically, Bramah favors economy, lucid structure, and a dry, almost conversational wit that keeps the machinery of the plot transparent while maintaining intrigue. His scenes tend to unfold with a purposeful calm, allowing clues to surface without fanfare and encouraging readers to do the interpretive work. The prose is attentive to concrete surfaces and procedural steps, the small pivots by which a hypothesis is tested. Even when the stakes rise, the tone remains civilized and exact, a hallmark of early twentieth-century British mystery writing in which intellectual play and narrative poise take precedence over sensation.
Thematically, the story resonates with contemporary readers for the way it examines expertise and misdirection. In an age saturated with information, the challenge of distinguishing signal from noise mirrors the narrative’s insistence on disciplined attention. The focus on practical reasoning, on the uses and abuses of classification, and on the social circulation of objects speaks to current concerns about provenance, accountability, and the fragility of trust. It also offers the enduring satisfaction of fair-minded detection: the sense that, if we look carefully and think methodically, we might glimpse the design that lies beneath confusion.
Approached as a compact study in observation and inference, The Specimen Case rewards patience, curiosity, and a taste for quiet exactitude. It exemplifies Bramah’s commitment to clarity and to the pleasures of an intelligently structured enigma, in which each detail earns its place and acquires meaning through relation to the whole. Without resorting to sensationalism, the story cultivates a steady, accumulating pressure that turns an everyday object into a lens on motive and character. The result is a poised, engaging mystery whose insight into seeing, naming, and knowing makes it as inviting and thought-provoking now as when it first appeared.
Synopsis (Selection)
Ernest Bramah’s The Specimen Case is a collection of detective tales featuring Max Carrados, the celebrated blind sleuth whose acute non-visual perception and calm logic guide each inquiry. Set in an Edwardian milieu of clubs, motorcars, and discreet offices, the book presents a sequence of varied investigations, each a self-contained instance of method applied to mystery. The title signals a curated array of examples rather than a single continuous plot, offering readers a representative range of crimes and contexts. Throughout, Bramah emphasizes observation, inference, and quiet strategy over spectacle, allowing Carrados’s measured approach—and the social worlds he moves through—to shape the progress of every case.
The opening stories establish the apparatus of Carrados’s detective practice: clients arrive through the mediation of his friend Louis Carlyle, circumstances appear ordinary or even trivial, and a small inconsistency prompts closer scrutiny. Carrados’s techniques—careful listening, forensic touch, command of routine details—become visible as he tests hypotheses without alarming suspects. Domestic misplacements, suspicious accidents, and modest financial irregularities introduce the range of puzzles. The narrative voices keep the tone neutral and unhurried, foregrounding process. Turning points tend to hinge on a sound, a scent, or a texture others overlook, after which the inquiry widens to take in motives, alibis, and the quietly entangled lives of those involved.
As the sequence advances, the stakes rise from private embarrassments to well-organized thefts and frauds that cross social strata. Carrados sifts patterns of behavior, reconstructs movements from minor traces, and arranges controlled tests to confirm or eliminate possibilities. A casual remark, the placement of a commonplace object, or an unaccounted interval becomes the fulcrum on which an entire explanation pivots. The stories lead readers from tidy parlors to railway compartments and counting rooms, mapping a world where modern conveniences create opportunities as well as clues. Without disclosing solutions, the collection marks its midcourse by showing how seemingly isolated details cohere into a larger, deliberate design.
Several middle tales turn on questions of authenticity and value: rare objects, collectible curiosities, and financial instruments whose worth depends on provenance and trust. Carrados brings documentary knowledge to bear alongside sensory analysis, correlating catalog entries, signatures, and routine paperwork with physical evidence. The tension here arises less from pursuit than from verification—whether a claim will stand once examined. Social and legal complications surface when exposure threatens to damage reputations beyond the crime itself. The decisive moments occur in quiet conversations and private demonstrations, where a single test or overlooked record reframes the matter, guiding principals toward restitution, discreet settlement, or formal charge as circumstances warrant.
Bramah also explores how new communications and transport technologies reshape opportunity and risk. Telephones, telegrams, taxis, and timetables enable rapid action but leave characteristic traces that Carrados parses. Timelines are reconstructed from background noises, mechanical rhythms, and the practical limits of machines. Collaborations with officials and trusted assistants allow discreet observation without public fuss. The resolution of these episodes depends on aligning human intention with the material facts of distance and duration. When a plan seems flawless on paper, a barely audible interval or the feel of worn metal reveals the hidden constraint that undermines it, redirecting the investigation and quietly narrowing the circle of plausible actors.
A later group of cases brings personal jeopardy and moral complexity to the fore. Blackmail, coercion, and the disappearance of reluctant witnesses move the inquiries from purely evidential puzzles toward questions of consequence. Carrados weighs the immediate harm of exposure against the longer-term necessity of principled action. His reliance on confidants—including the capable Parkinson—broadens the method from solitary insight to coordinated effort. Pivotal scenes unfold in controlled environments where he can manage variables without resorting to force. Outcomes, kept discreet in the telling, emphasize measured interventions that secure safety while preserving dignity, indicating that justice may be served in ways that do not always end at a courtroom door.
The collection’s climactic stretch extends the canvas to matters of regional or international concern, where contraband, coded messages, and border movements introduce layers of secrecy. Here Bramah underscores patience: patterns emerge only after routines are observed and small anomalies repeated. Everyday containers, innocuous correspondence, and habitual errands conceal more than they reveal. Carrados coordinates with authorities when necessary, but the final pressure comes from a convergence of quiet facts rather than confrontation. The decisive shifts occur when a mundane process—sorting, packing, delivering—proves incompatible with the story told about it, letting inference do the work of pursuit and allowing a minimal exertion to produce a maximal disclosure.
Denouements across the volume are understated, often concluding with restitution, a private acknowledgment, or a carefully limited exposure. Bramah keeps attention on causes and mechanism rather than sensation. Characters face the consequences of their choices within the codes of their milieu, and Carrados, courteous and reserved, accepts outcomes that repair harm without unnecessary damage. Carlyle’s perspective frames several reflections on method, noting how steadiness, exact language, and attention to the ordinary suffice in place of dramatic gestures. The collection closes by reaffirming that detection is a discipline of sympathetic intelligence, where the most consequential act may be recognizing the point at which further display is neither useful nor humane.
Taken together, The Specimen Case functions as a deliberate exhibition of Carrados’s practice—an array of exemplars demonstrating that perception, patience, and reasoning can compensate for the absence of sight and outmatch guile. The book’s central message is that truth resides in unconsidered particulars, and that careful inquiry can restore proportion in a world crowded with haste. Without relying on sensational twists, Bramah shapes each narrative to highlight turning points where a minor fact quietly unlocks a larger pattern. The result is a concise, varied survey of crime and motive in a modernizing society, presented with restraint and an emphasis on how understanding is, itself, a form of resolution.
Historical Context
Set in early twentieth-century London, The Specimen Case unfolds against the dense urban fabric of the metropolis—clubland in Pall Mall and St James’s, the legal precincts around the Strand and the Old Bailey, and the fast-modernizing suburbs linked by rail and tram. The social world it depicts is Edwardian and interwar: servants and valets, discreet private banks, auction rooms, and museums whose collections symbolized status and knowledge. Technological novelties—the telephone, motorcabs, electric lighting—were becoming routine, while the Metropolitan Police’s CID professionalized detection. The city’s tempo, synchronized by timetables, newspapers, and postal deliveries, supplies the story’s atmosphere of precision, opportunity, and risk.
The story’s investigative logic is steeped in the era’s forensic and policing revolution. Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, founded in 1878, moved from intuition to system. A watershed came in 1901, when Sir Edward Henry established the Metropolitan Police Fingerprint Bureau; four years later, the Stratton brothers were convicted of the Deptford murders (1905), the first British murder verdict grounded in fingerprint evidence. Telegraphy and telephony integrated into police work, and the capture of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen in 1910—tracked via Marconi wireless to the SS Montrose and arrested in Canada—dramatized a new, technological reach of justice. Forensic pathology, too, grew in authority through figures like Sir Bernard Spilsbury, whose testimony in the “Brides in the Bath” case (1915) made the laboratory and mortuary central to courtrooms. London’s violent episodes, notably the Siege of Sidney Street (1911), highlighted firearms, anarchist networks, and the need for coordinated intelligence. These developments standardized evidence handling: exhibits were labeled, sealed, and curated—literally placed into specimen cases—anticipating a culture in which objects told stories. The Specimen Case draws on this milieu. Its premise treats material traces as decisive and mirrors the period’s faith that disciplined observation could convert scattered particulars into proof. The protagonist’s reliance on nonvisual inference (a hallmark of Ernest Bramah’s detective cycle) complements the new empiricism by broadening what counts as “forensic” beyond sight—texture, weight, smell, provenance, and pattern. The narrative’s careful choreography of alibis, routes, packages, and appointments reflects police practice shaped by registers, chain-of-custody, and the increasingly bureaucratic architecture of justice in Edwardian and interwar Britain.
Britain’s late Victorian and Edwardian passion for collecting—natural history specimens, ethnographic artifacts, coins, and curios—expanded with imperial reach. The Natural History Museum opened in South Kensington in 1881; the British Museum and learned societies fostered cataloguing cultures, while dealers and auctioneers fed a brisk market. Debates over scientific fraud and provenance simmered, symbolized by controversies like the Piltdown “discovery” (1912), later exposed as a hoax. The Specimen Case echoes this world of cabinets and cases: specimens stand for knowledge, prestige, and temptation. The plot’s focus on a curated object—and on the ethics of acquisition—mirrors anxieties about forgery, theft, and the commercialization of scientific and cultural capital.
Modern transport and communications reshaped London’s map and criminal opportunity. The Central London Railway (Central line) opened in 1900, the Piccadilly line in 1906, and suburban railways radiated timetabled precision. The Motor Car Act 1903 regularized registration and speed limits, and taxicabs replaced horse-drawn hansoms on Fleet Street and the Strand. The General Post Office expanded telephone exchanges, making summonses and alibis increasingly instantaneous. Such changes saturate The Specimen Case: movements by tube, cab, or messenger compress time, complicate surveillance, and turn clocks, tickets, and delivery slips into evidence. The narrative’s reliance on synchronized schedules and rapid communication reflects this new urban tempo.
The social stratification of Edwardian and interwar Britain—club members, professionals, collectors, and domestic staff—structures both opportunity and suspicion. In the 1911 Census, domestic service was Britain’s largest female occupation, exceeding one million workers; discrete club servants and private bank clerks guarded reputations and valuables. Gentlemen’s clubs such as the Carlton (1832) and Reform (1836) anchored elite networks, while the burgeoning middle class navigated auction rooms and specialty dealers. The Specimen Case leverages these hierarchies: access to drawing rooms and strongrooms, gossip moving through staff corridors, and the deference or resentment embedded in service relationships shape motive and method. Crime tests the seams between status, trust, and temptation.
The legal environment formed a recognizable procedural backdrop. The Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court) set trials before juries trained by precedent; the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act introduced supervised leniency; the “Judges’ Rules” of 1912 sought to standardize police questioning; and capital punishment remained for murder. Prisons such as Wormwood Scrubs (opened 1891) embodied a modern penal regime. Expert testimony—pathologists, chemists, document examiners—grew pivotal, while the press publicized trials in detail. The Specimen Case reflects this ecosystem: methods hinge on admissible, corroborable facts, chain-of-custody, and expert knowledge. Its detective often collaborates with, yet also critiques, official procedures, embodying contemporary tensions between private initiative and state authority.
Wider political currents inflect the atmosphere of order and anxiety. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) exposed imperial vulnerabilities; Liberal welfare reforms (1906–1914)—the 1908 Children Act, the 1911 National Insurance Act, and the Parliament Act 1911—recast state responsibility. The First World War (1914–1918) strained social fabric; demobilization in 1919 brought unrest; and the 1926 General Strike sharpened fears of disorder and class conflict. Ernest Bramah’s own conservatively inflected politics, conspicuous in his anti-union dystopia The Secret of the League (1907), inform a preference for stability secured by individual ingenuity. The Specimen Case, without preaching, channels a postwar desire for rational restoration: reason, evidence, and quiet competence triumph over volatility.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the vulnerabilities of a society that prizes status objects and reputations while relying on intricate, impersonal systems. It interrogates the ethics of collecting and the commodification of knowledge; it reveals how class deference can obscure scrutiny and how bureaucratic routine can miss subtle, embodied evidence. By centering a detective who turns disability into methodological strength, it challenges assumptions about authority and expertise. The narrative implies that justice depends on equitable access to truth, not merely on institutional power, and it quietly censures the complacency of elites who mistake possession—for specimens, wealth, or influence—for legitimacy.
The Specimen Case
PREFACE
A COLLECTION of twenty-one stories which bridge, in the process of their writing, thirty years of life, might be expected to offer at least the element of variety. How far the present volume succeeds or fails in this respect I am not just now concerned in arguing, but the occasion has reminded me...
When I was very young (how young, the reader may gather from the context) I was for some time possessed by one definite ambition: to have to my credit a single example of every kind of literary exercise. To anticipate repeating any of these facile achievements would seem to have held no charm, and at this flight of time I am fax from being certain what the youth who is now so dim a shadow in memory's background would have included in his quaint and ingenuous assemblage. But there were to be, I am sure, an historical romance; a psychological study; a "shilling shocker" (as it was then called); an intensely pathetic book (Misunderstood was doubtless still being spoken of); an epic (or was the thing I meant called a saga, I wondered?); something quite unlike anything that had ever been written before; a classic (I have already pleaded infancy); a "best seller" (but that distressing cliche was as yet uncoined); a novel showing my intimate knowledge of the world, women, and sin in general; one of each kind of play; and, if I may drop my voice a Punch joke, a prize Tit-Bit, and a Family Herald Supplement.
I suppose it is credible that at that age (whatever it may have been) abnormal reticence should go hand in hand with appalling candour. We must have talked; otherwise how should I have known that Batget (since become wealthy as a lard importer) made a practice of rising an hour before he need each day, solely to avoid encountering a rejected manuscript at the domestic breakfast table? I must have talked; otherwise how should Melwish have known anything of these callow aspirations?
Melwish was the enigma of our genial gatherings. Middle-aged, successful and clear-cut, he appeared to find some interest in the society of the young, the impecunious and the half-baked. We knew that he was a prolific fiction writer; indeed it was usual to pick up a magazine of a sort that did not contain one of his unsophisticated little love stories; and we wondered how on earth he did it—not in the writing but the marketing thereof. So simple, so sheerly artless was he both in matter and in manner as to give rise to the occasional heresy that there really must be something in them after all or no one would accept his stuff. But on the whole we classed it as pretty hopeless tripe, although we did not fail to congratulate Melwish whenever the occasion fitly offered. Our own efforts lay in the direction of originality and something better than the editors were used to: Lang's How to Fail in Literature had obviously reached us then, but Leonard Merrick's Cynthia certainly had not. Melwish took it all quietly and easily; he was essentially a listener and gave nothing in return—except a rescuing donation when the state of the society's funds urgently required it.
How it came about I have long ago forgotten, but one night I found myself walking with Melwish down the Strand. Possibly I had been speaking of his work; more probably of my own. In any case he would have been the listener.
At the corner of one of the southward streets he stopped; my way lay up Chancery Lane, so that we seemed to be on the point of parting.
"Where do you dig?" he suddenly asked, detaining me. "Are you in any hurry?"
"Up in Bloomsbury," I replied, with just the discreet touch of ambiguity. "No, it doesn't matter what time I get there. Why?"
"Do you care to see my place?" he asked. "You might have a drop of something to carry you along."
This unexpected offer was rather exciting in its way. Generous enough after his own fashion, Melwish did not incline towards private hospitality; even the quarter of London he homed in was a matter of occasional speculation. He alone among us possessed a club address.
"I should be delighted if it's not troubling you," I replied—we were always rather on our company manners with this seasoned adult. "I had no idea that you lived anywhere round here."
"I don't; it's only a workroom that I have...I suppose," he added thoughtfully, "you really wonder that my particular sort of sludge should require any particular place to turn it out in? I expect you youngsters guy it pretty well when I'm not there."
This made matters rather easier, as I could be virtuously indignant.
"I bet we jolly well wish we could do half as well," I exclaimed, possibly with a mental reservation that I spoke financially. "We only wonder that you should ever think it worth while to come among us."
We had reached Melwish's outer door. He turned in the act of opening it to face me as he spoke.
"I go," he said dryly, "to hear you fellows talk." A whole diatribe could not have expressed more.
The workroom proved to be a very comfortably-appointed study, reached through a little ante-room, furnished as a hall. Everything proclaimed the occupant's success in life. Melwish lit the gas-fire and pulled up an easy-chair for me. While he engaged himself with spirit-lamp and glasses I looked frankly about the room. An illustrated interview was among the things I meant to do, and I speculated whether my host's standing would carry it. At all events there would be no harm in laying a foundation.
"Do you find it necessary to sit on any particular chair or to adopt any especial position while you write?" I inquired, apropos of the room at large. These intriguing, details always bulked in an interview with an author in those days.
"My dear lad," he replied tolerantly, "I haven't the least doubt that I could write equally well if I stood on my head all the time."
"Then you have no pet superstition or favourite mascot that you rely on?" I persisted.
"No," he grunted, conveying the impression that he thought I was talking hectic nonsense; and then I saw him pause and think, and turning down the spirit-lamp for a moment he came across to me.
"Yes, I have, by Jupiter," he admitted slowly. "I was forgetting that. You see the inkstand there? Well, I have the strongest possible conviction that in order to keep my work what is termed 'up to magazine standard,' I must write from that.
"This is jolly interesting," I said—the interview promised to be fashioning. "May I look at it?" Melwish nodded and went back to the brew.
Without doubt it was worth inspecting—in a way. It was absolutely the ugliest inkpot that I had ever seen, and it was probably the most inconvenient. Its owner pointed out, later on, that in order to fill it one had to use a funnel, and that when filled it was difficult, except by way of a pen, to get the ink out again; but he was mistaken in this, for I got a considerable amount out on to my grey trousers quite easily. It was extremely top-heavy, very liable to catch passing objects, and would be unusually intricate in cleaning. All this was accounted for by the fact that it had been fashioned by a "craftsman."
So much for its qualities. In shape it was modelled as a turnip. It was, in fact, a silver turnip. A few straggling leaves sprouted from the crown and an attenuated root got into the way beneath. A hinged lid towards the top disclosed the ink-well and the whole thing stood on three incongruous feet. Before I had done with it I discovered an inscription across the front, and lifting it (hence the contretemps) I read the single line of inconspicuous script:
Remember the Man with the Hoe.
"Jolly fine thing," I remarked, when I had admired it sufficiently. "I don't wonder that you are fond of it."
"I'm not," he said. "The damned thing would be an eyesore in a pig-sty. All the same it has served its purpose. Yes, B., every ounce of my success I owe to that incredible abortion."
"Go on!" I exclaimed. The interview was positively creaming.
Melwish added the last touch to the concocting of the drinks and indicated mine—possibly one was slightly less potent than the other.
"I've used that metallurgic atrocity for nearly twenty years now, four days a week, six hours a day, and not a soul on earth knows why. But I'm going to tell you, B., because you talk like a—well, something in the way I did myself at about your age."
"Good," I contributed to encourage him; and not to overdo it I said no more.
"When I was about your age," he continued, "I was doing pretty much as you are, and with about the same result. Then going along the Edgeware Road late one starry night, with Swift walking on one side of me and Defoe upon the other, I suddenly got an inspiration for a masterpiece. I expect you know how they come—all at once clean into your head without any making up on your part."
"Why, yes," I admitted, in some surprise, "but I didn't know that—that anyone else—"
"Everyone," he retorted bluntly. "This idea involved a full- length book, such as would take me at least two years to write. I ruminated on it for the next few months and it grew spontaneously in the usual way. Then I began the writing, did the opening chapters, and stuck hopelessly.
"I saw at once what the matter was. Summer had come and I couldn't get on with the thing here in London. It needed space and solitude. I had a few pounds to spare; I packed up and went off into the country, intending to stay at some cottage for a couple of months and come back with the difficulties surmounted and the whole line in trim.
"I got my room easily enough and settled down there at once, but of course I could hardly expect to do anything the first night—the light was poor and the place so damn quiet that you had to listen to it. The next morning I set out to take the manuscript off into the fields and get it going there. It was a simple matter to find a field-path, but I had to go a considerable distance to get the exact spot I fancied. Then I discovered that it was too hot and brilliant in the sun and not quite pleasant out of it. There were more distractions of one sort and another than you would have credited; in the end I fell asleep, thinking out some detail of the plot, and when I woke it was about time to get back for dinner.
"On my way in, the path led through a turnip-field where a venerable labourer was hoeing. In the interests of local colour I stopped to pass a few words with this ancient and to observe his system. He walked between two rows of young plants and very dexterously, considering his archaic tool, he chopped them all down with the exception of a single turnip every foot or so. He used judgment too and would let the space be a little more or a little less in order to select a particularly vigorous growth if one offered, but I saw that at least twenty young hopes must wither for the single one that grew—a saddening thought, especially at our job, B. Then, just ahead of us, I noticed an exceptionally well-grown young plant, standing by itself. It was the finest of any about, and I saw with quite a personal satisfaction that it would come at the right interval...Without a pause Old Mortality chopped it down.
"'Why, man alive!' I exclaimed, 'you've sacrificed the most promising of the lot!'
"'Oh, aye," he replied—I won't attempt the barbarous dialect—'it was a likely enough young turnip, but don't you see, master, it was out of line with all the rest? Even it it didn't get cut off by hand sooner or later, the horse-hoe would be bound to finish it when once it came along.' And then, B., the hob-nailed philosopher uttered this profound truth: 'An ordinary plant where it's wanted has a sight more chance of coming to something than a giant where it isn't.'
"I walked on with my ideas suddenly brought out into the clear light of day, and perhaps for the first time in my life I really set before my sober judgment a definition of what I wanted to do and what were the pros and cons of ever doing it...After dinner I burned the manuscript of the masterpiece, as much as I had written, and with it all the notes and jottings I had made. Then I sat down to write a short story for the magazines.
"Of course I knew well enough what sort of stories the magazines wanted. Everyone knows and in a general way everyone can write them. The line of demarcation isn't whether you can or can't, but whether you do or don't. Outside my cottage window was an orchard, and I wrote a story about two lovers who met there for the last time. She thought that she ought to give him up for some insane reason or other, and he thought that she oughtn't. They talked all round it and when, finally, he saw how noble she was and they were parting irrevocably, she suddenly threw herself into his arms and said that she couldn't, and he saw how much nobler she was. There was a dog that looked on and expressed various sympathetic emotions, and so forth. There wasn't a word in it that a tram conductor couldn't have written, and from beginning to end it didn't contain a page whose removal would have made the slightest difference to the sense. It was soothing in the way that the sound of a distant circular saw, or watching an endless chain of dredging buckets at work, soothes. A reader falling asleep over the story (an extremely probable occurrence) would wake up without the' faintest notion of whether he had read all of it, some of it, or none of it. I didn't even trouble to find names for the two imbeciles: they were just 'the Man' and 'the Girl.'
"It took a single afternoon to write that four-thousand-word story—of course there was no need to read it over—and I addressed it at once to an editor whom I knew slightly. I had ample time before the mail went to stroll down to the village office and send it off. Afterwards I wrote a short, light article with the title, 'Why do Long-nosed Girls Marry Photographers?' It had to be written in the dark, but that made no difference.
"The next day I wrote the same story over again, giving the couple names this time, putting them on a romantic Cornish shore instead of in an orchard, and changing the dog into a sea-gull. I had no wish to repeat myself literally in any detail, but when you reflect that it is impossible to remember a story of that kind ten minutes after you have read it, you will see that it is unnecessary to take any especial pains to avoid some slight resemblance. As a matter of fact I have been writing that particular story at least once a month ever since.
"Three days later I heard from the editor in question. He congratulated me on having hit off their style so successfully at last. Would two guineas a thousand suit? And he hoped that I would let him see anything further in the same pleasant vein. The article was not so promptly dealt with where it went, but in due course I received notice of acceptance, subject to a trifling change of title, which would make it more attractive to the bulk of their readers. When the proof came along I noticed that it was headed, 'Why do Photographers Marry Long-nosed Girls?'"
"Well?" I prompted.
"That's all," he replied. "Except, of course,"—with a complacent look around the attractive room—"the et ceteras of life."
There were several things that I would have liked to know, especially exactly how much money he was making now, but Melwish seemed to think that he had told his story, and, after all, there was always a certain air of detachment about the man in his attitude towards us.
"Think it over, B.," he concluded, as I rose to go a little later. "You're only a young beggar yet.[1q]"
"Jolly decent of you to take the trouble," was my dutiful reply. "Still," I reminded him, "you did say that you liked to hear us young beggars talk."
"Yes," he admitted, dropping into that caustic tone of his; "but I doubt if you quite appreciate why."
Certainly I have wondered about that once or twice since.
He came down to the lower door to let me out. It had been raining in the meanwhile and a forlorn creature who was evidently sheltering for the time almost fell into our arms. He offered a box of matches in extenuation of his presence.
"No," said Melwish very sharply, "and remember what I told you about hanging round this doorway, Thompson. A wretched fellow," he explained, as the miserable being shambled off into the night; "impossible to help that sort. I put him in the way of a nice job delivering circulars once and he threw it up within a week. You'd hardly credit it, B., but that wastrel fancies his real forte is to write—verse, if you please, at that! Pretty pass we're coming to. Well, so long."
* * *
THERE is, you will (I hope) notice, a certain system in the arrangement of this book of stories. It is not—if an author may speak more than very casually of his own work without indelicacy—intended essentially as a collection of quite the best stories I might perhaps have chosen, nor is it, I am more than sure, a collection of anything like the worst that were available; it consists rather of a suitable example taken at convenient intervals over the whole time that I have been engaged in writing stories—a span of thirty years. In every case, therefore, the date at which the tale was written is attached—the place of writing being added merely, in the words of Mr. Finch McComas, "to round off the sentence." Each tale thus becomes a sort of milestone by which, should you happen to maintain so much interest, you can estimate your author's progress—backwards or forwards, as you may decide.
When the suggestion of this collection first arose there had already been published two volumes of what are now generally referred to as "Kai Lung" stories, and another pair of what might with more propriety be described as "Max Carrados" tales. There being no lack of other material available it seemed fitting that in this instance all stories of those two distinctive classes should be ruled out, and no doubt this would have been the plan had not, about that time, the Mystery arisen.
It is a little difficult, as the hand holds the pen, to appreciate a Mystery in relation to oneself. The nearest parallel that occurs is the case of the dentist (as described in Punch) who administered gas to himself preparatory to extracting one of his own teeth. Being intimately concerned, but quite unconscious of what is going on, I am therefore driven to contemporary record. So far as I have any evidence, Mr. Edward Shanks was the first to use the fatal word. Referring to The Wallet of Kai Lung, he would seem to have written: "Its name was therefore passed from mouth to mouth in a mysterious way, but few people had ever seen it or knew what it was like."
If this is indeed the fount and origin of the legend the historic reference may be proved in the Queen of December the 2nd, 1922. It sounds harmless enough, and in any case I take the opportunity of publicly forgiving Mr. Shanks whatever may result, but Dark Forces were evidently at work, for a few weeks later Mr. Grant Richards found it necessary (in the Times Literary Supplement) to declare: "Meanwhile I am asked all sorts of questions about the book and its author. Is there really such a person as Ernest Bramah? and so on."
The "so on" has a pleasantly speculative ring—to me, that is to say. At all events, whatever Mr. Richards had been asked, his diplomatic reference answered nothing, so that, later, he is induced to state without reserve: "Finally, I do assure his readers that such a person as Ernest Bramah does really and truly exist. I have seen and touched him." This should settle the matter, you would say? Not a bit of it. Turn to "N. G. R.-S." in the Westminster Gazette: "He assures us that there is such a person as Ernest Bramah. Well, there may be! I myself still believe..." (This break does not represent omitted matter, but "N. G. R.-S.'s" too-sinister-for-words private belief.) "Anyway, you can now buy The Wallet for seven-and-sixpence and form your own opinion of the reasons which keep the author of such a book so closely mysterious behind his unusual name."
And then, surely the most astonishing of all, there is Miss Rose Macaulay: Miss Macaulay the relentless precision, so flawlessly exact that she must by now hate the phrase "hard brilliance," author of Potterism (in whose dedication I have never ceased to cherish an ifinitesimal claim), retailing "They say" with the cheerful irresponsibility of a village gossip. "N. G. R.-S.", it will be seen, gilds the pill of innuendo with a compliment; Miss Macaulay administers a more salutary dose: "The crude, stilted, Conan Doyleish English of his detective stories certainly goes far to bear out the common theory that Mr. Bramah has a literary dual personality" (Nation and Athenaeum).
Finally (perhaps), to my hand as I write this Preface there comes a letter conveying the excogitation of an American publisher, representative of a firm which has already issued three books bearing my name. Casually, quite naturally, among other mundane business details, he drops the inspiring remark: "I have always had a feeling that you were a mythical person." So, in the language of a bygone age, that's that. After all, there is something not unattractive in the idea of being a mythical person...though from the heroic point of view one might have wished that it could have been "a mythological personage."...
Should the reader, still maintaining the intellectual curiosity which I have credited to him, here exclaim, "What is all this about and why?" I can only assure him that I have not the faintest notion. He and I are equally in the dark.
Apparently, there is no simple middle way, no sheltered, obvious path. Either I am to have no' existence, or I am to have decidedly too much: on the one hand banished into space as a mythical creation; on the other regarded askance' as the leader of a double (literary) life. But there is one retort still left whereby to confound the non-existers and the dualists alike—I can produce both a "Kai Lung" and a "Max Carrados" between one pair of covers, and here they are.
E. B.
London, 1924.
I. MING TSEUEN AND THE EMERGENCY
IT was the custom of Ming Tseuen to take his stand at an early hour each day in the open Market of Nang-kau, partly because he was industrious by nature and also since he had thereby occasionally found objects of inconspicuous value which others had carelessly left unprotected over-night. Enterprise such as this deserved to prosper, but so far, owing to some apathy on the part of the fostering deities, silver had only come to Ming Tseuen in dreams and gold in visions. Yet with frugality, and by acquiring the art of doing without whatever he was unable to procure, he had supported himself from the earliest time he could remember up to the age of four short of a score of years. In mind he was alert and not devoid of courage, the expression of his face mild and unconcerned, but in stature he lacked the appearance of his age, doubtless owing to the privations he had frequently endured.
Next to Ming Tseuen on the one side was the stall of Lieu, the dog-butcher, on the other that of a person who removed corroding teeth for the afflicted. This he did with his right hand while at the same time he beat upon a large iron gong with his left, so that others in a like plight who might be approaching should not be distressed by hearing anything of a not absolutely encouraging strain. About his neck he wore a lengthy string of massive teeth to indicate his vigour and tenacity, but to Ming he privately disclosed that these were the fangs of suitable domestic animals which he had obtained to enlarge himself in the eyes of the passer-by. Ming in return told him certain things about his own traffic which were not generally understood.
Across the Way a barber was accustomed to take his stand, his neighbours being a melon-seller to the east, and to the west a caster of nativities and lucky day diviner. Also near at hand a bamboo worker plied his useful trade, an incense vendor extolled his sacred wares, a money-changer besought men to enrich themselves at his expense, and a fan-maker sang a song about the approaching heat and oppression of the day. From time to time the abrupt explosion of a firework announced the completion of an important bargain, proclaimed a ceremony, or indicated some protective rite, while the occasional passage of a high official whose rank required a chariot wider than the Way it traversed, afforded an agreeable break in the routine of those who found themselves involved. At convenient angles beggars pointed out their unsightliness to' attract the benevolently inclined, story- tellers and minstrels spread their mats and raised their enticing chants, the respective merits of contending crickets engaged the interest of the speculative, and a number of ingenious contrivances offered chances that could not fail—so far as the external appearance went—to be profitable even to the inexperienced if they but persisted long enough. It will thus be seen that almost all the simpler requirements of an ordinary person could be satisfied about the spot.
Ming Tseuen's venture differed essentially from all these occupations. In Nang-kau, as elsewhere, there might be found a variety of persons—chiefly the aged and infirm—who were suddenly inspired by a definite craving to perform a reasonable number of meritorious actions before they Passed Beyond. The mode of benevolence most esteemed consisted in preserving life or in releasing the innocent out of captivity, down even to the humblest creatures of their kind; for all the Sages and religious essayists of the past have approved these deeds of virtue as assured of celestial recognition. As it would manifestly be unwise for the aged and infirm to engage upon so ambiguous a quest haphazard—even if it did not actually bring them into conflict with the established law—those who were of Ming Tseuen's way of commerce had sought to provide an easy and mutually beneficial system by which so humane an impulse should be capable of wide and innocuous expression. This took the form of snaring alive a diversity of birds and lesser beings of the wild and offering them for sale, with a persuasive placard, attractively embellished with wise and appropriate sayings from the lips of the Philosophers, inviting those who were at all doubtful of their record in the Above World to acquire merit, while there was still time, by freeing a victim from its bondage; and so convincing were the arguments employed and so moderate the outlay involved when compared with the ultimate benefits to be received, that few who were feeling in any way unwell at the time were able to resist the allurement.
Owing to the poverty of his circumstances, Ming Tseuen was only able to furnish his stall with a few small birds of the less expensive sorts, but, to balance this deficiency, he could always traffic at a certain profit, for so devoted to his cause were the little creatures he displayed, as a result of his zealous attention to their natural wants, that when released they invariably returned after a judicious interval and took up their accustomed stations within the cage again. In such a manner the mornings became evenings and the days passed into moons, but though Ming sustained existence he could add little or nothing to his store.
