The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Feel it!’ Mr Boggis ordered. ‘Put your fingers on it! There, how does it feel, warm or cold?’

  ‘Feels cold,’ Rummins said.

  ‘Exactly, my friend! It happens to be a fact that faked patina is always cold to the touch. Real patina has a curiously warm feel to it.’

  ‘This feels normal,’ Rummins said, ready to argue.

  ‘No, sir, it’s cold. But of course it takes an experienced and sensitive finger-tip to pass a positive judgement. You couldn’t really be expected to judge this any more than I could be expected to judge the quality of your barley. Everything in life, my dear sir, is experience.’

  The men were staring at this queer moon-faced clergyman with the bulging eyes, not quite so suspiciously now because he did seem to know a bit about his subject. But they were still a long way from trusting him.

  Mr Boggis bent down and pointed to one of the metal drawer-handles on the commode. ‘This is another place where the fakers go to work,’ he said. ‘Old brass normally has a colour and character all of its own. Did you know that?’

  They stared at him, hoping for still more secrets.

  ‘But the trouble is that they’ve become exceedingly skilled at matching it. In fact it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between “genuine old” and “faked old”. I don’t mind admitting that it has me guessing. So there’s not really any point in our scraping the paint off these handles. We wouldn’t be any the wiser.’

  ‘How can you possibly make new brass look like old?’ Claud said. ‘Brass doesn’t rust, you know.’

  ‘You are quite right, my friend. But these scoundrels have their own secret methods.’

  ‘Such as what?’ Claud asked. Any information of this nature was valuable, in his opinion. One never knew when it might come in handy.

  ‘All they have to do,’ Mr Boggis said, ‘is to place these handles overnight in a box of mahogany shavings saturated in sal ammoniac. The sal ammoniac turns the metal green, but if you rub off the green, you will find underneath it a fine soft silvery-warm lustre, a lustre identical to that which comes with very old brass. Oh, it is so bestial, the things they do! With iron they have another trick.’

  ‘What do they do with iron?’ Claud asked, fascinated.

  ‘Iron’s easy,’ Mr Boggis said. ‘Iron locks and plates and hinges are simply buried in common salt and they come out all rusted and pitted in no time.’

  ‘All right,’ Rummins said. ‘So you admit you can’t tell about the handles. For all you know, they may be hundreds and hundreds of years old. Correct?’

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Boggis whispered, fixing Rummins with two big bulging brown eyes. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Watch this.’

  From his jacket pocket, he took out a small screwdriver. At the same time, although none of them saw him do it, he also took out a little brass screw which he kept well hidden in the palm of his hand. Then he selected one of the screws in the commode – there were four to each handle – and began carefully scraping all traces of white paint from its head. When he had done this, he started slowly to unscrew it.

  ‘If this is a genuine old brass screw from the eighteenth century,’ he was saying, ‘the spiral will be slightly uneven and you’ll be able to see quite easily that it has been hand-cut with a file. But if this brasswork is faked from more recent times, Victorian or later, then obviously the screw will be of the same period. It will be a mass-produced, machine-made article. Anyone can recognize a machine-made screw. Well, we shall see.’

  It was not difficult, as he put his hands over the old screw and drew it out, for Mr Boggis to substitute the new one hidden in his palm. This was another little trick of his, and through the years it had proved a most rewarding one. The pockets of his clergyman’s jacket were always stocked with a quantity of cheap brass screws of various sizes.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, handing the modern screw to Rummins. ‘Take a look at that. Notice the exact evenness of the spiral? See it? Of course you do. It’s just a cheap common little screw you yourself could buy today in any ironmonger’s in the country.’

  The screw was handed round from the one to the other, each examining it carefully. Even Rummins was impressed now.

  Mr Boggis put the screwdriver back in his pocket together with the fine hand-cut screw that he’d taken from the commode, and then he turned and walked slowly past the three men towards the door.

  ‘My dear friends,’ he said, pausing at the entrance to the kitchen, ‘it was so good of you to let me peep inside your little home – so kind. I do hope I haven’t been a terrible old bore.’

  Rummins glanced up from examining the screw. ‘You didn’t tell us what you were going to offer,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Boggis said. ‘That’s quite right. I didn’t, did I? Well, to tell you the honest truth, I think it’s all a bit too much trouble. I think I’ll leave it.’

  ‘How much would you give?’

  ‘You mean that you really wish to part with it?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wished to part with it. I asked you how much.’

  Mr Boggis looked across at the commode, and he laid his head first to one side, then to the other, and he frowned, and pushed out his lips, and shrugged his shoulders, and gave a little scornful wave of the hand as though to say the thing was hardly worth thinking about really, was it?

  ‘Shall we say … ten pounds. I think that would be fair.’

  ‘Ten pounds!’ Rummins cried. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Parson, please!’

  ‘It’s worth more’n that for firewood!’ Claud said, disgusted.

  ‘Look here at the bill!’ Rummins went on, stabbing that precious document so fiercely with his dirty fore-finger that Mr Boggis became alarmed. ‘It tells you exactly what it cost! Eighty-seven pounds! And that’s when it was new. Now it’s antique it’s worth double!’

  ‘If you’ll pardon me, no, sir, it’s not. It’s a second-hand reproduction. But I’ll tell you what, my friend – I’m being rather reckless, I can’t help it – I’ll go up as high as fifteen pounds. How’s that?’

  ‘Make it fifty,’ Rummins said.

  A delicious little quiver like needles ran all the way down the back of Mr Boggis’s legs and then under the soles of his feet. He had it now. It was his. No question about that. But the habit of buying cheap, as cheap as it was humanly possible to buy, acquired by years of necessity and practice, was too strong in him now to permit him to give in so easily.

  ‘My dear man,’ he whispered softly, ‘I only want the legs. Possibly I could find some use for the drawers later on, but the rest of it, the carcass itself, as your friend so rightly said, it’s firewood, that’s all.’

  ‘Make it thirty-five,’ Rummins said.

  ‘I couldn’t, sir, I couldn’t ! It’s not worth it. And I simply mustn’t allow myself to haggle like this about a price. It’s all wrong. I’ll make you one final offer, and then I must go. Twenty pounds.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ Rummins snapped. ‘It’s yours.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mr Boggis said, clasping his hands. ‘There I go again. I should never have started this in the first place.’

  ‘You can’t back out now, Parson. A deal’s a deal.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’

  ‘How’re you going to take it?’

  ‘Well, let me see. Perhaps if I were to drive my car up into the yard, you gentlemen would be kind enough to help me load it?’

  ‘In a car? This thing’ll never go in a car! You’ll need a truck for this!’

  ‘I don’t think so. Anyway, we’ll see. My car’s on the road. I’ll be back in a jiffy. We’ll manage it somehow, I’m sure.’

  Mr Boggis walked out into the yard and through the gate and then down the long track that led across the field towards the road. He found himself giggling quite uncontrollably, and there was a feeling inside him as though hundreds and hundreds of tiny bubbles were rising up from his stomach and bursting merrily in the top of his head, like sparkling-water. A