Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

by Roald Dahl

  ‘Come here,’ Mr Boggis said. ‘Come over here and I’ll show you.’ He stood beside the commode and waited for them to gather round. ‘Now, anyone got a knife?’

  Claud produced a horn-handled pocket knife, and Mr Boggis took it and opened the smallest blade. Then, working with apparent casualness but actually with extreme care, he began chipping off the white paint from a small area on the top of the commode. The paint flaked away cleanly from the old hard varnish underneath, and when he had cleared away about three square inches, he stepped back and said, ‘Now, take a look at that!’

  It was beautiful – a warm little patch of mahogany, glowing like a topaz, rich and dark with the true colour of its two hundred years.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Rummins asked.

  ‘It’s processed! Anyone can see that!’

  ‘How can you see it, mister? You tell us.’

  ‘Well, I must say that’s a trifle difficult to explain. It’s chiefly a matter of experience. My experience tells me that without the slightest doubt this wood has been processed with lime. That’s what they use for mahogany, to give it that dark aged colour. For oak, they use potash salts, and for walnut it’s nitric acid, but for mahogany it’s always lime.’

  The three men moved a little closer to peer at the wood. There was a slight stirring of interest among them now. It was always intriguing to hear about some new form of crookery or deception.

  ‘Look closely at the grain. You see that touch of orange in among the dark red-brown. That’s the sign of lime.’

  They leaned forward, their noses close to the wood, first Rummins, then Claud, then Bert.

  ‘And then there’s the patina,’ Mr Boggins continued.

  ‘The what?’

  He explained to them the meaning of this word as applied to furniture.

  ‘My dear friends, you’ve no idea the trouble these rascals will go to to imitate the hard beautiful bronze-like appearance of genuine patina. It’s terrible, really terrible, and it makes me quite sick to speak of it!’ He was spitting each word sharply off the tip of the tongue and making a sour mouth to show his extreme distaste. The men waited, hoping for more secrets.

  ‘The time and trouble that some mortals will go to in order to deceive the innocent!’ Mr Boggis cried. ‘It’s perfectly disgusting! D’you know what they did here, my friends? I can recognise it clearly. I can almost see them doing it, the long, complicated ritual of rubbing the wood with linseed oil, coating it over with French polish that has been cunningly coloured, brushing it down with pumice-stone and oil, beeswaxing it with a wax that contains dirt and dust, and finally giving it the heat treatment to crack the polish so that it looks like two-hundred-year-old varnish! It really upsets me to contemplate such knavery!’

  The three men continued to gaze at the little patch of dark wood.

  ‘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 judgment. 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 recognise 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 that 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 into 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 toward the door.

  ‘Mr 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 hea
d 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 forefinger 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 secondhand 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 toward 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. All the buttercups in the field were suddenly turning into golden sovereigns, glistening in the sunlight. The ground was littered with them, and he swung off the track on to the grass so that he could walk among them and tread on them and hear the little metallic tinkle they made as he kicked them around with his toes. He was finding it difficult to stop himself from breaking into a run. But clergymen never run; they walk slowly. Walk slowly, Boggis. Keep calm, Boggis. There’s no hurry now. The commode is yours! Yours for twenty pounds, and it’s worth fifteen or twenty thousand! The Boggis Commode! In ten minutes it’ll be loaded into your car – it’ll go in easily – and you’ll be driving back to London and singing all the way! Mr Boggis driving the Boggis Commode home in the Boggis car. Historic occasion. What wouldn’t a newspaperman give to get a picture of that! Should he arrange it? Perhaps he should. Wait and see. Oh, glorious day! Oh, lovely sunny summer day! Oh, glory be!

  Back in the farmhouse, Rummins was saying, ‘Fancy that old bastard giving twenty pound for a load of junk like this.’

  ‘You did very nicely, Mr Rummins,’ Claud told him. ‘You think he’ll pay you?’

  ‘We don’t put it in the car till he do.’

  ‘And what if it won’t go in the car?’ Claud asked. ‘You know what I think, Mr Rummins? You want my honest opinion? I think the bloody thing’s too big to go in the car. And then what happens? Then he’s going to say to hell with it and just drive off without it and you’ll never see him again. Nor the money either. He didn’t seem all that keen on having it, you know.’

  Rummins paused to consider this new and rather alarming prospect.

  ‘How can a thing like that possibly go in a car?’ Claud went on relentlessly. ‘A parson never has a big car anyway. You ever seen a parson with a big car, Mr Rummins?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘Exactly! And now listen to me. I’ve got an idea. He told us, didn’t he, that it was only the legs he was wanting. Right? So all we’ve got to do is to cut ’em off quick right here on the spot before he comes back, then it’ll be sure to go in the car. All we’re doing is saving him the trouble of cutting them off himself when he gets home. How about it, Mr Rummins?’ Claud’s flat bovine face glimered with a mawkish pride.

  ‘It’s not such a bad idea at that,’ Rummins said, looking at the commode. ‘In fact it’s a bloody good idea. Come on then, we’ll have to hurry. You and Bert carry it out into the yard. I’ll get the saw. Take the drawers out first.’

  Within a couple of minutes, Claud and Bert had carried the commode outside and had laid it upside down in the yard amidst the chicken droppings and cow dung and mud. In the distance, halfway across the field, they could see a small black figure striding along the path toward the road. They paused to watch. There was something rather comical about the way in which this figure was conducting itself, Every now and again it would break into a trot, then it did a kind of hop skip and jump, and once it seemed as though the sound of a cheerful song came rippling faintly to them from across the meadow.

  ‘I reckon he’s balmy,’ Claud said, and Bert grinned darkly, rolling his misty eye slowly round in its socket.

  Rummins came waddling over from the shed, squat and froglike, carrying a long saw. Claud took the saw away from him and went to work.

  ‘Cut ’em close,’ Rummins said. ‘Don’t forget he’s going to use ’em on another table.’

  The mahogany was hard and very dry, and as Claud worked, a fine red dust sprayed out from the edge of the saw and fell softly to the ground. One by one, the legs came off, and when they were all severed, Bert stooped down and arranged them carefully in a row.

  Claud stepped back to survey the results of his labour. There was a longish pause.

  ‘Just let me ask you one question, Mr Rummins,’ he said slowly. ‘Even now, could you put that enormous thing into the back of a car?’

  ‘Not unless it was a van.’

  ‘Correct!’ Claud cried. ‘And parsons don’t have vans, you know. All they’ve got usually is piddling little Morris Eights or Austin Sevens.’

  ‘The legs is all he wants,’ Rummins said. ‘If the rest of it won’t go in, then he can leave it. He can’t complain. He’s got the legs.’

  ‘Now you know better’n that, Mr Rummins,’ Claud said patiently. ‘You know damn well he’s going to start knocking the price if he don’t get every single bit of this into the car. A parson’s just as cunning as the rest of ’em when it comes to money, don’t you make any mistake about that. Especially this old boy. So why don’t we give him his firewood now and be done with it. Where d’you keep the axe?’

  ‘I reckon that’s fair enough,’ Rummins said. ‘Bert, go fetch the axe.’

  Bert went into the shed and fetched a tall woodcutter’s axe and gave it to Claud. Claud spat on the palms of his hands and rubbed them together. Then, with a long-armed high-swinging action, he began fiercely attacking the legless carcass of the commode.

  It was hard work, and it took several minutes before he had the whole thing more or less smashed into pieces.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, straightening up, wiping his brow. ‘Tha
t was a bloody good carpenter put this job together and I don’t care what the parson says.’

  ‘We’re just in time!’ Rummins called out. ‘Here he comes!’

  The Ratcatcher

  In the afternoon the ratcatcher came to the filling-station. He came sidling up the driveway with a stealthy, soft-treading gait, making no noise at all with his feet on the gravel. He had an army knapsack slung over one shoulder and he was wearing an old-fashioned black jacket with large pockets. His brown corduroy trousers were tied around the knees with pieces of white string.

  ‘Yes?’ Claud asked, knowing very well who he was.

  ‘Rodent operative.’ His small dark eyes moved swiftly over the premises.

  ‘The ratcatcher?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  The man was lean and brown with a sharp face and two long sulphur-coloured teeth that protruded from the upper jaw, overlapping the lower lip, pressing it inward. The ears were thin and pointed and set far back on the head, near the nape of the neck. The eyes were almost black but when they looked at you there was a flash of yellow somewhere inside them.

  ‘You’ve come very quick.’

  ‘Special orders from the Health Officer.’

  ‘And now you’re going to catch all the rats?’

  ‘Yep.’

  The kind of dark furtive eyes he had were those of an animal that lives its life peering out cautiously and forever from a hole in the ground.

  ‘How are you going to catch ’em?’

  ‘Ah-h-h,’ the ratman said darkly. ‘That’s all accordin’ to where they is.’

  ‘Trap ’em, I suppose.’

  ‘Trap ’em!’ he cried, disgusted. ‘You won’t catch many rats that way! Rats isn’t rabbits you know.’

  He held his face up high, sniffing the air with a nose that twitched perceptibly from side to side.

  ‘No,’ he said, scornfully. ‘Trappin’s no way to catch a rat. Rats is clever, let me tell you that. If you want to catch ’em, you got to know ’em. You got to know rats on this job.’