Night of the Jabberwock

by Fredric Brown

  It’s not, I might mention, the best way to make money. It had made me plenty of friends and subscribers, but a newspaper doesn’t make money from its subscribers. It makes money from advertisers and most of the men in town big enough to be advertisers had fingers in politics and no matter which party I slammed I was likely to lose another advertising account.

  I’m afraid that policy didn’t help my news coverage, either. The best source of news is the sheriff’s department and, at the moment, Sheriff Rance Kates was just about my worst enemy. Kates is honest, but he is also stupid, rude and full of race prejudice; and race prejudice, although it’s not a burning issue in Carmel City, is one of my pet peeves. I hadn’t pulled any punches in my editorials about Kates, either before or after his election. He got into office only because his opponent—who wasn’t any intellectual heavyweight either—had got into a tavern brawl in Neilsville a week before election and was arrested there and charged with assault and battery. The Clarion had reported that, too, so the Clarion was probably responsible for Rance Kates’ being elected sheriff. But Rance remembered only the things I’d said about him, and barely spoke to me on the street. Which, I might add, didn’t concern me the slightest bit personally, but it forced me to get all of my police news, such as it is, the hard way.

  Past the supermarket and Beal Brothers and past Deak’s Music Store—where I’d once bought a violin but had forgotten to get a set of instructions with it—and the corner and across the street.

  The walk home.

  Maybe I weaved just a little, for at just that stage I’m never quite as sober as I am later on. But my mind—ah, it was in that delightful state of being crystal clear in the centre and fuzzy around the edges, the state that every moderate drinker knows but can’t explain or define, the state that makes even a Carmel City seem delightful and such things as its squalid politics amusing.

  Past the corner drugstore—Pop Hinkle’s place—where I used to drink sodas when I was a kid, before I went away to college and made the big mistake of studying journalism. Past Gorham’s Feed Store, where I’d worked vacations while I was in high school. Past the Bijou Theatre. Past Hank Greeber’s Undertaking Parlours, through which both of my parents had passed, fifteen and twenty years ago.

  Around the corner at the courthouse, where a light was still on in Sheriff Kates’ office—and I felt so cheerful that, for a thousand dollars or so, I’d have stopped in to talk to him. But no one was around to offer me a thousand dollars.

  Out of the store district now, past the house in which Elsie Minton had lived—and in which she had died while we were engaged, twenty-five years ago.

  Past the house Elmer Conklin had lived in when I’d bought the Clarion from him. Past the church where I’d been sent to Sunday School when I was a kid, and where I’d once won a prize for memorizing verses of the Bible.

  Past my past, and walking, slightly weaving, toward the house in which I’d been conceived and born.

  No, I hadn’t lived there fifty-three years. My parents had sold it and had moved to a bigger house when I was nine and when my sister—now married and living in Florida—had been born. I’d bought it back twelve years ago when it happened to be vacant and on the market at a good price. It’s only a three-room cottage, not too big for a man to live in alone, if he likes to live alone, and I do.

  Oh, I like people too. I like someone to drop in for conversation or chess or a drink or all three. I like to spend an hour or two in Smiley’s, or any other tavern, a few times a week. I like an occasional poker game.

  But I’ll settle, on any given evening, for my books. Two walls of my living-room are lined with them and they overflow into bookcases in my bedroom and I even have a shelf of them in the bathroom. What do I mean, even? I think a bathroom without a bookshelf is as incomplete as would be one without a toilet.

  And they’re good books, too. No, I wouldn’t be lonely tonight, even if Al Grainger didn’t come around for that game of chess. How could I be lonesome with a bottle in my pocket and good company waiting for me? Why, reading a book is almost as good as listening to the man who wrote it talking to you. Better in one way, because you don’t have to be polite to him. You can shut him up any moment you feel so inclined and pick someone else instead. And you can take off your shoes and put your feet on the table. You can drink and read until you forget everything but what you’re reading; you can forget who you are and the fact that there’s a newspaper that hangs around your neck like a millstone, all day and every day, until you get home to sanctuary and forgetfulness.

  The walk home.

  And so to the corner of Campbell Street and my turning.

  A June evening, but cool, and the night air had almost completely sobered me in the nine blocks I’d walked from Smiley’s.

  My turning, and I saw that the light was on in the front room of my house. I started walking a little faster, mildly puzzled. I knew I hadn’t left it on when I’d left for the office that morning. And if I had left it on, Mrs. Carr, the cleaning woman who comes in for about two hours every afternoon to keep my place in order, would have turned it off.

  Maybe, I thought, Al Grainger had finished whatever he was doing and had come early and had—but no, Al wouldn’t have come without his car and there wasn’t any car parked in front.

  It might have been a mystery, but it wasn’t.

  Mrs. Carr was there, putting on her hat in front of the panel mirror in the closet door as I went in.

  She said, “I’m just leaving, Mr. Stoeger. I wasn’t able to get here this afternoon, so I came to clean up this evening instead; I just finished.”

  “Fine,” I said. “By the way, there’s a blizzard out.”

  “A—what?”

  “Blizzard. Snowstorm.” I held up the wrapped bottle. “So maybe you’d better have a little nip with me before you start home, don’t you think?”

  She laughed. “Thanks, Mr. Stoeger. I will. I’ve had a pretty rough day, and it sounds like a good idea. I’ll get glasses for us.”

  I put my hat in the closet and followed her out into the kitchen.

  “A rough day?” I asked her. “I hope nothing went wrong.”

  “Well—nothing too serious. My husband—he works, you know, out at Bonney’s fireworks factory—got burned in a little accident they had out there this afternoon, and they brought him home. It’s nothing serious, a second-degree burn the doctor said, but it was pretty painful and I thought I’d better stay with him until after supper, and then he finally got to sleep so I ran over here and I’m afraid I straightened up your place pretty fast and didn’t do a very good job.”

  “Looks spotless to me,” I said. I’d been opening the bottle while she’d been getting glasses for us. “I hope he’ll be all right, Mrs Carr. But if you want to skip coming here for a while——”

  “Oh, no, I can still come. He’ll be home only a few days, and it was just that today they brought him home at two o’clock, just when I was getting ready to come here and—That’s plenty, thanks.”

  We touched glasses and I downed mine while she drank about half of hers. She said, “Oh, there was a phone call for you, about an hour ago. A little while after I got here.”

  “Find out who it was?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me, just said it wasn’t important.”

  I shook my head sadly. “That, Mrs. Carr, is one of the major fallacies of the human mind. The idea, I mean, that things can be arbitrarily divided into the important and the unimportant. How can anyone decide whether a given fact is important or not unless one knows everything about it—and no one knows everything about anything.”

  She smiled, but a bit vaguely, and I decided to bring it down to earth, I said. “What would you say is important, Mrs. Carr?”

  She put her head on one side and considered it seriously. “Well, work is important, isn’t it?”

  “It is not,” I told her. “I’m afraid you score zero. Work is only a means to an end. We work in order to enable ourselves to
do the important things, which are the things we want to do. Doing what we want to do—that’s what’s important, if anything is.”

  “That sounds like a funny way of putting it, but maybe you’re right. Well, anyway, this man who called said he’d either call again or come around. I told him you probably wouldn’t be home until eight or nine o’clock.”

  She finished her drink and declined an encore. I walked to the front door with her, saying that I’d have been glad to drive her home but that my car had two flat tyres. I’d discovered them that morning when I’d started to drive to work. One I might have stopped to fix, but two discouraged me; I decided to leave the car in the garage until Saturday afternoon, when I’d have lots of time. And then, too, I know that I should get the exercise of walking to and from work every day, but as long as my car is in running condition, I don’t. For Mrs. Carr’s sake, though, I wished now that I’d fixed the tyres.

  She said, “It’s only a few blocks, Mr. Stoeger. I wouldn’t think of letting you, even if your car was working. Good night.”

  “Oh, just a minute, Mrs. Carr. What department at Bonney’s does your husband work in?”

  “The Roman candle department.”

  It made me forget, for the moment, what I’d been leading up to. I said, “The Roman candle department! That’s a wonderful phrase; I love it. If I sell the paper, darned if I don’t look up Bonney the very next day. I’d love to work in the Roman candle department. Your husband is a lucky man.”

  “You’re joking, Mr. Stoeger. But are you really thinking of selling the paper?”

  “Well—thinking of it.” And that reminded me. “I didn’t get any story on the accident at Bonney’s, didn’t even hear about it. And I’m badly in need of a story for the front page. Do you know the details of what happened? Anyone else hurt?”

  She’d been part way across the front porch, but she turned and came back nearer the door. She said, “Oh, please don’t put it in the paper. It wasn’t anything important; my husband was the only one hurt and it was his own fault, he said. And Mr. Bonney wouldn’t like it being in the paper; he has enough trouble now getting as many people as he needs for the rush season before the Fourth, and so many people are afraid to work around powder and explosives anyway. George will probably be fired if it gets written up in the paper and he needs the work.”

  I sighed; it had been an idea while it lasted. I assured her that I wouldn’t print anything about it. And if George Carr had been the only one hurt and I didn’t have any details, it wouldn’t have made over a one-inch item anyway.

  I would have loved, though, to get that beautiful phrase, “the Roman candle department,” into print.

  I went back inside and closed the door. I made myself comfortable by taking off my suit coat and loosening my tie, and then I got the whisky bottle and my glass and put them on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

  I didn’t take the tie off yet, nor my shoes; it’s nicer to do those things one at a time as you gradually get more and more comfortable.

  I picked out a few books and put them within easy reach, poured myself a drink, sat down, and opened one of the books.

  The doorbell rang.

  Al Grainger had come early, I thought. I went to the door and opened it. There was a man standing there, just lifting his hand to ring again. But it wasn’t Al; it was a man I’d never seen before.

  CHAPTER THREE

  How cheerfully he seems to grin

  How neatly spreads his claws,

  And welcomes little fishes in

  With gently smiling jaws!

  HE was short, about my own height, perhaps, but seeming even shorter because of his greater girth. The first thing you noticed about his face was his nose; it was long, thin, pointed, grotesquely at variance with his pudgy body. The light coming past me through the doorway reflected glowing points in his eyes, giving them a catlike gleam. Yet there was nothing sinister about him. A short pudgy man can never manage to seem sinister, no matter how the light strikes his eyes.

  “You are Doctor Stoeger?” he asked.

  “Doc Stoeger,” I corrected him. “But not a doctor of medicine. If you’re looking for a medical doctor, one lives four doors west of here.”

  He smiled, a nice smile. “I am aware that you are not a medico, Doctor, Ph.D., Burgoyne College—nineteen twenty-two, I believe. Author of Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass and Red Queen and White Queen.

  It startled me. Not so much that he knew my college and the year of my magna cum laude, but the rest of it was amazing. Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass was a monograph of a dozen pages; it had been printed eighteen years ago and only a hundred copies had been run off. If one still existed anywhere outside of my own library, I was greatly surprised. And Red Queen and White Queen was a magazine article that had appeared at least twelve years ago in a magazine that had been obscure then and had long since been discontinued and forgotten.

  “Yes,” I said. “But how you know of them, I can’t imagine, Mr.——”

  “Smith,” he said gravely. Then he chuckled. “And the first name is Yehudi.”

  “No!” I said.

  “Yes. You see, Doctor Stoeger, I was named forty years ago, when the name Yehudi, although uncommon, had not yet acquired the comic connotation which it has today. My parents did not guess that the name would become a joke—and that it would be particularly ridiculous when combined with Smith. Had they guessed the difficulty I now have in convincing people that I’m not kidding them when I tell them my name——” He laughed ruefully.

  “I always carry cards.”

  He handed me one. It read:

  Yehudi Smith

  There was no address, no other information. Just the same, I wanted to keep that card, so I stuck it in my pocket instead of handing it back.

  He said, “People are named Yehudi, you know. There’s Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist. And there’s——”

  “Stop, please,” I interrupted. “You’re making it plausible. I liked it better the other way.”

  He smiled. “Then I haven’t misjudged you, Doctor. Have you ever heard of the Vorpal Blades?”

  “Plural? No. Of course, in Jabberwocky:

  One, two! One, two! and through and through

  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

  But—Good God! Why are we talking about vorpal blades through a doorway? Come on in, I’ve got a bottle, and I hope and presume that it would be ridiculous to ask a man who talks about vorpal blades whether or not he drinks.”

  I stepped back and he came in. “Sit anywhere,” I told him. “I’ll get another glass. Want either a mix or a chaser?”

  He shook his head, and I went out into the kitchen and got another glass. I came in, filled it and handed it to him. He’d already made himself comfortable in the overstuffed chair.

  I sat back on the sofa and lifted my glass toward him. I said, “No doubt about a toast for this one. To Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known, when in Wonderland, as Lewis Carroll.”

  He said, quietly, “Are you sure, Doctor?”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Of your phraseology in that toast. I’d word it: To Lewis Carroll, who masqueraded under the alleged identity of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the gentle don of Oxford.”

  I felt vaguely disappointed. Was this going to be another, and even more ridiculous, Bacon-was-Shakespeare deal? Historically, there couldn’t be any possible doubt that the Reverend Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll, had created Alice in Wonderland and its sequel.

  But the main point, for the moment, was to get the drink drunk.

  So I said solemnly, “To avoid all difficulties, factual or semantic, Mr. Smith, let’s drink to the author of the Alice books.”

  He inclined his head with solemnity equal to my own, then tilted it back and downed his drink. I was a little late in downing mine because of my surprise at, and admiration for, his manner of drinking. I’d never seen anything quite like it. The glass had stopped, qu
ite suddenly, a good three inches from his mouth. And the whisky had kept on going and not a drop of it had been lost. I’ve seen people toss down a shot before, but never with such casual precision and from so great a distance.

  I drank my own in a more prosaic manner, but I resolved to try his system sometime—in private and with a towel or handkerchief ready at hand.

  I refilled our glasses and then said, “And now what? Do we argue the identity of Lewis Carroll?”

  “Let’s start back of that,” he said. “In fact, let’s put it aside until I can offer you definite proof of what we believe—rather, of what we are certain.”

  “We?”

  “The Vorpal Blades. An organization. A very small organization, I should add.”

  “Of admirers of Lewis Carroll?”

  He leaned forward. “Yes, of course. Any man who is both literate and imaginative is an admirer of Lewis Carroll. But—much more than that. We have a secret. A quite esoteric one.”

  “Concerning the identity of Lewis Carroll? You mean that you believe—the way some people believe, or used to believe, that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon—that someone other than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote the Alice books?”

  I hoped he’d say no.

  He said, “No. We believe that Dodgson himself—How much do you know of him, Doctor?”

  “He was born in eighteen thirty-two,” I said, “and died just before the turn of the century—in either ninety-eight or nine. He was an Oxford don, a mathematician. He wrote several treatises on mathematics. He liked—and created—acrostics and other puzzles and problems. He never married but he was very fond of children, and his best writing was done for them. At least he thought he was writing only for children; actually, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, while having plenty of appeal for children, are adult literature, and great literature. Shall I go on?”

  “By all means.”

  “He was also capable of—and perpetrated—some almost incredibly bad writing. There ought to be a law against the printing of volumes of The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. He should be remembered for the great things he wrote, and the bad ones interred with his bones. Although I’ll admit that even the bad things have occasional touches of brilliance. There are moments in Sylvie and Bruno that are almost worth reading through the thousands of dull words to reach. And there are occasional good lines or stanzas in even the worst poems. Take the first three lines of The Palace of Humbug: