Printer's Error (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  He saw Carey at once, walked up to him, and took him by the arm.

  “Good man,” he said. “Wait a bit and have a drink with me. We can go back together in a car I’ve borrowed. Will you?”

  “Of course,” sad Carey. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, nothing. Double brandy, please. What’s yours? More beer? Come over here with it, will you?”

  They sat down at a small table away from the men at the counter.

  “I’ve been to see Saxant. He lives here,” Bassin explained. “There was some question as to whether they would still print the book—issue it, rather. All the printing and most of the binding is done. You see, it’s awkward, in the absence of both Carn and his wife. They appealed to Carn’s brother, but he said they’d better see us. There was no proof, you see, that Carn was dead or couldn’t pay, and the order for the hundred copies still stood. What’s more, they had been given the names and addresses of all the people Carn wanted a copy sent to. All the copies were to go out direct from the press and not through Carn. He wasn’t going to sign them, or anything, first.

  “Well, my father referred Saxant to me. Said I was on the spot, more or less, gave him my address at the ‘Lion,’ and said I would be furnished with all necessary particulars, as, of course, I am.

  “It appears—don’t tell anyone this, because, professionally speaking, I ought not to spill it at all—that Carn was so pleased with himself over the beastly book—”

  “I agree,” said Carey.

  “Eh?”

  “A beastly book.”

  “Oh, yes, I thought so, too. And if Carn knew any Jews I should think—”

  “I thought that, too, except that anti-Jewish literature is published by the ream in Germany, so that there wouldn’t seem much point in doing in a chap who, in any case, was proposing to circulate only one hundred copies. Still, if some of the proposed recipients were Jews—”

  “Ah, but they aren’t, you know. Not a Finkelbaum among the whole lot of ’em. I’ve seen Saxant’s list.”

  “Lots of Jews change their names.”

  “Yes, but these are people Saxant knows. He’s a publisher as well as a printer, and he knows everybody. No, I can’t prove it to you, without his list, but we can accept it that the people to get the copies don’t number a single Jew among the lot. Besides, nobody’s seen the book, generally speaking. Nobody knows what it’s like except us and the printers themselves—oh, and, of course, the typist, unless Carn did the typing himself.”

  “By the way, the junior partner. Is he a Jew, by any chance?”

  “Senss? No, he’s a German all right—a Prussian, actually—but dead against the present regime. Had to hop it, in fact. But there’s not a trace of Jew in him. He’s a Social Democrat. That’s what. I bet he’s under pretty close supervision here, too, if the truth were known. There are Nazi agents everywhere. No, Saxant and Senss had only one objection to the book. They didn’t think it worth their while, even at the very stiff price they charged, to print and bind a miserable hundred copies. Senss, in fact, put it to Saxant that, if the author didn’t turn up again soon, or give some indication of his whereabouts, they should hold up sending out the hundred copies, print a hundred thousand instead, at half a crown or so, and make a profit on the thing. It would be bound, Senss thinks, to have a run. After all, it’s fairly sensational, and people will always buy offal.”

  “But would the censor pass it?”

  “Actually there’s no censorship of books, and Saxant and Senss don’t think that it would violate the law of libel or indecency or anything. It skates close but pretty, as it were, and, of course, it doesn’t actually mention any names.”

  “No, I suppose it doesn’t. Still, it’s rather foul.”

  “Yes, I agree. Well, furnished by my father with the terms of Carn’s will, I observe that he wants the book published, whether he’s alive or dead, and the requisite amount of money is to be devoted to the purpose.”

  “Then it almost looks as though he expected to peg out before the thing was published.”

  “I argued that point with Saxant. Personally, I don’t think so, and my father doesn’t think so. He knew Carn well. I barely remember him. The man’s an egoist, like all authors, and was fearfully keen, even above the average of authors, on his own work. Thought it was sacred, and so on. Wouldn’t have a syllable altered, and all that sort of thing. Never would have a book filmed, for instance, although he had several good offers from Hollywood. Littera scripta manet sort of bloke.”

  “I see. Just obitur dicta in the will, then, as regards the book about the Jews?”

  “Yes, it seems so. And, of course, he had received those threatening letters, you know. I wish those hadn’t been swiped along with the corrected galleys. I’d like to have seen them. For threatening letters they were odd.”

  “Are you an expert on threatening letters, then?”

  “Not exactly. But all solicitors see them. People are not quite such fools and cowards about blackmail as they used to be, thanks, largely, to Freud and Havelock Ellis, you know.”

  “How my Aunt Adela would love to hear you say that.”

  “I wish she’d come into this with us. Do you suppose she would?”

  “She would if it happened to interest her, not otherwise.”

  “Well, it’s become quite interesting, I should say. Again keep this under your hat. What do you think happened at Saxant’s house this afternoon?”

  He did not need a reply, and Carey did not give one. He drank deeply of his beer, and watched Bassin take a good gulp of brandy.

  “We are coming, I perceive,” he said, “to the explanation of your presence in this pub in front of a double cognac.”

  “Yes,” said Bassin. “They asked me to have some tea; there was a good many other guests. Saxant, in fact, had come away from the works early, because his wife was having a tennis afternoon. A very good-looking, fascinating woman, by the way. Definitely Elinor Glyn. Well, tea was on the verandah, and just as we were in the middle of it, a registered parcel came for Mrs. Saxant. She, it appears, was under the impression that it was a packet of delicate seedlings she was expecting. She had been talking about them, to all of us who were near her, and we all watched the postman coming towards the house.”

  “More threatening letters, actually, I suppose? Wonder who the maniac is?”

  “So do I,” said Bassin. He drank some more brandy, and pushed back the empty glass. “Well, Mrs. Saxant called for scissors, and somebody gave her a small penknife, and she soon had the paper and string off. It wasn’t seedlings, of course. What the packet actually contained was—pardon me—a couple of bloody ears.”

  • CHAPTER 3 •

  The Packing Department

  “… all the workmen, full of terror, sought out the king, and threw themselves on their faces before him, beseeching him to interfere and help them or to deliver them from their dreadful work.”

  •1•

  Saxant and Senss were not the only printers in the neighbourhood. In the town of Falshanger, less than three miles by arterial road from their printing press, was the huge plant belonging to Lyle, Lyle and Seeley, whose buildings covered many acres of land and who numbered their employees by the thousand. About seventy-five per cent of the small houses in the streets near their works, offices, and packing department were occupied by the workmen, and in many families the work was hereditary, for the press had been established in the town some eighty-seven years.

  It had grown, particularly since the war, although its directors would have replied to enquirers that there seemed no particular reason why it should have done so. The fact of its growth was apparent, however, outwardly, in the various styles of its buildings, and, so far as its interior was concerned, in the fact that its original office building could no longer accommodate more than about one-fifth of its office staff, some of whom were now lodged in a kind of glass-house partitioned off from a store-room on the ground floor, and the rest in a top-fl
oor room above the packing department.

  The great machines were working at full pressure. An ex-Cabinet Minister had decided to publish his reminiscences, and the fortunate publishers had already sold out two complete editions before publication.

  Everyone at the printing works became excited when a big job was on hand, for the works had contrived, to an extraordinary extent, to preserve the homely atmosphere, with the directors as the fathers of their work-people, which had always been the keynote of the firm’s policy with regard to its employees. The works had been a family business, employing fewer than a score of men in 1852, when the first Lyle had set up his printing press in Falshanger.

  •2•

  Jonathan Mabb cut himself a piece of cheese.

  “Pickles with that?” said his mother.

  “Indigestible,” said he. “Got to go on at seven.”

  “Oh, Jon, I wish you didn’t have to work a long shift! And isn’t it your night for Flossie?”

  “Bust with her Saturday.”

  “Oh, Jon! I thought there was something up.”

  “Not with me there isn’t. Anyway, plenty of girls, and so I told her.”

  “Unkind to say it, Jon, even if it’s true.”

  “Well, so long, Mother. Home with the milk, if I have luck.”

  “Seven o’clock, I thought you said. The milk comes at half-past five, dear.”

  “That’s right. Knock off at seven.”

  “How many days you got to work the long shift, Jon?”

  “Don’t know yet. Don’t believe anybody knows. This is one of the biggest jobs we’ve had for years, Mother. Old Green’s autobiography. Two editions sold out before publication, and another two called for. Ten thousand copies, that first edition was. They say we may be printing half a million before we’re through with it.”

  “Just fancy! Is it a nice book, Jon?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t read it. Half-inch you a copy if I can.”

  “Well, I think perhaps I would like to have a look at it, if it’s going to be so famous. What Green is it?”

  “Why, the Green, Mother. In the Cabinet he was. You must have read about him in the papers.”

  “No, I don’t think so, dear. I’ll think about it while you’re gone. Green? Green?”

  “Never mind. So long, Mother.”

  “Good-bye, dear. Now do mind, when you’re getting tired, and don’t go catching your fingers under that dreadful machine. I wish I’d never seen it, that I do. I know you’ll chop your own head off, one of these days.”

  “But I couldn’t, Mother. Nobody could. It’s only got a five-inch clearance. You couldn’t get your head under that.”

  “Well, you be careful, anyway.”

  “OK. I’ll be all right. So long. I ought to be off.”

  His mother went to the door behind him, and watched him go down the street. The big printing works was only a short distance from his home.

  Once Jonathan was in the next street he could see the works. Four storeys high they rose, great barracks with staring glass windows. He quickened his steps, although he did not know it. He loved the works. He had been employed at them (by them, he thought, for they were to him more of a living entity than the human beings who spent, as he did, the greater part of their conscious existence there) ever since he had left school at the age of fourteen. He could not imagine existence without the works, and the paper-slicing guillotine at which he worked was his pride as well as his task-master.

  The packing department, where he worked, was the nearest part of the printing works to his home. Its big iron gates had been newly painted green, the same colour as the five great doors, which opened on to the lading stage for the lorries. In front of the building, near the wall, which separated the grounds of the works from the street, was a great dump of coke for the boiler-rooms, which formed the basement of the packing department. A semicircular road, the private property of the company, ran from the iron gates by which Jonathan entered to the other similar gates near the canteen, so that the lorries had a one-way track.

  The road also ran directly north from the iron gates, which formed the In entrance for the lorries, to printing rooms at the back, by which the girl employees always entered the building. This road passed the girls’ bicycle shed and their canteen, which was separate from that of the men.

  Jonathan went in by the first of the green doors. The lading stage was raised about five feet above the level of the road for convenience in loading the lorries, and was covered so that, whatever the weather, the loads need never get wet. This lading stage ran the whole length of that part of the building, a distance of at least sixty yards. Behind it and behind the sliding doors ran a corridor formed of half-glass, half-wooden screens. In this corridor books or printed papers could be stacked, awaiting loading.

  Behind the corridor itself was the last of four large packing rooms, which were all very much alike, furnished, as they were, with vast stacks of paper, which cut up the room into corridors. There were also packers’ benches and, in addition, there were three guillotines, worked by electricity, each with its Board of Trade regulation safety catch.

  Jonathan was one of the last to enter the building. He took off his jacket—he had no cap—and hung it up near his machine. Then he switched on the power, inspected the working of the machine, which someone else had handled during the past twelve hours, found everything in correct working order, and was very soon busy.

  The work went on with a steady surge and swing. There was nothing feverish about it. It was like the rise and fall of great tides. Part of the time, Jonathan was slack. At other times, he was in the full noise and flow of labour, and at these times, if the full surrender of all his faculties to the demands of the moment could be called happiness, then he was happy. He was, at any rate, unconscious of any existence outside and beyond the pressing urgency of the apparently endless, careful, steady work.

  But when another lull came he was conscious of a duty, which would fall to him later on. This was to tell Bert Mason what he thought of him. Chewing-gum had been parked on the outside of one of the uprights of the guillotine. Jonathan had cleaned it off, as well as he could, during temporary slackenings in the spate, but the thought that anybody should use his guillotine as a parking place for gum angered and affronted him. It was not like Bert, either, although Bert did chew gum.

  The first break came at midnight, after five long hours. It lasted until a quarter to one. At the first sound of the bell—the packing department did not use a buzzer—a man near Jonathan dropped the bale he had just picked up and wiped his mouth. A couple of lorry drivers put their heads inside the door. Jonathan sheared through his last pile, the guillotine slicing the closely packed paper like a keen knife going through butter, stopped his machine, and put the safety catch on. Men by the dozen—by the hundred, a stranger might have thought—materialised from the other packing rooms, pulling on caps and buttoning coats, tying scarves round their throats, talking, jostling, and making their way to the canteen for the forty-five minutes’ break, an interval which would not seem very long.

  The last man, an elderly fellow, another guillotine minder, left the department. The head of the department gave a last glance round and then crossed to the lift, which would take him up to the floor where the office was. Here he would make himself his private and particular cup of cocoa from his own store, guarded and, from time to time, replenished for him by his sister, who was one of the office staff. As he entered the lift the watchman walked into the department for a cursory inspection of its emptiness.

  The atmosphere was hot and incredibly dusty. Particles of paper, minute paper dust, dust from men’s boots and out of their clothing, microscopic fragments of bookbinders’ cloth all floated in the air, making a kind of fog. It was misty outside, too. The cloudy wisps floated in through the open door, and added to the dimness of the vast room. The caretaker coughed and blew his nose. He walked about a bit, then went to one of the sliding doors, which the last
man had pulled to behind him, and pushed it open. At the same moment he thought he heard a scuffling sound near one of the great bales in the centre of the floor. He walked that way, peered and poked a bit, said aloud, “Rats, I suppose,” and went off to his little cubby hole to get his stick. He came back with it and poked and prodded, but could not start a rat, so he walked slowly out of the room to make his rounds.

  His rounds began with the four packing rooms, the passage joining the last (or innermost) two, and two dark store-rooms, which had small windows on to a side-street. One of these rooms had been suspected, once, of being the hiding-place of a petty pilferer who had got away with a quantity of bookbinders’ cloth and some four-colour prints of a book jacket—scarcely a big enough haul to have been worth the risk, the directors thought, of being discovered on enclosed premises. However, the thief had not been discovered, and the firm, beyond informing the police, had done nothing in the matter, presuming the thief to have been a mischievous boy.

  It had taken the watchman about ten minutes to make this part of his round, and he was going on into the four-colour room, which happened to be close at hand and where a friend of his had promised to leave him a copy of the evening paper, when he was aware of a slight sound coming from the direction of the store-rooms he had just left.

  He was a bovine man, employed for that very reason, for he had no nerves, a fact which, in a large building whose ramifications extended over more than five acres of ground, was usually an asset, particularly as in normal times he was alone in it for five hours. His raison d’être was to see that tramps, on their way to London or Southampton, did not make the premises their temporary dormitory, for it was very easy to get into the works without being seen. Nobody more dangerous or undesirable than these poor roadsters was thought of by the watchman’s employers.

  The watchman’s first reaction, therefore, upon hearing any kind of noise for which he could not account, was not to give chase, but to listen.