The Incredible Honeymoon

"A sort of 'do-good-by-stealth-and-blush-to-find-it-fame' feeling, I expect, wasn't it? Of course she's all right. You know I knew you knew she was, don't you?"

"I know now," said he. "Yes, of course I knew it. Don't let's pretend we aren't both jolly glad we met her."

"No, don't let's," said she. And laid her hand on his. His turned under it and held it, lightly yet tenderly, as his hand knew that hers would wish to be held, and not another word did either say till their car drew up at the prosperous, preposterous Shakespeare Inn at Stratford-on-Avon. But all through the drive soft currents of mutual kindness and understanding, with other electricities less easy to classify, ran from him to her and from her to him, through the contact of their quiet clasped hands.

The inn at Stratford is intolerably half timbered. Whatever there may have been of the old woodwork is infinitely depreciated by the modern imitation which flaunts itself everywhere. The antique mockery is only skin deep and does not extend to the new rooms, each named after one of Shakespeare's works, and all of a peculiarly unpleasing shape, and furnished exactly like the rooms of any temperance hotel. The room where Katherine washed the dust of the road from her pretty face was called "The Tempest," and the sitting-room where they had tea was a hideous oblong furnished in the worst taste of the middle-Victorian lower middle class, and had "Hamlet" painted on its door.

"We must see the birthplace, I suppose," said Edward, "but before we go I should like to warn you that there is not a single authentic relic of Shakespeare, unless it's the house where they say he was born, and even that was never said to be his birthplace till a hundred and fifty years after his death, and even then two other houses claimed the same honor. If ever a man was born in three places at once, like a bird, that man was William Shakespeare."

"You aren't a Baconian, are you?" she asked, looking at him rather timidly across the teacups. "But you can't be, because I know they're all mad."

"A good many of them are very, very silly," he owned, "but don't be afraid. I'm not a Baconian, for Baconians are convinced that Bacon wrote the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature off his own bat. I only think there's a mystery. You remember Dickens said the life of Shakespeare was a fine mystery and he trembled daily lest something should turn up."

"And nothing has."

"Nothing. That's just it. There's hardly anything known about the man. He was born here – died here. He went to London and acted. One of his contemporaries says that the top of his performance was the Ghost in 'Hamlet.' He married, he had children, he got hold of money enough to buy a house, he got a coat of arms, he lent money and dunned people for it, he speculated in corn, he made a will in which he mentions neither his plays nor his books, but is very particular about his second-best bed and his silver-gilt bowl. He died, and was buried. That's all that's known about him. I'm not a Baconian, Princess, but I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote 'Hamlet,' that frowzy, money-grubbing provincial never did."

"But we'll go and see his birthplace, all the same, won't we?" she said.

And they went.

If she desired to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare he did not give her much chance. She listened to the talk of the caretaker, but always he was at her ear with the tale of how often Shakespeare's chair had been sold and replaced by a replica, how the desk shown as his is that of an eighteenth-century usher and not of a sixteenth-century scholar. How the ring engraved "W. S." was found in the surface of the ground, near the church, in 1810, where, one supposes, it had lain unnoticed since Shakespeare dropped it there two hundred years before.

At the grammar-school Edward pointed out that there is no evidence to show that Shakespeare ever attended this or any other school. Anne Hathaway's cottage could not be allowed to be Anne Hathaway's, since it was only in 1770 that its identity was fixed on, two other houses having previously shared the honor. Like her husband, she would seem to have possessed the peculiar gift of being born in three places at once.

"I don't think I like it," she said at last. "I'd rather believe everything they say. It's such a very big lot of lies, if they are lies. Let's go to the church. The man's grave's his own, I suppose."

"I suppose so," said he, but not with much conviction; "anyhow, I won't bore you with any more of the stuff. But it is a fine mystery, and there's a corner of me that would like to live in Bloomsbury and grub among books all day at the British Mu. and half the night in my booky little den, and see if I couldn't find something out. But the rest of me wants different things, out-of-door things, and things that lead to something more than finding the key to a door locked three hundred years ago."

The bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church is a great blow to the enthusiast. A stubby, sensual, Dutch-looking face.

"I wish they'd been content with the gravestone," she said, and read aloud the words:

"Goodfrend for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloasèd heare
Blest be ye man yt spares these stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones."

"There's not much chance of any one doing that – look, the altar-step goes right across the tombstone. I wonder what they would find, if they did move the stone."

"Nothing, madam," said a voice behind her – "nothing human, that is."

She turned to face a tall, gaunt man in loose, ill-fitting clothes with a despatch-case in one hand and three or four note-books in the other. "Excuse my joining in," he said, "but I couldn't help hearing what you said. Whatever there is in that tomb, there is not the body of the man Shakespeare. Manuscripts there may be, but no corpse."

"What makes you think so?" she asked.

"Evidence, madam, evidence. The evidence of facts as well as of ciphers."

"Oh," she said, and smiled brilliantly, "you must be a Baconian. How very interesting!"

Now she had received all Edward's criticisms of Shakespearian legend with a growing and visible impatience. Yet for this stranger she had nothing but sympathy and interest.

"It is interesting," said the stranger. "There's nothing like it. I've spent eighteen years on it, and I know now how little I know. It isn't only Bacon and Shakespeare; it's a great system – a great cipher system extending through all the great works of the period."

"But what is it that you hope to find out in the end?" she asked. "Secrets of state, or the secret of the philosopher's stone, or what?"

"The truth," he said, simply. "There's nothing else worth looking for. The truth, whatever it is. To follow truth, no matter where it leads. I'd go on looking, even if I thought that at the end I should find that that Stratford man did write the plays." He looked up contemptuously at the smug face of the bust.

"It's a life's work," said Mr. Basingstoke, "and I should think more than one life's work. Do you find that you can bring your mind to any other kind of work?"

"I gave up everything else," said the stranger. "I was an accountant, and I had some money and I'm living on it. But now.. now I shall have to do something else. I've got a situation in London. I'm going there next week. It's the end of everything for me."

"There ought to be some endowment for your sort of research," said Edward.

"Of course there ought," said the man, eagerly, "but people don't care. The few who do care don't want the truth to come out. They want to keep that thing" – he pointed to the bust – "to keep that thing enthroned on its pedestal forever. It pays, you see. Great is Diana of the Ephesians."

"I suppose it wouldn't need to be a very handsome endowment. I mean that sort of research work can be done at museums. You don't have to buy the books," Edward said.

"A lot can be done with libraries, of course. But I have a few books – a good few. I should like to show them to you some day – if you're interested in the subject."

"I am," said Edward, with a glance at the girl, "or I used to be. Anyhow, I should like very much to see your books. You have a Du Bartas, of course?"

"Three," said the stranger, "and six of the Sylva Sylvarum, and Argalus and Perthenia – do you know that – Quarles – and – "

Next moment the two men were up to the eyes in a flood of names, none of which conveyed anything to her. But she saw that Edward was happy. At the same time, the hour was latish. She waited for the first pause – a very little one – but she drove the point of her wedge into it sharply.

"Wouldn't it be nice if you were to come back to dinner with us, at Warwick, then we should have lots of time to talk."

"I was going to London to-night," said the stranger, "but if Warwick can find me a night's lodging I shall only too gladly avail myself of your gracious invitation, Mrs. – "

"Basingstoke," said Edward.

The stranger had produced a card and she read on it:

Dr. C. P. Vandervelde,

Ohio College, U. S. A

"Yes," he said, "I'm an American. I think almost all serious Baconians are. I hope you haven't a prejudice against my country, Mrs. Basingstoke – "

"It's Miss Basingstoke," she said, thinking of the hotel, "and I've never met an American that I didn't like."

He made her a ceremonious and old-fashioned bow. "Inscrutable are the ways of fate," he said. "Only this morning I was angry because the chambermaid at my inn in Birmingham destroyed my rubbing of the grave inscription, and I had to come to Stratford to get another. Yes, I could have written, but it was so near, and I shall soon be chained to an office desk – and now, in this of all spots, I meet youth and beauty and sympathy and hospitality. It is an omen."

"And what," she asked, as they paced down the church, "was the cipher that said there was nothing in the tomb? Or would you rather not talk about your ciphers?"

"I desire nothing better than to talk of them," he answered. "It's the greatest mistake to keep these things secret. We ought all to tell all we know – and if we all did that and put together the little fragment of knowledge we have gathered, we should soon piece together the whole puzzle. The first words I found on the subject are, 'Reader, read all, no corpse lies in this tomb,' and so on, and with the same letters another anagram in Latin, beginning 'Lector intra sepulcho jacet nullum cadaver.' I'll show you how I got it when we're within reach of a table and light."

They lingered a moment on the churchyard terrace where the willows overhang the Avon and the swans move up and down like white-sailed ships.