“Why do you say that?” Renata asked.
“Because it is true,” Mac said grandly. “Only a cynic - a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, according to Oscar Wilde - could share Jefferson’s total incomprehension of the joys of collecting.”
I confessed that the passion to pay big money for things that nobody really needs, like multiple editions of the same Sherlock Holmes book and even variant printings of the same edition, was way beyond my ken.
“But maybe you can explain it,” I told Chalmers. I whipped out my notebook and prepared for enlightenment. There could be a news release or an alumni mag article in this lunacy, which I would then tweet a link to.
“Think of it as a game,” Chalmers said, leaning back on the couch, relaxed and in his element. “It’s a chase that’s always changing. Sometimes you know what you’re looking for, but you don’t know where to find it. Other times you know who has some unique item and the challenge is to make it yours. In Moscow, for example, I once talked a policeman out of a Russian first edition of His Last Bow.”
“And you almost went to Lubyanka Prison or someplace equally awful on smuggling charges when you tried to take it out of the country,” his wife reminded him.
Chalmers nodded at the memory. “There was no real crime involved, of course, except the extortion directed at me. Generous amounts of hard currency got me out of that pickle rather quickly. Overcoming obstacles - whether corrupt foreign officials or rival collectors - only adds zest to the game, Jeff.”
Just thinking about it was enough to light the fire of battle in Chalmers’s clear blue eyes.
“Oh, my collection isn’t the largest,” he went on, “but it is distinctive. No one else, for example, owns fully half the hand-written manuscript of The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
I could imagine a nice photo spread of that, but why only half the MS? “Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.
“Scattered,” Chalmers said, “as it has been for more than a century. The manuscript was broken up and sent to book dealers as part of a promotion for the book’s American publication in 1902. Various libraries and just a few private collectors own the other pages. One sold not so long ago for seventy-eight thousand dollars. Alas, I was not the purchaser.”
“Then you obviously haven’t been able to get everything you’ve gone after,” I said.
Chalmers sat forward. His grip on the cane tightened. “Perhaps not, young man, but I always left the other fellow knowing he’d been in a fight. I play to win. Isn’t that right, Renata?”
She nodded, her smile slipping a bit.
“And now you’re just going to give away the Woollcott Chalmers Collection,” I said. “I don’t understand that part, either.”
With an avuncular smile, Chalmers pointed his cane at Mac. “Blame your brother-in-law. He talked me into it.”
Staying at a bed and breakfast in Savannah, Georgia, a couple of years back, I met a man who had once sold a refrigerator to an Eskimo in Alaska (who used it as a cigar humidor). Well, that guy had nothing on Sebastian McCabe when it comes to persuasion. But Mac refused the credit.
“Slander!” he thundered. “Calumny and character assassination! I talked you into nothing. I had heard that you were ready to share your collection, Woollcott, and I merely suggested that St. Benignus College would be a most grateful recipient.”
Chalmers nodded. “True enough. There comes a time when hoarding it all to yourself is no longer satisfying. It becomes rather like Renata playing her violin to an empty concert hall or an actor performing to a darkened theater. Besides, after forty years the challenge has mostly disappeared. So I decided to give the collection away while I’m still alive to enjoy the gratitude - and the tax deduction.”
“Perhaps Jefferson would enjoy a private tour of the exhibit right now,” Mac rumbled.
The whole collection wasn’t even unpacked yet, but some of the highlights were set up in a room next to the one where the speakers would be holding forth in the colloquium. Although I’d written about the exhibit in press releases and talked about it in pitching stories, I hadn’t yet had a chance to see it. So I was mildly curious.
“But you can’t just leave the party,” I told Mac. “You’re the host.”
Mac looked at his watch, which had a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes on the face. “It is barely ten o’clock. With my charming wife presiding as hostess and ample adult beverages on hand to lubricate the guests, this jamboree will still be going strong long after we get back. We may not even be missed.”
Further pro forma protests on my part proved predictably futile. Within ten minutes the four of us had piled into Mac’s 1959 Chevy convertible, headed for Muckerheide Center on the St. Benignus campus. The car is fire-engine red with immense tail fins. It’s no vehicle for a grown man at all, but it fits Sebastian McCabe just fine. Chalmers sat in front with Mac, apparently because it was easier on the older man’s bum leg, and I sat in back next to Renata. She was a delightful conversationalist (although I can’t remember a word she said - maybe something about her musical career) and she smelled so good I felt guilty just breathing around her.
A guard let us into Muckerheide Center, thanks to an advance call to Bobby Deere, who runs the center at night. The place was fully lighted, but eerily empty. The clicks of our heels on the tile floor echoed far down the wide corridors as we walked along.
On the first floor we passed the darkened offices, the abandoned Information Desk, and the empty racks that hold the campus newspaper when school is in session. Walking up the immobile escalator to the second level, Chalmers moved slowly, relying heavily on his cane. Just outside Hearth Room C, where the display from the Woollcott Chalmers Collection was set up behind closed doors, I realized we weren’t going any farther without help.
“We need to get a key from that guard,” I said in a near-whisper. The place had me a little spooked. “This baby’s locked.” By way of demonstration, I jiggled the handle. The door didn’t move.
“No mere lock can stop Sebastian McCabe,” my brother-in-law announced. He did not whisper. From his breast pocket he produced a yellow balloon. “Be so good as to blow this up, please,” he asked Renata Chalmers as he handed it to her. She hesitated, clearly bewildered by Mac’s madcap actions. Apparently she didn’t know him very well.
“Humor him,” I said as Mac lit a cigar. “You may have children of your own some day.”
Looking resigned rather than enthusiastic, she blew up the balloon. Her husband, at Mac’s request, tied the balloon shut and handed it over to Mac - who immediately applied the hot tip of his cigar to the latex. The balloon popped and something clattered to the floor. Renata picked it up and handed it to Mac - an old-fashioned metal key.
“I believe this will facilitate our entrance,” Mac said.
Woollcott Chalmers tucked his cane under his right arm and clapped softly in appreciation of this sophomoric parlor trick. “Bravo!” His wife smiled, the rough equivalent of turning on a mega-watt spotlight.
“Can’t you ever do anything the easy way?” I asked Mac.
“What would be the fun of that, old boy?”
He used the key to open the door. At first he fumbled for a light switch, then found it on the wall to his left. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling blinked on with the flickering brightness of lightning.
The Chalmers Collection filled the room, some of it spread out on tables, some on the walls, some in bookcases. There were books, posters, calendars, records - anything to which the name or image of Sherlock Holmes had been applied. It was hard to take it all in. And this was only a small sampling of the collection; the bulk of it remained in packing boxes over at the library.