The Locksmith's Last Key

Reference

CoE-0007

Category

parable

Version

1.0

A locksmith in an old quarter of a city spent eleven years on a key.

It was not for any door. It was for a class of lock — the kind fitted to the better houses of that district, of which there were perhaps four hundred, all made to the same principle. He had begun by wondering whether the principle had a flaw. In the fourth year he became certain it did. In the eleventh he made the key that exploited it.

He tested it on his own door and it turned.

He was sixty-one, and he had done the finest work of his life, and there was nobody in the city who would understand what he had accomplished except perhaps two other locksmiths, both of whom were his rivals and neither of whom he would tell.

He did not use it. He was not a thief and had never been near to being one. He put it in the drawer where he kept his gauges, and he told his wife about it, and she said he should destroy it, and he said he would, and did not.

He thought about telling the guild. He drafted the letter several times. Each draft required him to explain the flaw in order to explain the key, and each draft was therefore itself a description of how to make the key, and he could not think of a way to warn the four hundred households without also informing everyone else. He was aware that this difficulty is very old and that nobody has solved it. He put the letter away too.

He thought about telling the lockmakers directly. But the lockmakers had sold four hundred of these locks, and had a considerable interest in their being sound, and he had a fair idea of the reception he would get. Also — and this was the part he did not say aloud — the lock was theirs and the flaw was his discovery, and he was not certain he wanted to give it to them.

So it stayed in the drawer for four years. He mentioned it twice, both times when he had been drinking, both times to people he trusted, and one of those people mentioned it once, to someone else.

He died in the winter. His wife had died the year before. The shop and its contents passed to a nephew, who was not a locksmith and who sold the tools by weight to a dealer, and the drawer went with them, and the key was in it.

What happened after that is not clearly known.

There were burglaries in that quarter over the following two years — nine that were reported, and no forced entry in any of them, which was remarked upon at the time. Whether the key was involved cannot be established. It is equally possible that the flaw was rediscovered by someone else; a flaw that exists for one person to find exists for others. It is possible the key was melted down by the dealer, who dealt in metal and not in mechanisms, and that the nine burglaries were nine ordinary betrayals by servants and relatives, which is how most burglaries have always happened.

The lockmakers changed the principle in the third year, for reasons they described as an improvement.

There is a version of this story told among locksmiths in which the man is a villain, and a version in which he is a tragic figure, and a version in which the point is that he should have published immediately. There is another version, less often told, in which none of it turned on him at all: the flaw was in the lock and had been there since the first one was fitted, and every house in that quarter had been open for thirty years to anyone patient enough, and the only thing the locksmith actually did was find out.

His widow’s view is recorded, because it was quoted in a memoir written by a neighbour. She had said, when he first showed her the key and she told him to destroy it and he explained that it was the finest thing he had ever made: Then you have made a fine thing, and you will not always be the one holding it.

The memoir does not record what he replied. The neighbour who wrote it was not present and had the story from someone else.