THE LADDER IN THE LIBRARY
The librarian at Seawood had once had his name in the papers; though he was probably unaware of the fact. It was during the great Camel Controversy of 1906, when Professor Otto Elk, that devastating Hebrew scholar, was conducting his great and gallant campaign against the Book of Deuteronomy; and had availed himself of the obscure librarian’s peculiar intimacy with the Palaeo-Hittites. The learned reader is warned that these were no vulgar Hittites; but a yet more remote race covered by the same name. He really knew a prodigious amount about these Hittites, but only, as he would carefully explain, from the unification of the kingdom by Pan-El-Zaga (popularly and foolishly called Pan-Ul-Zaga) to the disastrous battle of Uli-Zamul, after which the true Palaeo-Hittite civilisation, of course, can hardly be said to have continued. In his case it can be said seriously that nobody knew how much he knew. He had never written a book upon his Hittites; if he had it would have been a library. But nobody could have reviewed it but himself.
In the public controversy his appearance and disappearance were equally isolated and odd. It seems that there existed a system or alphabet of Hittite hieroglyphics, which were different from all other hieroglyphics, which, indeed, to the careless eye of the cold world, did not appear to be hieroglyphics at all, but irregular surfaces of partially decayed stone. But as the Bible said somewhere that somebody drove away forty-seven camels, Professor Elk was able to spread the great and glad news that in the Hittite account of what was evidently the same incident, the researches of the learned Herne had already deciphered a distinct allusion to only forty camels; a discovery which gravely affected the foundations of Christian cosmology and seemed to many to open alarming and promising vistas in the matter of the institution of marriage. The librarian’s name became quite current in journalism for a time, and insistence on the persecution or neglect suffered at the hands of the orthodox by Galileo, Bruno, and Herne, became an agreeable variation on the recognised triad of Galileo, Bruno, and Darwin. Neglect, indeed, there may in a manner have been; for the librarian of Seawood continued laboriously to spell out his hieroglyphics without assistance; and had already discovered the words “forty camels” to be followed by the words “and seven.” But there was nothing in such a detail to lead an advancing world to turn aside or meddle with the musty occupations of a solitary student.
The librarian was certainly of the sort that is remote from the daylight, and suited to be a shade among the shades of a great library. His figure was long and lithe, but he held one shoulder habitually a little higher than the other; his hair was of a dusty lightness. His face was lean and his lineaments long and straight; but his wan blue eyes were a shade wider apart than other men’s; increasing an effect of having one eye off. It was indeed rather a weird effect, as if his eye were somewhere else; not in the mere sense of looking elsewhere, but almost as if it were in some other head than his own. And indeed, in a manner, it was; it was in the head of a Hittite ten thousand years ago.
For there was something in Michael Herne which is perhaps in every specialist, buried under his mountains of material and alone enabling him to support them; something of what, when it gains vent in an upper air, is called poetry. He instinctively made pictures of the things he studied. Even discerning men, appreciative of many corners of history, would have seen in him only a dusty antiquarian, fumbling with pre-historic pots and pans or the everlasting stone hatchet; a hatchet that most of us are very willing to bury. But they would have done him an injustice. Shapeless as they were, these things to him were not idols, but instruments. When he looked at the Hittite hatchet he did imagine it as killing something for the Hittite pot; when he looked at the pot he did see it boiling, to cook something killed with the hatchet. He would not have called it “something,” of course; but given the name of some sufficiently edible bird or beast; he was quite capable of making out a Hittite menu. From such faint fragments he had indeed erected a visionary and archaic city and state, eclipsing Assyria in its elephantine and unshapely enormity. His soul was afar off, walking under strange skies of turquoise and gold; amid head-dresses like high sepulchres and sepulchres higher than citadels; and beards braided as if into figured tapestries. When he looked out of the open library window at the gardener sweeping the trim garden walks of Seawood, it was not these things that he saw. He saw those huge enthroned brutes and birds that seemed to be hewn out of mountains. He saw those vast, overpowering faces, that seemed to have been planned like cities. There were even hints that he had allowed the Hittites to prey upon his mind to its slight unsettlement. A story was current of an incautious professor who had repeated idle gossip against the moral character of the Hittite princess, Pal-Ul-Gazil, and whom the librarian had belaboured with the long broom used for dusting the books and driven to take refuge on the top of the library steps. But opinion was divided as to whether this story was founded on fact or on Mr. Douglas Murrel.
Anyhow, the anecdote was at least an allegory. Few realise how much of controversial war and tumult can be covered by an obscure hobby. The fighting spirit has almost taken refuge in hobbies as in holes and corners of the earth; and left the larger public fields singularly dull and flat and free from real debate. It might be imagined that the Daily Wire was a slashing paper and the Review of Assyrian Excavation was a mild and peaceful one. But in truth it is the other way. It is the popular paper that has become cold and conventional, and full of cliches used without any conviction. It is the scholarly paper that is full of fire and fanaticism and rivalry. Mr. Herne could not contain himself when he thought of Professor Poole and his preposterous and monstrous suggestion about the Pre-Hittite sandal. He pursued the Professor, if not with a broom at least with a pen brandished like a weapon; and expended on these unheard-of questions energies of real eloquence, logic and living enthusiasm which the world will never hear of either. And when he discovered fresh facts, exposed accepted fallacies or concentrated on contradictions which he exposed with glaring lucidity, he was not an inch nearer to any public recognition but he was something which public men cannot invariably claim to be. He was happy.
For the rest, he was the son of a poor parson; he was one of the few who have succeeded in being unsociable at Oxford, not from positive dislike of society but from an equally positive love of solitude; and his few but persistent bodily exercises were either solitary like walking and swimming, or rather rare and eccentric, like fencing. He had a very good general knowledge of books and, having to earn his own living, was very glad to earn a salary by looking after the fine old library collected by the previous owners of Seawood Abbey. But the one holiday of his life had been full of hard work, when he went as a minor assistant in the excavations of Hittite cities in Arabia; and all his day-dreams were but repetitions of that holiday.
He was standing at the open French windows by which the library looked on to the lawn, with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, and the rather blind look of introspection in his eyes when the green line of the garden was broken by the apparition of three figures, two of whom at least might have been considered striking, not to say startling. They might have been gaily coloured ghosts, come out of the past. Their costume was far from being Hittite, as even a humbler grade of specialism might well have perceived; but it was almost as outlandish. Only the third figure, in a light tweed jacket and trousers was of a reassuring modernity.
“Oh, Mr. Herne,” a young lady was saying to him in courteous but rather confident tones; a young lady framed in a marvellous horned head-dress and a tight blue robe with hanging pointed sleeves. “We want to ask you a great favour. We are in no end of a difficulty.”
Mr. Herne’s eyes seemed to alter their focus, as if fitted with a new lens, to lose the distance and take in the foreground; a foreground that was filled with the magnificent young lady. It seemed to have a curious effect on him, for he was dumb for a moment, and then said with more warmth than might have been expected from the look of him.
“Anything whatever that I can do . . .”
“It’s only to take a tiny little part in our play,” she pleaded, “it’s a shame to give you such a small one, but everybody has fallen through and we don’t want to give up the whole thing.”
“What play is it?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s all nonsense, of course,” she said easily, “it’s called ‘Blondel the Troubadour,’ about Richard Coeur de Lion and serenades and princesses and castles and the usual sort of thing. But we want somebody for the Second Troubadour, who has to go about with Blondel and talk to him. Or rather be talked to, for, of course, Blondel does all the talking. It wouldn’t take you long to learn your part.”
“Just twanging the light guitar,” said Murrel encouragingly, “sort of medieval variant of playing on the old banjo.”
“What we really want,” said Archer more seriously, “is a rich romantic background, so to speak. That’s what the Second Troubadour stands for; like ‘The Forest Lovers,’ boyhood’s dreams of the past, full of knights errant and hermits and all the rest of it.”
“Rather rough to ask anybody to be a rich romantic background at such short notice,” admitted Murrel, “but you know the sort of thing. Do be a back-ground, Mr. Herne.”
Mr. Herne’s long face had assumed an expression of the greatest grief.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “I should have loved to help you in any way. But it’s not my period.”
While the others looked at him in a puzzled way he went on like a man thinking aloud.
“Garton Rogers is the man you want. Floyd is very good; but he’s best on the Fourth Crusade. I’m sure the best advice I could give you is to go to Rogers of Balliol.”
“I know him a bit,” said Murrel, looking at the other with a rather twisted smile. “He was my tutor.”
“Excellent!” said the librarian, “You couldn’t do better.”
“Yes, I know him,” said Murrel gravely, “he’s not quite seventy-three and entirely bald; and so fat he can hardly walk.”
The girl exploded with something not much more dignified than a giggle; “Goodness!” she said. “Think of bringing him all the way from Oxford and dressing him up like that,” and she pointed with irrepressible mirth at Mr. Archer’s legs, which were of somewhat dubious date.
“He’s the one man who could interpret the period,” said the librarian, shaking his head, “As to bringing him from Oxford, the only other man I can think of you’d have to bring from Paris. There are one or two Frenchmen and a German. But there’s no other historian in England to touch him.”
“Oh, come,” remonstrated Archer, “Bancock’s the most famous historical writer since Macaulay; famous all over the world.”
“He writes books, doesn’t he?” remarked the librarian with a fine shade of distaste. “Garton Rogers is your only man.”
The lady in the horned head-dress exploded again. “But Lord bless my soul,” she cried, “it only takes about two hours!”
“Long enough for little mistakes to be noticed,” said the librarian gloomily. “To reconstruct a past period for two solid hours wants more work than you might fancy. If it were only my own period now . . .”
“Well, if we do want a learned man, who could be better than you?” asked the lady, with bright but illogical triumph.
Herne was looking at her with a sort of sad eagerness; then he looked away at the horizon and sighed.
“You don’t understand,” he said in a low voice, “a man’s period is his life in a way. A man wants to live in medieval pictures and carvings and things before he can walk across a room as a medieval man would do it. I know that in my own period; people tell me the old carvings of the Hittite priests and gods look stiff to them. But I feel as if I knew from those stiff attitudes what sort of dances they had. I sometimes feel as if I could hear the music.”
For the first time in that clatter of cross-purposes there was a suspension of speech and an instantaneous silence; and the eyes of the learned librarian, like the eyes of a fool, were in the ends of the earth. Then he went on as with a sort of soliloquy.
“If I tried to act a period I hadn’t put my mind into, I should be caught out. I should mix things up. If I had to play the guitar you talk about, it wouldn’t be the right sort of guitar. I should play it as if it were the shenaum or at least the partly Hellenic hinopis. Anybody could see my movement wasn’t a late twelfth century movement. Anybody would say at once, ‘That’s a Hittite gesture.’”
“The very phrase,” said Murrel staring at him “that would leap to a hundred lips.”
But though he continued to stare at the librarian in frank and admiring mystification, he was gradually convinced of the seriousness of the whole strange situation. For he saw on Herne’s face that expression of shrewdness that is the final proof of simplicity.
“But hang it all,” burst out Archer, like one throwing off a nightmare of hypnotism, “I tell you it’s only a play! I know my part already; and it’s a lot longer than yours.”
“Anyhow, you’ve had the start in studying it,” insisted Herne, “and in studying the whole thing; you’ve been thinking about Troubadours; living in the period. Anybody could see I hadn’t. There’d always be some tiny little thing,” he explained almost with cunning, “some little trick I’d missed, some mistake, something that couldn’t be medieval. I don’t believe in interfering with people who know their own subject; and you’ve been studying the period.”
He was gazing at the somewhat blank if beautiful countenance of the young woman in front of him; while Archer, in the shadow behind her, seemed finally overcome with a sort of hopeless amusement. Suddenly the librarian lost his meditative immobility and seemed to awaken to life.
“Of course, I might look you up something in the library,” he said, turning towards the shelves. “There’s a very good French series on all aspects of the period on the top shelf, I think.”
The library was a quite unusually high room, with a sloping roof pitched as high as the roof of a church. Indeed it is not impossible that it had been the roof of a church or at least of a chapel for it was part of the old wing that had represented Seawood Abbey when it really was an abbey. Therefore, the top shelf meant something more like the top of a precipice than the top of an ordinary bookcase. It could only be scaled by a very long library ladder, which was at that moment leaning against the library shelves. The librarian, in his new impulse of movement, was at the top of the tall ladder before anybody could stop him; rummaging in a row of dusty volumes diminished by distance and quite indistinguishable. He pulled a big volume from the rank of volumes; and finding it rather awkward to examine while balancing on the top of a ladder, he hoisted himself on to the shelf, in the gap left by the book, and sat there as if he were a new and valuable folio presented to the library. It was rather dark up there under the roof; but an electric light hung there and he calmly turned it on. A silence followed and he continued to sit there on his remote perch, with his long legs dangling in mid-air and his head entirely invisible behind the leather wall of the large volume. “Mad,” said Archer in a low voice. “A bit touched, don’t you think? He’s forgotten all about us already. If we took away the ladder, I don’t believe he’d know it. Here’s a chance for one of your practical jokes, Monkey.”
“No thanks,” replied Murrel briefly. “No ragging about this, if you don’t mind.”
“Why not?” demanded Archer. “Why you yourself took away the ladder when the Prime Minister was unveiling a statue on the top of a column and left him there for three hours.”
“That was different,” said Murrel gruffly; but he did not say why it was different. Perhaps he did not clearly know why it was different, except that the Prime Minister was his first cousin and had deliberately set himself up to be ragged by being a politician. Anyhow, he felt the difference acutely and when the playful Archer laid hands on the ladder to lift it away, told him to chuck it in a tone verging on ferocity.
At that moment, however, it happened that a well-known voice called to him by name from the doorway opening on the garden. He turned and saw the dark figure of Olive Ashley framed in the doorway, with something about her attitude that was expectant and imperative.
“You jolly well leave that ladder alone,” he said hastily over his shoulder as he turned away, “or by George . . .”
“Well?” demanded the defiant Archer.
“Or I’ll indulge in what we would call a Hittite gesture,” said Murrel and walked hastily across to where Olive was standing. The other girl had already stepped out into the garden to speak to her, as she was obviously excited about something; and Archer was left alone with the unconscious librarian and the alluring ladder.
Archer felt like a schoolboy who had been dared to do something. He was no coward; and he was very vain. He unhooked the ladder from the high book-shelf very carefully without disturbing a grain of dust on the dusty shelves or a hair on the head of the unconscious scholar who was reading the large book. He quietly carried the ladder out into the garden and leaned it up against a shed. Then he looked round for the rest of the company; and eventually saw them as a distant group on the lawn, so deep in conversation as to be as unconscious of the crime as the victim himself. They were talking about something else; something that was to be the first step leading to strange consequences; to a strange tale turning on the absence of several persons from their accustomed places, and not least on the absence of a ladder from the library.