A COMMISSION AS COLOURMAN
As Murrel gazed there gradually grew upon his mind (which was perhaps clearing itself rather slowly of many festive fumes) the sense of one result of his nonsensical nocturnal expedition or experiment in the education of revolutionists. He had been out all night and had seen nothing of what had lately been happening to his friends and their theatricals. But he remembered that it was almost exactly at this moment of the morning, with its long, fine tapering shadows and faint, far-flung flush of dawn, that he had abandoned his painting of the scenery and plunged into the library in pursuit of the librarian. He had left the librarian at the top of the ladder a little more than twenty-four hours ago. And here was the ladder thrown away like lumber in the garden, spotted with mildew, a skeleton on which spiders flung their silvery morning webs. What had happened, and why was that particular piece of furniture thus thrown out into the garden? He remembered Julian Archer’s jokes, and his face contracted with a spasm of annoyance as he walked hastily towards the library and looked in.
His first impression was that the long and lofty room, entirely lined with books, was empty. The next moment he saw that high up in the dark corner, where the librarian had found his French text-books of medieval history, there hung a queer sort of luminous blue cloud or mist. Then he saw that the electric light was still burning, and that the veil of vapour through which it shone was the result of somebody having been smoking on that remote perch, and smoking for a considerable stretch of hours, possibly (as it began to dawn on the mind of the strayed reveller) all night and a great part of the day before. Then for the first time he clearly visualised the two long legs of Mr. Michael Herne still hanging from his lofty ledge; where it seemed that he had been reading steadily from sunrise to sunrise. Luckily, it would appear that he had something to smoke. But he could not possibly have had anything to eat. “Lord bless us,” muttered Murrel, to himself, “the man must be famished! And what about sleep? If he’d slept on that ledge I suppose he’d have fallen off.”
He called out cautiously to the man above, rather as one does to a child playing on the edge of a precipice. He said to him, almost reassuringly, “It’s all right; I’ve got the ladder.”
The librarian looked up mildly over the top of his large book. “Do you want me to come down?” he asked.
And then Murrel saw the last of the prodigies of his preposterous twenty-four hours. For without waiting for the ladder at all the librarian let himself swiftly down the face of the bookcase, finding footholds in the shelves, with a little difficulty and some danger, falling at last on his feet. It is true that when he reached the ground he gave a stagger.
“Have you asked Garton Rogers?” he asked. “What an interesting period!”
Murrel was not easily startled but for the moment he also almost staggered. He could only reply with a blank stare and the repetition of the word “Period! What period?”
“Well,” replied Mr. Herne, the librarian, half closing his eyes. “I suppose we might put the most interesting period say from 1080 to 1260. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a long time to wait for a meal,” answered Murrel. “Man alive, you must be starving. Have you really been perched up there for–for two hundred years, so to speak?”
“I do feel a little funny,” replied, Herne.
“I don’t approve of your taste in fun,” answered the other. “Look here, I’m going to get you some food. The servants aren’t up yet; but a knife-boy who was a friend of mine once showed me the way to the pantry.”
He hurried out of the room and returned in about five minutes bearing a tray loaded with incongruous things, among which beer bottles seemed to predominate.
“Ancient British cheese,” he said, setting down the several objects on the top of a revolving bookcase. “Cold chicken, probably not earlier than 1390. Beer, as drunk by Richard Coeur de Lion; or all of it that he left. Jambon froid a la mode Troubadour. Do start it at once. I assure you that eating and drinking were practised in the best period.”
“I really can’t drink all that beer,” said the librarian. “It’s very early.”
“On the contrary, it’s very late,” said Murrel. “I don’t mind joining you, for I’m just finishing off a sort of a feast myself. Another little drink won’t do us any harm, as it says in the old Troubadour song of Provence.”
“Really,” said Herne, “I don’t quite understand what all this means.”
“Nor do I,” replied Murrel, “but the truth is I’ve been out of bed all night too. Engaged on researches. Not exactly researches into your period, but another period; a systematic, organised sort of period, full of sociology and all that. You will forgive me if I am a little dazed myself. I’m wondering whether there was really such a damned lot of difference between one period and another.”
“Why, you see,” cried Herne eagerly, “in a way that’s just how I feel. It’s extraordinary the parallels you find between this medieval period and my own subject. How interesting all that change is, that turning of the old imperial official into a hereditary noble! Wouldn’t you think you were reading about the transformation of the Nal after the Zamul invasion?”
“Wouldn’t I just!” said Murrel with feeble fervour. “Well, I hope you’ll be able to let us know all about Troubadours.”
“Well, of course you and your friends know what you’re about,” said the librarian. “You looked it all up long before; but I rather wonder you concentrated so much on the Troubadours. I should have thought the Trouveres would have fitted into your plan better.”
“It’s a matter of convention, I suppose,” answered Murrel. “It’s quite a regular thing to be serenaded by a Troubadour; but if they found a Trouvere hanging about the garden, it would not be very respectable and he might be pinched by the police for loitering with intent to commit a felony.”
The librarian looked a little puzzled. Then he said: “At first I thought the Trouvere was something like the Zel or lute player; but I have come to the conclusion that he was only a sort of Pani.”
“I always suspected it,” said Murrel, darkly, “but I should very much like to have Julian Archer’s opinion on the matter.”
“Yes,” replied the librarian humbly, “I suppose Mr. Archer is a great authority on the subject.”
“I’ve always found him a great authority on all subjects,” said Murrel in a controlled manner. “But then you see I’m ignorant of all subjects–with the exception perhaps of beer, of which I seem to be taking more than my fair share. Come, Mr. Herne, troll the brown bowl in a more festive manner, do. Perhaps you would oblige the company with a song–an ancient Hittite drinking song.”
“No, really,” said the librarian earnestly, “I couldn’t possibly sing it; singing is not among my accomplishments.”
“Falling off the tops of bookcases seems to be among your accomplishments,” returned the companion. “I often fall off omnibuses and things; but I couldn’t have done it better myself. It seems to me, my dear sir, that you are something of a mystery. Now that you are perhaps a little restored by food and drink, especially drink, perhaps you will explain. If you could have got down at any time during the last twenty-four hours, may I ask why it never occurred to you that there is something to be said for going to bed and even getting up for breakfast?”
“I confess I should have preferred the latter,” said Mr. Herne, modestly. “Perhaps I was a little dizzy and nervous of the drop, till you startled me into making it. I don’t usually climb up walls in that way.”
“What I want to know is, if you are such an Alpine climber, why did you remain on that ledge of the precipice all night, waiting for the dawn. I had no idea librarians were such light-footed mountaineers. But why? Why not come down? Come down, for love is of the valley; and it is quite useless to await the coming of love perched on the top of a bookcase? Why did you do it?”
“I ought to be ashamed of myself, I know,” replied the scholar sadly. “You talk about love, and really it’s a kind of unfaithfulness. I feel just as if I’d fallen in love with somebody else’s wife. A man ought to stick to his own subject.”
“You think the Princess Pal-Ul–what’s-her-name?–will be jealous of Berengaria of Navarre?” suggested Murrel. “Devilish good magazine story–you being haunted by her mummy, trailing and bumping about all the passages at night. No wonder you were afraid to come down. But I suppose you mean you were interested in the books up there.”
“I was enthralled,” said the librarian, with a sort of groan. “I had no idea that the rebuilding of civilisation after the barbarian wars and the Dark Ages was so fascinating and many-sided a matter. That question of the Serf Regardant alone. . . . I’m afraid if I’d come on it all when I was younger . . .”
“You’d have done something desperate about it, I suppose,” said Murrel. “Hurled yourself madly into the study of Perpendicular Gothic or wasted your substance on riotous old brasses and stained glass. Well, it isn’t too late, I suppose.”
A minute or two later Murrel looked up sharply in answer to a silence, as men look up in answer to a speech. There was something arresting in the way in which the Librarian had stopped talking; something still more arresting in the way in which he was looking out between the open glass doors across the spaces of the garden which were gradually warmed with the growing sunlight. He looked down the long avenue, with strips of flat but glowing flower-beds on either side, a little like the borders of a medieval illumination, and at the end of that long perspective stood the fragment of medieval masonry poised upon its eighteenth century pedestal above the great sweep of the garden, and the fall of the whole countryside.
“I wonder,” he said, “how much there is in that term we hear so often ‘Too late.’ Sometimes it seems to me as if it were either quite true or quite false. Either everything is too late or nothing is too late. It seems somehow to be right on the border of illusion and reality. Every man makes mistakes; they say a man who never makes mistakes never makes anything else. But do you think a man might make a mistake and not make anything else? Do you think he could die having missed the chance to live?”
“Well, as I told you,” said Murrel, “I’m inclined to think one subject is pretty much like another. They’d all be interesting to a man like you and very bewildering to a man like me.”
“Yes,” replied Herne with an unexpected note of decision. “But suppose one of the subjects really is the subject of men like you and me. Suppose we had forgotten the face of our own father in order to dig up the bones of somebody else’s great-great-grandfather? Suppose I should be haunted by somebody who is not a mummy, or by a mummy who is not dead?”
Murrel continued to gaze curiously at Herne and Herne continued to gaze fixedly at the distant monument on the lawn.
Olive Ashley was in some ways a singular person; being described by her friends in their various dialects as an odd girl, a strange bird and a queer fish; and in nothing more queer, when they came to think of it, than in that simple action with which her story starts; the fact that she was still “illuminating” when everyone felt that the play was the thing. She was bent, we might almost say crouched, over her microscopic medieval hobby in the very heart or hollow centre of the whirlwind of the absurd theatricals. It seemed like somebody picking daisies on Epsom Downs with his back to the Derby. And yet she had been the author of the play and the original enthusiast for the subject.
“And then,” as Rosamund Severne observed with a large gesture as of despair, “when Olive had got what she wanted, she didn’t seem to want it. Gave her her old medieval play and then it was she that got sick of it! Went back to pottering about with her potty little gold paints, and let us do the rest of the work.”
“Well, well,” Murrel had said, for he was a universal peace-maker, “perhaps it’s as well the work is left to you. You are so practical. You are a Man of Action.”
And Rosamund was somewhat soothed and admitted she had often wished she were a man.
Her friend Olive’s wishes remained something of a mystery; but it may be conjectured that this was not one of them. Indeed it was not quite true to say, as Rosamund said, that they had given her her old medieval play. It would be truer to say that they had taken it away from her. They had improved it immensely; they seemed to be quite confident of that, and no doubt they ought to know. They paid every possible tribute to it, as a thing that could be worked up most successfully for the stage. A little adapted, it afforded some admirable entrances and exits for Mr. Julian Archer. Only she began to have a deep and deplorable feeling, touching that gentleman, that she preferred the exits to the entrances. She did not say anything about it, least of all to him. She was a certain sort of lady; who can quarrel with those she loves, but cannot quarrel with those she despises. So she curled up in her shell; in that shell in which gold paint was quaintly preserved in the old paint-boxes.
If she chose to colour a conventional tree silver, she would not hear over her shoulder the loud voice of Mr. Archer saying it would look shabby not to have gold. If she painted a quaint decorative fish a bright red, she would not be confronted with the exasperated stare of her best friend, saying, “My dear, you know I can’t wear red.” Douglas could not play practical jokes with the little towers and pavilions in her pictures, even if they looked as queer and top-heavy as pantomime palaces. If those houses were jokes, they were her own jokes; and they were not at all practical. The camel could not pass through the eye of the needle; and the pantomime elephant could not pass through the key-hole of the door that guarded her chamber of imagery. That divine dolls’-house in which she played with pigmy saints and pigmy angels was too small for these people, like big clumsy brothers and sisters, to come blundering into it. So she fell back on her own old amusement, amid general wonder. Nevertheless on this particular morning she was a little less mildly monomaniac than usual. After working for about ten minutes, she rose to her feet, staring out on to the garden. Then she passed out almost like an automaton, the paint-brush still in her hand. She stood looking for a little time at the great Gothic fragment on the pedestal, in the shadow of which she and Murrel had debated the terrible problem of John Braintree. Then she looked across at the doors and windows in the opposite wing of the house; and saw that in the doorway of the library the librarian was standing, with Douglas Murrel beside him.
The sight of these two early birds seemed to awaken the third early bird to a more practical contact with the waking world. It seemed as if she suddenly took a resolution, or became aware of a resolution she had already taken. She walked a little more quickly and in an altered direction, towards the library; and when she reached it, almost disregarding the breezy surprise of Murrel’s greeting, she said to the librarian with a curious seriousness: “Mr. Herne, I wish you would let me look at a book in the library.”
Herne started as from a trance and said, “I beg your pardon.”
“I wanted to speak to you about it,” said Olive Ashley, “I was looking at a book in the library the other day, an illuminated book about St. Louis, I think; and there was a wonderful red used; a red vivid as if it were red-hot, and yet as delicate in its tint as a clear space in the sunset. Now I can’t get a colour like that anywhere.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Murrel in his easy-going way. “I reckon you can get pretty well anything nowadays if you know where to go.”
“You mean,” said Olive somewhat bitterly, “that you can get anything nowadays if you know how to pay for it.”
“I wonder,” said the librarian musing, “if I were to offer to pay for a Palaeo-Hittite palumon, now, I wonder whether it would be easy to obtain.”
“I don’t say that Selfridge actually puts it in the shop-window,” said Murrel, “but you’d probably find some other American millionaire somewhere, willing to do what he would call a trade with it.”
“Now look here, Douglas,” cried Olive with a certain fire, “I know you’re fond of bets and wagers and that sort of thing. I’ll show you the red colour I mean in the book, and you shall compare it yourself with the colours in my paint-box. And then you shall go out yourself and see whether you can buy me a cake of it.”