THE LUNACY OF THE LIBRARIAN
Far away in Seawood Abbey the great performance of “Blondel the Troubadour” was over. It had been not only a success but a sensation. After it had been performed twice on successive afternoons, a sort of special encore performance had been given comparatively early on the following morning, for the gratification of the school-children and others; and Julian Archer was finally putting off his armour with an air of some weariness and relief. Some of the more malicious said his fatigue was partly due to the fact that he himself had not been the sensation.
“So that’s over,” he said to Michael Herne who was standing beside him, still in the romantic green rags of the Outlaw King. “I’m off to get into some comfortable togs. Thank the Lord we shan’t have to wear these again.”
“I suppose not,” said Herne and looked down at his own long green legs in a sort of daze, rather as if he had never seen his legs before. “I suppose we shall never wear them again.”
He remained standing thus for a moment; then as Archer darted back to his own dressing room, the librarian slowly followed him and betook himself to his own apartments adjoining the library.
One other person remained as if stunned with thought, though the performance had long been over. And that was the writer of the play; who did not feel in the least as if she had written it. Olive Ashley felt as if she had merely struck a match at midnight and it had burst and broadened into the unearthly splendours of the midnight sun. She felt as if she had painted one of her gold and crimson angels and the painted face had spoken, and spoken terrible things. For the eccentric librarian, turned for an hour into a pantomime king, might have been possessed of a devil. Only the devil had been a little like the gold and crimson angel. Something seemed to come pouring out of him that nobody had ever thought was in him; and which the poet could not claim to have put in him. He seemed to her to span and take in his stride all the abysses and the heights known to the secret humility of the artist. She did not seem to be hearing the verses she had written. They sounded like the verses she would have liked to have written. She had not only excitement but expectation. For he had the power of making each line seem greater than the last; and yet they were only her own pretty tolerable verses. The moment which glowed in her memory, and in that of many much less sensitive, was that in which the King, who had been captured as an outlaw, refused the offer of his own crown and declared that in a world of wicked princes he preferred the wandering life of the woods.
Shall I who sing with the high tree-tops at morning
Sink to be Austria; even as is that brute
And brigand that entrapped me, or be made
A slave, a spy, a cheat, a King of France?
And what crowns other shadow this the earth?
The evil kings sit easy on their thrones
Shame healed with habit; but what panic aloft
What wild white terror if a king were good!
What staggering of the stars; what prodigy.
Men easily endure an unjust master
But a just master no man will endure
His nobles shall rise up, his knights betray him
And he go forth, as I go forth, alone.
A shadow fell across her upon the grass; and preoccupied as she was she seemed to know even the shape of the shadow. Braintree reclothed and in his right mind (which some considered a very wrong mind) had joined her in the garden.
Before he could speak, she had said impulsively: “I’ve discovered something. It’s more natural to talk poetry than to talk prose. Just as there’s more spontaneity in singing than in stammering. Only, you see, most of us stammer.”
“Your librarian certainly didn’t stammer,” said Braintree. “You might almost say he sang. I’m a pretty prosaic person; but I feel somehow as if I’d been listening to good music. It all seems very mysterious. When a librarian can act a King like that, there seems to be only one possible inference; that he has only been acting a librarian. And excellent as he was as the King, I consider his creation of the part of an embarrassed bookworm in the library was an even more finished performance. Do theatrical stars often come and conceal themselves behind bookcases in this way?”
“You think he was always acting,” said Olive, “and I know he was never acting. That is the explanation.”
“I fancy you are right,” he answered. “But couldn’t you have sworn you were in the presence of a great actor?”
“No, no; that is just the point,” she cried sharply. “I could have sworn I was in the presence of a great man.”
After a pause she went on: “I don’t mean a great acting man like Garrick or Irving or somebody. I mean a great dead man–most awfully alive. I mean a medieval man: a man risen out of the grave.”
“I know what you mean,” assented the other, “and of course you are quite right. You mean that he couldn’t have taken any other part. Your friend Mr. Archer could have taken any other part; but he is only a good actor.”
“It all seems so strange,” said Olive. “Why should Mr. Herne out of the library be–like that?”
“I think I know why,” said Braintree, and his voice deepened to something like a growl. “In a sense that nobody understands he really does take it seriously. And so do I; I take it damned seriously.”
“Do you mean my play?” she asked with a smile.
“I consented to put on those troubadour togs and act,” he said, “I couldn’t give a greater proof of devotion than that.”
“I mean,” she said a little hastily, “what do you mean about taking the King’s part seriously?”
“I don’t like Kings,” replied Braintree rather roughly. “I don’t like Knights and nobles and all that parade of armed aristocracy. But that man likes them. He doesn’t only pretend to like them. He is not a snob or a silly flunkey of old Seawood. He is the only man I have ever seen who might really defy democracy and the revolution, I know it simply from the way he strode about that silly stage and spoke–”
“And spoke those silly verses, you were going to say,” said the poetess, pointing at him with a finger and laughing with a curious indifference rather rare among poetesses. It almost seemed as if she had found something that interested her more than poetry.
But it was one of Braintree’s more virile qualities that he was never easily forced into flippancy; and he went on in his quiet pulverising fashion, a man always meditating with a clenched fist.
“I tell you when he was right on top, and seemed to tower over everything, when he said he would chuck away his sceptre and go wandering in the woods again with a spear, I knew–”
“Why here he is,” cried Olive hastily and lowering her voice, “and the joke of it is that he is still wandering in the woods with a spear.”
For indeed Mr. Herne was still in the theatrical costume of an Outlaw, having apparently forgotten to change his clothes when he drifted to his dressing-room; and the long hunting-spear on which he leaned in his blank verse soliloquies was still grasped unconsciously in his hand.
“I say,” exclaimed Braintree, “aren’t you going to get into any other clothes before lunch?”
The librarian looked at his legs again and said in a dull voice, “What other clothes?”
“I mean your ordinary clothes,” replied Braintree.
“Oh never mind now,” said the lady, “you’d better change after lunch now, I should think.”
“Yes,” replied the abstracted automaton, in the same wooden voice, and took his long green legs and spear away with him.
The lunch was pretty informal anyhow; and though all the others had managed to get out of their theatrical costumes, they had not all thoroughly got back into their conventional ones. Some of them, especially the ladies, were in a transitional state before the full splendours of the afternoon. For there was that afternoon at Seawood Abbey a grand political and social reception eclipsing even that which had attempted the education of Mr. Braintree. Needless to say it contained most of the same unmistakable figures with many more in addition. Sir Howard Pryce was there, wearing if not the white flower of a blameless life at least the white waistcoat of a Victorian merchant, whose life was always assumed to be blameless. He had lately passed equally blamelessly from Soap to Dyes, of which he was a financial pillar and a partner in certain commercial interests of Lord Seawood. Mr. Aubrey Wister was there, wearing his exquisite blend of artistic and fashionable raiment; wearing also his long moustache and melancholy smile. Mr. Hanbury, squire and traveller, was there, wearing nothing that could be noticed in particular and wearing it very well. Lord Eden was there, wearing his single eyeglass and the hair that looked like a yellow wig. Mr. Julian Archer was there, wearing clothes so good that they are hardly ever seen on a living man but only on the ideal beings in tailors’ shops. And Mr. Michael Herne was there, still wearing a suit of green rags suitable to a royal outlaw in exile and quite unsuitable to the present occasion.
Braintree was not a conventional person but he was brought up against this walking mystery with an involuntary stare.
“You do seem to be dawdling about,” he said. “I thought you’d gone off to dress long ago.”
Herne appeared to be rather sulky in his last phase.
“Dress as what,” he asked.
“Well, dress as yourself, I suppose,” answered the other. “Give your celebrated imitation of Mr. Michael Herne.”
Michael Herne lifted his rather hang-dog head with a jerk and stared at the other for a moment with almost blinding concentration; and then moved away towards the house, presumably to perform the belated toilet. And Mr. John Braintree did the only thing he ever did do in these rather uncongenial assemblies; went in search of Miss Olive Ashley.
Their conversation was lengthy and largely theoretical; and it is a remarkable fact that even after the afternoon guests had gone and dinner loomed in the distance, when Olive had retired to dress and then reappeared in a violet and silver vesture of rather unusual richness, they encountered each other again in the garden, by the broken monument where they had their first dispute. But they encountered something else as well.
Mr. Herne, the librarian, was standing beside that scrap of grey sculpture like a green statue; it might have been a bronze statue green with rust, but it was in fact a familiar figure still clad in the forester’s fancy dress.
Olive Ashley said almost automatically, with a sort of jerk: “Are you never going to change?”
He swung his head slowly round and looked at her with blank blue eyes; then he seemed to recall his voice from the ends of the earth and said rather huskily.
“Am I ever going to change? . . . Or never change?”
She seemed to see something suddenly pictured in his staring eyes that started her trembling a little and she half shrank into the shadow of the man beside her, who struck in with something like a defensive authority: “Are you going to get into ordinary clothes, I mean?”
“What do you mean by ordinary clothes?” asked Herne.
“Well,” replied Braintree, with a short laugh, “I suppose I mean the sort of clothes I wear; though I’ve never been considered exactly a leader of fashion.” He smiled a moment in his grim fashion and added, “Nobody here will insist on your wearing a red tie.”
Herne suddenly bent his brows upon the other man with a fixed and concentrated but rather puzzling expression and then said, in a soft voice: “And you think yourself revolutionary because you wear a red tie?”
“I have given other indications,” answered Braintree, “but the tie has certainly become rather a symbol of them. I assure you some people whom I admire very much regarded it rather as a scarf dipped in gore. In fact, if you go back to the beginning, I think that was the reason why I wore it.”
“I dare say,” said the librarian thoughtfully, “that was why you wore a red tie. But I want to know why you wore a tie. I want to know why anybody, of all the sacred race of man, ever wore a tie.”
Braintree, who was always sincere, was suddenly silent and the other man went on, still gazing at him earnestly, as if he were a specimen or a stranger from a foreign clime: “What do you do?” he said in the same soft accent. “You get up; you wash. . .”
“So far,” said Braintree, “I will confess to conventionality.”
“You put on a shirt. Then you take a separate strip of some linen or something and hook it round your neck with a complicated set of knobs or hooks. Then, not content with that, you take another and longer strip of some sort of cloth or something, of some particular colour that you fancy. You wreathe that strip round the other strip in most complicated convolutions of a particular kind of knot. You do this every morning; you do it all your life; you never think of doing anything else; you never are for one moment moved to cry aloud on God and rend your garments, like the prophets of old. You do precisely this or pretty much like it, because a vast number of other people are so mysteriously employed at the same hour of the day; you never think it too much trouble; you never complain because it is always the same. And then you call yourself a revolutionist– and boast because your tie is red!”
“There is something in what you say,” said Braintree, “but am I to understand that this is your reason for putting off the evil hour when you must abandon your fantastic attire?”
“Why do you call my attire fantastic?” asked Herne. “It’s very much simpler than yours. It just goes over your head and there you are. Besides, it has all sorts of sensible elements you don’t discover till you’ve worn it for a day or so. For instance,” he looked up at the sky with a sort of frown, “it may be going to rain or something; it may turn very cold or the wind be very strong. What will you all do then? You will make a bolt for the house and come back with a paraphernalia of things for the lady; perhaps a huge horrible umbrella that will force you to walk about like a Chinese Emperor under a canopy; perhaps a lot of wraps and waterproofs and things. But nine times out of ten a man only wants something to pull over his head in this climate; he simply does this,” and he plucked forward the hood that hung between his shoulders, “and for the rest of the time he can belong to the Hatless Brigade. . . . Do you know,” he added abruptly and in a lowered voice, “there’s something very satisfying about wearing a hood . . . something symbolical; I don’t wonder they corrupted the name of the great medieval hero into Robin Hood.”
Olive Ashley had been looking away across the undulating slopes of the valley, to where they vanished into a shining haze of evening, as if she were somewhat distrait and detached from the conversation, but she looked round, as if at the sound of a word which could penetrate her dreams.
“What do you mean,” she said, “by saying a hood is symbolical?”
“Have you never looked through an archway?” asked Herne, “and seen the landscape beyond as bright as a lost paradise? That is because there is a frame to the picture. . . . You are cut off from something and allowed to look at something. When will people understand that the world is a window and not a blank infinity; a window in a wall of infinite nothing? When I wear this hood I carry my window with me. I say to myself–this is the world that Francis of Assisi saw and loved because it was limited. The hood has the very shape of a Gothic window.”
Olive looked over her shoulder at John Braintree and said: “Do you remember what poor Monkey said? . . . No, it was just before you came.”
“Before I came?” asked Braintree in a momentary doubt.
“Before you first came here,” she answered colouring and looking again at the landscape. “He said he would have to look through a leper’s window.”
“A very typical medieval window, I should think,” said Braintree rather sourly.
The face of the man in medieval masquerade suddenly flamed as at a challenge to battle.
“Will you show me a King,” he cried, “a modern reigning King, by the grace of God, who will go and handle lepers in a hospital as St. Louis did?”
“I am not very likely,” said Braintree grimly, “to pay such a tribute to reigning Kings.”
“Or a popular leader either,” insisted the other. “St. Francis was a popular leader. If you saw a leper walking across this lawn, would you rush at him and embrace him?”
“He is as likely to do it as any of the rest of us,” said Olive, “Perhaps more.”
“You are right,” said Herne, with abrupt sobriety “Perhaps none of us would do it. . . . But what if the world needs such despots and such demagogues?”
Braintree slowly raised his head and looked steadily at the other man. “Such despots . . .” he said, and frowned heavily.