The Return of Don Quixote Read online

  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 th
e 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.

  * * *

  CHAPTER IV

  THE FIRST TRIAL OF JOHN BRAINTREE

  The gentleman called Monkey made his way rapidly across the wide and windy sweep of lawn towards the solitary monument (if it can so be called), or curiosity, or relic, which stood in the middle of that open space. It was, in fact, a large fragment fallen from the Gothic gateways of the old Abbey, and here incongruously poised upon a more modern pedestal, probably by the rather hazy romanticism of some gentleman a hundred years ago, who thought that a subsequent accumulation of moss and moonlight might turn it into a suitable subject for the ingenious author of “Marmion.” On close inspection (which nobody in particular ever accorded to it) the broken lines of it could be dimly traced in the shape of a rather repulsive monster, goggle-eyed and glaring upwards, possibly a dying dragon, above which something stood up in vertical lines like broken shafts or columns, possibly the lower part of a human figure. But it was not out of any antiquarian ardour to note these details that Mr. Douglas Murrel hastened towards the spot; but because the very impatient lady who had summoned him out of the house on urgent business had named this place for the appointment. From across the garden he could see Olive Ashley standing by the stone, and see that she was by no means standing equally still. Even at that distance there seemed to be something restless and even nervous about her gesture and carriage. She was the only person, perhaps, who ever did look at that lump of laboriously graven rock; and even she admitted that it was ugly and that she did not know what it meant. In any case she was not looking at it now.

  “I want you to do me a favour,” she said, abruptly, and before he could speak. Then she added, rather inconsequently, “I don’t know why it should be any favour to me. I don’t care. It’s for everybody’s sake–society and all that!”

  “I see,” said Murrel, with gravity, and possibly a little irony.

  “Besides, he’s your friend; I mean that man Braintree.” Then her tone changed again, and she said explosively, “It’s all your fault! You would introduce him.”

  “Well, what’s the matter?” asked her companion, patiently.

  “Only that I simply detest him,” she said. “He was abominably rude and–”

  “I say–” cried Murrel, sharply, with a new and unusual note in his voice.

  “Oh, no,” said Olive, crossly, “I don’t mean like that. I don’t want somebody to fight him; he wasn’t rude in a conventional sense. Simply horribly stuck-up and opinionated, and laying down the law in long words out of his horrid foreign pamphlets– shouting all sorts of nonsense about coordinated syndicalism and proletarian something–”

  “Such words are not fit for a lady’s lips,” said Murrel, shaking his head, “but I’m afraid I don’t yet quite understand what it’s all about. As I’m not to fight him for saying coordinated syndicalism (which seems to me a jolly good reason for fighting a man), what in the world is it that you want?”

  “I want him taken down a peg,” observed the young woman, with vindictive gloom. “I want somebody to hammer into his head that he’s really quite ignorant. Why, he’s never mixed with educated people at all. You can see that from the way he walks and dresses. I feel somehow as if I could stand anything if he wouldn’t thrust out that great bristly black beard. He might look quite all right without his beard.”

  “Do I understand,” asked Murrel, “that you wish me to go and forcibly shave the gentleman?”

  “Nonsense,” she replied, impatiently, “I only mean I want him, just for one little moment, to wish he was shaved. What I want is to show him what educated people are really like. It’s all for his own good. He could be–he could be ever so much improved.”

  “Is he to go to a continuation class or a night school?” inquired Murrel innocently, “or possibly to a Sunday school.”

  “Nobody ever learns anything at school,” she replied, “I mean the only place where anybody ever does learn anything– the world; the great world. I want him to see there are things much greater than his grumbling little fads–I want him to hear people talking about music and architecture and history, and all the things that really scholarly people know about. Of course, he’s got stuck-up by spouting in the streets and laying down the law in low public-houses–bullying people even more ignorant than himself. But if once he gets among really cultivated people, he is quite clever enough to feel stupid.”

  “And so, wanting a stately scholar, cultured to his finger-tips, you naturally thought of me,” remarked Monkey, approvingly. “You want me to tie him to a drawing-room chair and administer tea and Tolstoy, or Tupper, or whoever is the modern favourite. My dear Olive, he wouldn’t co
me.”

  “I’ve thought of all that,” she said, rather hurriedly, “that’s what I meant by calling it a favour–a favour to him and all my fellow creatures, of course. Look here, I want you to persuade Lord Seawood to ask him to some business interview about the strike. That’s the only thing he’d come for; and after that we’ll introduce him to some people who’ll talk right above his head, so that he’ll sort of grow–grow up. It’s really serious, Douglas. He’s got the most terrible power over these workmen. Unless we can make him see the truth they will all–he’s an orator in his way.”

  “I knew you were a bloated aristocrat,” he said, contemplating the tense and tenuous little lady, “but I never knew you were such a diplomatist. Well, I suppose I must help in your horrid plot, if you really assure me that it’s all for his own good.”

  “Of course it’s for his own good,” she replied, confidently. “I should never have thought of it but for that.”

  “Quite so,” replied Murrel, and went back towards the house, walking rather more slowly than when coming away from it. But he did not see the ladder leaning up against the outhouse, or the development of this story might have been disastrously foiled.

  Olive’s theory about educating the uneducated man by association with educated men seemed to give him considerable food for thought as he went across the grassy plot kicking his heels, with his hands thrust deep in his trousers’ pockets. Of course, there was something in it; fellows did find their level sometimes by going to Oxford. They find out in what way their education has been neglected, even if they continue to neglect it. But he had never seen the experiment tried on so dark a social stratum as the black and buried coal-seam for which the Syndicalist stood. He could not imagine anyone quite so rugged and dogged in his demagogy as his friend Jack Braintree gradually learning how to balance a cigarette and a tea-cup and talk about the Roumanian Shakespeare. There was to be a reception of that sort that afternoon, he knew– but Braintree in it! Of course, there was a whole world of things that the sulky tub-thumper out of the slums did not know. He was not so sure whether they could ever be things that he wanted to know.