“The upshot was that the Dean gave way; he didn’t want to lose the publicity or the big fee, either. So away we went to the States for six months. You should have seen us, Mackilwraith! For the first part of the programme we wore our blue cassocks and our ruffs, and sang Byrd and Tallis and all that. Then for the secular stuff in Part Two we switched into evening dress, with Eton suits for us boys. Ah, Mackilwraith, if you could but once have seen me in a bumfreezer and a clean collar, singing “Love was once a little boy”, it would have made a better man of you!”
“As soon as dinner was over we made our excuses and got out of the mess as fast as we could. It was easy, because the OC was dining with the bigwig. We got over to the men’s quarters, which were empty; everybody was out on the town. Some of us who were engineers arranged wires on the handles of all the water closets on each floor. Then we did the same in every other building where there were any. Then we established a central control in the administration building in the dark, and waited.”
“Given taste, you can then go as far as you like with your big stage effects. Hundreds of people milling about if you like. Fill the stage with horses and dogs. Pageantry in a big way. Make it complex! Let it fill the eye! Let it be enriched, bejewelled, Byzantine! The parrot-cry that simplicity is one with good taste comes from people who cannot trust their taste in anything which is not simple. Shakespeare demands all the opulence that we can give him!”
“The man who had charge of us boys was one of the counter-tenors, a dear little chap named Thickpenny—Roland Thickpenny. You know what a counter-tenor is? No, I thought not. You’ve lived a dreadfully meagre life, Mackilwraith. A counter-tenor is a male alto. He is a tenor who has trained and enriched his falsetto register so that he can sing in a lovely, clear voice, and fill in the alto part in the male choir in a cathedral. You can’t have women in Church choirs; they sour the Communion wine, or something. They’re damned nuisances, anyhow. Well, Thickpenny was a dear—a chubby, red-faced little fellow, with a lovely voice. Women in the States went wild over him. Wanted to see what made him sing like that. Thought he was a eunuch, or something. Dear old Thickers was always being chased by some orgulous hag. But he was true to Mrs Thickpenny and all the little Thickpennies at home.”
“At last the great moment came. The OC walked out into the barrack yard with the bigwig. Every window in every building was open. We pulled all the wire controls. There was a perfect Niagara of flushing closets. We did it again. And again. It was a feu de joie of WCs. The OC and the bigwig scampered inside again. We never heard a word about it. That taught him to keep us in on Dominion Day.”
“Tasset, I’m going to make a life’s work out of it! If it kills me I’m going to squelch this notion that there is anything meritorious about simplicity on the stage. I proclaim the Baroque, Tasset! I laud the daedal!”
“But if Thickpenny was a man of iron, Mackilwraith, I was not. For you must know that I, too, had my following. “That dear little boy,” ladies would exclaim, and want to kiss me. Now, Mackilwraith, it was in a place in Montana called Butte, that a very beautiful woman, a superb creature of about thirty-five, I suppose, caught me at a party and kissed me to such purpose that my voice broke on the voyage home. And that is why I refuse to get stewed up about any woman’s honour. What about my honour, such as it was at the age of eleven? Worse still, what about my voice? For once it was gone the Dean made my life a perfect misery. But you can’t say my American tour wasn’t educative.”
Catch as catch can, and every man for himself, the conversation spun on through the night. Only Hector was silent, nodding from time to time and allowing his glass to be filled almost without protest. At five o’clock they went home, Roger to appear at a lecture at nine, Humphrey to sleep till noon, and Hector to greet a class which found him pale, inattentive and apt to desert them while he sought the drinking fountain.
Six
Eight days before the first night of The Tempest the following advertisement appeared in the Salterton evening paper for the last of five successive publications:
The complete Household Effects of the late Dr Adam Savage will be sold at auction at his former residence, 33 King Street, on Friday, June 8, beginning at 10 o’clock a.m.
All furnishings, ornaments, china and glass, carpets, bed linen, etc. will positively be sold to the highest bidder under the conditions posted on the door. No catalogue. View day Thursday, June 7.
Do not miss this sale which is the most Important to be held in Salterton so far this year.
And for this fifth appearance the following note was appended to the advertisement:
We are directed by Miss Valentine Rich, executor of the late Dr Savage, to announce that his splendid library, comprising more than 4300 volumes of Philosophy, Theology, Travel, Superior Fiction and Miscellaneous will be open to the clergy of all denominations from 10 o”clock Wednesday, June 6, and they may have gratis any volumes they choose. This is done in accordance with the wish of the late Dr Savage. Clergy must remove books personally.
Elliot & Maybee
This addition to the auction notice was printed in no larger type than the rest of the advertisement, but it caught a surprising number of eyes on the Tuesday when it appeared. Anything which concerns a subject dear to us seems to leap from a large page of print. Freddy Webster, who was no careful reader of newspapers, saw it, and snorted like a young warhorse.
“Giving away books!” said she. “But only to preachers! Damn!”
Later that evening she met Solly, who was in the garden wondering, as all directors of outdoor performances of The Tempest must, whether the arrangements for the storm-tossed ship in the first scene of the play would provoke the audience to such derisive laughter that they would rise in a body and demand the return of their money at the gate.
“Yes, I saw it,” he said in answer to her question. “Pretty rotten, confining it to the clergy. Not that I care about Philosophy, or Theology, or even Superior Fiction. But there might just be something tucked away in Miscellaneous which would be lost on the gentlemen of the cloth.”
“Whatever made Valentine do it?”
“Apparently, two or three years ago, the old chap said something, just in passing, about wanting his books dealt with that way. And they’re quite unsaleable, you know. A bookseller wouldn’t give five cents apiece for the lot.”
“Have you seen them, Solly?”
“No; but you know how hard it is to get rid of books. Especially Theology. Nothing changes fashion so quickly as Theology.”
“But there might just be a treasure or two among them.”
“I know.”
“Still, I don’t suppose a preacher would know a really valuable book if he saw one. They’ll go for the concordances and commentaries on the Gospels. Do you suppose Val would let us look through what’s left?”
“Freddy, my innocent poppet, there won’t be anything left. They’ll strip the shelves. Anything free has an irresistible fascination. Free books to preachers will be like free booze to politicians; they’ll scoop the lot, without regard for quality. You mark my words.”
Freddy recognized the truth of what he said. She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines—not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.