However, according to the sign, the museum should be open. I was curious, bored, and needed a job: no reason not to go in and at least look around. I walked up to the heavy, panelled door, suppressed an impulse to knock, and sidled my way inside.
"Dauntless, the slug-horn to my lips I set…"
The foyer was dark, but beyond a high archway just to the right I saw a big, lofty room lit by a few brass wall fixtures with gilt-lined black shades that made the place seem even more like a mortuary than it had from outside. This gallery must once have been the house’s main living room, or maybe even a ballroom. Now it was full of tall, dark mahogany cases, glass-fronted, in which you could dimly glimpse a bunch of unidentifiable potsherds, stuck around with little descriptive placards.
The walls, here and all over the museum, were covered with dark red brocaded silk hangings or velvety maroon embossed wallpaper, both flaunting a design in a sort of fleur-de-lys pattern that I later learned was a coat of arms old Ehlers had dug up for himself, or had faked, somewhere in Europe.
The building looked, and smelled, as if nobody bad been there for decades. However, just under the arch stood a shabby bulletin board that spelled out a welcome for visitors in big alphabet-soup letters, and also contained a photo of the pudgy, mutton-chop bearded founder, along with a typed history of the museum and a rack of little folders that seemed to be guide-catalogues. I took one of these and, ignoring the rest of the notices, walked on into the first gallery.
The quiet was shy-making; for the first time in years, I missed Muzak. My footsteps, though I found myself almost tiptoeing, elicited sharp creaks from the shrunken floorboards, just as happens in the corridors of the Shogun’s old palace at Kyoto, which I visited on leave during the Korean War. The Japs called those "Nightingale Floors", and claimed they had been installed that way especially to give away the nocturnal presence of eavesdroppers or assassins. The sound was supposed to resemble the chirping of birds, though I could never see that part of it.
I wondered what the reason was for Old Man Ehlers to have this kind of flooring. Just shrinkage of the wood from age, maybe. But then, he’d been around the world a lot in his quest for curios, probably. Maybe the idea for the floor really was copied from the Shogun’s palace. But if so, why bother, since it wasn’t the sort of relic that could be exhibited?
Anyway, I walked through that gallery without giving the specimens more than a glance. I understand that the Ehlers Collection of North American Indian pottery rates several footnotes in most archaeological studies of the subject, but for myself I could never understand why beat-up old ceramic scraps should interest anybody but professors with lots of time on their hands and no healthy outlets for their energy. (Maybe that attitude explains my never graduating from college, or why I picked up a habit instead of a Hobby; or both.)
The next gallery was visible through another arch, at right angles to the first. Even after I had looked over the floor plan of the museum, and learned to make my way around in it somehow, I never really understood why one room or corridor connected with another at just the angle and in just the direction that it indisputably did. On this first visit, I didn’t even try to figure it out.
The second gallery was more interesting: armour and medieval armaments, most impressive under that dull brazen light and against that wine-dark wallpaper and hangings. I kept walking, but my attention had been tweaked.
The third room, a long and narrow one, held most of the Remington cowboy scenes, and a few sculptural casts of the Dying Gladiator school. For some reason, this was the darkest gallery in the whole place — you could hardly see to keep your footing; but the squeaky floor gave you a sort of sonar sense of the walls and furnishings, as if you were a bat or a dolphin or a blind man.
After that came the framed posters from World War I ("Uncle Sam Wants YOU!") and the 19th century stage placards, well lit by individual lamps attached to their frames, though some of the bulbs had burned out. Next was a big, drafty central rotunda set about tastefully with cannon from Cortez’ conquests and a silver gilt grand piano, decorated with Fragonard cupids, which Liszt once played, or made a girl on top of, or something.
All this time no sight of a human being, nor any sound except the creaking floorboards under my feet. I was beginning to wonder whether the museum staff only came out of the woodwork after sunset.
But when I had made my way up a sagging ebon staircase to the second floor, and poked my nose into a narrow, boxlike hallway with small, bleary windows on both sides (which I figured must be the covered drawbridge to the donjon keep I’d glimpsed from outside), I did finally hear some tentative echoes of presumably human activity. What kind of activity it was hard to say, though.
First of all, it seemed a sort of distant, echoing mumble, like a giant groaning in his sleep. Granted the peculiar acoustics here, I could put this down to someone talking to himself — not hard to imagine, if he worked in this place. Next, from ahead, I caught further creaking, coming from the annex, that was analogous to the racket I had been stirring up myself all along from those Nightingale Floors. The sound advanced and I was almost startled when the thoroughly prosaic figure responsible hove into view at the end of the corridor — startled either because he was so prosaic, or because it didn’t seem right to meet any living, corporeal being in these surroundings; I couldn’t figure out which.
This old fellow was staff, all right: his casual shuffle and at-home attitude proclaimed it, even if he hadn’t been wearing a shiny blue uniform and cap that looked as if they’d been salvaged from some home for retired streetcar motormen.
‘I saw the sign outside,’ I said to the old man as he approached, without preliminaries, and rather to my own surprise. ‘Do you still have that night watchman job open?’
He looked me over carefully, eyes sharply assessing in that faded, wrinkled mask of age; then motioned me silently to follow him back along the corridor to the keep and into the dilapidated, unutterably cluttered, smelly office from which, I learned, he operated as Day Custodian.
That was how I went to work for the Ehlers Museum.
My elderly friend, whose name was Mr. Worthington, himself comprised all the day staff there was, just as I constituted the entire night staff. A pair of cleaning ladies came in three days a week to wage an unsuccessful war against dust and mildew, and a furnace man shared the night watch in winter; that was all. There was no longer a curator in residence, and the board of directors (all busy elderly men with little time to spend on the museum) were already seeking new homes for the collections, anticipating the rumored demolition of the neighbourhood.
In effect, the place was almost closed now, though an occasional serious specialist or twittery ladies’ club group came through; like as not rubbing shoulders with snot-nosed slum school kids on an outing, or some derelict drunk come in to get out of the cold, or heat.
Worthington told me all this, and also the salary for the night job, which wasn’t high because they had established the custom of hiring university students. I made a rapid mental calculation and determined that this amount would feed me, while my quarterly annuity payments went mostly to the monkey. So I told Worthington yes. He said something about references and bonding, but somehow we never actually got around to that.
I was relieved to learn that, since the public was not admitted during the twelve hours I was on duty, I would not be expected to wear one of the rusty uniforms.