“Short, I believe,” Brother Hilarius said. “Under five feet.”
“Pity,” said Brother Leo.
Brother Mallory had come up with another armload, which he passed to Brother Peregrine. Sheets fluttered this way and that. I spotted a beautifully rendered version of a poster for the Louis-Schmeling fight, the letters cleverly entwined with knotted ring ropes. An outsize copy of what appeared to be a doctor’s prescription featured stethoscopes, caducei, brass bedposts and cork-stoppered bottles in free-form style around the carefully reproduced illegible handwriting. Other sheets were too heavily encrusted with drawings, ivy-festooned capital letters, calligraphic curlicues and general grume to be comprehendible without a closer clearer look. But it was all very interesting.
And there was tons of it. When at last we all blundered back downstairs again armloads of the stuff were being toted by Brothers Mallory, Leo, Jerome, Silas, Eli and Clemence, while I stayed behind to gather up the half dozen sheets that had slipped and slithered out of the Brothers’ embrace. None of them proved to be the wanted lease, but I carried them along anyway, and followed everyone else all the way down to the first floor and Brother Oliver’s office, picking up other stray sheets along the way.
It’s truly wonderful how intense group activity can take one out of oneself. From the moment this great lease-hunt had gotten underway I had completely forgotten all about my own personal troubles, the doubts and perplexities about my future. It wasn’t until I was alone again, following the trail of paper left by the others, that reflection on my own situation returned to me. I felt the gloom descending, the unease and uncertainty, and I hurried to rejoin the safe anonymity of the crowd.
Brother Oliver’s office looked like Bureaucrat Heaven: papers everywhere, teetering and tottering on chairs and tables, collapsing on the floor, heaped atop the filing cabinet. Brothers Clemence, Oliver, Flavian, Mallory and Leo were all simultaneously trying to create order, which meant that together they created chaos. Brothers Valerian, Eli, Quillon and Thaddeus were all waving sheets of paper in Brother Clemence’s general direction and crying out, not at all in unison, “Is this it?” Brother Dexter looked across the mob scene at me, shook his head, and rolled his eyes. I could only agree with him.
It was Brother Peregrine who finally got everything channeled. Leaping up onto the refectory table as though about to break into a fast buck-and-wing — Brother Oliver gave him a startled and not pleased stare — Brother Peregrine clapped his hands together and shouted, exactly like the choreographer in every movie musical, “People! People!”
I think it was being called “People” rather than “Brothers” that did the trick. Silence fell, two or three syllables later, and everybody looked up at Brother Peregrine, who filled the silence at once by saying, very loudly, “Now, we need some organization here!” Two or three people would have restored chaos by simultaneously agreeing with him, but he out-shouted them and bore inexorably onward: “Now, Brother Clemence is the only one of us who knows exactly what we’re looking for.” Pointing at Brother Clemence, he said, “Brother, if you’ll come around on the other side of this table... Come along, come along.”
You don’t argue with the choreographer. I could see Brother Clemence begin dimly to understand that as, after a very brief pause, he pushed through the crush and went obediently around to the far side of the refectory table.
“That’s fine.” Brother Peregrine was suddenly so totally in command that he didn’t have to ask anybody for anything. Pointing as he called out the names, he said, “Now, Brother Oliver, Brother Hilarius, Brother Benedict and myself, we’ll go through those papers. It won’t take more than four of us. I know the rest of you are interested, but if we all try to help we just won’t get anything done. Now, if you want to watch, please just stand back there by the door. Brother Flavian? Over by the door, please.”
Magnificent. In no time at all Brother Peregrine had chosen his cast and created his audience. (I noticed he’d cast himself in a leading role, but since he’d done the same for me I wasn’t about to complain.)
Obedience was prompt and complete. Even Brother Flavian, though he hesitated, finally chose to keep his mouth shut and join the spectators. As those also-rans clustered themselves into the corner by the door, Brother Peregrine finished his staging. “Now,” he said, “we four will each take a stack of manuscripts and go through them one at a time. If you find something that looks as though it might be right, take it to Brother Clemence for inspection. All clear?”
I noticed that he didn’t ask us if we agreed; he asked us if we understood. You can’t answer a question you haven’t been asked, so we all nodded and mumbled our yesses. Brother Peregrine hopped gracefully down again from the refectory table, and the search got under way.
Brother Hilarius and I worked at stacks side by side, and very soon Brother Hilarius totally lost sight of the objective. The historian in him took over, and he thought we were here to admire the manuscripts. “Very nice,” he would say, holding out a representation of the front of a Kellogg’s Pep box. “Unusual commingling of Carolingian and Byzantine elements.” Or, in re a supermarket flyer offering steak at forty-nine cents a pound, “A perfect example of the Ottoman Renaissance.”
It made it difficult to concentrate on my own stack, but I did my best. And what a busy pen Abbot Urban had possessed! Anything in print, anything in print, that had passed before that man’s eyes had been copied in one or another style of illumination. Sheet after sheet after sheet I went through, finding nothing, pausing at a menu in which the capitals were constructed around the animals whose parts were being offered: fish, cattle, sheep.
“Look,” said Brother Hilarius. “Look at these drolleries.”
They didn’t look very droll to me. Hangings, crucifixions, electrocutions and other forms of violent institutional death were represented with small stylized figures in the margins of a wanted poster. I said, “Droll?”
“Drolleries,” he corrected me. “That’s the term for these, it’s a characteristic of the Gothic style, early sixteenth century.”
“Oh,” I said, and went back to my own array of drolleries.
“This Brother Urban,” Brother Hilarius said, “was quite a scholar as well as being quite an artist. He knew the different styles and stages of illumination, and he had the wit to combine them for his own statements.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, and rejected a laundry list, all in gold and red.
“Is this it?” Brother Peregrine stood up, spraying sheets of paper off his lap, and rushed to Brother Clemence with his find. We all waited, tense, watching Brother Clemence’s face. He studied the wording which, like many of these things, was hard indeed to read, and abruptly shook his head. “Seven cents off on Crisco,” he announced.
Crushed, his star role reduced to a comic turn, Brother Peregrine turned away without a word and went back to his place. And my own humiliation followed almost immediately after.
I was positive I’d found it, positive, but Brother Clemence hardly gave it a look before dismissing it. “Birth certificate,” he announced. “Somebody named Joseph something-or-other.”
So we continued, more cautiously now, nobody wanting to be third in the chump sweepstakes, and then I got to something I couldn’t read at all. There was lettering there — I could see that much — but I couldn’t make out a word of it. Was that an L? Vines entwined themselves around the latticework of lettering, leaves fluttered, long-necked birds craned Heavenward, suns and moons were scattered with a liberal hand, and all in all I just got a headache trying to look at it.