"Did they spurt water too?"
"Oh no. They gave the touch of solemnity, sir, the memento mori."
"Black thoughts," Rowe said, "in a black shade?"
"It's how you look at it, isn't it, sir?" But there was no doubt that the bookseller looked at it with a kind of gloating. He brushed a little bird-lime off his jacket and said, "You don't have a taste, sir, for the Sublime -- or the Ridiculous?"
"Perhaps," Rowe said, "I prefer human nature plain."
The little man giggled. "I get your meaning, sir. Oh, they had room for human nature, believe me, in the grottoes. Not one without a comfortable couch. They never forgot the comfortable couch," and again with sly enthusiasm he blew his carious breath towards his companion.
"Don't you think," Rowe said, "you should be getting on? You mustn't let me rob you of a sale," and immediately he reacted from his own harshness seeing only the mild tired eyes, thinking, poor devil, he's had a weary day, each one to his taste. . . after all, he liked me. That was a claim he could never fail to honour because it astonished him.
"I suppose I ought, sir." He rose and brushed away some crumbs the birds had left. "I enjoy a good talk," he said. "It's not often you can get a good talk these days. It's a rush between shelters."
"You sleep in a shelter?"
"To tell you the truth, sir," he said as if he were confessing to an idiosyncrasy, "I can't bear the bombs. But you don't sleep as you ought in a shelter." The weight of the suitcase cramped him: he looked very old under its weight. "Some people are not considerate. The snores and squabbles. . ."
"Why did you come into the park? It's not your shortest way?"
"I wanted a rest, sir -- and the trees invited, and the birds."
"Here," Rowe said, "you'd better let me take that. There's no bus this side of the river."
"Oh, I couldn't bother you, sir. I really couldn't." But there was no genuine resistance in him; the suitcase was certainly very heavy: folios of landscape gardening weighed a lot. He excused himself, "There's nothing so heavy as books, sir -- unless it's bricks."
They came out of the park and Rowe changed the weight from one arm to the other. He said, "You know it's getting late for your appointment."
"It's my tongue that did it," the old bookseller said with distress. "I think -- I really think I shall have to risk the fare."
"I think you will."
"If I could give you a lift, sir, it would make it more worth while. Are you going in my direction?"
"Oh, in any," Rowe said.
They got a taxi at the next corner, and the bookseller leant back with an air of bashful relaxation. He said, "If you make up your mind to pay for a thing, enjoy it, that's my idea."
But in the taxi with the windows shut it wasn't easy for another to enjoy it; the smell of dental decay was very strong. Rowe talked for fear of showing his distaste. "And have you gone in yourself for landscape gardening?"
"Well, not what you would call the garden part." The man kept peering through the window -- it occurred to Rowe that his simple enjoyment rang a little false. He said, "I wonder, sir, if you'd do me one last favour. The stairs at Regal Court -- well, they are a caution to a man of my age. And no one offers somebody like me a hand. I deal in books, but to them, sir, I'm just a tradesman. If you wouldn't mind taking up the bag for me. You needn't stay a moment. Just ask for Mr Travers in number six. He's expecting the bag -- there's nothing you have to do but leave it with him." He took a quick sideways look to catch a refusal on the wing. "And afterwards, sir, you've been very kind, I'd give you a lift anywhere you wanted to go."
"You don't know where I want to go," Rowe said.
"I'll risk that, sir. In for a penny, in for a pound."
"I might take you at your word and go a very long way."
"Try me. Just try me, sir," the other said with forced glee. "I'd sell you a book and make it even."
Perhaps it was the man's servility -- or it may have been only the man's smell -- but Rowe felt unwilling to oblige him. "Why not get the commissionaire to take it up for you?" he asked.
"I'd never trust him to deliver -- straightaway,"
"You could see it taken up yourself."
"It's the stairs, sir, at the end of a long day." He lay back in his seat and said, "If you must know, sir, I oughtn't to have been carrying it," and he made a movement towards his heart, a gesture for which there was no answer.
Well, Rowe thought, I may as well do one good deed before I go away altogether -- but all the same he didn't like it. Certainly the man looked sick and tired enough to excuse any artifice, but he had been too successful. Why, Rowe thought, should I be sitting here in a taxi with a stranger promising to drag a case of eighteenth-century folios to the room of another stranger? He felt directed, controlled, moulded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination.
They drew up outside Regal Court -- an odd pair, both dusty, both unshaven. Rowe had agreed to nothing, but he knew there was no choice; he hadn't the hard strength of mind to walk away and leave the little man to drag his own burden. He got out under the suspicious eyes of the commissionaire and lugged the heavy case after him. "Have you got a room booked," the commissionaire asked and added dubiously, "sir?"
"I'm not staying here. I'm leaving this case for Mr Travers."
"Ask at the desk, please," the commissionaire said, and leapt to serve a more savoury carload.
The bookseller had been right; it was a hard pull up the long wide stairs of the hotel. You felt they had been built for women in evening-dress to walk slowly down; the architect had been too romantic -- he hadn't seen a man with two days' beard dragging a load of books. Rowe counted fifty steps.
The clerk at the counter eyed him carefully. Before Rowe had time to speak he said, "We are quite full up, I'm afraid."
"I've brought some books for a Mr Travers in room six."
"Oh yes," the clerk said. "He was expecting you. He's out, but he gave orders" -- you could see that he didn't like the orders -- "that you were to be allowed in."
"I don't want to wait. I just want to leave the books."
"Mr Travers gave orders that you were to wait."
"I don't care a damn what orders Mr Travers gave."
"Page," the clerk called sharply, "show this man to number six. Mr Travers. Mr Travers has given orders that he's to be allowed in." He had very few phrases and never varied them. Rowe wondered on how few he could get through life, marry and have children. He followed at the page's heels down interminable corridors lit by concealed lighting; once a woman in pink mules and a dressing gown squealed as they went by. It was like the corridor of a monstrous Cunarder -- one expected to see stewards and stewardesses, but instead a small stout man wearing a bowler hat padded to meet them from what seemed a hundred yards away, then suddenly veered aside into the intricacies of the building. "Do you unreel a thread of cotton?" Rowe asked, swaying under the weight of the case which the page never offered to take, and feeling the strange light-headedness which comes, we are told, to dying men. But the back, the tight little blue trousers and the bum-freezer jacket, just went on ahead. It seemed to Rowe that one could be lost here for a lifetime: only the clerk at the desk would have a clue to one's whereabouts, and it was doubtful whether he ever penetrated very far in person into the enormous wilderness. Water would come regularly out of taps, and at dusk one could emerge and collect tinned foods. He was touched by a forgotten sense of adventure, watching the numbers go backwards, 49, 48, 47; once they took a short cut which led them through the 60's to emerge suddenly among the 30's.