Meanwhile, Murrel continued to rap at intervals on the counter and exchange badinage with a large young woman who had apparently tried to make her own hair look like a wig. Then he fell into an interminable dispute with the man next him about whether some horse or other could win by some particular number of sections of lengths; the difference being apparently one of degree and not of fundamental principle. The debate did not advance very rapidly to any final conclusion, as it consisted mostly of the repetition of the premises over and over again with ever-increasing firmness. These two disputants were polite as well as firm; but their conversation was somewhat embarrassed by the conduct of an immensely tall and lank and shabby man with drooping moustaches, who leaned across them, talking all the time, in a well-meant effort to refer the point in dispute to the gloomy Braintree.
“I know a gentleman when I see him,” repeated the long man at intervals, “and I arsk ’im . . . I jest arsk ’im, as a gentleman; I know a gentleman when I–”
“I’m not a gentleman,” said the Syndicalist, with some bitterness.
The long man tried to lean over him with vast fatherly gestures, like one soothing a fretful child.
“Now, don’t you say that, sir,” said the fatherly person. “Don’t say that . . . I know a real toff when I see ’im, and I put it to you–”
Braintree turned away with a jerk and collided with a large navvy covered with white dust, who apologised with admirable amiability and then spat on the sawdust floor.
That night was like a nightmare. To John Braintree it seemed to be as endless as it was meaningless, and yet wildly monotonous. For Murrel took his festive bus-driver on a holiday to bar after bar, not really drinking very much, not drinking half so much as a solitary duke or don might drink out of a decanter of port, but drinking it to the accompaniment of endless gas and noise and smell and incessant interminable argument; argument that might truly be called interminable, in the literal sense that it did not seem even capable of being terminated. When the sixth public house resounded to booming shouts of “Time,” and the crowds were shuffled and shunted out of it and the shutters put up, the indefatigable Murrel began a corresponding tour of coffee-stalls, with the laudable object of ensuring sobriety. Here he ate thick sandwiches and drank pale-brown coffee, still arguing with his fellow-creatures about the points of horses and the prospects of sporting events. Dawn was breaking over the hills and the fringe of factory chimneys, when John Braintree suddenly turned to his friend and spoke in a tone which compelled his attention.
“Douglas,” he said, “you needn’t act your allegory any more. I always knew you were a clever fellow, and I begin to have some notion of how your sort have continued to manage a whole nation for so long; but I’m not quite a fool myself. I know what you mean. You haven’t said it with your own tongue, but you’ve said it with ten thousand other tongues to-night. You’ve said, ‘Yes, John Braintree, you can get on all right with the nobs. It’s the mobs you can’t get on with. You’ve spent an hour in the drawing-room and told them all about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Now that you’ve spent a night in the poor streets, tell me– which of us know the people best?’”
Murrel was silent. After a moment the other went on.
“It is the best answer you could make, and I won’t trouble you now with answers to it. I might tell you something about why we shrink from these things more than you; about how you can play with them and we have had to fight them. But I’d rather just now show you that I understand and that I don’t bear malice.”
“I know you don’t,” answered Murrel. “Our friend in the pub didn’t select his terms very tactfully; but there was something in what he said about your being a gentleman. Well, this is, let us hope, the last of my practical jokes.”
But he had not done with practical jokes that day; for as he came back through the garden of Seawood he saw something which startled him; the ladder from the library leaning against a tool-shed. He stopped, and his good-humoured face grew almost grim.
CHAPTER VI
A COMMISSION AS COLOURMAN
As Murrel gazed there gradually grew upon his mind (which was perhaps clearing itself rather slowly of many festive fumes) the sense of one result of his nonsensical nocturnal expedition or experiment in the education of revolutionists. He had been out all night and had seen nothing of what had lately been happening to his friends and their theatricals. But he remembered that it was almost exactly at this moment of the morning, with its long, fine tapering shadows and faint, far-flung flush of dawn, that he had abandoned his painting of the scenery and plunged into the library in pursuit of the librarian. He had left the librarian at the top of the ladder a little more than twenty-four hours ago. And here was the ladder thrown away like lumber in the garden, spotted with mildew, a skeleton on which spiders flung their silvery morning webs. What had happened, and why was that particular piece of furniture thus thrown out into the garden? He remembered Julian Archer’s jokes, and his face contracted with a spasm of annoyance as he walked hastily towards the library and looked in.
His first impression was that the long and lofty room, entirely lined with books, was empty. The next moment he saw that high up in the dark corner, where the librarian had found his French text-books of medieval history, there hung a queer sort of luminous blue cloud or mist. Then he saw that the electric light was still burning, and that the veil of vapour through which it shone was the result of somebody having been smoking on that remote perch, and smoking for a considerable stretch of hours, possibly (as it began to dawn on the mind of the strayed reveller) all night and a great part of the day before. Then for the first time he clearly visualised the two long legs of Mr. Michael Herne still hanging from his lofty ledge; where it seemed that he had been reading steadily from sunrise to sunrise. Luckily, it would appear that he had something to smoke. But he could not possibly have had anything to eat. “Lord bless us,” muttered Murrel, to himself, “the man must be famished! And what about sleep? If he’d slept on that ledge I suppose he’d have fallen off.”
He called out cautiously to the man above, rather as one does to a child playing on the edge of a precipice. He said to him, almost reassuringly, “It’s all right; I’ve got the ladder.”
The librarian looked up mildly over the top of his large book. “Do you want me to come down?” he asked.
And then Murrel saw the last of the prodigies of his preposterous twenty-four hours. For without waiting for the ladder at all the librarian let himself swiftly down the face of the bookcase, finding footholds in the shelves, with a little difficulty and some danger, falling at last on his feet. It is true that when he reached the ground he gave a stagger.
“Have you asked Garton Rogers?” he asked. “What an interesting period!”
Murrel was not easily startled but for the moment he also almost staggered. He could only reply with a blank stare and the repetition of the word “Period! What period?”
“Well,” replied Mr. Herne, the librarian, half closing his eyes. “I suppose we might put the most interesting period say from 1080 to 1260. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a long time to wait for a meal,” answered Murrel. “Man alive, you must be starving. Have you really been perched up there for–for two hundred years, so to speak?”
“I do feel a little funny,” replied, Herne.
“I don’t approve of your taste in fun,” answered the other. “Look here, I’m going to get you some food. The servants aren’t up yet; but a knife-boy who was a friend of mine once showed me the way to the pantry.”