Part 3

"My daughter had passed the goal almost before her father had started. Once more, discouraged and baffled, I relinquished my ambitions: I was a foolish fellow to have entertained them at all. But my child was good to me--very good. Although she possessed neither the art nor the patience to teach me my letters, she discovered in me my one talent--quite a phenomenal aptitude for memorization. Compensation, probably. If I heard an ordinary newspaper article read over once or twice, I could repeat it word for word without prompting. And so to satisfy my hungry soul I would beg my little daughter to read aloud to me her school tasks, or her evening lessons--elementary history, geography, and the like. I never forgot them: they were the first real learning I ever possessed. I can repeat them still--and I think they kept me sane.

"My daughter grew up; married; had a daughter of her own; died; and I was alone again. Suddenly I perceived that I had passed middle age. I was no longer able-bodied; and I began to realize that when the body begins to fail, it is the brain that must carry on. And I had no brain--nothing but a few instincts and rules of life. They were wholesome instincts and healthy rules of life; but as a means of livelihood they were valueless. I began to slip down. I supported myself by odd and menial tasks: I cleaned knives and boots: I sold newspapers which I could not read: I spent long hours as a night watchman, occupying my mind by repeating to myself passages from my little girl's schoolbooks.

"Then came a hard winter: work was scarce enough for skilled labourers, let alone unskilled. As for the illiterate, there was no market for them at all. I tramped from London to try my fortune elsewhere; and came to Broxborough. I was destitute: I sang in the streets for bread--songs I had learnt by listening in public houses or at popular entertainments in my younger days. And there the late Archdeacon found me. I was a stranger, and he took me in." He was silent again.

"He was very good to you?" I said presently.

"He was an angel from Heaven, sir!"

"But didn't he teach you to read?"

The old man looked up at me piteously.

"Sir, I never confessed to him that I could not! And he never found me out! Why should he? I was his servant, engaged on purely domestic duties. Such clerical work as dealing with tradesmen involved was attended to by the housekeeper. One day my master asked me if I had read the Prime Minister's speech, and I replied that I never read the newspapers. I intended the statement to be a confession, leading up to a fuller confession; but instead, the good old man took me to mean that I despised politics and journalism and was interested only in philosophy and literature. From that day he admitted me to all the privileges of his literary companionship. His favourite hobby was reading aloud--preferably passages from the Classics--and he had few to read to. None, in fact. I was appointed his audience. Every evening we sat together and he read aloud to me, with every kind of illuminating comment. My peculiar faculty for memorization, intensified by the absence of any other medium of self-cultivation, enabled me to commit to memory the greater part of what he read and said. At the end of ten years I could quote long passages from most of the standard works of literature. When the dear old man died, I was a human fountain of quotations--poetical, historical, philosophical. Just that, and nothing more. Once more I had to make a niche for myself in the world. My accumulated lore was my sole asset. So I took this little house, and set up my useless--because mainly ornamental--little library, and endeavoured to win the respect of my new neighbours by dispensing an erudition which was in reality second-hand. Second-hand, sir!" He looked up wistfully. "Am I an impostor?"

"All learning is second-hand," I said. "You are not an impostor."

He rose to his feet, and took my hand.

"You have lifted a load from my mind," he said. "Confession is good for the soul. But you will understand now why I cannot deliver that Address."

"Why not?" I repeated. "I will get a copy of it for you, and you can learn it by heart."

"You can do that?"

"Certainly."

The colour came back to his face.

"The time is short," he said eagerly--"very short; and my memory is not what it was: but I will try. Ada shall read it to me, and read it to me, and read it to me, until I am word-perfect! I _will_ succeed! It will be wonderful!"

"It will score off Mould and Pettigrew too," I added spitefully.

But obviously Mr. Baxter was not thinking of Mould or Pettigrew. He was up again in his rightful place, in the clouds.

"It will be my Apotheosis!" he declared; and brought down his feeble hand with a gentle thump upon the table beside him.

"That's right!" said Miss Weeks, entering. "Break all the cups!"

VII

At the Municipal luncheon which followed the inauguration of Crake Hall, one chair was vacant; the Mayor, in his opening remarks, referring sympathetically to the fact. Mr. Baxter, to whom had fallen the honour of reading the Address of Welcome to their distinguished guest that morning, had found the strain of the proceedings rather too great for his advanced years, and had reluctantly begged to be excused from participating further in the ceremonies of the day. In short, Mr. Baxter, his task completed, had gone home to bed. Later in the proceedings the Lord Lieutenant also alluded to the matter. His Lordship was a statesman of somewhat limited ideas, and it is just possible that he was grateful to have had a topic suggested to him. So he spoke quite feelingly of the empty chair--the chair which was to have been occupied by "our eminent fellow-citizen, Mr.--er--Buxton." It was a cheering and reassuring sign, he continued, of our national and civic solidity of character and sense of proportion that Broxborough, where to the unseeing eye of the outside world nothing seemed to matter save linoleum, should yet be able, amid its manifold industrial activities, to produce a man--a man in quite humble circumstances--to whom Linoleum was nothing and Letters everything. Napoleon had called us a nation of shopkeepers; but so long as a commercial community like Broxborough could go on breeding homespun scholars like Mr.--ah--Dexter, we as a nation could continue to give the lie to Napoleon. (Loud and prolonged applause.)

Meanwhile the recipient of these testimonials lay a-dying in his own front parlour. Ada Weeks had put him straight to bed there on his return, utterly exhausted, from the Inauguration. All his frail physical powers had been concentrated for three days on making himself word-perfect in the Address--which he had delivered, by the way, flawlessly. Now reaction had come. An hour later, more nearly frightened than I had ever seen her, Ada fetched me.

My patient had just asked me, faintly but fearlessly, one of the last questions that mortal man can ask; and I had given him his answer.

"I am quite ready," he replied calmly. "I am only seventy-four; but it is well that a man should go at the zenith of his career."

"Are there any arrangements you would like to make?" I asked. "Anything you would like to say?"

"Yes. Is Ada there?"

"Of course I am there!" The small, stricken figure crouching on the other side of the bed put out a skinny paw and took the old man's hand. She held it steadfastly for the rest of the time he lived.

"Would you like to see the Rector?" I asked.

"No, no. I am at peace with God. It is of my little granddaughter that I would speak." His voice was stronger now. "My annuity dies with me. I have some small savings, which she will receive. But they will not keep her. I shall be grateful if you will exert your influence, sir, in enabling her to go into service."

"There is a vacancy in my house, if Ada will come," I said.

"Thank you. Will you go to the Doctor, Ada?"

Ada, with tears running freely at last, nodded in answer; and the dying man proceeded to the business which was ever uppermost in his thoughts.

"Then, sir, my Library."

"Yes. What are you going to do with it? Leave it to the town?"

"No, no, no, no!" He was strangely emphatic.

"What, then?" I asked. I had an uneasy feeling that the Library was going to be bequeathed to me, and I did not want it in the least. But my fears were relieved at once.

"I intend to leave it to Ada--temporarily."

"Temporarily?"

"Yes. But as she will be an inmate of your household, she will probably desire to take you into her confidence, and possibly avail herself of your assistance." His voice failed again; his grip on life was relaxing rapidly. Then he recovered himself, and almost sat up.

"Will you promise me, sir, to assist Ada to carry out my wishes with regard to the disposal--"

"I promise," I said. "Don't exhaust yourself."

The old man sank back, with a long and gentle sigh.

"Then I die contented, and reassured. Re--" His voice weakened again. Then he rallied, for a final effort:

"I have lived respected, I think!"

That was all.

I looked across to Ada, and nodded. Characteristically, she rose from her knees, crossed to the window, and drew down the blind.

VIII

Next morning, Ada Weeks and I sat facing one another in my study, across a newly opened packing-case. It contained Mr. Baxter's Library.

"But why must we?" I asked.

"We needn't worry why. He said every blessed book was to be destroyed, and that's all there is about it. Mr. McAndrew is burning rubbish outside: I've told him we've got some more for him. Let's get it over, and go back to Grampa--sir," concluded Ada suddenly, remembering somewhat tardily that she was addressing her employer.

We unpacked the books. First came some musty theological tomes.

"He knew a lot out of them," remarked Ada. "Used to fire it off at the Rector, and people who didn't believe in religion, or couldn't. He picked it all up from his old Archdeacon, though, long before I came to him."

"When did you come, by the way?"

"Nearly six years ago now. I was living with an aunt. She went and died when I was nine, and Grampa sent for me here. It was me that learned him all his new stuff--science, and machinery, and aeroplanes, and things like that. He didn't know nothink but Latin and Greek and history and things up till then. Here's the Cyclopædia coming out now. He never used it till I come. He never even knew it was four volumes short until I told him.... This next lot is mostly little books he picked up cheap at second-hand places--mouldy little things, most of 'em. Some of them were useful, though. Here's one--'The Amateur Architect.' It's queer how fussy people can be about house-planning, and ventilation, and drainage, and things like that, especially when they know they've got to live all their lives in a house where they have no more say in the ventilation and drainage than my aunt's cat! Grampa had to learn nearly the whole of this book, they wanted so many different bits of it. Well, I think we have fuel enough now for a start."

We staggered into the garden, with arms full, to where McAndrew's bonfire was burning fiercely. McAndrew himself, having regard to his chronic interest in other people's business, I had despatched upon an errand. Soon the Encyclopædia and the theological works were engulfed in flame. Some odd volumes followed. I cremated my old friend Robert Southey with my own hands. This done, we returned to the packing-case and delved again.

"Did Mr. Baxter wish everything to be burned?" I asked. "What about the presentation volumes--the Shakespeare, for instance?"

"They was _all_ to be burned," announced Ada doggedly, lowering her head into the case and avoiding my glance.

"Very well," I said.

Suddenly Ada looked up again, fiercely.

"Cross your heart and wish you may die if you look inside one of them!" she commanded.

I meekly took the grisly oath. But chance was too strong for us. Ada, eager to keep me entirely aloof from the mystery, attempted to lift four large volumes out of the case at once. The top volume--the Presentation Shakespeare itself--slipped off the others, fell upon the floor, and lay upon its back wide open. I could not help observing that it was a London Telephone Directory.

For a moment Ada and I regarded one another steadily. She did not wink an eyelash. Indeed, it was I who felt guilty.

"I may as well see them all now," I said.

"Please yourself," said Ada coldly.

It was a strange collection. There were three Telephone Directories in all--all old friends of mine, and peculiarly adapted, from their size and dignity, for "Presentation" purposes. (I think they were Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. The Presentation Tennyson, however, proved to be a Bulb Catalogue.) There was a Hall and Knight's Algebra, from which, in my presence, the old man had frequently and most movingly quoted Keats. Homer, as Pettigrew had correctly indicated, was an elementary German grammar. Plato's Apology was Mr. Chardenal's First French Course.

"He used to get them cheaper than the real ones," explained Ada. "Besides, what did it matter to him, anyhow?"

What indeed? Poor old boy!

I worked through the whole collection--the miscellaneous flotsam of second-hand bookshops and jumble sales--old novels sold in bundles; old directories sold as waste paper. Every book was neatly covered, and decorated with a sprawling number--the sight of which, although it advertised nothing to the outside world but the position of a book on a shelf, had never failed, for more than thirty years, to switch on the right record in that amazing repertoire.

Idly, I picked out the last book in the box. It was a stumpy little volume, bearing the number Twenty-Five.

"That's 'Orace," said Ada promptly. "It's a real one--in Latin: only it has the English on the opposite page. We used that a lot."

I turned over the time-soiled leaves, and my eye encountered a familiar passage. I looked up.

"I think he would have liked to have a small inscription on the coffin," I said. "We can arrange it when we go back to the house. There's a line here that seems to me to describe him very accurately."

"Read it," said Ada. I did so:

"_Of upright life, and stainless purity._"

"Yes; he was all that," said Ada thoughtfully. "Never done nothink on nobody; and always the gentleman. It will look nice on the plate. How does it go in Latin?"

I read aloud the ancient tag.

"_Integer vitæ, scelerisque purus--_"

Ada nodded her head vigorously.

"Put it in Latin," she said. "He'd have liked it that way. Besides, it'll learn Mould and Pettigrew, and that lot!"

THE END