FOR FIVE YEARS NOW, really ever since 1965, Marvin Lesterhouse’s reputation as a teacher of Shakespeare had been on the skids. At forty-five, at his peak, he had kidded himself that he had achieved an eminence that was at last secure, that he could continue indefinitely to lecture to large classes at the College of Manhattan, holding both the affection and the enthusiasm of his students with his high-pitched, tense, unblushingly lyrical analyses of characters and motivations. He had from the beginning, as he well knew, been subject to the deadly charge of “Bradleyism,” of making up early and last chapters for characters of whose lives the bard had furnished us only scanty glimpses—in short, of filling out biographies, of supplying King Lear with a wife and Hamlet with a college career. But he had hoped that he had made up for this by the very intensity of his appreciations, by his aptitude in conveying some of his own sense of beauty to his classes, and that this histrionic capacity might have proved sufficient, in conjunction with his perfectly competent grasp of the symbols, myths, and other jargon of modern criticism, to convince his students that a simple enjoyment of his performance was not necessarily to be condemned as an indulgence in literary nostalgia.
Now, however, no quaver of the voice, no passionate declamation, no wizardry of memory in quotations could avert the stern questions from humorless, unshaven faces, of why all this was “relevant,” of what did Imogen or Viola or even Cleopatra have to do with the problems of desegregation or the war in Vietnam. The answer, “Nothing, thank God!” did not long stave off inattention followed by nonattendance, nor did one factitious effort to meet the young men halfway: an improvised lecture on Troilus and Cressida in which the noble Trojans, with their good hearts and bad cause, and the wily Greeks, with their duplicity and genuine wrong, had been likened to the Americans and the North Vietnamese. Lesterhouse had been made to feel a thorough fool, the inevitable doom of anachronisms who try to convince others—and themselves—that they are not anachronisms, or even that anachronisms do not exist.
It was all made a great deal worse by the fact that he had, even in his palmy days, suspected some such thing. He had carried about within him—locked up tight, to be sure—a disquieting, even at times a panicky, sense of not being, of not even approaching, really, what he tried so desperately to look like. When he stood on the platform and gravely intoned the Ghost’s sepulchral warning in Hamlet, did any of his play-acting make the class forget the fair, fat, fiftyish bachelor professor, with the sandy-yellow, graying hair cut short and parted in the middle and the voice that tended to squeak or purr except when it rose to the unexpected thunder of his too rare fits of temper? Did they not jeer at him behind his back and suggest obscene motives for his befriending of this or that nice young man who would come to him after class to ask if Hamlet were really mad or Ophelia really chaste? Had it not always been a harsh, unlaughing world that made only the scantest pretense of having any use at all for people who lived in their imaginations?
During the summer that followed the terrible spring when the dean had cut his courses for the following semester from four to two, Marvin Lesterhouse had suffered a mild nervous collapse. One night he even went so far as to discuss retirement with his sister, Rhoda, who lived with him—or really on him (for it was he who had inherited the whole of the whimsical paternal grandfather’s fortune) in the big, dark, cool, ugly, beloved brownstone mansion on Brooklyn Heights. Neither of them ever left the city even for a day in the hot months.
“I don’t see why you wouldn’t be glad to quit,” Rhoda observed. “You’d have more time to write.”
“Oh, write!” he said impatiently. “Everyone’s always talking about writing. Anyone can write. Who needs more books? The great communication is by word of mouth. Think of the millions of books one has read on Shakespeare.”
“I haven’t.”
“Well, I mean people in my game,” he retorted. “But who made me feel him first? Professor Tinker, when I was a freshman at Yale!”
“Yes, but isn’t that just what we’re discussing? The fact that you’re not Tinker?”
Rhoda was as plain and stout, as long-nosed and short-haired, as any woman lawyer could be in the mind of a male antifeminist. She was consistently, even persistently, unromantic and literal. If she burped, it had to be a triumphant assertion of the natural over the artificial, never an inadvertent noise that might conceivably be apologized for. She was devoted to Marvin, but she regarded his nervous problems as the anticipatable result of a life not based on the sounder realities.
“You needn’t be unkind, Rhoda.”
“But I’m only trying to help. Honestly!”
Marvin wondered with a sigh if there was any relationship as arid as that of bachelor brother and old-maid sister. It was a marriage without juice; it had all the rivalry, all the bickering, all the petty meannesses, but none of the exaltation. Rhoda knew that he, at least, had his exaltations: with his library, his teaching, his students; and her jealousy was tediously present in her constant hashing over of these things to ferret out what she liked to call the “vicarious” in his life. Poor creature, how happy she would have been with but a whiff of one of his illusions!
“Why don’t you give your students Betterton?” she demanded suddenly.
“Betterton?” He gaped. “What do you mean, give them Betterton?”
“Well, you’ve always been so convinced that you were teaching Shakespeare. You’ve never listened to me when I’ve tried to tell you that you were really teaching acting. Styles of acting. Like Thomas Betterton’s. It’s your ‘thing,’ as they say today. Well, do it!”
Marvin felt the odd little tension of interest that always accompanies one’s recognition that a relative may actually be speaking disinterestedly. For years he had taken for granted that he knew every motive behind every one of his sister’s speeches, as he had taken it equally for granted that she knew his. Their conversations had not really been made with words, but with word-like balls, batted back and forth. Yet now he actually had a vision . . . but, of course, he could not yet admit it.
“Would that be ‘relevant’?” he asked bleakly.
“It would be different. And difference may always be relevance. Teach Shakespeare through his interpreters. Show what each generation had to twist him into seeming to mean. And then maybe the hippies in your class will discover what they want to twist him into. Maybe you’ll even discover what you do!”
Ah, why had she had to say that? Rhoda was Rhoda again.
“I wouldn’t presume to twist him into anything,” he said coldly. “It’s always been my thesis that one can’t look at him directly. Shakespeare is like the sun. He requires dark glasses.”
“Exactly. In your case, he requires Betterton. Very well, use Betterton. Be Betterton!”
Marvin did not want to talk anymore now because he did not want yet to acknowledge how much she had excited him. He could hardly wait to be alone, and as soon as he could decently break off he hurried to the solace of his library in the back of the house, which looked over the East River to the commercial temples of downtown Manhattan. Closing the door behind him he went to the alcove where he kept his Thomas Betterton collection and breathed with a faint, sweet relief, as he always did, even a dozen times a day, to see it intact. Ah, Rhoda was right. She had to be right! He had started Shakespeare through Betterton. It was Betterton who would see him through.
In the center of the alcove was an old drawing in a heavy gilt frame over which protruded a small lamp that he now turned on. It revealed the portrait of a handsome, fleshy, clean-shaven, aquiline-nosed, round-cheeked, thick-lipped man of middle years with round, expressive eyes and a high, curled peruke that fell to his shoulders. The bronze plate on the lower board of the frame read: THOMAS BETTERTON. 1635–1710. BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER. On alternate shelves in the alcove, to balance the books, were engravings of the great actor as Hamlet, Brutus, Falstaff, Coriolanus, Antony; playbills showing casts; glass cases with precious relics: shoe buckles, costume jewelry, daggers, bits of armor, snuffboxes. A silver casket used in The Merchant of Venice housed the precious remnants of an early Desdemona’s handkerchief. On the bookshelves were ranged the quartos of the plays as adapted for Betterton by Davenant and Ravenscroft, including the actor’s own stage copy of Julius Caesar.
Seated in the alcove, his sanctum, Marvin put together, piece by piece, the beautiful plan suggested by Rhoda’s idea. He would make a virtue out of what had been cried up as his worst defect. He had been accused of worshiping the priest rather than the deity, of preferring the great interpreter to what was being interpreted. But it was precisely his error that would redeem him. He would save his situation by putting a spotlight on it. He would, as Rhoda said, be Betterton!
Marvin stood, on the first Monday of the fall semester, before a diminished and inattentive class. He opened his lecture in a high, penetrating tone that seemed to challenge dissent.
“There is nothing, surely, in the whole history of English literature about which scholars and critics are more agreed than that the late seventeenth-century editions of Shakespeare by such ‘refiners’ as Davenant, Tate and Ravenscroft represent the very pinnacle of Philistine audacity. Yet the fact must be faced that the great actor who more than any other man saved and revitalized the declining reputation of the Swan of Avon acted—presumably by preference—in these versions. Thomas Betterton was the first pilgrim to Stratford, the first investigator to dig out the meager facts and legends of the poet’s life. As a young man he had been directed in Hamlet by Davenant—Davenant, who had seen Joseph Taylor play the role; Taylor, who had been coached by Shakespeare himself! For all the amendments, the violations, the horrors of these tampered-with texts, we can still reach back through them and touch Betterton’s hand, and through Betterton we almost touch the white feathers of the Swan!”
Marvin paused and glared into the auditorium. If they would ever heckle, they would do so now. Well, he would give them time, all the time they wanted.
“It must be important how such a man felt and interpreted Shakespeare. We know from Pepys and from Addison that Betterton on the boards was unforgettable. Colley Cibber records that he never heard him recite a line of tragedy wherein the judgment, the ear and the imagination were not fully satisfied. In Hamlet, Betterton made the Ghost as terrible to the spectator as to himself. When he first caught sight of Hamlet’s father’s spirit, he paused in mute amazement. Then, very softly and gradually, he raised his tone from a near-whisper to one of solemn trembling, but always controlled, always respectful:
“Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked, or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, Father, Royal Dane: O, answer me!”
It was not until he had reached the “Royal Dane” that he recognized that the voice to which he had been listening was a voice other than his own. It had a rich, low, reverberating tone; it was saturated in emotion and the deepest awe. Marvin trembled all over, but it was a tremble of ecstatic pleasure, as if every part of his chest and stomach and loins were being slowly and somehow delectably pulled up and out of his skin, as if his body were being liberated in some incomprehensible fashion from itself with a strange, orgiastic thrill. And the voice, the mysterious, tremulous, commanding voice, continued to declaim the whole speech, only the first half of which Marvin had any sense of knowing by heart, placing its emphases quite otherwise than Marvin would have placed them, but in each instance making him feel that he had leapt unexpectedly, rather wildly into the air but had alit, happily, on a trapeze that some unseen hand had sent winging to him just in time for his reaching fingers. When the voice stopped and his own lips closed after the “What should we do?” there was a thunderstruck silence followed by a startled, scattered applause.
He held up his hand.
“We do not know how the Ghost was played in Betterton’s day, but it seems likely that it varied less from today’s Ghosts than the other characters varied from their modern counterparts. Of course, there is a legend that in Shakespeare’s day he played the part himself.”
Here Marvin started, in his most sepulchral tone, the speech beginning “I am thy father’s spirit,” but with a sharp, almost agonizing deflation of his euphoria, he at once recognized his own voice. Sitting down suddenly, for his legs seemed to bend beneath him, he continued the lecture from his notes until, just toward the end of the period, an idea struck him, and he looked up at the class and almost shouted:
“Haste me to know it, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation, or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge!”
It was the voice! Of course! It would come only for Hamlet!
Students crowded around his desk at the end of the period, but he could not even understand their questions. He stared at them, dazed.
“I’m sorry, I have an appointment. I can only make it if I rush!”
And rush he did. His rush carried him all the way to the downtown subway before he stopped to consider where he was going. He was so excited that he dared not think. He got off the car at Grand Central and walked rapidly to the place where he always went when he was in that part of town: the Seven Gables Book Shop. Its beautiful mustiness, its gleaming leather and dustiness, its shabby magnificence cut out the city, the century, the whole horrible contemporary world. Michael Papantonio, sharp, quizzical, half-smiling, gaunt, looked up with the air of a man who would be surprised if anything could still surprise him.
“Why, Marvin! I was just going to call you.”
“You’ve got a Betterton?”
“That’s right! It’s the Hamlet ninth edition you were looking for. From Betterton’s library. With the cast of characters showing his wife as Ophelia. Does your happy instinct tell you the price I want?”
“Only that it’s more than I want to pay!”
They both laughed—Marvin a bit hysterically—as they concluded their bargain.
Rhoda was very still and attentive that night, when he told her, at dinner, of his day’s experiences. Like many unimaginative, literal-minded persons she was fascinated by the occult. Marvin knew that she even consulted an astrologist about some of her law cases.
“Of course, you suppose it’s Betterton himself who haunted you,” she observed.
“‘Visited’ is the word I should prefer. Who else? Isn’t he the person who would most care about reassembling his scattered relics?”
“Possibly. But might it not also be the spirit of some humble book collector who couldn’t afford a Betterton collection in his own lifetime? And who is now putting one together through you?”
Marvin reflected that this was a very sisterly reaction.
“How, then, would you explain the voice?”
“Maybe it’s the spirit of some poor down-and-out actor who never had a chance to play Hamlet.”
“If it amuses you to think so.”
“It doesn’t amuse me, Marvin. It doesn’t amuse me at all. I’m not a bit sure that this ‘visitation’ is a good thing.”
“Even if it brings back my students?”
“Even so. Why should you care about a few more beards in your classroom? You have a distinguished library, an assured income, an established reputation . . .”
“No reputation is established these days!”
“Then what good will it do you to create a new one? It’s one thing when we try to get in touch with the spirit world. It’s quite another matter when it tries to get in touch with us. Watch out, Marvin!”
Marvin felt his heart pounding again as it had pounded that morning in his classroom. For a sick minute he wondered if this could be fear. But then he felt once more the strange pushing upward in his chest that had been accompanied by such a curious exaltation. “Oh, Rhoda, can’t you and I face a fact every now and then?” he cried. “We make a great deal of what we do—you of your law, I of my literature—but can’t we still admit that we haven’t done much living?”
Rhoda’s brown face seemed to shrink to a small, obdurate tan plate. “Speak for yourself,” she muttered. “I’m satisfied that I’ve done my share of living.”
“Well, I’m not! And maybe this is just my chance—my miraculous last chance—to live a bit. Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing to miss it?”
“Marvin,” his sister said in a suddenly diffident tone, and then she paused. “You don’t suppose that this might . . . well, that it might have something to do with your nervous troubles of last summer?”
He had been waiting for this, and he almost spat the quotation at her:
“My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music; it is not madness
That I have uttered: bring me to the test,
And I the matter will re-word; which madness
Would gambol from.”
He stopped, for the voice was not Hamlet’s, not Betterton’s, but his own. In something like panic he excused himself from the table, saying that he had a lecture to prepare, and shut himself in the library, sitting in the Betterton alcove for the rest of the evening. Whatever the precious spirit was, it could not be summoned. That was clear. It came when it wanted and only then.
In the following weeks Marvin learned, bit by bit, how to live with his ghostly visitor. Even expectation could be fatal to the wonderful process of the latter’s realization within the form of Marvin Lesterhouse. If he started to quote from a plan and listened for the great voice, he was sure to be disappointed. He had first to clear his mind—insofar as he was able—of all greedy anticipation. He would then relax his muscles, close his eyes, harken for his own voice and start. And then—at least sometimes—the great thing would happen. Of course, when he read non-Betterton roles, he did not expect anything to happen, and nothing for some weeks did, until one day, when he was reading the lines of Lucius to Brutus in the last act of Julius Caesar, the great voice suddenly sounded, but oddly shrill and piping and very far away. Marvin clenched his fists in a thrill of excitement as he speculated that this might have been a role that Betterton had played as a boy!
Word spread rapidly through the college that Mr. Lesterhouse had developed an extraordinary gift of aping ancient dramatic styles, and Marvin found that he sometimes had as many as fifty auditors in his class. Furthermore, the course was oversubscribed for the following semester, and the head of the English department called him to his office for congratulations.
“I don’t know whether you noticed me, Marvin, in the back of your classroom the other day. You were lecturing on the different versions of King Lear from Tate to Pope. But when you recited from the heath scene—well, man, I’ve never heard anything like it! Where did you ever learn to do that?”
Marvin simply smiled demurely, as he always now did in answer to this question, and said nothing.
“Of course, I don’t know to what degree the thing’s authentic, but I don’t care. We have such a devil of a time today interesting students in anything but civil rights and pollution that I wonder if your little performance—or whatever you call it—isn’t just the kind of spark we need. Damn it all, even if it isn’t the seventeenth century, maybe it is if they think it is!”
As Marvin rose now to leave, his smile was almost condescending.
“Oh, it’s the seventeenth century, all right,” he assured his superior.
He was happy, happy, he was sure now, for the first time in his life. All of the principal facts of his emotional biography—the sad, ailing, complaining, invalid mother; the petulant, terrifying father; the evasions of his long, scared boyhood; his sick envy of the strong, the beautiful, the loved—all this sorry heap of nonliving paled to nothing against the exploding orgasm of being Lear in the storm or Hamlet on the ramparts or Othello moving grimly, step by soft step, to his wife’s chamber. Waking at night and remembering the great moments of the previous morning’s class, he would find his eyes streaming with tears, happy tears, at the release, the heaven, the very loving of it.
If Rhoda eyed him strangely across the breakfast table, it no longer irritated him. He simply felt sorry for her, and he had no further inclination to make her understand that he did feel sorry for her. Rhoda’s life seemed unbearably bleak to him now, and he trembled at the idea that she should ever see it as he saw it. He understood that he did, after all, care for her, that under the sibling tolerance that had been taken for granted between them there existed another, more substantial feeling created out of pity: pity for Rhoda’s methodicalness, her exactitude, her high conscientiousness, her fairness; or rather, pity for the empty heart that these things had to fill. He tried to take more interest in her law practice, in her lame ducks at Legal Aid, but she tended to become grumpy at this, and he desisted, fearing that she might suspect the real reason for his sudden curiosity.
The beneficent spirit, in the meantime, did not limit its visitations to Marvin’s classroom. It seemed dedicated to assist and illuminate him, not only as a professor and book collector but in other, anomalous capacities. One afternoon, sitting in the back of a taxicab on his way to his college library to chide the librarian for failing to bid high enough for an early Massachusetts prayer-book at a Parke-Bernet auction, he had a sudden, curious sense that the errand on which he was bound was a futile one. What on earth was the point of going so far uptown to see Mr. Kelper when at that very moment Mr. Kelper was indisposed for conversation? And why was he indisposed? The answer came in the vision that superimposed itself on that of the tumbled gray winter water of the Hudson that he could see from the West Side Drive. Mr. Kelper was indisposed because he was lying on the floor of the stackroom, his eyes closed and his chin covered with blood. Marvin leaned forward to speak to the taxi driver.
“I’ve changed my mind. Please get off the Drive at the next exit and take me back to Forty-second Street.”
As the cab continued to move north, he felt something that grew rapidly from surprise to consternation at what he had done. Why, on the basis of this inexplicable vision, should he alter his destination? And wasn’t it even more curious—so that now for the first time his heart took a quicker beat—that there should have been nothing in the vision that was scaring or even in the least unsettling? He had the oddest intuition, against all dictates of reason, that the bleeding Mr. Kelper was all right. The only thing that seemed to be all wrong was his own indulgence in an expensive cab ride to speak to a man who was in no position to be spoken to. Marvin shook himself, as if to shake off the whole absurd situation, and again leaned forward to speak to the driver.
“I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind again. Let’s go on to the college.”
At the library the girl at the main desk informed him that Mr. Kelper could not see him. He had fainted from the close air in the stackroom, and his fall had caused a nosebleed. He had re-covered, but had gone home to rest.
When Marvin told Rhoda about his experience that night before dinner, she stared at him in dismay.
“Then it’s happened,” she said gravely.
“What’s happened?”
“What I was afraid of. That you would have a visitation that has nothing to do with Betterton. That has nothing to do with the seventeenth century. That has nothing, in fact, to do with anything you’re interested in.”
“Of course, the experience was entirely a subjective one,” he explained hastily, as if to plead against the seriousness with which she took the little episode. Looking into her apprehensive eyes he felt some of the uneasiness that he had felt as a child when his mother had spied some glittering mechanical toy, given by a too indulgent uncle or aunt, that might have to be removed as “dangerous.” “I could produce the cab driver to confirm my change of direction, but what would that prove?”
“Nothing.” Rhoda’s face was drawn. “But it doesn’t matter. I believe you. I believe you absolutely.”
“Shouldn’t a lawyer be more skeptical?”
She shook her head. “A lawyer must know when to distinguish. There’s always the borderline. When the normal slips over into the sinister.”
Looking hard at his sister’s pursed lips, Marvin had a sense of bafflement that he identified with the felt prohibition, going back to the dawn of all sensation, that had always seemed to fall across anything that was fun. It was the interdict against thumb-sucking, against sweets between meals, against daydreaming in the classroom and movies in the afternoon, against horrid little friends and the furtive manipulation of secret parts of the body. He could see his father’s long pointing finger, indicating the alternative of violent ball games on concrete playgrounds, of standing up with one’s back to a wall, straight, straight, straight up.
“Why sinister?” he demanded.
“Because you’re being led on. Led on to something frightful. Oh, my dear Marvin, don’t you see it?”
“I’m not your dear Marvin,” he retorted. “Why do you call me that, all of a sudden? You’ve never called me that before.”
“I know we’re not a demonstrative pair, but we can still care about each other, can’t we? Whom else have we got, I’d like to know? Oh, you have Betterton, you think, but that’s just the point. Have you? Is it really Betterton who’s doing this to you?”
“I know. You think it’s some drunken ham actor who died in a ditch.”
“Or worse. Much worse.”
“Some devil, I suppose.” There. He had been the one to say it, anyway.
“Something that’s leading you on to do something horrible. Something that’s tempting you. By giving you success with your students. Success with your book collecting. And now it’s starting to show you the price. It’s breaking you in gradually. With a first faint whiff of blood!”
Marvin shuddered. Never would he have dreamed that Rhoda could be so insinuating. But then he jumped up with a sudden, unexpected start of hope and walked quickly away from her. At the end of the room he whirled about to face her. But no. She was still the same Rhoda. The wild idea that the spirit of Mrs. Siddons had entered into her to play Lady Macbeth vanished. They were alone with fear. Discouragement gushed into his heart in a plunging, stunning flood.
“What a ridiculous idea,” he muttered, but he covered his face with his hands and moaned aloud.
At a small stag dinner of bibliophiles in the Sutton Place home of Luke Reston, greatest of collectors, the tall, rangy, gray, smooth-voiced host was addressing his guests over the brandy glasses.
“I know everyone here has heard the gossip about Marvin Lesterhouse’s helpful spirit. Now wait, Marvin, don’t sputter till you hear what I have to say. It’s to your advantage, I promise. I have recently acquired Thomas Betterton’s own copy of the first volume of Rowe’s 1709 Shakespeare, with the famous biographical introduction that, of course, refers to the great actor and his trips to Stratford . . .”
“Where on earth did you get that?”
“I thought that might arouse you, Marvin. You want to know how it slipped past you? Well, it turned up, uncatalogued, in the library of the Bishop of Earns which I bought last spring in Edinburgh . . .”
“Where is it? Can I see it?”
“You can have it. With my compliments. But I want to see if you can find it first. It’s in the library, on a shelf. Suppose you go in there and bring it out. What would be a fair time to give you?” As Reston paused, the silence around the table became suddenly tense. It was broken when the host continued, with his best smile. “Or rather, how much time would it be respectful to exact of the beneficent spirit?” He pulled a watch from the pocket of his vest. “Shall we say ten minutes? It doesn’t really matter. It would be impossible to find it unless one had luck—or guidance.”
Marvin felt the close scrutiny of the table upon him. Everything in him seemed to be in suspense, in void. He could see nothing but the fantastic treasure, in dull brown calf, that Reston had dangled before his covetous mind’s eye. He had not even known that Betterton had seen the great edition, published just before his death! When he had promised Rhoda to abandon his dangerous game, he had never visualized such a temptation.
“You can time me,” he heard himself say, “from the moment I close the library doors.”
Stepping into the big, dim, alcoved chamber beyond the dining room, he shut the double doors behind him. Around him, above him, before him, were shelves upon shelves of leatherbound volumes of every size and variety, some black or brown, some magnificently gilded, some splendidly boxed, some protected by glass panes. The walls and projecting cases were lined from floor to ceiling with books. There was no relief but two French windows looking out over the moonlit East River and the lighted portrait, over the mantel, of a quaintly piratical-looking character with pearls in his ears who was believed by some scholars to be Shakespeare himself, painted from life.
It may have been the unexpected character of the supposed bard, with its bizarre suggestion of corsair activities, that made Marvin again think of blood. For a few seconds he stood stark still, transfixed with his fear. Then, for several precious minutes, he hurried from alcove to alcove, trying desperately to make out the plan of the library. As Reston had said, it was impossible. Reston had arranged his books, as did many collectors, according to a personal scheme. Marvin recalled the size of the Rowe Shakespeare and tried to pick it out by walking past the shelves, scanning them for dimensions. This, too, was futile. There were hundreds of books of that same approximate size. In a minute, the time would be up. Reston was right. He would never find it without guidance.
He walked back to the center of the room and stood there, his eyes closed, relaxing the muscles in his arms and stomach, stripping his mind of everything but the picture of the title page of the first volume of Rowe. Then he shuddered in a strange ecstasy of terror as the familiar feeling crept over him, and he felt his feet moving, and his right hand rising to touch a brown volume in the middle of a brown shelf. He opened it to the title page that corresponded to the one impressed upon his mind.
He closed the book again and clutched it to his heart, sobbing suddenly, as he visualized Rhoda’s pale, warning face.
“I’m sorry!” he cried aloud. “I can’t!”
He replaced the book on the shelf and returned to the center of the room just as the double doors opened and Reston appeared, the curious faces of the others crowding behind him.
“Maybe it’s the spirit’s night off,” Reston said in a kindly tone, when he saw that his guest was empty-handed.
Marvin simply shook his head, and then his host noticed his tear-stained eyes.
“I say, old man, you do take it hard!” he exclaimed. He turned to the others and waved them back. Then he closed the doors quickly and hurried to the shelf that Marvin had just visited to pluck forth the little volume.
“Please forgive the atrocious bad taste of the whole wretched incident,” he begged as he handed it to Marvin. “Of course I meant to give it to you anyway. If you’ll do me the honor of accepting it, it will help me to believe that you have not too much resented what has happened tonight.”
But Marvin pushed the treasured gift away. “I’m not worthy of it!” he groaned. “I’m not worthy of him.”
And then, to the anguished embarrassment of his genial host, he fell on his knees, there on the carpet in the middle of the library, and sobbed with the abandonment of a despairing child.