The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) (4 page)

As Mr. Berger soon discovered, it was no easy business being a detective on a
stakeout. It was all very well for those chaps in books, who could sit in a car
or a restaurant and make observations about the world in a degree of comfort,
especially if they were in Los Angeles or somewhere else with a climate noted
for warmth and sunlight. It was quite another thing to hang around among
dilapidated buildings in a small English town on a cold, damp February day,
hoping that nobody one knew happened by or, worse, some passing busybody didn’t
take it upon himself to phone the police and report a loiterer. Mr. Berger
could just imagine Inspector Carswell smoking another cigarette and concluding
that he now most definitely had some form of lunatic on his hands.

Thankfully, Mr. Berger found a sheltered space in the old
cooperage and chandlery that afforded a view of the end of the laneway through
a collapsed section of wall while allowing him to remain relatively concealed.
He had brought a blanket, a cushion, a flask of tea, some sandwiches and chocolate,
and two books, one of them a John Dickson Carr novel entitled
The Crooked
Hinge
, just to enter into the spirit of the thing, and the other
Our
Mutual Friend
, by Charles Dickens, the only Dickens he had yet to read.
The
Crooked Hinge
turned out to be rather good, if a little fantastical. Then
again, Mr. Berger considered, a tale of witchcraft and automatons was hardly
more outlandish than apparently witnessing the same woman attempt suicide
twice, the first time successfully and the second time less so.

The day passed without incident. There was no activity in
the laneway, the rustle of the odd rat apart. Mr. Berger finished the Dickson
Carr and started the Dickens, which, being the author’s last completed novel,
meant that it was mature Dickens and hence rather difficult by the standards of
Oliver Twist
or
The Pickwick Papers
, requiring considerably more
patience and attention. When the light began to fade, Mr. Berger set aside the
book, unwilling to risk drawing attention by using a torch, and waited another
hour in the hope that darkness might bring with it some activity at Caxton
Library. No illumination showed in the old building, and Mr. Berger
eventually gave up the watch for the night and took himself to the Spotted Frog
for a hot meal and a restorative glass of wine.

His vigil recommenced early the next morning, although he
chose to alternate Dickens with Wodehouse. Once again the day passed with
little excitement, the appearance of a small terrier dog apart. The dog began
yapping at Mr. Berger, who shooed it ineffectually until its owner gave a
shrill whistle from nearby and the dog departed. Still, the day was warmer than
the one before, which was a small blessing: Mr. Berger had woken that morning
with stiff limbs and had determined to wear two overcoats if the new day proved
as chilly as the last.

Darkness started to descend, and with it doubts on the part
of Mr. Berger about the wisdom of his course of action. He couldn’t hang around
laneways indefinitely. It was unseemly. He leaned into a corner and found
himself starting to doze. He dreamed of lights in Caxton Library and a train
that rolled down the laneway, its complement of passengers consisting entirely
of dark-haired ladies carrying small red bags, all of them steeling themselves
for self-destruction. Finally he dreamed of footsteps on gravel and grass, but
when he woke he could still hear the footsteps. Someone was coming. Tentatively
he rose from his resting place and peered at the library. There was a figure on
its doorstep carrying what looked like a carpet bag, and he heard the rattle of
keys.

Instantly Mr. Berger was on his feet. He climbed through the
gap in the wall and emerged into the laneway. An elderly man was standing
before the door of Caxton Library, his key already turning in the lock. He was
shorter than average and wore a long, gray overcoat and a trilby hat with a
white feather in the band. A remarkable silver handlebar moustache adorned his
upper lip. He looked at Mr. Berger with some alarm and hurriedly opened the
door.

“Wait!” said Mr. Berger. “I have to talk to you.”

The old gent was clearly in no mood to talk. The door was
wide-open now, and he was already inside when he realized that he had forgotten
his carpetbag, which remained on the ground. He reached for it, but Mr. Berger
got there at the same time and an unseemly tug-of-war began, with each man
holding on to one of the straps.

“Hand it over!” said the old man.

“No,” said Mr. Berger. “I want to talk with you.”

“You’ll have to make an appointment. You’ll need to
telephone in advance.”

“There’s no number. You’re not listed.”

“Then send a letter.”

“You don’t have a postbox.”

“Look, you must come back tomorrow and ring the bell.”

“There is no bell!” shouted Mr. Berger, his frustration
getting the better of him as his voice jumped an octave. He gave a final hard
yank on the bag and won the struggle, leaving only a handle in the grip of the
old man.

“Oh bother!” said the old man. He looked wistfully at his
bag, which Mr. Berger was clutching to his chest. “I suppose you’d better
come in, then, but you can’t stay long. I’m a very busy man.”

He stepped back, inviting Mr. Berger to enter. Now that the
opportunity had at last presented itself, that worthy gentleman experienced a
twinge of concern. The interior of Caxton Library looked very dark, and who
knew what might be waiting inside? He was throwing himself at the mercy of a
possible madman, armed only with a hostage carpetbag. But he had come this far
in his investigation, and he required an answer of some sort if he was ever to
have peace of mind again. Still holding on to the carpetbag as though it were a
swaddled infant, he stepped into the library.

Lights came on. They were dim, and the illumination they offered had a touch of
jaundice to it, but they revealed lines of shelves stretching off into the
distance, and that peculiar musty smell distinctive to rooms in which books are
aging like fine wines. To his left was an oak counter and behind it cubbyholes
filled with paperwork that appeared not to have been touched in many years, for
a fine film of dust lay over it all. Beyond the counter was an open door, and
through it Mr. Berger could see a small living area with a television and
the edge of a bed in an adjoining room.

The old gent removed his hat and his coat and scarf and hung
them on a hook by the door. Beneath them he was wearing a dark suit of
considerable vintage, a white shirt, and a very wide gray-and-white-striped
tie. He looked rather dapper in a slightly decaying way. He waited patiently
for Mr. Berger to begin, which Mr. Berger duly did.

“Look,” said Mr. Berger, “I won’t have it. I simply won’t.”

“Won’t have what?”

“Women throwing themselves under trains, then coming back
and trying to do it again. It’s just not on. Am I making myself clear?”

The elderly gentleman frowned. He tugged at one end of his
moustache and sighed deeply.

“May I have my bag back, please?” he asked.

Mr. Berger handed it over, and the old man stepped behind
the counter and placed the bag in the living room before returning. By this
time, though, Mr. Berger, in the manner of bibliophiles everywhere, had
begun to examine the contents of the nearest shelf. The shelves were organized
alphabetically, and by chance Mr. Berger had started on the letter
D
. He
discovered an incomplete collection of Dickens’s work, seemingly limited to the
best known of the writer’s works.
Our Mutual Friend
was conspicuously
absent, but
Oliver Twist
was present, as were
David Copperfield
,
A
Tale of Two Cities
,
The
Pickwick Papers
, and a handful of
others. All of the editions looked very old. He took
Oliver Twist
from
the shelf and examined its points. It was bound in brown cloth with gilt
lettering and bore the publisher’s imprint at the foot of the spine. The title
page attributed the work to Boz, not Charles Dickens, indicating a very early
edition, a fact confirmed by the date of publisher and date of publication:
Richard Bentley, London, 1838. Mr. Berger was holding the first edition, first
issue, of the novel.

“Please be careful with that,” said the old gent, who was
hovering nervously nearby, but Mr. Berger had already replaced
Oliver Twist
and was now examining
A Tale of Two Cities
, perhaps his favorite novel
by Dickens: Chapman & Hall, 1859, original red cloth. It was another first
edition.

But it was the volume marked
The
Pickwick Papers
that contained the greatest surprise. It was oversized and contained within it
not a published copy but a manuscript. Mr. Berger knew that most of Dickens’s
manuscripts were held by the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the Forster
Collection, for he had seen them when they were last on display. The rest were
held by the British Library, Wisbech Museum, and the Morgan Library in New
York. Fragments of
The
Pickwick Papers
formed part of the
collection of the New York Public Library, but as far as Mr. Berger was aware,
there was no complete manuscript of the book anywhere.

Except, it seemed, in Caxton Private Lending Library &
Book Depository, of Glossom, England.

“Is it…?” said Mr. Berger. “I mean, can it…?”

The old gentleman gently removed the volume from Mr.
Berger’s hands and placed it back in its place on the shelf.

“Indeed,” said the gentleman.

He was looking at Mr. Berger a little more thoughtfully than
before, as though his visitor’s obvious appreciation for the books had prompted
a reassessment of his probable character.

“It’s in rather good company as well,” he said.

He gestured expansively at the rows of shelves. They
stretched into the gloom, for the yellow lights had not come on in the farther
reaches of the library. There were also doors leading off to the left and
right. They were set into the main walls, but Mr. Berger had seen no doors when
he had first examined the building. They could have been bricked up, but he had
seen no evidence of that either.

“Are they all first editions?” he asked.

“First editions or manuscript copies. First editions are
fine for our purposes, though. Manuscripts are merely a bonus.”

“I should like to look, if you don’t mind,” said Mr. Berger.
“I won’t touch any more of them. I’d just like to see them.”

“Later, perhaps,” said the gent. “You still haven’t told me
why you’re here.”

Mr. Berger swallowed hard. He had not spoken aloud of his
encounters since the unfortunate conversation with Inspector Carswell on that
first night.

“Well,” he said, “I saw a woman commit suicide in front of a
train, and then sometime later I saw her try to do the same thing again, but I
stopped her. I thought she might have come in here. In fact, I’m almost certain
that she did.”

“That is unusual,” said the gent.

“That’s what I thought,” said Mr. Berger.

“And do you have any idea of this woman’s identity?”

“Not exactly,” said Mr. Berger.

“Would you care to speculate?”

“It will seem odd.”

“No doubt.”

“You may think me mad.”

“My dear fellow, we hardly know each other. I wouldn’t dare
to make such a judgment until we were better acquainted.”

Which seemed fair enough to Mr. Berger. He had come this
far; he might as well finish the journey.

“It did strike me that she might be Anna Karenina.” At the
last minute, Mr. Berger hedged his bets. “Or a ghost, although she did
appear remarkably solid for a spirit.”

“She wasn’t a ghost,” said the gent.

“No, I didn’t really believe so. There was the issue of her
substantiality. I suppose you’ll tell me now that she wasn’t Anna Karenina
either.”

The old gent tugged at his moustache again. His face
betrayed his thoughts as he carried on an internal debate with himself.

Finally, he said, “No, in all conscience I could not deny
that she is Anna Karenina.”

Mr. Berger leaned in closer and lowered his voice
significantly. “Is she a loony? You know…someone who thinks that she’s
Anna Karenina?”

“No. You’re the one who thinks that she’s Anna Karenina, but
she
knows
that she’s Anna Karenina.”

“What?” said Mr. Berger, somewhat thrown by the reply. “So
you mean she
is
Anna Karenina? But Anna Karenina is simply a character
in a book by Tolstoy. She isn’t real.”

“But you just told me that she was.”

“No, I told you that the woman I saw
seemed
real.”

“And that you thought she might be Anna Karenina.”

“Yes, but you see, it’s all very well saying that to oneself
or even presenting it as a possibility, but one does so in the hope that a more
rational explanation might present itself.”

“But there isn’t a more rational explanation, is there?”

“There might be,” said Mr. Berger. “I just can’t think of
one at present.”

Mr. Berger was starting to feel light-headed.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” said the old gent.

“Yes,” said Mr. Berger, “I rather think I would.”

They sat in the gentleman’s living room, drinking tea from china cups and
eating some fruitcake that he kept in a tin. A fire had been lit, and a lamp
burned in a corner. The walls were decorated with oils and watercolors, all of
them very fine and very old. The style of a number of them was familiar to Mr.
Berger. He wouldn’t have liked to swear upon it, but he was fairly sure that
there was at least one Turner, a Constable, and two Romneys—a portrait and a
landscape—among their number.

The old gentleman had introduced himself as Mr. Gedeon, and
he had been the librarian at the Caxton for more than forty years. His job, he
informed Mr. Berger, was “to maintain and, as required, increase the
collection; to perform restorative work on the volumes where necessary; and, of
course, to look after the characters.”

It was this last phrase that made Mr. Berger choke slightly
on his tea.

“The characters?” he said.

“The characters,” confirmed Mr. Gedeon.

“What characters?”

“The characters from the novels.”

“You mean they’re alive?”

Mr. Berger was beginning to wonder not only about his own
sanity but that of Mr. Gedeon as well. He felt as though he had wandered into
some strange bibliophilic nightmare. He kept hoping that he would wake up at home
with a headache to find that he had been inhaling gum from one of his own
volumes.

“You saw one of them,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“Well, I saw someone,” said Mr. Berger. “I mean, I’ve seen
chaps dressed up as Napoleon at parties, but I didn’t go home thinking I’d met
Napoleon.”

“We don’t have Napoleon,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“No?”

“No. Only fictional characters here. It gets a little
complicated with Shakespeare, I must admit. That’s caused us some problems. The
rules aren’t hard and fast. If they were, this whole business would run a lot
more smoothly. But then, literature isn’t a matter of rules, is it? Think how
dull it would be if it was, eh?”

Mr. Berger peered into his teacup, as though expecting the
arrangement of the leaves to reveal the truth of things. When they did not, he
put the cup down, clasped his hands, and resigned himself to whatever was to
come.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me about the characters…”

It was, said Mr. Gedeon, all to do with the public. At some
point certain characters became so familiar to readers—and, indeed, to many
nonreaders—that they reached a state of existence independent of the page.

“Take Oliver Twist, for example,” said Mr. Gedeon. “More
people know of Oliver Twist than have ever read the work to which he gave his name.
The same is true for Romeo and Juliet, and Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote.
Mention their names to the even averagely educated man or woman on the street
and, regardless of whether they’ve ever encountered a word of the texts in
question, they’ll be able to tell you that Romeo and Juliet were doomed lovers,
that Robinson Crusoe was marooned on an island, and Don Quixote was involved in
some business with windmills. Similarly, they’ll tell you that Macbeth got
above himself, that Ebenezer Scrooge came right in the end, and that
D’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos were the names of the musketeers.

“Admittedly, there’s a limit to the number of those who
achieve that kind of familiarity. They end up here as a matter of course. But
you’d be surprised by how many people can tell you something of Tristram Shandy
or Tom Jones or Jay Gatsby. I’m not sure where the point of crossover is, to be
perfectly honest. All I know is that at some point a character becomes
sufficiently famous to pop into existence, and when they do so they materialize
in or near Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository. They always
have, ever since the original Mr. Caxton set up the first depository shortly
before his death in 1492. According to the history of the library, he did so
when some of Chaucer’s pilgrims turned up on his doorstep in 1477.”

“Some of them?” said Mr. Berger. “Not all?”

“Nobody remembers all of them,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Caxton
found the Miller, the Reeve, the Knight, the Second Nun, and the Wife of Bath
all arguing in his yard. Once he became convinced that they were not actors or
lunatics, he realized that he had to find somewhere to keep them. He didn’t
want to be accused of sorcery or any other such nonsense, and he had his
enemies: where there are books, there will always be haters of books alongside
the lovers of them.

“So Caxton found a house in the country for them, and this
also served as a library for parts of his own collection. He even established a
means of continuing to fund the library after he was gone, one that continues
to be used to this day. Basically, we mark up what should be marked down and
mark down what should be marked up, and the difference is deposited with the
Trust.”

“I’m not sure that I understand,” said Mr. Berger.

“It’s simple, really. It’s all to do with ha’pennys and
portions of cents or lire, or whatever the currency may be. If, say, a writer
was due to be paid the sum of nine pounds, ten shillings, and sixpence ha’penny
in royalties, the ha’penny would be shaved off and given to us. Similarly, if a
company owes a publisher seventeen pounds, eight shillings, and sevenpence
ha’penny, they’re charged eightpence instead. This goes on all through the
industry, even down to individual books sold. Sometimes we’re dealing in only
fractions of a penny, but when we take them from all round the world and add
them together, it’s more than enough to fund the Trust, maintain the library,
and house the characters here. It’s now so embedded in the system of books and
publishing that nobody even notices anymore.”

Mr. Berger was troubled. He would have had no time for such
accounting chicanery when it came to the Closed Accounts Register. It did make
sense, though.

“And what is the Trust?”

“Oh, the Trust is just a name that’s used for convenience. There
hasn’t been an actual trust in years, or not one on which anyone sits. For all
intents and purposes, this is the Trust. I am the Trust. When I pass on, the
next librarian will be the Trust. There’s not much work to it. I rarely even
have to sign checks.”

While the financial support structure for the library was
all very interesting, Mr. Berger was more interested in the question of the
characters.

“To get back to these characters, they live here?”

“Oh, absolutely. As I explained, they just show up outside
when the time is right. Some are obviously a little confused, but it all
becomes clear to them in the days that follow, and they start settling in. And
when they arrive, so too does a first edition of the relevant work, wrapped in
brown paper and tied with string. We put it on a shelf and keep it nice and
safe. It’s their life story, and it has to be preserved. Their history is fixed
in those pages.”

“What happens with series characters?” asked Mr. Berger.
“Sherlock Holmes, for example? Er, I’m assuming he’s here somewhere.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Gedeon. “We numbered his rooms as
221B, just to make him feel at home. Dr. Watson lives next door. In their case,
I do believe that the library received an entire collection of first editions
of the canonical works.”

“The Conan Doyle books, you mean?”

“Yes. Nothing after Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 actually
counts. It’s the same for all of the iconic characters here. Once the original
creator passes on, then that’s the end of their story as far as we, and they, are
concerned. Books by other authors who take up the characters don’t count. It
would all be unmanageable otherwise. Needless to say, they don’t show up here
until after their creators have died. Until then, they’re still open to
change.”

“I’m finding all of this extremely difficult to take in,”
said Mr. Berger.

“Dear fellow,” said Mr. Gedeon, leaning over and patting Mr.
Berger’s arm reassuringly, “don’t imagine for a moment that you’re the first. I
felt exactly the same way the first time that I came here.”

“How did you come here?”

“I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop,” said Mr. Gedeon.
“He’d been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him
by, and he hadn’t taken any of them. It’s to be expected, I suppose. It’s in
his nature.”

“So what did you do?”

“I got talking to him, although he does tend to soliloquize,
so one has to be patient. Saying it aloud, I suppose it seems nonsensical in
retrospect that I wouldn’t simply have called the police and told them that a
disturbed person who was under the impression he was Hamlet was marooned at the
48B bus stop. But I’ve always loved Shakespeare, you see, and I found the man
at the bus stop quite fascinating. By the time he’d finished speaking, I was
convinced. I brought him back here and restored him to the safe care of the
librarian of the day. That was old Headley, my predecessor. I had a cup of tea
with him, much as we’re doing now, and that was the start of it. When Headley
retired, I took his place. Simple as that.”

It didn’t strike Mr. Berger as very simple at all. It seemed
complicated on a quite cosmic scale.

“Could I…?” Mr. Berger began to say, then stopped. It
struck him as a most extraordinary thing to ask, and he wasn’t sure that he
should.

“See them?” said Mr. Gedeon. “By all means! Best bring your
coat, though. I find it can get a bit chilly back there.”

Mr. Berger did as he was told. He put on his coat and
followed Mr. Gedeon past the shelves, his eyes taking in the titles as he went.
He wanted to touch the books, to take them down and stroke them like cats, but
he controlled the urge. After all, if Mr. Gedeon was to be believed, he was
about to have a far more extraordinary encounter with the world of books.