“These are not spiritualists, although now that you mention it, spirit is of interest to them.”
“Don’t let me die of suspense—what’s the name of this pack?”
“I believe it is the, um, Lyre Club.”
“Liars?” His shoulders shook as he laughed long and loud. “You slay me, Morgan. The majority of Butte is already a liars’ club.”
“No, no, you misconstrue. The meaning in this instance is the stringed instrument that accompanied the words of bards. When Homer smote his lyre, he heard men sing by land and sea, remember?” I drew a breath. “To launch this group, I have been asked to be the guest speaker for a series of sessions.”
“You’re the main attraction? They must be hard up. What are you going to yatter to them about?”
“Versification,” I said, honest enough as far as it went.
“Aren’t there enough bad poets in the world already?”
“You never know where the next bard will derive from, Sandy.”
“If you want to spend your nights making up nursery rhymes, I guess I can’t bring you to your senses.” He looked around at me as though I had lately lost more than my mustache. “If you ask me, you’re going about things all wrong. Why don’t you spend your nights sparking Miss Rellis like a red-blooded human being, instead of preaching verse to some bunch of sissies?”
“Actually, she will be on hand at these meetings.”
“Oho. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Morgan. Make the most of your Homeric opportunity.” Chortling into his beard, he turned back to fondling his latest bound-and-engraved prize.
Rab was lingering near the office doorway when I came out. “Is he going to let you?”
“We have his blessing,” I said moodily.
“I knew you’d make things click. Jared will get word to the others and we’re in business, presto!”
“I can hardly wait,” I said, my mood not at all improved.
“AHA! THERE YOU ARE.”
Dora Sandison made it sound as if I had been hiding from her, when in point of fact she was the one lurking like a lioness at a watering hole as I emerged from the lavatory later that morning.
“Everyone is somewhere, nature’s way of housekeeping,” I responded, skipping back a bit from her overpowering height. “I expect you’re in search of your husband, and I believe I just saw him disappear into the mezzanine stacks. May I escort you to—”
“Not at all,” she crushed that with a smile. “My evening group has a wee problem that is beneath Sandy’s notice.”
“I see. How wee would that be, Mrs. Sandison?”
“Simply a book we are in desperate need of,” she said airily. Her enunciation of the title lacked only a drum roll: The Gilbert and Sullivan Musical Treasury, Complete and Illustrated.
“You’re in luck!” I exulted, really meaning that I was. “If I am not mistaken, such a volume already exists at the reference desk.”
“That is precisely the point,” she said, that sly note coming into her voice. “The book can’t leave the Reading Room. But our meetings are held not there but in the auditorium.” She fixed me with the look I had come to dread. “A downstairs copy of our own is absolutely essential when major questions arise, such as what costumes the three little girls from school wore in the original Shaftesbury production of The Mikado.” Confident that even I could see the justice of that argument, she added, generously: “Storing it would be no problem whatsoever for you. It could fit with the music stands, could it not?”
My mind was whirring with the cost of a fat reference book of that sort, the kind of duplicate expenditure that would send Sandison through the roof. Fortunately, though, there were a lot of Gilberts in the world, and if I slipped merely the author’s last name and a reference like costumery in foreign lands into the general book budget, chances were our mutual bugaboo wouldn’t pay any attention to it.
“Mrs. Sandison, I think I can accommodate you.”
“Good. You haven’t disappointed me yet.” She pursed the smile of one weaned on a pickle, and turned to go.
“Now I have a favor to ask of you,” I halted her.
A pause. “And what would that be?”
“A dual favor, actually. I need to squeeze a new group into the meetings calendar. So, I would like your group to change its meeting night for the next several weeks, and to amalgamate with another group during that period.”
Dora Sandison looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
“Preposterous,” she snorted when she had regained enough breath for it. “We could not possibly—”
“The other group,” I sped on, “is the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle. Your husband rather scoffs at them as junior aesthetes, but just between us, Mrs. Sandison, they would make ideal new adherents to Gilbert and Sullivan. Think of it: maidens and swains, already listening hard for the music that makes a heart go pit-a-pat. You’d be doing them a favor, really.”
The sniff of conspiracy had its effect on her. I swear, her nostrils widened a tiny bit with anticipation as she eyed me. “This might work to everyone’s benefit, am I to understand? Yours included?”
“Your understanding is pitch-perfect.”
She gave me the queen of smiles, as lofty as it was crafty. “You still have not disappointed me.” With that, she swept out of the library.
When I got back to the inventorying, Rabrab looked at me curiously and asked where I had been.
“Reinventing the calendar,” I said, mopping my brow.
“GOOD EVENING, FELLOW LYRISTS.”
Among the upturned faces as I took center stage in the auditorium only a faithful few showed any appreciation of my greeting. Rab sent back a warm conniving smile, and Jared grinned gamely. In the front row Hoop and Griff looked eager for whatever mischief the night might bring; Quinlan’s expression was similarly keen, but with a sardonic edge. Most of the others, union stalwarts coaxed by Jared and his council to represent their neighborhoods, showed curiosity at best, and at worst a variety of misgivings. These hardened miners had sifted into the library basement one by one or in pairs; several had brought their wives, weathered women in dark-dyed dresses usually worn to weddings, wakes, and funerals. Life on the Hill was written in the creased faces staring up at me in my blue serge, and I needed to tap into whatever inspiration I could find, without delay.
“Why the lyre, you may be wondering, as a fitting symbol for our musical quest?” I whirled to the blackboard I had rigged up on Miss Runyon’s story-hour tripod and sketched the flowing curves of the instrument, then chalked in the strings. “Poets and singers of ancient Greece took up the lyre to accompany their recitations, wisely enough. It is a civilized instrument that honors a song’s words without drowning the intonations out.”
“You draw a pretty picture,” Quinlan called out, “but come right down to it, Morgan my man, the thing is only a midget harp. How’s that going to compete with anything in the Little Red Songbook”—in back of him Jared pained up at those words—“where all you have to do is oil your tonsils a little and bawl out the verse?”
“Just the question I was hoping for, Quin. What the lyre gives us is the word we must strive toward.”
There was a waiting silence, which I could tell would not last beyond one more fidget from the audience.
“Lyrical,” I pronounced, and drove the matter home. “The lyrics of the work song for the union cause must sing to the heart as well as the mind.”
A miner with a bristling mustache objected. “What’d be wrong with a song that just out and out gives Anaconda hell?”
“I believe that already exists.” I warbled the first few lines of “The Old Copper Collar” in illustration. “As apt as that may be, it seems to have had no measurable effect on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, do we agree?” Griff looked hurt.
The audience absorbed my performance uncertainly until the Cornish miner from the Muckaroo called out. “Thee speak a good spoke. But what’s th
e first bite of the bun to get this done?”
“Aha! You have just put your tongue to it.” I spun to the blackboard and wrote bun and done. “Rhyme is the mother of song.”
THAT WAS THE OVERTURE, musically speaking, in the quest for a battle hymn for the miners of the Hill.
With the union contingent now regularly showing up, a martial set to their jaws and unpredictable stirrings in their throats, I had to enlist Hoop and Griff to direct traffic in and out of the library; it would not do for top-hatted downtowners to come face-to-face with restive Dublin Gulch and Finntown, for example. (I could just imagine Quinlan at close quarters with a library trustee.) No, at all costs I needed to keep the so-called Lyre Club from being brought to Sandison’s attention by any complainers. Only too well I remembered how he fumed against “taking sides” when the idled miners sought shelter in the library during the work actions. If he ever divined that the crowd of us in the basement were, shall we say, less than legally assembled to generate a rallying song for the union, all he had to do to be rid of us was to summon the authorities. What other choice would he have?
Jail was only one worry. Authoritative in their own way and answering to their own shadowy purposes, there were always the goons.
BUT WHERE WERE THEY?
Jared reported that the pair of them had vanished from the mine gate, replaced by uniformed guards not so apt to be taunted as scabs and bombarded with rocks in the night. Accordingly, I watched the shadows more sharply on my way home from the library in the dark, but the inky shapes at alley mouths and lightless doorways never once materialized into Eel Eyes and Typhoon Tolliver. Which did not put to rest my sense of apprehension. In broad daylight, I was carrying a beautiful matched set of Shakespeare plays to the antiquarian shop for appraisal when I rounded a corner and nearly bumped into a hulking figure with an upraised club. I jumped back, shielding myself and the works of the Bard against a blow from Typhoon, but it was merely a hod carrier transporting bricks into the building. So, maybe the goons were nowhere to be seen, but to my mind that didn’t mean they were not, as the one called Roland had said of me, up to something.
My imagination kept asking: Up to what?
“DO ME A FAVOR, please, Rab,” I felt compelled to ask, when I was sure we would not be overheard in the book stacks as we tackled Tennyson, Thoreau, and Tolstoy. “Just as a hypothetical exercise, mind you, find out from Jared how much granite it takes to withstand dynamite.”
“Mr. Morgan, since when are you such a scaredy-cat?” she scolded. She clucked as if I were one of her more dismaying schoolboys. “Besides, I already checked. The walls of the basement auditorium are three feet thick.”
“RHYTHM.” I turned to the next session of miners and wives sitting immobile as birds on a wire while I paced the stage. “The ebb and rise of sounds, the heartbeat that gives life to the alphabet.”
I paused, which never hurts in building up drama.
“In other words, the vital pattern within each line of a verse. Art imitates nature in this, for we live amid natural rhythms, don’t we? For instance, the pit-pat, pit-pat of rain,” I clapped gently in time with that.
Climatology evidently did not stir this audience. Not even Hoop and Griff in the front row responded with more than stifled yawns.
“Or,” I resorted to, “let us take the example of oceanic sound, the anticipatory swish of the tide coming in”—I illustrated with my elbows out and my hands sweeping grandly to my chest—“and the conclusive hiss of it going out,” my arms spreading wide to imaginary watery horizons.
High tide did not seem to register in Butte. Clearing my throat as though the problem of communication might be there in the windpipe, I tried once more:
“In strictly musical terms, a song can attain a distinctive rhythm with repetition of certain syllables or sets of sounds. An example, please, anyone?”
I had not encountered that many mute faces since trying to explain the Pythagorean theorem in the Marias Coulee schoolroom.
Walking a circle on the stage as if surrounding the problem, I thought out loud for the benefit of the passive gathering:
“I assume many of you have children at home? A show of hands, please.”
A good proportion of the audience admitted to parenthood.
“And all of us here are former children, am I correct?”
An unsettled chuckle went around the room.
“Therefore, let us approach this matter from that younger time. We are fortunate to have with us someone who, I happen to know, excelled in schoolyard serenade. Miss Rellis? Would you come up, please, and demonstrate?”
Rab colored prettily. Beside her, Jared tried to look as though he was not present during this. “You’re too kind, Mr. Morgan,” she made a show of demurring, “I’m badly out of practice.”
“One never forgets one’s specialty. Recess was never complete without it, I have reason to believe.”
“Ooh, that. Do you really want me to?”
“Desperately.”
“You asked for it, then.”
Rab sprang from her seat and paraded up onto the stage. As I had counted on, she showed the admirable zeal of a schoolgirl, but of more interest to this mostly male audience, also the chest and legs of a Ziegfeld chorine. She proceeded to deliver the playground song in a voice as pretty as she was, her hands instinctively hoisting the hem of her dress a trifle at just the right words:
Two little lovebirds sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
First comes love!
Then comes marriage!
Then comes a baby in a baby carriage!
That’s not all! That’s not it!
Now there’s another before they quit!
That’s not it! That’s not all!
Now comes twins, Peter and Paul!
I had no more trouble explaining the vital nature of rhythm.
HECTIC NIGHTS OR NOT, the library went about its daytime business at its own whirligig pace. Rab and I were kept hopping to finish the inventory before she went back to teaching in a few weeks, and on top of that was my never-ending round of chores devised by Sandison. Reaching the end of a typically crammed week, I was somewhat behind in tabulating the most popular books of the past seven days and typing up the list for the Daily Post, and still was slaving away at the checkout slips when I heard footsteps approaching the office at a near trot. Why, just once in his life, couldn’t the courier be less than prompt? Glancing up to say something of the sort, I discovered the speed demon coming in the door was not Skinner, but an even skinnier messenger.
“He’s busy running bets on some fight,” Russian Famine explained nonchalantly. “Said it don’t take any brains to do this kind of thing.”
“Nice to see you, Famine. Make yourself comfortable,” I pointed him to a chair, “I’ll be a little while yet at this.”
Making himself comfortable was the opposite of sitting still, as I should have known. After a bit of trying to put up with his fidgets, I suggested he work off that energy on the back staircase and I’d meet him there. Bouncing up to go, he spun into the doorway and collided with Sandison’s belly. The boy gawked up the slope of body, gasped out a strangled “ ’Scuse me,” and darted into the hallway.
Sandison stared after him. “What the hell now, do you have us taking in orphans?”
“You have just met our current messenger to the Daily Post, Sandy. Butte’s version of winged Mercury.”
“If he was any scrawnier, he’d be transparent. Where’s he off to?”
“Oh, just out among the books. Fam—Wladislaw is interested in higher learning.”
Only barely assuaged, Sandison steamed on into the room, took charge of his chair, and wheeled it around to face me. Lately he seemed even more testy than usual. “Something’s not quite right around here, and for once I don’t just mean the library. You’ve got ears like a donkey when it comes to what’s going on in this town. Catch me up.”
I hesitated. Saying anything about
the rising resolve of the miners’ union might brush too close to the fact of the sessions in the basement. I chose to concentrate on the Wobblies and recited the gossip about the arrival of phantom operatives to poach membership from the miners’ union.
“Outsiders,” Sandison pronounced flatly. “They’re always trouble.” With that, he heaved himself out of the chair and marched over to the stained-glass window to broodily peer out as if watching for trouble to come.
RUSSIAN FAMINE WAS FLYING UP the top steps when I went to the back staircase with the book list for him to deliver to the newspaper office. For a minute I stood watching, not daring to interrupt the dizzying ballet on the stairs. As before, the scissor-thin legs flashed up the steps three and almost four at a time, then straddled the banister and rode gravity zip-zip-zip to the bottom. Reluctantly I called to him after one of these precipitous rides, and, shaking his thatch of hair as if coming awake, he trotted over to me.
“Has anyone ever told you, my young friend, you give new meaning to the word restless?”
“Huh-uh. You’re the only one who talks that way.”
I thought it best to walk him out of the building, lest he run into Sandison again. While we made our way through the standing ranks of books Rab and I had tallied, the turn of season was on my mind, with her impending departure back to the classroom, and, as adults always foolishly do, I asked Famine if he was ready for school to start.
The boy put on a long face. “Flunked is what I shoulda done. Hung on in Miss Rellis’s class. Now I’ll get some old biddy for a teacher.” He sent me a sideward look, his eyes as quick as the rest of him. “I maybe won’t be going to school too much longer anyway. Skinner says I’m in luck, the Hennessy bunch has its eye on me when they do any more hiring.”
That knifed through me. So much for my bright idea of having posted him to the almighty top floor, just for the summer, to watch for any message of a certain sort dispatched by the goons; true to its nature, Anaconda was ready to swallow him up.