The Reader
BY J. C. SQUIRE. TENS of thousands of people a year use the British] Museum Reading Room. Of these many are casual droppers-in who come once with a day-ticket to look up a few references, or who remember at rare inter- vals that everything they want is there ; and amongst these there are persons of all ages and stations, even beautiful young women and ruddy-faced, smartly. dressed young men. But at the heart of the changing multitude there is a large number of regular readers, who go there day after day, year after year, sometimes for a whole generation of years. Trade, occupation or hobby takes them there : they look up pedigrees, or compile historical works which are published under other people's names, or they are engaged on huge mono- graphs which they will never finish, or they are deter- mined to read everything that ever was published about the Assyrian Empire, or they are interested in Arms and Armour. Many of them appear as soon as the Museum opens and stay until the time for darkening comes, and the endless books are left to one another's company. Some, poor, dowdy old women, old white- bearded men to whom silence and self-sufficiency have become second nature, come and go, fetch their books, carry them back, fetch more, return them and shuffle away at the day's end to their un'maginable homes without ever speaking to or apparently seeing even their most habitual neighbours. Others are more observant and with time grow cordial, waiting each morning to greet with a smile the old acquaintance whose line of inquiry they may know but whose name they never think of asking. Some make friends there : the silent aisles of that vast whispering room, with its tall tiers of book-galleries and its long radiating spokes of black desks, pen racks, tomes and bent heads, its shuffling students, its quiet ring of officials in the middle, its austerity, its gravity, its air heavy with reminders of the passage of time and the incessant advance of all- obliterating death, have even led to honeymoons and country cottages.
In the years 1908 and 1909 I also was a settled inhabi- tant of that peaceful if slightly depressing place, familiar with the diffused, sober; :light and subdued swishes, rustles, scratches, thumps, footfalls, coughs and hoarse mumbles which are characteristic of it. I was young and engaged on a historical work ingeniously, if too pic- turesquely, compiled from the writings of wiser and older men who had spent very much more time grubbing in • museums, amongst the volumes of still more numerous predecessors, than I ever intended to spend. And, being young, and being also curious about the types and given to fanciful conjectures about strangers, I wasted a good deal of time observing those around me and sitting next me, bending over the heavy volumes of catalogue, passing to and fro, in and out of the swing doors. After a few months I knew many by sight and some to speak to. Of the oddities, the very tall, or fat, or dirty, or cadaverous, or -shaggy, or strangely dressed, I was sure I knew the face of every one. Those with whom I made friends were more ordinary.
There was a man of middle age, spectacled and mous- tached, quietly and decently dressed, who for a long time sat at K. 18 desk, which was next to K. 12, always mine when I could get it. He always had a heap of books of heraldry in front of him, and copied names, dates and blazons very neatly into small exercise-books. He was shy, and it took, us a long time to get beyond a nod at meeting and parting. But in the end we fell into the habit of going out together and talking until we reached the gates. Usually our talk was about his subject, and he once told me a very strange thing about the history of a very well-known family. His name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
A student whom I got to know better was an Indian, a tall, rather good-looking, amber-skinned Bengali, who had a pleasant smile, soft, brown, dreaming eyes, and a melodiously twittering voice, and who spent his time mastering the dreariest kind of railway economics. He came several times to my rooms, drank coffee, ate bananas (his one ardent passion) and told me all about his family and home and hopes and something about his opinions. I went once to dine with him in a Woburn Place boarding- house, full of spinsters, medical students, aspidistras, paper fans and assorted saucers. His name, if I could remember it, I should not be able to spell.
And there was an extraordinarily pleasant young woman. It began with my helping her lift one of those very bulky catalogues ; it continued with my pretending to be looking for the very same obscure entry as herself, the most minor of Elizabethan poets. The coincidence was certainly remarkable ; we couldn't help observing the fact when we next met in the passage ; and one day we reached the steps together, and made such sym- pathetic remarks about the ceaselessly weaving mur- muring pigeons at the top of the steps that we naturally went to the same shop for tea, and fairly sparkled with excitement over our favourite Elizabethan lyrics. This became almost a habit afterwards. Her name is neither here nor there.
There was also in the Reading Room, almost every day, all that time, another man who looked rather ordinary. He was a neat little man, short and slight, in comfortable quiet clothes, looking like a very respectable Continental shopkeeper. Continental, certainly : there was something distinctly foreign about him. Not more than early middle-aged, he had gone bald early, and his thin, reddish-brown hair had receded to his temples. He had a moustache, and a goatee, but the, foreign appear- ance was chiefly given by the high cheek-bones and the little slanting slits of eyes. "Pig-like" is the first word that comes to hand ; but it is wrong. There was nothing coarse about those eyes ; they were intent and direct, and occasionally there came into them a metallic twinkle of good-tempered mockery. He spoke to few : when he did speak it was with an easy courtesy.
This man, who had spent most of his life abroad, had been trained for the Bar. At the Museum, where he was the most regular of attendants, he read very persistently. His principal study was sociology, economic theory, and the philosophy of history ; but he read good novels as well, and he occasionally perused, with apparent pleasure, volumes dealing with the shooting of game. Every evening, when his day's reading was over, he picked up his note-books and walked back to the rooms in where he lived with his wife. Those who visited him there said that everything was extremely tidy and clean. The couple were poor, but not oppressively so. The allowance he received for prosecuting his studies and occasionally producing a small political paper, was, he said, ample for their needs, which were few.
Some years later a friend of mine met him at an evening party in Geneva. It was a very voluble party, but the little man listened, without doing more than smile, the whole evening. My friend walked away with him, and remembered later that in six words, which seemed so boastful as to suggest that he was jesting, he Precisely forecast his own destiny.
• Later he emerged from a great turmoil in which myriads were butchered to be virtual autocrat of a vast empire. His reading of history stood him in good stead; and at intervals he enjoyed a little game shooting.
To-day his name is known, for execration or reverence, over the whole world. From end to end of Russia his portrait hangs, where once was the ikon, in millions of homes. His mausoleum stands in the Red Square at Moscow. Within it there is a glass coffin and he lies embalmed in it, looking just as he used to look in the Museum, just as quiet, though older and rather balder and a little more seamed. By day an endless file of wor- shipping peasants goes by the glass case and stares at the wonder of this dead man, who will be a legend for all the ages. Through the darkest and bitterest of 'nights silent, uniformed sentries, with bayonets pointing aloft, stand at guard round the crystal coffin.
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