The Return of Don Quixote by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Author:Gilbert Keith Chesterton [Chesterton, Gilbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_classic
Publisher: Dodd, Mead & Company
Published: 1927-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER XI

THE LUNACY OF THE LIBRARIAN

Far away in Seawood Abbey the great performance of “Blondel the Troubadour” was over. It had been not only a success but a sensation. After it had been performed twice on successive afternoons, a sort of special encore performance had been given comparatively early on the following morning, for the gratification of the school-children and others; and Julian Archer was finally putting off his armour with an air of some weariness and relief. Some of the more malicious said his fatigue was partly due to the fact that he himself had not been the sensation.

“So that’s over,” he said to Michael Herne who was standing beside him, still in the romantic green rags of the Outlaw King. “I’m off to get into some comfortable togs. Thank the Lord we shan’t have to wear these again.”

“I suppose not,” said Herne and looked down at his own long green legs in a sort of daze, rather as if he had never seen his legs before. “I suppose we shall never wear them again.”

He remained standing thus for a moment; then as Archer darted back to his own dressing room, the librarian slowly followed him and betook himself to his own apartments adjoining the library.

One other person remained as if stunned with thought, though the performance had long been over. And that was the writer of the play; who did not feel in the least as if she had written it. Olive Ashley felt as if she had merely struck a match at midnight and it had burst and broadened into the unearthly splendours of the midnight sun. She felt as if she had painted one of her gold and crimson angels and the painted face had spoken, and spoken terrible things. For the eccentric librarian, turned for an hour into a pantomime king, might have been possessed of a devil. Only the devil had been a little like the gold and crimson angel. Something seemed to come pouring out of him that nobody had ever thought was in him; and which the poet could not claim to have put in him. He seemed to her to span and take in his stride all the abysses and the heights known to the secret humility of the artist. She did not seem to be hearing the verses she had written. They sounded like the verses she would have liked to have written. She had not only excitement but expectation. For he had the power of making each line seem greater than the last; and yet they were only her own pretty tolerable verses. The moment which glowed in her memory, and in that of many much less sensitive, was that in which the King, who had been captured as an outlaw, refused the offer of his own crown and declared that in a world of wicked princes he preferred the wandering life of the woods.

Shall I who sing with the high tree-tops at morning

Sink to be Austria;

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