Gasping, Henchard ran up the stairs, unlocked the apartment door, and burst into the room.
To his dismay he saw that the closet door was open a few inches, and when he flung it wide he saw to his horror that another board had fallen to the floor. The narrow slit between the remaining boards was now twelve inches wide. The fucking bastard had put his eye to the hole and seen Henchard's priceless treasure. Shit!
But now, Christ, he had to get back to the office. There were patients to see, a grim phone call to make.
After that it was perfectly plain what had to be done, and done without delay.
*9*
The great conference had not yet begun, although a few scholars from here and there were already nosing around the Biblioteca Marciana, getting in the way, having to be rescued from the fierce clutches of the official dragon at the door with her insistence on some reason why they should be admitted, people of the exalted stature of the Herr-Direktor of the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna, two scholars from the Uffizi, two more from the Morgan Library in New York, and the curator of early printed books in Chicago's Newberry Library.
These august visitors kept turning up, much too soon, while preparations were still frantically in progress. There they would be, eminently important people cooling their heels in the entry of the Marciana under the dark suspicious gaze of the dragon until Sam could be summoned. And then he would have to come downstairs to apologize in person, and spend the rest of the day taking them to lunch and showing them around, and explaining about the water slipping over the stone banks of the canals at certain times of day.
"Oh, no matter," exclaimed the man from the Houghton Library at Harvard. "After all, I spend half my time in swamps, studying the flora and fauna."
"And surely this is nothing!" said the woman from the British Museum. "I was expecting Noah's Flood!"
"Should we start pairing off?" joked the director of the Fitzwilliam. "Two camels, two giraffes, two students of early printed books?" He winked at the woman from the British Museum, but she pursed her mouth.
And therefore Sam was harried and worried, but Homer Kelly basked in happiness. He adored libraries, any library, from a closet full of books in a rural town hall to the vast collections of Widener Library in Harvard Yard. To Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand. At least that was Homer's opinion. This library too was holy ground.
And he was helping! Sam had drafted Homer to fetch and carry. He was permitted to enter the sacred storage vault and extract one priceless volume after another and carry it up through a private passage into the magnificent reading room, the Sala della Libreria.
This reading room was not like the workaday one downstairs, marvelous as that chamber might be. It was a masterpiece of the Venetian High Renaissance, every inch of it decorated by Venetian artists and craftsmen. Here, surrounded by glory upon glory, Homer Kelly and Sam's other assistants unwrapped the beautiful volumes from the bubble envelopes that protected them against woodworm.
With reverent hands Homer helped place them upright in the display cases. Then Sam Bell himself walked up and down, choosing the pages to be held open with satin ribbons.
When the work was done, Homer spent an hour ogling the elegant pages, trying to read the Latin names. He could guess at Sallust's Catiline, which was adorned with floating cherubs, but Sam had to help him with the Greek titles, Ptolemy's Geography and the Epistles of Paul.
"How many books did Cardinal Bessarion have altogether?" said Homer, gazing at the foliated initials of a Latin Livy.
"Oh, thousands. That's why the library had to be built to house them." Sam took Homer's arm and led him to a case across the aisle. Leaning over it, he breathed a reverent mist on the glass. "Of course you're aware, Homer, that the printing press of Aldus Manutius was one of the first in Venice. This is his masterpiece, The Dream of Poliphilius. I think it's the most beautiful book ever printed."
Homer was six feet six inches tall, his beard was gray and bushy, and he was fifty years old, but he wanted to weep like a child. His wife Mary sometimes complained about the way he was forever being hooked by some new obsession. The man was incapable of being bored by anything human, nor by any branch of learning, no matter how feeble his understanding. Now he was overwhelmed with sentimental awe, and he made a gulping sound in his throat.
Sam clapped him on the back. "Come on. Facciamo uno spuntino. I've got a bottle of Prosecco in my office. I'll just make sure there aren't any dignitaries with hurt feelings swarming around downstairs."