Catch as catch can, and every man for himself, the conversation spun on through the night. Only Hector was silent, nodding from time to time and allowing his glass to be filled almost without protest. At five o’clock they went home, Roger to appear at a lecture at nine, Humphrey to sleep till noon, and Hector to greet a class which found him pale, inattentive and apt to desert them while he sought the drinking fountain.

Six

Eight days before the first night of The Tempest the following advertisement appeared in the Salterton evening paper for the last of five successive publications:

And for this fifth appearance the following note was appended to the advertisement:

This addition to the auction notice was printed in no larger type than the rest of the advertisement, but it caught a surprising number of eyes on the Tuesday when it appeared. Anything which concerns a subject dear to us seems to leap from a large page of print. Freddy Webster, who was no careful reader of newspapers, saw it, and snorted like a young warhorse.

“Giving away books!” said she. “But only to preachers! Damn!”

Later that evening she met Solly, who was in the garden wondering, as all directors of outdoor performances of The Tempest must, whether the arrangements for the storm-tossed ship in the first scene of the play would provoke the audience to such derisive laughter that they would rise in a body and demand the return of their money at the gate.

“Yes, I saw it,” he said in answer to her question. “Pretty rotten, confining it to the clergy. Not that I care about Philosophy, or Theology, or even Superior Fiction. But there might just be something tucked away in Miscellaneous which would be lost on the gentlemen of the cloth.”

“Whatever made Valentine do it?”

“Apparently, two or three years ago, the old chap said something, just in passing, about wanting his books dealt with that way. And they’re quite unsaleable, you know. A bookseller wouldn’t give five cents apiece for the lot.”

“Have you seen them, Solly?”

“No; but you know how hard it is to get rid of books. Especially Theology. Nothing changes fashion so quickly as Theology.”

“But there might just be a treasure or two among them.”

“I know.”

“Still, I don’t suppose a preacher would know a really valuable book if he saw one. They’ll go for the concordances and commentaries on the Gospels. Do you suppose Val would let us look through what’s left?”

“Freddy, my innocent poppet, there won’t be anything left. They’ll strip the shelves. Anything free has an irresistible fascination. Free books to preachers will be like free booze to politicians; they’ll scoop the lot, without regard for quality. You mark my words.”

Freddy recognized the truth of what he said. She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines—not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.

Still, she had her pride. She would not beg Valentine to regard her as a member of the clergy for a day; she would not even hang about the house in a hinting manner. She would just drop in, and if the conversation happened to turn upon books, as some scholarly rural dean fingered a rare volume, she would let it be known, subtly, that she was deeply interested in them, and then—well, and then she would see what happened.

With this plan in view she was at the residence of the late Dr Adam Savage at five minutes to ten on the following morning, dismayed to find that an astounding total of two hundred and seventeen clergymen were there before her, waiting impatiently on the lawn. They ranged from canons of the cathedral, in shovel hats and the grey flannels which the more worldly Anglicans affect in summer, through Presbyterians and ministers of the United Church in black coats and Roman collars, to the popes and miracle workers of backstreet sects, dressed in everything under the sun. There was a young priest, a little aloof from the others, who had been instructed by his bishop to bespeak a copy of The Catholic Encyclopaedia which was known to be in the house, for a school library. There were two rabbis, one with a beard and one without, chatting with the uneasy geniality of men who expect shortly to compete in a race for a shelf of books on the Pentateuch. There were High Anglicans with crosses on their watch chains, and low Anglicans with moustaches. There were sixteen Divinity students, not yet ordained, but trying to look sanctified in dark suits. There was a stout man in a hot brown suit, wearing a clerical stock with a wing collar; upon his head sat a jaunty grey hat, in the band of which was fixed a small metal aeroplane; it was impossible to say what he was, but he wore a look of confidence which bespoke an early training in salesmanship. There was a mild man with a pince-nez, who was whispered to be a Christian Science practitioner. There was no representative of the Greek Orthodox, the Syrian or Coptic Churches; otherwise Christianity in its utmost variety was assembled on that lawn.

It was never discovered how clergymen for a radius of fifty miles around Salterton got wind of Dr Savage’s posthumous bounty. The local newspaper took the great assembly of holy men as a tribute to the power of its advertising columns; indeed, as Freddy approached, a press photographer was climbing into a tree to take a picture of the extraordinary sight. However, the orgulous pride of newspapers is widely understood. The gossips of Salterton decided, after several weeks of discussion, that the matter was beyond any rational explanation, but that the Christian Church must be better organized, and more at one on certain matters, than they had thought.