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Mr Collopy had risen and was at the press in search of his crock and glass. Fortified with them, he sat down again.

–We’ll see what’s in them all in good time, he announced sternly, and if those books are dirty books, lascivious peregrinations on the fringes of filthy indecency, cloacal spewings in the face of Providence, with pictures of prostitutes in their pelts, then out of this house they will go and their owner along with them. You can tell him that if you see him first. And I would get Father Fahrt to exorcise all fiendish contaminations in this kitchen and bless the whole establishment. Do you hear me?

–Yes, I hear.

–Where is he now?

–I don’t know. He is a very busy man. Perhaps he is at confession.

–The what was that?

–He might be seeing the clergy on some abstruse theological point.

–Well, I’ll abstruse him if he is up to any tricks because this is a God-fearing house.

I sat down to attack my loathsome homework with the idea of being free at eight o’clock so that I could meet a few of the lads for a game of cards. Mr Collopy sat down quietly sipping his whiskey and gazing at the glare of the fire.

It was about eleven when I got home that night, to find no trace of Mr Collopy nor the piled boxes. Next morning I learnt that Mr Collopy had gone to bed early and the brother, arriving home about ten, went out again to summon Mr Hanafin to assist him in getting the boxes up to his office. No doubt the reward was a handsome tip, though a soiled glass in the sink suggested that further recompense from the crock had been sought by either Mr Hanafin or the brother himself. I warned the latter, before I set off for school, of Mr Collopy’s dire suspicions about the books and the threats to fire him out of the house. Was Cervantes an immoral writer?

–No, the brother said grimly, but I won’t be long here in any case. I think I know how to fix the oul divil. Have a look at these books.

They were thick octavo volumes of real beauty in an old-fashioned way, and there were many clear pictures of the woodcut kind. If only as an adornment to bookshelves, they were surely good value for six and sixpence.

Later in the day the brother cunningly inscribed a dedication to Mr Collopy in each volume and ceremoniously presented them in the kitchen.

–At first, he told me, he was mollified, then he was delighted and said I had very true taste. Cervantes, he said, was the Aubrey de Vere of Spain. His Don Quixote was an immortal masterpiece of the classics, clearly inspired by Almighty God. He told me not to fail to send a copy to Father Fahrt. I had to laugh. There’s a pair of humbugs in it. Can you give me a hand to do some packing? I have bought a load of brown paper.

I had to, of course.

It was a peculiarity of the brother never to stop in his tracks or rest on his oars. In a matter of days he was back at work in his private mine, the National Library.

After some weeks he asked my opinion of three manuscripts he had compiled for issue as small books by the Simplex Nature Press. The first was the ‘Odes and Epodes of Horace done into English Prose by Dr Calvin Knottersley, D.Litt.(Oxon)’; the second was ‘Clinical Notes on Pott’s Fracture, by Ernest George Maude, M.D., F.R.C.S.’; and the third was ‘Swimming and Diving. A Manly and Noble Art, by Lew Paterson’. It was clear that these compositions were other people’s work rehashed but I offered no comment other than a warning of the folly of making Dr Maude a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. A register of such Fellows was in existence, and somebody was bound to check.

–How do you know there isn’t a Fellow named Maude? the brother asked.

–So much the worse if there is, I answered.

But I noticed later that the doctor had lost that honour.

10

IT was a vile night as we sat in the kitchen, Mr Collopy and I. He was slumped at the range in his battered arm-chair, reading the paper. I was at the table, indolently toying with school exercises, sometimes pausing to reflect on the possibilities of getting a job. I was really sick of the waste of time known