At last they reached a closed door upon which Mr. Gedeon knocked tentatively.
“Oui?” said a female voice.
“Madame, vous avez un visiteur,” said Mr. Gedeon.
“Bien. Entrez, s’il vous plaît.”
Mr. Gedeon opened the door, and there was the woman whom Mr. Berger had watched throw herself beneath the wheels of a train, and whose life he felt that he had subsequently saved, sort of. She was wearing a simple black dress, perhaps even the very one that had so captivated Kitty in the novel, her curly hair in disarray, and a string of pearls hanging around her firm neck. She seemed startled at first to see him, and he knew that she recalled his face.
Mr. Berger’s French was rusty, but he managed to dredge up a little from memory.
“Madame, je m’appelle Monsieur Berger, et je suis enchanté de vous rencontrer.”
“Non,” said Anna after a short pause, “tout le plaisir est pour moi, Monsieur Berger. Vous vous assiérez, s’il vous plaît.”
He took a seat, and a polite conversation commenced. Mr. Berger explained, in the most delicate terms, that he had been a witness to her earlier encounter with the train, and it had haunted him. Anna appeared most distressed and apologized profusely for any trouble that she might have caused him, but Mr. Berger waved it away as purely minor and stressed that he was more concerned for her than for himself. Naturally, he said, when he saw her making a second attempt—if attempt was the right word for an act that had been so successful the first time around—he had felt compelled to intervene.
After some initial hesitancy, their conversation grew easier. At some point Mr. Gedeon arrived with fresh tea and some more cake, but they barely noticed him. Mr. Berger found much of his French returning, but Anna, having spent so long in the environs of the library, also had a good command of English. They spoke together long into the night, until at last Mr. Berger noticed the hour and apologized for keeping Anna up so late. She replied that she had enjoyed his company, and she slept little anyway. He kissed her hand and begged leave to return the next day, and she gave her permission willingly.
Mr. Berger found his way back to the library without too much trouble, apart from an attempt by Fagin to steal his wallet, which the old reprobate put down to habit and nothing more. When he reached Mr. Gedeon’s living quarters, he discovered the librarian dozing in an armchair. He woke him gently, and Mr. Gedeon opened the front door to let him out.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Berger, as he stood on the doorstep, “I should very much like to return tomorrow to speak with you, and Anna, if that wouldn’t be too much of an imposition.”
“It wouldn’t be an imposition at all,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Just knock on the glass. I’ll be here.”
With that the door was closed, and Mr. Berger, feeling both more confused and more elated than he had in all his life, returned to his cottage and slept a deep, dreamless sleep.
XII
The next morning, once he had washed and breakfasted, Mr. Berger returned to the Caxton Library. He brought with him some fresh pastries that he had bought in the local bakery in order to replenish Mr. Gedeon’s supplies, and a book of Russian poetry in translation of which he was unusually fond, but which he now desired to present to Anna. Making sure that he was not being observed, he took the lane that led to the library and knocked on the glass. He was briefly concerned that Mr. Gedeon might overnight have spirited away the contents of the premises—books, characters, and all—fearful that the discovery by Mr. Berger of the library’s true nature might bring some trouble upon them, but the old gentleman opened the door to Mr. Berger’s knock on the glass and seemed very pleased to see him.
“Will you take some tea?” asked Mr. Gedeon, and Mr. Berger agreed, even though he had already had tea at breakfast and was anxious to return to Anna. Still, he had questions for Mr. Gedeon, particularly pertaining to the lady.
“Why does she do it?” he asked, as he and Mr. Gedeon shared an apple scone.
“Do what?” said Mr. Gedeon. “Oh, you mean throw herself under trains?”
He picked a crumb from his waistcoat and put it on his plate.
“First of all, I should say that she doesn’t make a habit of it,” said Mr. Gedeon. “In all the years that I’ve been here, she’s done it no more than a dozen times. Admittedly, the incidents have been growing more frequent, and I have spoken to her about them in an effort to find some way to help, but she doesn’t seem to know herself why she feels compelled to relive her final moments in the book. We have other characters that return to their fates—just about all of our Thomas Hardy characters appear obsessed by them—but she’s the only one who re-enacts her end. I can only give you my thoughts on the matter, and I’d say this: she’s the titular character, and her life is so tragic, her fate so awful, that it could mean both are imprinted upon the reader, and herself, in a particularly deep and resonant way. It’s in the quality of the writing. It’s in the book. Books have power. You must understand that now. It’s why we keep all of these first editions so carefully. The fate of characters is set forever in those volumes. There’s a link between those editions and the characters that arrived here with them.”
He shifted in his chair, and pursed his lips.
“I’ll share something with you, Mr. Berger, something that I’ve never shared with anyone before,” he said. “Some years ago, we had a leak in the roof. It wasn’t a big one, but they don’t need to be big, do they? A little water dripping for hours and hours can do a great deal of damage, and it wasn’t until I got back from the picture house in Moreham that I saw what had happened. You see, before I left I’d set aside our manuscript copies of Alice in Wonderland and Moby-Dick.”
“Moby-Dick?” said Mr. Berger. “I wasn’t aware that there were any extant manuscripts of Moby-Dick.”
“It’s an unusual one, I’ll admit,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Somehow it’s all tied up with confusion between the American and British first editions. The American edition, by Harper & Brothers, was set from the manuscript, and the British edition, by Bentley’s, was in turn set from the American proofs, and there are some six hundred differences in wording between the two editions. But in 1851, while Melville was working on the British edition based on proofs that he himself had paid to be set and plated before an American publisher had signed an agreement, he was also still writing some of the later parts of the book, and in addition he took the opportunity to rewrite sections that had already been set for America. So which is the edition that the library should store: the American, based on the original manuscript, or the British, based not on the manuscript but on a subsequent rewrite? The decision made by the Trust was to acquire the British edition and, just to be on the safe side, the manuscript. When Captain Ahab arrived at the library, both editions arrived with him.”
“And the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland? I understood that to be in the collection of the British Museum.”
“Some sleight of hand there, I believe,” said Mr. Gedeon. “You may recall that the Reverend Dodgson gave the original ninety-page manuscript to Alice Liddell, but she was forced to sell it in order to pay death duties following her husband’s demise in 1928. Sotheby’s sold it on her behalf, suggesting a reserve of four thousand pounds. It went, of course, for almost four times that amount, to an American bidder. At that point, the Trust stepped in, and a similar manuscript copy was substituted and sent to the United States.”
“So the British Museum now holds a fake?”
“Not a fake, but a later copy, made by Dodgson’s hand at the instigation of an agent of the Trust. In those days, the Trust was always thinking ahead, and I’ve tried to keep up that tradition. I’ve always got an eye out for a book or character that may be taking off.
“So the Trust was very keen to have Dodgson’s original Alice: so many iconic characters, you see, and then there were the illustrations, too. It’s an extremely powerful manuscript.
“But all of this is beside the point. Both of t
he manuscripts needed a bit of attention—just a careful clean to remove any dust or other media with a little polyester film. Well, I almost cried when I returned to the library. Some of the water from the ceiling had fallen on the manuscripts: just drops, nothing more, but enough to send a little of the ink from Moby-Dick onto a page of the Alice manuscript.”
“And what happened?” asked Mr. Berger.
“For one day, in all extant copies of Alice in Wonderland, there was a whale at the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” said Mr. Gedeon solemnly.
“What? I don’t remember that.”
“Nobody does, nobody but I. I worked all day to clean the relevant section, and gradually removed all traces of Melville’s ink. Alice in Wonderland went back to the way it was before, but for that day every copy of the book, and all critical commentaries on it, noted the presence of a white whale at the tea party.”
“Good grief! So the books can be changed?”
“Only the copies contained in the library’s collection, and they in turn affect all others. This is not just a library, Mr. Berger: it’s the ur-library. It has to do with the rarity of the books in its collection and their links to the characters. That’s why we’re so careful with them. We have to be. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on the reader. But the books here are special. They’re the books from which all later copies came. I tell you, Mr. Berger, not a day goes by in this place that doesn’t bring me one surprise or another, and that’s the truth.”
But Mr. Berger was no longer listening. He was thinking again of Anna and the awfulness of those final moments as the train approached, of her fear and her pain, and how she seemed doomed to repeat them because of the power of the book that bore her name.
But the contents of the books were not fixed. They were open not only to differing interpretations, but also to actual transformation.
Fates could be altered.
XIII
Mr. Berger did not act instantly. He had never considered himself a duplicitous individual, and he tried to tell himself that his actions in gaining Mr. Gedeon’s confidence were as much to do with his enjoyment of that gentleman’s company, and his fascination with the Caxton, as with any desire he might have harbored to save Anna Karenina from further fatal encounters with locomotives.
There was more than a grain of truth to this. Mr. Berger did enjoy spending time with Mr. Gedeon, for the librarian was a vast repository of information about the library and the history of his predecessors. Similarly, no bibliophile could fail to be entranced by the library’s inventory, and each day among its stacks brought new treasures to light, some of which had been acquired purely for their rarity value rather than because of any particular character link: annotated manuscripts dating back to the birth of the printed word, including poetical works by Donne, Marvell, and Spenser; not one but two copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, one of them belonging to Edward Knight himself, the book-holder of the King’s Men and the presumed proofreader of the manuscript sources for the Folio, and containing his handwritten corrections to the errors that had crept into his particular edition, for the Folio was still being proofread during the printing of the book, and there were variances between individual copies; and what Mr. Berger suspected might well be notes, in Dickens’s own hand, for the later, uncompleted chapters of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
This latter artifact was discovered by Mr. Berger in an uncatalogued file that also contained an abandoned version of the final chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which Gatsby, not Daisy, is behind the wheel when Myrtle is killed. Mr. Berger had glimpsed Gatsby briefly on his way to visit Anna Karenina. By one of the miracles of the library, Gatsby’s quarters appeared to consist of a pool house and a swimming pool, although the pool was made marginally less welcoming by the presence in it of a deflated, bloodstained mattress.
The sight of Gatsby, who was pleasant but haunted, and the discovery of an alternate ending to the book to which Gatsby, like Anna, had lent his name, caused Mr. Berger to wonder what might have happened had Fitzgerald published the version held by the Caxton instead of the book that eventually appeared, in which Daisy is driving the car on that fateful night. Would it have altered Gatsby’s eventual fate? Probably not, he decided: there would still have been a bloodstained mattress in the swimming pool, but Gatsby’s end would have been rendered less tragic, and less noble.
But the fact that he could even think in this way about endings that might have been confirmed in him the belief that Anna’s fate might be recast, and so it was that he began to spend more and more time in the section devoted to Tolstoy’s works, familiarizing himself with the history of Anna Karenina. His researches revealed that even this novel, described as “flawless” by both Dostoevsky and Nabokov, presented problems when it came to its earliest appearance. While it was originally published in installments in the Russian Messenger periodical from 1873 onward, an editorial dispute over the final part of the story meant that it did not appear in its complete form until the first publication of the work as a book in 1878. The library held both the periodical version and the Russian first edition, but Mr. Berger’s knowledge of Russian was limited, to put it mildly, and he didn’t think that it would be a good idea to go messing around with the book in its original language. He decided that the library’s first English-language edition, published by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. of New York in 1886, would probably be sufficient for his needs.
The weeks and months went by, but still he did not act. Not only was he afraid to put in place a plan that involved tinkering with one of the greatest works of literature in any language, but Mr. Gedeon was a perpetual presence in the library. He had not yet entrusted Mr. Berger with his own key, and still kept a careful eye on his visitor. Meanwhile, Mr. Berger noticed that Anna was becoming increasingly agitated, and in the middle of their discussions of books and music, or their occasional games of whist or poker, she would grow suddenly distant and whisper the names of her children or her lover. She was also, he thought, taking an unhealthy interest in certain railway timetables.
Finally, fate presented him with the opportunity he had been seeking. Mr. Gedeon’s brother in Bootle was taken seriously ill, and his departure from this earth was said to be imminent. Mr. Gedeon was forced to leave in a hurry if he was to see his brother again before he passed away and, with only the faintest of hesitations, he entrusted the care of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository to Mr. Berger. He left Mr. Berger with the keys, and the number of Mr. Gedeon’s sister-in-law in Bootle in case of emergencies, then rushed off to catch the last evening train north.
Alone for the first time in the library, Mr. Berger opened the suitcase that he had packed upon receiving the summons from Mr. Gedeon. He removed from it a bottle of brandy and his favorite fountain pen. He poured himself a large snifter of the brandy—larger than was probably advisable, he would later accept—and retrieved the Crowell edition of Anna Karenina from its shelf. He laid it on Mr. Gedeon’s desk and turned to the relevant section. He took a sip of brandy, then another, and another. He was, after all, about to alter one of the treasures of nineteenth-century literature, so a stiff drink seemed like a very good idea.
He looked at the glass. It was now almost empty. He refilled it, took a large strengthening swig, and uncapped his pen. He offered a silent prayer of apology to the god of letters, and with three swift dashes of his pen removed a single paragraph.
It was done.
He refilled his glass. It had all been easier than expected. He let the ink dry on the Crowell edition, and restored it to its shelf. He was, by now, more than a little tipsy. Another title caught his eye as he returned to the desk: Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, in the first edition by Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., London, 1891.
Mr. Berger had always hated the ending of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Oh well, he thought: in for a penny, in for a
pound.
He took the book from the shelf, stuck it under his arm, and was soon happily at work on Chapters LVIII and LIX. He worked all through the night, and by the time he fell asleep the bottle of brandy was empty, and books surrounded him.
In truth, Mr. Berger had got a little carried away.
XIV
In the history of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository, the brief period that followed Mr. Berger’s “improvements” to great novels and plays is known as the “Confusion,” and has come to be regarded as a lesson in why such experiments should generally be avoided.
The first clue Mr. Gedeon had that something was amiss was when he passed the Liverpool Playhouse on his way to catch the early afternoon train, his brother having miraculously recovered to such an extent that he was threatening to sue his physicians, and discovered that the theater was playing The Comedy of Macbeth. He did a quick double take and immediately sought out the nearest bookshop. There he found a copy of The Comedy of Macbeth, along with a critical commentary labeling it “one of the most troubling of Shakespeare’s later plays, due to its curious mixture of violence and inappropriate humor bordering on early bedroom farce.”
“Good Lord,” said Mr. Gedeon aloud. “What has he done? For that matter, what else has he done?”
Mr. Gedeon thought hard for a time, trying to recall the novels or plays about which Mr. Berger had expressed serious reservations. He seemed to recall Mr. Berger complaining that the ending of A Tale of Two Cities had always made him cry. An examination of a copy of the book in question revealed that it now ended with Sydney Carton being rescued from the guillotine by an airship piloted by the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a footnote advising that this had provided the inspiration for a later series of novels by Baroness Orczy.
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