Welcome to the Library of Time! In today’s story, two librarians set out on a quest for the perfect Christmas tree.
“It doesn’t matter,” said I, as Beatrice gazed at the scrubbed and empty floor beneath our front window. “No one else has them here, after all.”
“All the same, I should like one very much.”
Beatrice (being a librarian) has read too much about a great many things. The subject of Christmas trees is almost certainly one of them – and yet – I am very fond of Beatrice, and am often compelled to admit that her fancies find frequent echoes in my own imagination. Moreover, when she has these fancies a wistful look comes across her face, and she knows full well that such looks never fail to weaken my resolve, if I had any to begin with.
“Where will you get it?”
“I don’t know. Are there any forests here?”
“Forests? Do you mean that you intend to find a real tree and cut it down?”
Beatrice shrugged delicately. Beatrice, though she has a clear perception of her wants, is inclined to be vague on the execution thereof.
“Are there any trees in the Library?” I wondered aloud. “We are surrounded by paper, I suppose, but…”
“Miss Brooke has a potted palm at home.”
I bit at my lower lip. “That requires an altogether different climate than that of Christmas trees.”
“Or perhaps there is a forest where people cut down trees and sell them,” Beatrice said.
“Sell Christmas trees? Really?”
“I read it in a book. And moreover,” she said triumphantly, “if it is in a book it is almost certain to be present in the Library.”
As I am a librarian too, I had to admit the truth of her statement, and therefore changed tactics.
“Could we afford it?”
The Library provides its denizens with room and board (after its own peculiar fashion), and a modest wage, in exchange for our work, and our consent to remain within the bounds of the Library for the duration of our employment. The wage is not extravagant, if only for the reason that there is not much need for money in the Library.
Beatrice looked doubtful for the first time at my question.
“If it were a very small tree, perhaps,” she said hopefully. “But I do not want a large one anyway. Just a little one. And some glass balls, I think, and a few candles. Please, Helena. I know you would enjoy it.”
“I, enjoy it?” I said, amused, but she did not look any the less discouraged at my tone. Her countenance shone with the light of hope, and perhaps reflected that of imaginary candles and painted glass birds. So at length I relented, as I always do, for as I said I have the greatest affection for my friend.
“Very well,” I said. “Let us have a Christmas tree. And balls, and candles, and birds, and small animals, and garlands” – for I too, to my chagrin, have read too many books about Christmas trees – “and whatever you’ll think of next to strangle the poor thing with.”
She smiled, and took my hand. We turned to warm our hands at the fire.
“I knew you would say yes.”
“When do I not?” I grumbled, nonetheless pleased. “We’ll go tomorrow morning. It’ll take us long enough, and some trick will have us find a forest of palm trees, before we ever see so much as a glob of myrrh.”
Beatrice laughed. “I should hope not. You can’t abide coco-nuts.”
I shut my eyes briefly. “Be so kind, my dear, as to not remind me.”
. . .
We woke at half-past seven, with the rain coming down lightly and the wind a gentle wail around the chimneys in our street. Accordingly we armed ourselves with umbrellas, thick coats, and sturdy boots, and went forth.
The street we live in is narrow, with grey terraced houses on each side. The houses are weary and thin – some of them, indeed, so thin that one can at times observe faded letters on the bricks, or traces of the gold leaf used on bindings. Whether this is because the houses were at one time books, or whether they have been a part of the library so long that it is as natural for them to have Agnes Grey, A Novel, by Acton Bell written above the front door as it is to have doors at all, no one can say. It rains almost continuously, and the sky is dark as if with thick smoke, though none have ever found the source of it, and the whole street echoes with the noises of a large city we have never seen.
Beatrice and I set off down the pavement, our collars buttoned high. At the end of the street we turned a corner and found ourselves in the atrium of a railway station rising to Gothic heights, echoing with talk. Ladies and gentlemen poured through the station, appearing from between pillars and high arched doorways, boarding the trains which were visible only faintly through the wreathing clouds of steam. A group of children in scarlet coats was coaxed into forming two lines, while three librarians, high above our heads, twined a silver garland around the face of the solemn station clock.
The walls of the station were lined with telephones, each closeted away from its neighbours by elaborately carved screens. To one of these Beatrice and I went, and I lifted up the receiver, from which a cool, automated voice emanated.
“Tertiary Processes of Alchemy has moved two points clockwise, meanwhile Twenty-Fifth Century Imagined Books holds at its last given location. Eighteenth-Century Nocturnally-Conceived Fragments is presently in conjunction in Andromedan Conceptions of the Mechanical Soul. Librarians are advised to allow for a shortened travelling span of three minutes. The centre presently holds at twenty-four points counter-clockwise.”
“Operator,” I said.
“Which designation, please?”
“One-one-eight-six-eight.”
“Connecting.”
The station clock chimed.
“The centre presently holds at twenty-four points counterclockwise,” the automaton’s voice said. “Expect a deviation of negative one to three points within the hour. You are now connected.”
“Operator present.”
“Hello, Laura,” I said, pleased.
“Helena! My dear, don’t you know it’s your day off?”
“O, I know,” I admitted. “But I need your help. Beatrice –”
Laura sighed in a long-suffering manner, though I knew she did not mean it. “What fancy is it now? She allowed you to sleep, last night, one presumes?”
“Quite. I need a tree.”
Laura paused. I heard, over the line, the sound of other operators, and the quiet snap of a pencil.
“Dear me, whatever next? A tree?”
“A Christmas tree. Do you know where one might be found?”
“You know very well,” Laura said in a repressive manner, “that the official navigational lines are not to be used for personal matters unless in case of emergency or other pressing need?”
“I know,” I said. “But what other recourse have I? I’ve never seen a forest, nor a tree.”
“I did, once,” Laura said. She kept silent for a moment, so silent that I feared she had cut off the call. Then, at last, she spoke.
“I suppose you want a live tree?”
“Yes,” said I. “I am in your –”
“I’m afraid I cannot help much. I have never seen a forest here. But there are… rumours of living plants, or rather trees, near Late Nineteenth-Century Dream-Conceived Lyric Poetry.”
“Thank you,” I said fervently. “Most ex-”
“And where that is is very difficult to tell, even on a good day, but as Neo-Victorian Children’s Fantastical Literature will shortly be in radius 5, thirty-three points clockwise, I suggest that you begin there.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
“I won’t have Beatrice driving you mad.” She paused. “Do tell me – that is, if you find it, tell me what it looks like.”
“I shall,” I promised.
“Keep on the windy side of care.” Her voice was replaced by the mechanical one of the general information automata. “24th Century Theological Philosophy is presently moving clockwise by five points. Please stand by for next portal confirmation.”
. . .
Navigation through the Library is a complex endeavour, or sport, or science – it has been called all these things, as well as an art, and there is an entire wing devoted to it, which, like every section in the library, is never in the same place. As far as librarians are concerned, there are two methods of getting where one wants to go. The first is to take advantage of the general information reports, a continuous stream issuing forth from the clock at the very centre of the Library, detailing each shift and peregrination of the collection. This is a method that also takes into account the positioning of the various monitored portals. The second method is to picture (very clearly) where one wishes to go within the bounds of the Library, and then to follow the path of doors that appears. This is a method with varied success, primarily dependent upon the librarian’s strength of mind, and the whims of the Library itself.
We applied the second method in our search, which took us a great deal farther afield than we had ever meant to go – but such is hardly unusual.
“We shall not spend more than half the day,” Beatrice reasoned. “The Neo-Victorian Wings rarely change course; they are most predictable.”
“On that I cannot agree,” said I. “Nothing here is predictable.”
“Even so, I can’t think we will be very long.”
Beatrice is an optimist. I have tried, but it does not suit me. I am of a gloomier cast altogether – and in the end it was I and not she that saw most clearly.
We wandered through vast Tudor palaces lined with shelves, and through long poorly-lit corridors plastered with advertisements, remnants of the Corporate Era of the Library. We found ourselves in narrow side streets whose cobblestones were books, in long, twisting labyrinths, and ill-papered parlours groaning with stacks of ladies’ magazines. We passed through a cathedral whose vaults echoed with poems of sacred and profane love, whose very columns were living books. At noon we entered a city of smoke and blackened bricks, dark factory chimneys spewing forth letters against a grimy sky. Beatrice and I agreed that it looked very much like Birmingham, which we had left in 1867 under the strangest of circumstances, circumstances such as I may one day be empowered to record.
It was long past noon when at last we came upon the threshold of the Neo-Victorians. We became lost in halls with heavy wooden bookcases so high their tops were lost in pink clouds, and went in circles through a great long-corridored house in which all was bare save for the stained glass windows on each wall, each of which contained the text of an entire five-volume novel.
And yet there were no trees here, nor anywhere – not even a potted palm. Nor could we find any suggestion of the section that we sought, and the librarians we met were as bemused as ourselves. Some had heard of Late Nineteenth-Century Dream-Conceived Lyric Poetry (what a convoluted name to describe something so simple, which is only poetry written in dreams, and lost!) but none had ever seen it, nor knew where it might be found. They did, however, offer us sandwiches and tea, which we took gratefully. The sandwiches were poor, but the tea was excellent, as the tea produced by the Library always is.
At length we opened a curiously carved door – covered in writhing whorls and spires – and emerged into a garden, where rows of flower beds and fountains were laid out in a line that stretched as far into the distance as either one of us could see, and on each side the hedges rose up thick and dark and green. The grass was real enough, but the hedges and the flowers were of paper, and the air was perfectly still.
Beatrice, who had brightened for a moment at the sight of green, now begun to despair. Complaining of tiredness, she sat down upon one of the stone benches laid parallel to the hedges, and idly watched a fountain. I approached a rose tree in bloom, upon whose bole was written the words Nocturne for Arabella, and broke off one of the flowers. It lay in my hand like a dead thing, but its petals were a delicate mass of sheet music.
“I do not think we shall ever find it,” Beatrice said.
“Don’t despair,” I said mechanically.
“If there were one surely we should have found it by now. I have never not found a thing I looked for here – not if I wished to find it. We should go back.”
“I will not have you looking like that. You know very well it is not your duty to tell us such things.”
She shut her eyes and tipped her head back against the hedge. It crackled slightly, but bore the weight. “I shouldn’t have convinced you.”
“My dear, if anyone ought to bear the blame for being convinced it is I. Your only mistake was in being convincing.” I approached the bench and took her hand, placing in it the paper rose. She opened her eyes. “Next time, I pray you, do not try so hard.”
She looked down at the rose in wonder. “What is this?”
“Nothing, I suppose. A rose, from a rose-tree, where there are no rose-trees and the Library dreams of them sometimes. Another quarter of an hour, Beatrice. It is not so very long, and we may find something.”
“And then we can go home.”
“And then we will go home. You’ll do it, to oblige me, will you not?”
She smiled, and took the rose, and tucked it into her dress. Then we walked down the length of the garden, peering into flowerbeds and trailing fingers in the fountains.
It was Beatrice who found the door, tucked into the hedge, and cunningly painted with the same pattern of leaves. Its handle was a paper rose. She looked at me before opening it, as if hesitating, half-afraid.
“It cannot be so very much more disappointing than what is on this side,” I pointed out.
“True enough,” she agreed, and opened it.
. . .
We stepped into a world transformed. All around us in the grey late afternoon were tall, bare, spreading – trees, they could not be else; they were the height of a house and chimneys and more, they seemed to be trying to seize the sky. Snow fell thickly, tipping down from under the branches to brush our faces, and the forest floor was a vast sheet of white. I put my hand out, and snow fell into it – four or five impossibly elaborate shapes which remained only long enough to marvel at. I walked forward, and the snow crunched beneath my feet, yet when I bent down I saw an uncounted mass of those same shapes I had held in my hand for a few brief seconds.
“Helena!”
I looked up. Beatrice was far ahead of me; she had already reached the edge of the clearing we stood in. I wish I had clevererer hands, for if I did I might have been able to paint her face – as it is I can only remember it, and the answering joy that coursed through me at the sight.
“Come on!”
“But these are not pine trees!” I said. They were bare-branched and naked. Perhaps somewhere under our feet lay the leaves they had shed in autumn.
“What of it?” Beatrice called. “Are you not coming?”
I shivered as a cluster of snowflakes melted on my neck, but concluded, happily, that I was not unprepared. I took my battered black umbrella out from under my arm and opened it. Dry and somewhat comfortable, for it was still quite cold, I made my way to Beatrice.
Her face was shining and beginning to be rather red, and also she had lost her scarf somewhere, but she leant back and laughed at me as I came trudging along under the umbrella.
“Afraid of a little cold?”
“A little wet,” I said, “But you are happy.”
For answer, her face could hardly contain her smile, and she walked quickly through the snow, here stopping to scoop up a handful, and there staring up intently at the sky. For my part I walked more slowly behind her, gazing up at the trees from under my umbrella. Along their branches were laid thin lines of snow, like frosting spread by an unbearably patient hand, and their roots were distinguishable only as gently swelling humps beneath the layers of white.
I had seen nowhere else in the Library like it. There was no sign of words, or letters, or books, but only trees – and living ones too. I put my hand up against the bark of one, and I swore I could feel the quickening within it, the long slow life that knows its own time.
We walked for what seemed like hours, in the perfect silence of the wood, though the light grew not less as time passed. After a while we saw a darkness ahead of us, that grew larger as we neared, but not the darkness of another door. We emerged into what seemed to be another forest, of what one might call Christmas trees – pine trees, only on a scale far larger than either of us had ever dreamt. These too were covered thickly in snow, and now that we had left the shelter of the deciduous trees, the same snow tried to cover us as thickly. Beatrice’s hair and coat had gone quite white in back, and we stopped every once in a while that she might brush them off.
It was about this time that it began to grow darker, the grey afternoon changing into a pinkish half-twilight, and that Beatrice saw a light in the distance. We pressed towards it eagerly – a light might mean other Librarians, in this strange place. We had not gone far towards it, however, when I thought better of it, and called to Beatrice that perhaps we should turn back, as it seemed to be very far indeed, and who could tell if it meant human habitation or no? But she did not hear me, and I was forced to follow after her.
We reached the source of the light much sooner than I had suspected, and when I saw it I laughed. It was an iron lamppost, its light shining undimmed through polished glass, changing the snow that fell around it to pale gold. I reached out to touch it, and my fingers met cold metal and came away tingling.
“Come on,” Beatrice called impatiently, and I raised my head to find that the lamppost was far from the only source of light here. Not far from where I stood a string had been tied between two trees, and on it hung a row of lanterns. Cautiously, for I could not now see where Beatrice stood, I made my way into the stronger light, tucking my umbrella under my arm.
The lanterns had been hung between other trees in the same manner, so as to create a square inside of a small clearing. A sort of tightly woven wire fence had been strung beneath the lanterns, and against it leant what were, unmistakably, Christmas trees. There were tall trees, small trees, full ones and thin ones, some still intertwined with the ivy that had grown on them while they were still rooted, and some dusted with snow. The scent of myrrh was overpowering.
Beatrice flitted from one to the other, exclaiming, laughing, trying to decide between the merits of this one or that. I myself glanced at one corner of the clearing, where there stood a curious metal vehicle, and in front of it an armchair, upon which a man in a heavy coat reposed at his ease, reading a newspaper. He looked up at me, and nodded in a friendly manner before returning to his paper.
I approached Beatrice, who was presently set on one particular tree of great size, prodigiously full, while becoming distracted by a more modest one opposite, with a small birds’ nest near its tip.
“What is this?” I asked. “A market, or… but there is no one else here, save us.”
“He is selling Christmas trees,” said Beatrice. “That is quite enough for me.”
“Can we afford one? Perhaps we ought to ask…”
“And we will ask, but not now, and what if you do not like the answer? Come help me choose one, I cannot decide alone.”
I entered in to her enthusiasm with a doubtful mind at first, but I soon caught her fever, and was just as eager to discount this tree, or to argue fiercely for the merits of another. We had finally settled on one, and had even begun to move it – myself at the fore, and Beatrice at the rear of the tree, humming O Tannenbaum, and indeed I had begun to lift it, when Beatrice ceased her humming, and said, in a very different tone:
“Helena, come look at this.”
I dropped the front of the tree, and stepped around its bulk.
Beatrice stood bathed in light, but it was not the light of the lanterns, nor of the lamppost. She stood in front of the last of a long line of trees propped against the wire – but this last was not propped, and did not lean; it stood straight in the ground as if still rooted. As I came closer I saw that its needles were formed entirely of paper, of pages of script in inks of all colours, suffused with a gentle, ethereal glow. Still more pages hung from the branches, some loose, some folded into flowers, or stars, or birds. From the branches, at intervals, hung small lanterns, but their light did not come from fire. Inside each lantern was a roll of paper covered in writing, and it burned with a light of its own, yet it produced no heat, and the paper was never consumed.
Beatrice reached out fingers that trembled suddenly, and she opened one of the tiny glass doors. She took the paper inside, unrolled it, and read it aloud.
“I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.”1
“It’s a poetry tree,” I said.
Beatrice nodded without speaking. She returned the piece of paper to its place, where it began to burn once more. The tree was small, perhaps about four feet, but its size meant nothing. It blazed in the imagination like a tower of flame.
“Well?” I said. “Do you not think it beautiful?”
“Indescribably,” she said, very quietly.
I said nothing, for I conceived that she was greatly moved, and did not wish to speak. Her eyes flitted from the tree we had chosen to the poetry tree, and back again.
“I did want a nice tree,” she said at last. “A proper Christmas tree. Green. And fresh, and… real.”
I said nothing, again.
“But you know, don’t you? You know, as well as I do. I can’t. Not with… with this.”
“I know,” I said gently.
“What would anyone give, for a poetry tree? I never thought of such a thing. Only here, I suppose. Only here. I wonder what he’ll ask for it?”
“I can’t tell,” I said honestly.
“I scarcely think we could ever afford such a thing.” But her gaze did not leave the poetry tree, nor did it return to the real one.
So in the end we heaved the real tree back upright against the wire, and lifted up the poetry tree. It was as light as a feather; either one of us could have carried it on our own. We brought it up to the man where he sat, and he looked up at us enquiringly. His face shone when he saw the poetry tree.
“Ah, that one. Truth be told I’d never seen it before I got here, it just seemed to – appear, sort of, in the back of the van. I never meant to stop here, you know. I meant to take a bit of a rest, but I’m afraid I became lost, and ended up here. And a lovely place it is, though rather cold and empty of people. I fancy that lamppost, though. Do you know who put it there?”
“No,” I said. “I cannot say. The tree. What is it – worth? What are you selling it for?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, after a moment, gamely enough though probably rather surprised at my bluntness. “It’s a poetry tree, isn’t it? You’d be librarians, then?”
“Yes,” Beatrice said, rather faintly, to both questions.
The man considered. I began to wonder exactly how much he meant to make us pay, and whether it would have been better never to have come and not set eyes on the tree – for already it seemed like our own.
“Tell you what,” the man said at last. “I don’t want much. I’m not here to make a profit, but it does get cold out there, and a bit lonely sometimes. If you’d be so kind as to pick a poem off the tree and give it to me, I’d consider that more than enough.”
I looked at Beatrice. “Is that acceptable?”
Beatrice nodded.
“All right then,” the man said. “Take your time.”
Beatrice went to the tree. She put out her hand to one lantern, but hesitated, and reached for another, which was in its turn rejected. At last she lifted one off the tree, carefully. She did not look inside, but held the lantern close, and turned to the man, and recited the words on the paper inside.
“This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
“That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav'n's high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside, and here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.”2
“That’ll do,” the man said. “Yes – very well done. That’ll do.”
Beatrice held the lantern out to him, and he took it, smiling, and tucked it away in his coat. And beneath the heavy wool it still shone forth, as though his heart had caught fire, burning in sympathy from its mortal prison.
. . .
We brought the tree home – it was only a matter of finding a door in between two trees, and then a few more doors back, to our own street. We set the tree up in the window, where it blazed forth like a hundred candles, and put the paper rose atop, where it gleamed with a light of its own. Later that night, Beatrice and I turned our chairs away from the fire so that we might watch it.
“I did want a real tree,” Beatrice said.
“I know you did.”
“But I can’t help being a librarian, I suppose. I wonder how long it will take us to read all the poems on the tree?”
“Somehow,” I said, “I don’t think we shall ever quite finish them all.”
So the fire warmed our backs as we watched the tree glow, and I read to Beatrice from the lowest lantern on the smallest branch.
I come from hevin which to tell
The best Nowells that e'er befell
To you thir tythings trew I bring
And I will of them say and sing.
This day to you is born ane child
Of Marie meik and Virgin mild
That bliss it bairn bening and kind
Sall you rejoice baith hart and mind.
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