THIS seems as good a time as any to resume our bibliothecal nook ogling and settle such further Library hash as falls within our purview. The book stacks, especially the newest ones, are threaded with wire mesh partitions. There are few places in the stacks forbidden to wanderers, but many approaches thereto prove impractical, especially up and down certain remote staircases and around the back door of the Hough Room, in which repose the dearest of the Library's holdings. Here the curious may study the "then and later" faces of the Class of '79, photograven in leaded windows, but they must be ingenious to discover the tiny locked vault secreted in this domain.
Directly below the Hough Room repose the archives of the College and alumni writings, as well as Daniel Webster's top hat, the cartridge used in a famous local murder of a half-century or more ago, and the "Yellow File" of scurrilous student publications. In another cache, unguessed at and not to be told, are the "Lock" books, sequestered not so much for their disturbing contents as for the lure they might hold to the casual kleptomaniac.
The building must have, of course, a certain amount of machinery in addition to its elevating and ventilating systems. Deep in its bowels, and guarded by insulated wooden walls, are pumps and tanks and steam coils too stifling to linger with. At another strategic spot is a series of little handles marked "Night" and "Day," and though we, ourselves, have never been able to achieve much with them, it is to be presumed that a clever operator could bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades and cause the morning stars to sing together.
In full view, but usually unnoticed by eager scanners of the Orozco frescoes, is a door that leads to a facinating array of cables and gargantuan fuses and switches. Modern movie goers, acclimated to characters in scanties and space hats manipulating giant rheostats and combolizers, would find this puerile, but to us there is nothing like the appeal of a big three-pole, two-way knife switch that might accomplish things unheard of if it were thrown at the proper moment. An auxiliary power center has lately been installed across the edge of a former store room off the semi-subterranean and definitely aqueous corridor to Sanborn House. Here stand defiant the battery of wetcell batteries that run the quarrelling Library clocks, fed by a devil's brew concocted in the electrician's wire-festooned hideout beneath the west stairs.
One might live days and nights for years in the Library, as people are reputed to do in department stores, especially if the ink-dispensing machines also carried chocolate bars and jujubes. We have often pondered the possibility of sinister denizens, and have thought how we might escape from the Tower Room if beset by hostile forces at both the east and west exits. One of lesser prescience might try escape by any of three doors off the balconies, flying breathless up the narrow stairs concealed in the room's central partitions, only to find that they offered the scant sanctuary of shallow cupboards. If hard pushed, we would choose the fourth and northwest door, which opens into an attic filled with discarded electrical fixtures and a skylight. A cul-de-sac indeed, but one in which we could accomplish a deal of noise and broken glass before our final surrender. We more likely, however, would go to ground by the remaining and northern exit, into a maze of corridors and tea kettles and powder rooms that would give eventually to the infinitely more manoeuverable battle ground of nine levels of stacks, where a well aimed folio would count for more than Norman blood.
In sooth, what ghosts of wasted hours and forgotten learning may haunt these apparently prosaic walls? The Paris Opera once housed, by report, a phantom (later, Lon Chaney) who flitted from the gilded figure of Apollo atop its lofty dome to the underground lake beneath its seventh sub-cellar, and swung once, during a performance, on the great chandelier of the main auditorium. What other explanation can there be than such a spirit, or company of spirits, for the displacement of volumes in never consulted collections, for the weird ebb and flow of the phantom elevator, for the graffiti that appear mysteriously on the walls of carrels and elsewhere, and, finally, for the cryptic inscription, diamond cut on the glass of an almost forgotten basement door: "In dreams I wander through the Library"?
